#SOL16: Turning to One Another

Rob and Devon on Martha's Vineyard

...To climb these coming crests/one word to you, to/ you and your children:/stay together/learn the flowers/go light     --Gary Snyder, "For the Children"



I.

Worrying about death is counter-productive. Rob and I imagined a future--the continuation of the work we so loved and the day when we would more or less retire. That future, though, always stopped short of death. We did not imagine our own or each other's death. In fact it would be correct to say we were completely unprepared for Rob's illness and hurried to have a will made in the closing weeks of his life. I'm so grateful now that we didn't waste time on what we neither controlled nor could know. In some ways the best revenge, if that's even the sentiment I'm after, is to live and love fully and to learn how to turn to one another.

Turning to one another helps us to confront the waves of grief that well up after loss. In so many ways, having Devon in my life and needing to care for him and be cared by him has been enormously healing. Life marches on with a teenager in the house as it does for the surviving spouse. Connecting with others helps.

In the two months prior to Rob's death I began writing and publishing blog posts that chronicled what was happening and how I was feeling. People I have known and others I have never met began to comment. Those comments mattered more than I think I could know at the time as they formed a lifeline that kept me present in the world, when I least had the presence of mind to do so. I did not know then that some who read this blog were in turn reading posts to other family members, sharing posts with friends. Learning this has been healing as all these acts connect us, connect me to you, and I suspect you to others.

During the six months Rob was ill, we were confronting on a daily basis some new horror, and a steady group of friends and family stood beside Rob, Devon and me and so many times held us up. Towards the end of Rob's life my brothers came to the house daily spending the day and evening with us and two friends, Robyn and Jane, more or less moved in, while other friends saw to the myriad of things I simply didn't even know needed seeing to. There were friends who came early in the morning to get Devon and bring him to school. Friends who grocery shopped for us. Friends who arrange for kind people from the town I live in to build a ramp so that I could get Rob out of the house if need be and helped me to find reliable care for Rob for the few mights I did so. Other friends brought food. Others simply texted a quick message of love. Against all the grief this helped us to feel happy.

II.

Jane tells me that her son, Peter shared Robert Waldinger's research (The Harvard Study of Adult Development) about what makes for a happy life with her. The crux of the research is that happy people have the constancy of a handful of others they can count on and be present with regardless of what is happening and not happening. Waldinger the director of the project that has stretched across 75 years says,

...The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. 

We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected...

...And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. 

In a grief group I attend each week, others there have commented about the surprise they felt given how soon I sought out the group. It was 8 days after Rob died that I joined the group. Believing in the necessity and goodness of others is what I have learned being married to Rob, raising Devon, and being an educator. Teaching, like a good marriage, is first about love and the solace that comes from being a teacher is the single most important 'outcome' that gets made in classrooms and schools daily. It did not occur to me that I should wait to seek the comfort of others. I'm so grateful now I did not wait. I knew it would be hard to be so raw, so vulnerable in front of others I did not know. But here's the thing: they recognized me by my story, my grief, my loss and the connection was rather immediate.

III.

In The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavment Tells Us About Life After Loss, George Bonanno, a clinal psychologist at Columbia University writes, "We are not accustomed to thinking of grief as a process of finding comfort. The idea seems a bit odd, but this is precisely what resilient people tend to do" (p.72). I had not connected comfort seeking with resiliency but see how they might be linked.

Finding comfort requires action. It requires courage. I cry easily. Just thinking about Rob is often enough for me to tear up and cry. Doing this publicly remains disquieting. Nonetheless, seeking comfort also is allowing me to heal. I feel this too in my bones: Rob's death will not kill me. Frankly, I wasn't always sure of that.  Dying from a broken heart felt very, very real.

A significant turn, that I did not see as a turn happened a couple of weeks ago when I began to remember Rob beyond the memories of his last week of life.  I was listening to Devon talk after his prom and I naturally began talking to Rob in my mind and this led me to thinking about the many times Rob and I secretly shared joy about our son. No one else will love this young man as we do. What I could not know then was the significance of that remembering. The  memory of Rob's last weeks and breath were so seared in my mind. For weeks I would relive his end. I would think about him and those thoughts were limited to the last few weeks of his life.  I couldn't remember before this. He was Rob who was so sick. Rob who no longer could walk. As I listened to Devon wax on about the prom, an earlier memory of Rob surfaced. I could see him, his head back, ponytail lying alongside his shoulder blade as he lifted Devon and turned toward me. I lifted the camera and caught the joy. And Rob took such joy in Devon's exuberance with being on holiday. We were on Martha's Vineyard early that April and Devon was just three years old. In my mind, I could see Rob twirling Devon through the air and hear their laughter. And perhaps that is what broke through the grief first: Rob's laughter. Of the hundreds of photos I made of Rob, almost all capture him smiling and laughing. He was a man who laughed easily.

