#SOL16: Samhain's Fire

Samhain's Fire (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

It's like testing the heat of water with an elbow.  Inch it into and out of a memory and see what heat rises, what exactly can be tolerated. And then, only then, place one foot following the next, edging, edgy until submerged in what has been.

Widows test memory, wait and see what scalds, what soothes, what passes unnoticed.


II.

With acceptance comes a manageable sorrow and a weighed sadness that is a whole body experience. Even my toes know its stink. Some days, I am full of it. And yet others, I can't remember its name.


III.

Originally, the old English word, sæd, meant having one's fill with food--feeling satiated. Across the years the meaning changed and yet the sense of heaviness remained. And it is that heaviness that weighs me, sends me out walking miles and miles each day.

Who knew grief could be tempered by a body in motion?


IV.

I am careful not to take too much of a backward glance to those closing days and hours when Rob was crossing from here to there. I think of this as we have just passed Samhain--when the veil between here and there is at its thinnest. If I knew a spell I would have spoke it aloud these last few nights, called up my husband to tell him how I was watching over our boy, keeping him steeped in love.

But I know no spells. Just these words.

Poetry Break: The Gate

The Gate (M.A. Reilly, Tuscany, 2009)

The Gate

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BY MARIE HOWE

I had no idea that the gate I would step through 

to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother's body made. He was 

a little taller than me: a young man 

but grown, himself by then, 

done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet, 

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold 

and running water. 

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. 

And I'd say, What? 

And he'd say, This—holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich. 

And I'd say, What? 

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around. 

#SOL16: Portal

Rob in Ireland. 

I.

In Marie Howe's poem, Gate, she opens by writing:

"I had no idea that the gate I would step through  

to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother's body made."

I tasted the sounds those perfect words made in my mouth--felt the immediacy that living demands. Like Howe who suffered the loss of her brother, I too know certain grief, and what such loss prompts the battered soul to do. For loss is both a gate that opens us to this moment, to the here and a burden we shoulder through the days.

Howe teaches us that we have only the present moment.


II.

The space my husband's body made as his soul soared and his life here bowed was more a passageway than an end. I did not know that at the moment.  But it was a gate to walk through and now, months later I am here, in a place I might not have come to without his death.

This is a space made by love--made by loss.


III.

What has taken shape before me is a new place of competence and uncertainty, of limits and possibilities. Across the last 15 months, I have grappled with choosing to live, not merely exist.

Who am I without him?
Who have I been?
Who won't I be?

I am no longer wife.
I am no longer RobandMaryann.
I am undefined from the ways I have known and yet, I am oddly hopeful.


IV.

What becomes possible after deep love and loss are newer ways of being in the world. Newer ways of coming to name what is essential and what is merely interesting.

I promise you--whatever it is you fear the most will announce itself after the death of your most beloved. Whatever you most fear will come knocking at that open gate seeking entrance. And understand this, you will be the better for it, if you bid it welcome. This is a time when courage has your name written all over it.

Let it in.


V.

There are gates--portals before us and to seek them requires sacrifice.  To walk through such gates is to know immense loss and promise; to know each and still feel your breath against the back of your hand.

#SOL16: Turn on the Light

The Lightbulb (M.A. Reilly: paper collage, handmade papers, found papers, digital remix, 2016)

I.

Imagine a very long chain suspended from a ceiling fixture. Get that imagine fixed in your mind. Now, look up and see that the fixture has no globe.  It had been lost along the way. Or perhaps it broke one afternoon. These details matter, but not today.

There's just a single bulb.

To turn the light on, to illuminate the room you know too well and night beyond the windows, you must reach up and tug the chain. Tug it hard.


 II.

About 9 days ago I began to wonder about what remains after the initial shock of grief passes. I realized then that I had stopped crying daily. I could think of Rob and not cry. I had just stopped and in the space where tears fell there was now this cavern, a hollowed out place. And I wondered what fills this body of mine now that the daily tears have stopped?  What new room have I made?


