#SOL16: The Unexpected Gift

Robin in NJ. She collaborated with Rob and this is an image he must have taken when
she had come East to visit his class and us.

Rob's dear friend, fellow teacher and writer--Robin wrote about Rob's death in a post, Lighting Out for the Territories.  She had sent me a link but it was the day after Rob had died and I must not have followed the link at that time. It's impossible to remember what I did the week that follows. This morning I did follow the link. It is a beautiful remembrance from a dear friend. Please take a minute to read what Robin wrote.

Thank you Robin, for such an unexpected gift. 

#SOL16: Sometimes I'm Terrified of My Heart

I.

All day I have felt off as if something awful was just around the bend, waiting. And tonight I realized that I have lived with this sense of foreboding since last summer. It gets turned up and lowered by what seems to be mostly whim.

There are pattens I cannot see.

II.

Sometimes I'm Terrified of My Heart (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I spent the day doing what I needed to do and beneath these daily tasks was the strong ache that comes from missing Rob so completely and I found that catching my breath was hard to do. The tears flowed as I walked this morning, right before I went into the local diner to meet new friends for lunch, while I waited for Devon at school, and after I cleaned up supper. Earlier this evening I placed a basil plant and a rosemary plant outside and realized that Rob will never see these grow or taste their leaves in foods I make. Yesterday, I bought pine nuts in order to make him pesto now that the basil is growing thick, forgetting that he will not be here to taste it. Every single day mail arrives in his name. Even though I know he has died, the millions of memories we made remain and now and then I act on one of these memories as if Rob was still here.  

Rob, whose will to live was so extraordinarily strong will never see another spring come and go. He will never see his son drive. And when Dev goes to the prom later this month, his dad won't make sure his tie is tied correctly.

All this loss is incalculable.

III.

Regardless of how good or bad I am, I will never kiss Rob again. I will never feel the weight of his arm as it settles with such certainty on my shoulder.  Last week I turned the mattress on our bed so I could sleep on top of his side and still I will never sleep with him again, feel his breath against the back of my neck, his lips at my shoulder.

The infinite number of things that comprise ordinary human life are now a list I cannot bear.


IV.

Desperation is a synonym for widow.
Making art offers a reprieve from what waits around the bend.
Sometimes, I'm terrified of my heart.

#SOL16: Art Collaboration 2

Live Brilliantly (R. Cohen & M.A. Reilly, 2016)

This is work that is part of a series I am creating that combines art Rob made during the last few weeks of his life with new work of mine. I promised Rob I would do this.

Mixed media (watercolor, newspaper, gesso, acrylic paint, notebook pages, rice paper)

#SOL16: Design

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

I've been planting. A lot. Filling clay pots with geraniums, petunias, fuchsia, lavender, lobelia, vinca, Dracaena spikes, rosemary, spearmint, tarragon, larkspur, snapdragons, and heliotrope. Inside, I have potted plants from last year and as soon as the weather warms a bit more I will be putting the parsley, basil, aloe, and cactus outside. In gardens I have planted over the years I notice that the peonies are up and the Hosta has broken through the ground and is unfurling. Azaleas and lilacs are beginning to bloom, rhododendrons are budding, day lilies are growing and the hydrangeas are beginning to reclaim their spaces. The butterfly bushes are greening and finally the birch trees are leafing. There's something so satisfying about growing plants and bushes; trees and shrubs.

Spring gardening reminds me that something bigger than my immediate sense of life is at work here. This morning find me thinking about Robert Frost who in the poem, Design, asked if design governs in a thing so small as the interaction among a spider, moth, and heal-all. Frost lodges such an important question of faith in a few lines. I remember Rob and I discussing this poem once and Frost's question during an English class. We were impossibly young at the time and matters of faith, of God, of mortality were distant marks we mostly ignored. We were so busy living, loving.

(M.A. Reilly, iPhone, hipstamatic app)

Now, matters of faith, of God, of mortality and afterlife are more immediate. I never expected Rob to die so young, to become a widow while still in my 50s. I didn't expect that my husband who never professed much belief in God would be the one to help me know that design does govern. In the last few weeks of Rob's life he shared with me what he was experiencing as he readied to leave this life. He told me he knew how to leave, how to cross over. He told our friend Jane one night as she sat up with him. As Jane tells me, Rob said, "I am seeing the most glorious things. Things you cannot see." 40 hours before he died, before he slipped into a coma, my brother, Jack and I stood next to Rob's bed and marveled at the look of ecstasy that lit his face as he stared at the ceiling of the room. We knew he was seeing well beyond what each of our eyes could see; he was seeing beyond our mortal limits. Rob told me he knew how to get to the next life and when it was my time he would be there to help me cross over. And he will.

Spring reminds me that life beats on infused with designs I sometimes understand and ones I am graced sometimes to sense.

#SOL16: Art Collaboration 1

Grief (R.Cohen & M.A. Reilly, 2016)

When Rob was in the palliative care center of the hospital a few weeks before he died, he began to apply watercolor washes over pages of writing he had done

One morning I brought paint and brushes with me to the palliative care center when I went to visit Rob. I arrived to find he was very, very anxious about coming off the high-flow oxygen machine. He was afraid he would be oxygen deprived. While we waited for one of the nurses to arrive with a tranquilizer, I suggested painting.


I find it helps me to relax.
Anything that helps.



I gave him a pallet of paints, a cup of water, some napkins and some brushes. He picked up a brush and I did as well and we spent the next 45 minutes just painting. The art making did relax him.