IV.

As I write this I'm reminded of Margaret Wheatley's words on healing, comfort, and  leadership--words we so need today. At the close of her book, Turning to One Another, she tells us,

"Remember, you don't fear people whose story you know. Real listening always brings people closer together. Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world. Rely on human goodness. Stay together." 

I love that sentiment especially the understanding that not only is there human goodness, but we can and ought to rely on it. What losing Rob is helping me to learn is that people need to stay together. We need to turn to one another. As Snyder writes, "learn the flowers/go light".

Hillary Wins!

Girls Allowed (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

Such an historic evening. A win to savor.

Because She's a Woman...Huh?

Vote (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I cringe each time I hear a woman qualify her vote.  For example, earlier this morning a woman being interviewed on NPR offered, almost apologetically, her admission that she's voting for Hillary Clinton, "not because she's a woman (rather long pause), but because she has so much experience." Since Secretary Clinton began her campaign, the response from many have been to silence gender as if gender in the United States might somehow not be relevant.

Does gender in America not matter?

I voted this afternoon in NJ for Secretary Clinton.  I did so, in part, because she is a strong woman and we are deeply in need of a strong, smart, capable, and experienced leader.  Hillary Clinton's life speaks clearly to the courageous action she has had to show in order for her to be poised to be our next president.  Her victory is a victory for all women, especially for our daughters. That ceiling she is cracking has been in place for as long as there has been the United States and there are a legion of men (and sadly) women who don't want to see it cracked.  I say break on through.

We need a woman to lead. It certainly helps that she is also the most qualified of the 18+ candidates who have made a bid for president and truly the most qualified candidate who has run for president in my life time. Advocate for women and children, First Lady of Arkansas and First Lady of the United States, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State. There is no person running for president with these or equal qualifications. No one. And all the recent comments that experience now doesn't matter is more bunk, more examples of how insidious sexism is. If Hillary Clinton were male, the tenor of the primaries would have been different and the derogatory, sexists and often empty rhetoric that has been generated for years would have been silent.  Just recall the Benghazi hearings (our tax dollars at work).

Gender matters.

Sexism isn't limited to being an interpersonal matter.  Rather, it is an institutional one.  It is what allows both women and men to report with ease that they will vote for a qualified man they don't "like", but will not do the same for a woman.  It is sexist rhetoric that fuels such dispositions like:  "I won't vote for Hillary because she's not 'likable.'" or "Clinton is too aggressive" or what I heard last night, "Clinton is flat. She doesn't inspire passion like Bill and Bernie."or " I'm not comfortable with her as president. I would feel safer with  ______ (fill in the name of a man)."

Really?

One only needs to see the plethora of reports that continue to show that a woman doing the same work as a man in the United States is paid less. Given the lack of movement on current pay gap it will take close to 100 years to close that gap.

100 years. Can your daughters wait that long?  Can our country? Can the world?

Sexism is coloring this election as it colors our lives. It is always present.  Misogynistic ideology has been given new voice. Katha Pollitt, expressed this well earlier this year in The Nation when she wrote:

Choose Bernie if you like—I won’t say a word against him. But don’t reject the first woman in history who could win the White House because she doesn’t fit your notion of how women should behave. Men put a thumb on the scale for men all the time: It’s called being “gender neutral” while defining leadership in male terms. (Can you imagine a 74-year-old democratic socialist named Bernice Sanders making a run like Bernie? The jokes write themselves.) And overt misogyny still exists. You’ll never persuade me that “Bernie bros”—the men who harass female Hillary supporters with patronizing, insulting, and sometimes-obscene tweets and posts—are just Internet will-o’-the-wisps. But if you want hard numbers, how about this: According to Gallup, 8 percent of people say they would never vote for a qualified woman for president. That’s nearly one in 12 voters. But if one in 12 female primary voters is choosing Hillary just because she’s a woman—and not also because she’s experienced, super-smart, shares their values, and looks more likely to win the general—I would be surprised.