III.

An idea began to formulate so bold that at first I turned away--shielded that part of me that has known such deep wounds. Could the easing of grief be as simple as deciding to actually live--not simply exist?  Could it be a matter of deciding?

Back in February when Rob told me to live brilliantly, he first warned me, no not warned for that is too tame a word for it. Rather he commanded me to not hide away.

"Don't you hide away," he told me.

What I could not know last February was that sometimes it feels necessary to hide in the dark--to pull the proverbial covers over my head--to rest what feels ladened with sorrow.


IV.

"It's heavier than I thought," I said to my brother.

Last night when my brothers came over, Brendan brought Rob's ashes with him.  I had asked him to do so. When he handed me the bag containing Rob's ashes, my first thought was how heavy it all is.  I had not expected my husband's remains to carry such weight.

Later after my brothers had left and I had placed the bag on a book shelf downstairs, I went to tell Devon. We hugged as touch is often more important than words and we each cried just a bit.

"It's not Dad," he told me.

"I know. We'll figure out what to do with the ashes," I told him. "At some point what we do will make sense."


V.

I don't know where the idea of choosing life over grief developed. I imagine if I reread what I have written these last 15 months, I might find a thread to tug and follow that would help me to better understand the evolution of this thought.

For now, I am less inclined to do so. For reasons I cannot explain, I have reached up and tugged that chain and light
               falls warm over me--lightens the darkened, heavy spaces I have known.

It's a matter of choice. When the body and the soul are ready--it's always a matter of choice.  I had forgotten. 

Please Sign My Petition to NOT Pay GOP Senators

Screenshot of the petition

Given the consistent nonperformance of 54 GOP Senators who have refused to give Judge Merrick Garland a hearing, I believe they should receive no pay, no health care benefits, no pension benefits for each and every day they have acted as obstructionists. You and I pay their salaries and benefits and for what?  Imagine if you or I decided to not actually do the job we are paid for?  Although I have never written a petition, I decided to do so.  Now I need to collect signatures. I have thirty days to reach the required 100,000 signatures.  If you feel strongly that the Republican Senators are acting in bad faith by not doing their job and want to stop them from getting paid, please sign.

#SOL16: Bone and Heart

Devon sitting on the steps (2003)

I.


The second step from the top creaks. It seems hard to miss that step and as such it is now a familiar sound. A comforting sound. This has always been more home than house, faulty in its grace.

Only Rob, Dev and I have ever lived here. The house was new when we bought. Others that spring would outbid us and yet  Dave, the builder, sold it to us anyway. I'd like to think that he knew we were at our limit and that we would make this place he built a home. And we have.

We gave rise to that creak. We made it climbing up and down these stairs for the last 14 years. Bounding down and trudging up ladened with books and boxes and laundry and more times than I could count, the sleeping weight of a toddler. Time has loosened these stairs--caused the wooden treads to rub against the risers and stringers; to grind against the screws and nails that hold it all together.  And how odd it is that such a noise could be more solace than annoyance; more balm than pain?


II.


Rob climbed those stairs a year ago for the last time this month. He was unsteady on his feet and the climb up those stairs became too much for him to accomplish. We each did our best to not notice his unsteady and too heavy gait. We wanted it to be something temporary. We told one another how this set back would resolve itself with treatment. To pay note would have shifted the narrative from ever so hopeful to less so. And truly that bit of hope we held on to was more gift than not--more necessary than any pseudo cure the legion of doctors would prescribe and (un)prescribe.

On that last day he climbed the stairs, I washed him, washed his hair and we laughed at my clumsy attempts that morning. And how good it felt to laugh. He needed to sit  halfway through as holding his too-sick body up was too much to bear.  He could no longer manage such things. Even shaving become a chore and though I gave it a good try, he would take the razor from my hand and redo my first attempt. We were getting ready for what would be his first chemo treatment, as he had been cleared by the infectious disease doctor after five weeks of fighting a staph infection to finally receive treatment--treatment that would only land him back in the hospital in need of emergency thoracic surgery a week later. As the chemo stripped his body's defenses, the staph resurged growing into an abscess a millimeter from the right ventricle of his heart.