I promised him that morning that I would create a piece of art that combined his notebook pages with new work of mine. The first attempt at this is the work that tops this post, Grief. It incorporates two pages from Rob's notebooks that he worked on that morning.

I love you, Rob and I hope somehow you are seeing this, feeling the love.

#SOL16: Loosening the Wall or Why I Write

                   

                                       ...Deep in a life
is another life.  I walked out, the nest
already by the step. 

                        - Marianne Boruch, Nest


I.

On top of a light fixture on the back deck, a robin has made a nest and inside that nest I imagine there are eggs and soon there will be baby birds. This nest building began a few weeks after Rob died.  It was at that time that I first began to notice the bits of twig and grass that started to accumulate in front of the door. And the mother bird has chosen well.  For this is a protected place, up against the house, off the ground. There are trees nearby for the mom to sleep and still be able to reach her babies in a second.  A fine home made ready.

A week ago,  I noticed the nest had been more fully formed and now the mother protects it, flying in and out, especially in early morning. There's something oddly poetic about this building, making, securing a future and how it began when a life that mattered so much to me had ended. All around are signs of life and I marvel at how this pulse beats so strong.


II.

A friend, Simon, asked recently, why do you write? What moves you?  And I have been thinking about this off and on the last two days. At first I wanted to say, I write out of necessity. It so often feels that way, especially those last months of Rob's life when I wanted to understand what I could barely find courage to say. Then, writing felt required, necessary, like breathing. But saying that I write out of necessity is only a partial truth.

After Rob's death, when the word grew so grey, so heavy, I thought I was writing each day in order to save my life.  It felt like I was slowing drowning in a large pool of sadness and writing helped to keep me afloat. It helped me to keep an eye on a distant horizon, for even in that foggy state the horizon was noticeable, present, beckoning. My will to live is strong.  So no, I am not writing to save my life.

Now I see a bit clearer and wonder if I am not writing in order to preserve a life. For the last 28 years I have been a central part in what grew to become Mary Ann and Rob; Rob and Mary Ann; and later Devon's parents. I still wear the slim wedding band Rob placed on my fingers all those years ago. I still feel married to him--more wife than widow.

I write, in part, to preserve the life I have made with Rob. Letting him go is too difficult, too unnecessary for now. The stories we have shared, made together are ones I tell, in part. I write to keep alive and to explore my memories of my husband and of myself with him. But this too is incomplete. What compels me to write is bigger than all of this.


III.

In 1922, during the civil war in Ireland, William Butler Yeats published a collection of poetry, Meditations in Time of Civil War. In the sixth poem in the collection, "The Stare's Nest by My Window," the speaker invites honey bees to build their home in an empty starling's nest. Against the death of soldiers, hostilities--life here is invoked by reinvention, repurposing the nest of a starling.

Yeats opens the poem:

The bees build in the crevices 

Of loosening masonry, and there 

The mother birds bring grubs and flies.  

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,  

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Come build in the empty house.
Come build.

IV.

This morning I am writing in the diner that Rob had breakfast more mornings than not. I am seated in the booth where he most often sat. Against the noise of dishes being cleared, orders being taken and served--I am writing mostly to loosen the wall. To reimagine, to reinvent my life. To wonder about who I am after Rob's death. Who is this woman? What does she favor? Want? What matters most? Least? How can she best serve others?

In February, when Rob told me to not hide away, to live brilliantly, he gave me a gift I knew was important instinctively. What I could not know then was how those words would carry me after he was no longer here to do so. Even on the very morning we first learned that the cancer had spread too far, too quickly and Rob would die too soon--his love for me led us. When I told him that I could not imagine a future without him, he commanded me to not hide away, to live brilliantly. He said this so directly with such certainty, that even now, months later I can feel the power of his conviction, the certainty of his love and I am humbled by this, motivated by his words.

After Rob's death, my life felt empty like Yeat's starling's nest. And during the last two months I have emptied it further.

Yes, emptied it further.

For the first time that I can remember, I have slowed working to a trickle and uncluttered my days, confronted the sadness, the pain, the loss. These days, my life consists of more contemplative arts like walking, painting, caring for Devon, gardening, grief counseling, talking with friends, photographing. At the end of the week, I will begin learning transcendental meditation.

Friends, I write to loosen my walls so I can try on the new, the repurposed, the starling's nest.

#SOL16: The Deeps

Blind Faith (M.A. Reilly, West Milford, NJ, 2008)

You have laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.   - Psalm, 88:6, American King James Bible

After the death, after the weeks of shock had begun to wear thin, putting down the burden of grief is more of a temporary matter, no matter how much I wish it was more permanent. After two weeks of great pain, of feeling wounded, yesterday and this morning I mostly remembered Rob with joy. Yes, joy. I know, it all feels so foreign.

Grief is more like a spiral, like a Klein bottle. Orientation is largely moment to moment and even then coming across an unexpected artifact can undo any sense of permanence And so it is not too surprising that I am not able to predict where I will land as I move through each day. I move through periods of calm and those drenched in terror. Through wakefulness, sudden bouts of crying, and now and then tender moments when I recall the man I have loved for so long. To not feel is to prolong the agony, the uncertainty and to memorialize the pain.  Not feeling distances me from Rob.

The last two weeks have been fraught with sorrows so deep I am mining well beneath the surface. The disbelief about Rob's illness and death has cracked some, leaving fissures I can now grab as I haul myself out of the deeps inch by inch.