Now is the time for a woman to lead and that woman is Hillary Clinton.  I look forward to seeing Secretary Clinton become the first President of the United States.  I only wish Rob could see this history being made. He would have proudly casted his vote for Hillary today. 

#SOL16: Covered with Stars

Free Verse (M.A. Reilly)

  "...Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
                Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
   stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
             my shoulders
                 covered with stars."

                                 Mary Oliver, "Walking Home from Oak-Head," Our World, p 45.

I.

Across these last three months since Rob died, I have cried some days a little, other days more so. But the tears last for a brief duration and then they end. What feels like months of crying is in essence thirty minutes or so.  It is hard to calculate time as these waves of grief feel more out of time than in. And alongside these tears there is also laughter.  My 28 years with Rob taught me to enjoy life, to find absurdity a comfort, and to laugh often.

Bereavement isn't a singular feeling. Like so much of life, bereavement is complex. Yes, sadness for me is potent, and so too is humor and laughter. There is solace in finding small joys in the everyday things that help to frame my life with my son. Devon continues to amaze and delight me and I notice more how many of his mannerism and gestures resemble his dad's.

Losing Rob has not rendered me apolitical. I have strong feelings about the upcoming presidential election and look forward to casting my vote in the NJ primary later today and casting my vote in November. During the last few months of Rob's life we discussed the upcoming election often.  I can recall the many times Rob raised concerns about a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz presidency.

Losing Rob has not stopped me from living each day and now I can anticipate a future albeit quite fuzzy, but nonetheless oddly present and at times exciting. I am learning that I am resilient in ways I simply had no need to test before or to name. Beneath that resiliency is unrealized strength that I am learning to use mostly out of necessity.

II.

Live brilliantly, my husband told me before he died. And at first I thought that meant entering into the largeness of life and being somehow dashing. I thought about the job I passed on in Afghanistan.  Is this what Rob meant?  Is that the brilliant living?

But now I know that isn't it.

In the same conversation when Rob told me to live brilliantly, he also told me,"You draw people to you. You attract others."  At the time I was so disturbed by the diagnosis that his cancer was no longer treatable, that I didn't dwell on his words.  But I remembered them.  It's an odd thing--grief. So many events I don't recall, and yet I can relive the last 6 months of Rob's life in slow motion. When I think about his message to me, I think Rob was telling me that I love easily, that I love fully. There's a brilliance to that. I rarely temper passion and this leads to an optimism about life. I deeply believe in the goodness of people, the goodness of life.

Living brilliantly is more about love and less about doing any particular thing. It's about being present, being a good parent to our son, loving without constraint and remaining open to possibility. In many ways this is how we made our life together.


III.

I offer these words, as slim and incomplete as they might be, in order to say that each person's grief has its own signature, timetable, need and response. For me there are no stages of grief, just as there are no sanctioned ways to feel or be.  I think of grief more as strange attractor, than a stage. For it is oscillation, not linear movement that better describes the last 9 months. And like strange attractors, there is organization to the chaos. In the chaos of grief, love is the force that organizes.

And it is out of love, that understanding develops. In the last week, I am awakening and noticing joy and an optimism I had not named before. The most important gift Rob and I made during our marriage was a deeper definition of love, imperfect love. For it was our imperfection as beings, as husband and wife, as parents that most allowed us to love so boldly, so bravely. We were going to err and there was beauty in letting that happen. It is within the ordinary bits of living and loving that who we are best finds expression.

IV.

Dear Rob,  I have finally arrived home once more, red-cheeked from the roused wind, my shoulders covered with stars. Somewhere in a parallel world I know you are cheering.

#SOL16: Nowness of Life

from my art journal with Berry poem. 6.5.16, (gesso, gouache paints, stabilo pencil, acrylic paint)

Each day I walk outside.  I thought it was the walking that mattered so, but realize that it is the walking and that I do so outside.  It is the communing with nature that is particularly centering. There's a poem by wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things, in which the speaker tells us how he comes "into the peace of wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief." Grief is taxing.

I walk each day to remember my small place within it and to feel the nowness of living. Some days, I remember that this is enough.