Rob would never see the second floor of our home again. Never walk up our stairs to our bedroom. Never sit in his favorite chair in the guest room which was more his study than not. Imagine that just seven weeks earlier he went up and down those stairs without a care. We each did.


III.


Late at night I listen, listen to welcome him home, as if his departed spiritual self might bear some weight when all things grow dark and the barriers between here and there grow thin. In the dark anything can happen, anything can be. Now and then I hear the tread of my now six-foot son take those stairs two at at a time well after midnight. He is in search of a glass of water, a glass of juice--and it will be the empty glass I find sitting in the sink the next morning that confirms this late night tale.

On his way up the stairs to his bedroom, I hear the creak and I think of Rob. I think how this home we made is part bone, part heart.

#SOL16: Sublime

from my art journal, 10.22.16 (gesso, found papers, acrylic paint, Tombow markers, tissue paper, ink)

I.

The weather has finally turned sending the too-hot and humid summer-like weather we had this past week in the Northeast US, packing.  Good riddance. The first fall-feeling day is here. Gale winds, raw cold, and buckets of rain ("Buckets of tears/Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears/Buckets of moonbeams in my hand...")

And it is absolutely glorious to walk in the fall of rain, feel the wind so strong tug at the umbrella that I must hold at an angle--less the wind with a sharp snap will turn it inside out. This afternoon I have the path to myself. No one else seems to have ventured forth and surely I can see the appeal of curling up with a good book in an oversized chair with some mint tea. I painted most of the morning, making the journal page at the top of this post and after lunch I found myself heading to that chair with some tea and a book. It was after all, raining.

So? I thought.  I transferred the hot tea to an old Starbucks cup, threw on a sweatshirt, and let myself outside after saying goodbye to Devon.  To me, nothing affirms life like a storm.


II.

I am rounding the last mile when the audio cuts out and my phone begins to ring. The display reads, Patty. My oldest friend in the world is phoning. We have known each other since we were each 4-years-old. I answer right away--using one hand to hold the umbrella and cup of tea and the other to put the phone closer to my mouth. We haven't spoken in a few months and I am eager to catch up. Between old friends there is no settling in to the conversation. No awkward pauses. No wondering what to say. There is just talk and lots of it--as if we talked every day. And well, I guess for so many years we did.

Pat tells me that creating helps ease grief.  Her husband John retired early and has taken up writing. "He says he needs two years.  One year to write and the next to reflect on that writing."

"How wise," I tell her, "to give himself that second year."

Pat's an art therapist. She recommends movement and creating as means to ease grief. She laughs telling me it was in the low 30s this morning in Michigan and raining too and she went out for a run anyway.  After about 20 minutes of which only the last 5 were dedicated to the election (Pat says with a chuckle that in Michigan all of the millennials and she voted for Sanders), she rings off as she is heading to a client.


III.

Later, after night has fallen and the wind has quieted a bit, I am reading an old copy of Flow Magazine.  I see there is an article about loss and begin reading. Dealing with loss says René Diekstra,

"is the ability to create something from our pain. This can be simple, like keeping a diary, contacting a fellow-sufferer or looking at a painting. Re-forging our pain can frequently lead to something sublime. The main question we must ask ourselves is: What can I do with my pain besides suffer from it?" (from Flow Magazine,  Issue 12).

What can I do? As much as there are days when I desire to stay active, I realize that I am even more partial to solitude. I enjoy writing and making art and both of these tend to be done alone. Painting all morning fueled me, allowed me to feel content and even, joyful.  It is the small acts that heal. Talking with an old friend. Walking in the rain. Watching what begins to emerge as I paint and become.