#SOL16: I Could Not Follow

from my art journal: 6.3.16, (gesso, acrylic and gouache paint)

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
                                                                                                ― Pablo Neruda

I.

Most days I try to remember what Rob and I were doing a year ago.  I try to call up a day prior to Rob's diagnosis of cancer as if calling up such a memory might restore a bit of what has been lost.

How were we living our lives? With what intensity did we greet life? Were we as complacent as Emily from Our Town says all humans are? Did I make time to show Rob how much I love him?

I check the calendar and note that a year ago, Rob and I were at a school in Newark. More than likely we drove together as we did most days, stopping on the way in for a cup of coffee and to drop Devon off at school.  Last June was a super busy time for both of us as we were completing work for three clients that involved lots of teaching and curriculum planning sessions. We were in a rhythm and looking forward to the long stretch of summer ahead.

II.

A year later and Rob is gone and in that immense absence I am weakened, unsteady, broken. I have bargained with God until I'm mostly mute and I see now that the passage of time does not ease the pain, does not make the loss of Rob any easier.

Sorrow remains. Well planted. Vocal.

III.

Keep busy I've been told, but know this: No series of activities can fill the gap his absence leaves. Rob is the missing weight from my life, the familiar love I turned to over and over again across the last three decades.

The weight of the paint on the brush, the word on the page, the voice of a friend--these sometimes anchor me to this earth, this life, this unknown place that I now reside.

#SOL16: Your House Stands

Dust of Snow (M.A. Reilly 2014)

I. 

The death of my husband unseated a sense of sureness that once framed the place I know as home. Now home feels less permanent, less safe. Where I live now, sorrow grows like trees, deep rooted with leaves that silver as if rain might be expected. Sometimes I'm filled with expectations about the new life I am making, but these moments are inconsistent. Rather, pain anchors me and just when I think I've given name to this sorrow it shows up donned in some new garb. 

Yesterday, it was the unexpected Yes song, "And You and I" that came on the radio. It wasn't just the song that stirred a deep unease. It was also the memory of hearing Rob talk about the purity of Jon Anderson's voice and as I remembered I was transported back to the townhouse we shared in Fort Lee nearly 30 years ago and I could still feel the warmth of sunlight which filtered each morning through the windows in the room where we each wrote. There, we could see the very tip to the George Washington Bridge and what I see mostly is how impossibly young we were. 

Two days ago, I was at home when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was an art therapist I had met when Rob was in Morristown Hospital. She was phoning to return art work Rob had made in January and she asked to speak with him. Whereas I can now write that Rob died without erasing it, getting my voice to utter the same phrase destroys me. My breath gives out.  It is these types of surprises that trigger the understanding of what absence feels like. My Rob is no longer here. Today it was an unmarked envelope that came addressed to me in the mail.  I opened it and found Rob's art that he had made while on the oncology floor of the hospital that the art therapist had returned.

II.

Profound sorrow is bone deep and terribly known.  Earlier this morning I was reading Bonnie's latest letter to her husband, Tuvia and her words helped me to realize that it is the familiar that is so difficult to contend with when the one you love is gone so permanently. The familiar foregrounds the absence, the tragedy. The field shifts. And most everything is unsteady. And here's the thing: there's no place to hide.  There's no way out of this.  There is only living each day, each moment. Trying to make sense of the the senseless.

III.

Tonight I'm thinking about safety and pain and desire and the way sunlight moves across carpet when I come across the Rilke poem, "Entrance."  He writes:

Entrance 

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Whovever you are: step out in to the evening  

out of your living room, where everything is so known; 

your house stands as the last thing before great space: 

Whoever you are. 

With your eyes, which in their fatigue can just barely  

free themselves from the worn-out thresholds, 

very slowly, lift a single black tree  

and place it against the sky, slender and alone.  

With this you have made the world. And it is large  

and like a word that is still ripening in silence.  

And, just as your will grasps their meaning,  

they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes . . .

Rilke's words remind me of the tenuousness of safety and how in many ways my house--this home I made with Rob "stands as the last thing before great space."  Rob told me to live brilliantly after his death and I suspect doing so will require me to walk out beyond the borders of home into unmarked, unnamed space. 

I'll get there. Just not tonight.  For now, the weight of the wedding band Rob placed on my finger so many years ago, feels right. Necessary.