#SOL16: The Jar Pandora Opened

the necklace...

I.

I'm waiting for coffee when the barista says to me, "I like your necklace."
I tell her thanks as she fills the cup with hot water, finishing my Americano. When she hands me my drink, she laughs and says once again, "I really, really like your necklace." 
"Thanks so much. It was a gift from my husband."
"He has great taste," she adds.  "Tell him I said so."

I smile a bit understanding there is no way for her to know that I will not be telling Rob anything. He gave me the necklace for our 24th wedding anniversary.

I thought we weren't going to be extravagant, I would later say to him, knowing we had agreed to not buy gifts.
I saw it and knew you would love it. Who knows where we will be next year. Enjoy it. I remember him saying this and both of us laughing and later beginning to plan a trip to Portugal for our 25th wedding anniversary, a trip we could not be able to make this past December.

II.

It's been a month since Rob died and I find that thoughts of my husband filter through my mind constantly.  Memories abound and recalling him, us, then--fills a good portion of my day. Triggers also abound, like the young girl in the coffee shop this morning. These jolt me as I am not anticipating the shock that happens. And how could I not be overwhelmed with thoughts about Rob? He is not only within me, but across the last three decades he has given shape to person I have become and am becoming.  Breathing is a trigger.

Love shapes us and now I know so too does loss.

III.

As I write this, Devon and I are struggling so much and watching my son hurt, undoes me.

When my mom died I felt like a weight was crushing me and I didn't know if I would ever feel like me again, I tell Devon tonight.  I can tell you that those feelings of despair and sadness and disbelief fade. The pain can still feel as acute, but the duration is far, far less. I now think of my mom and most of the time there is no slice, no pain, just love. 

I have no confidence left, he tells me. 
I get how you might feel that way. My confidence is shaky too. Our world has been upended and it's so hard to get oriented again--to have to be vulnerable again. You will though. I don't doubt that. You will get through this. Talking with a grief counselor will help. That takes courage and confidence.

When we got back from our mini-vacation on Sunday night we were too tired and it was too late to feel the loss of Rob.  But by Monday morning, the reality of Rob's death and how his death has temporarily rendered our lives so empty and untethered rolled over each of us and knocked us about in ways we had not anticipated.

We each loved Rob so greatly, so completely that a mini vacation does not fill that loss, in many ways it amplifies it. We woke up Monday to a house that was painfully empty.

IV.

I don't sleep through the night. I am restless, somewhat alert, waiting for some new horror to happen. My dreams are waking ones.

What's next? I wonder.  

Is there cancer growing within me? 

Is Devon okay? 

Will the sky fall, again?

And so when I notice that I am slowing down, that my interests beyond the walls of my home feel less vital, less necessary--I first think a lack of sustained sleep may be why. But that's not the reason, or at least not the whole reason.  I have always loved the work I do and now I notice that I feel less motivated to do anything. I can't imagine remaining in education.

I can't imagine.

I feel closer somehow to Rob when I'm home--where he was last alive. Those last weeks of his life were deeply intimate and insular and I crave both.  I want the past and I want to wrap it around me even as I know that it is more like William Carlos Williams's dirty mantle that he writes about in The Desert Music than some form of solace. The past is a corpse.

Williams writes,

from The Desert Music, p. 109.

V.

Now, I am filled with an immense and heavy sadness--the likes of which I have not know prior and oddly I also sense a slim ray of hope within.

I am the jar Pandora opened and then resealed.

You may recall that after Pandora released the plagues and maladies, diseases and evils into the world, hope remained at the bottom of that jar. She put the lid back on keeping hope within.

Hope resides within and though it feels faint, I know it is there. Hope is the poem that Williams said must be made.  It is the present that always beckons.

#SOL16: Saved Voice Messages

Want (M. A. Reilly, 2009)

Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived. From Afterword by Carole Blue (Hitchen's widow), p. 97. (From Mortality by Christopher Hitchens)

I miss Rob's voice. I have kept a dozen quick messages he sent to me between January 11, 2016 and February 12, 2016 saved on my phone. All of the messages were sent in the early morning and I realize now that Rob was less coherent by evening, even as early as December and so he had stopped phoning me later in the day.

Now that he is gone, I sometimes take out my iPhone just to listen to him speak. I get through 2 or sometimes even 3 messages before I am crying so hard and loud that I can't hear his voice. I don't listen to the messages in order as the idea of a narrative would be too much to bear. Rather, I select random messages and even though I don't want to, I still can hear his death approaching as the weakness of his voice increases. By the third week of January his voice is weakening. In that message I hear him say he is scheduled to have a cat scan later that day. I don't recall being startled or even concerned by this when I first received the message that January morning. Truthfully, he seemed to always be having some type of test of other. What I did not know was this test would reveal the spread of cancer to his sternum and right rib.

And even though the January 28th message is difficult, it is the first message from January 11th that mostly stops my heart. It's the one where Rob tells me the oncologist was just in to see him. "We're in good shape," he tells me with such conviction I can't help but believe him, even now months later when I know that we were in poor shape, knocking-on-heaven's-door-shape. Rob asks me to put a reminder on my calendar to call to the oncologist's office by February 1 in order to set up a chemo appointment for that week. It is an appointment that I will never make. He closes the one-minute conversation by saying, "We're about to begin the real race."

How prophetic.

On that morning his voice is still strong, determined. He does not know that in 30 days the same oncologist will tell us that the cancer has progressed, metastasizing to Rob's sternum, ribs, spleen and liver.  There will be no more treatment. Opdivo, the wonder drug, he had been scheduled to take instead of chemo the week earlier but could not because of a fever will not be given now as he likely would not survive the treatment nor would the treatment have enough time to work.

His case is now terminal.

Would you consider being on life support? the doctor asks.

Immediately Rob tells him he will not be hooked up to a breathing machine.

A couple hours later as we wait for my brother to arrive with Devon, a young resident comes in to make sure we understand that Rob's diagnosis is terminal and that he has a week to four weeks to live.

Five days to four weeks to be precise is what he tells us.  He will repeat this several times as if repetition best ensured successful completion of a given task. At some point during one of his repeats, I ask him to leave. "You aren't helping us," I say as kindly as I can muster. What he doesn't know is that we are all so far away from that room, waiting for our 17-year-old son to arrive so we can tell him that his dad is dying and there is nothing left to do medically. We will be breaking his heart.

The end when it came was so final. So declarative. More so than anything I have ever known. I don't have words to convey the difference between the moment before death and at death is like. I held Rob's right hand and Devon held his left hand. 40 minutes after Rob died, Devon still sat there, bent over his father's body, clutching his hand. 

Poetry Break: After the Winter

Uptown (M.A. Reilly, 2013, Harlem)

After the Winter

BY CLAUDE MCKAY

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves

     And against the morning’s white

The shivering birds beneath the eaves

     Have sheltered for the night,

We’ll turn our faces southward, love,

     Toward the summer isle

Where bamboos spire the shafted grove

     And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill

     Where towers the cotton tree,

And leaps the laughing crystal rill,

     And works the droning bee.

And we will build a cottage there

     Beside an open glade,

With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,

     And ferns that never fade.

Claude McKay, “After the Winter” from Claude McKay: Complete Poems. Published by University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2004 by Claude McKay.

#SOL16: Reading Walter Benjamin

Rob in Intensive Care in January 2016, reading Walter Benjamin

Across from me, on a bookshelf is the last book Rob was reading and writing about before he became too sick to do either--6 weeks before he died. He had spent most of the fall and early winter reading a number of texts by Walter Benjamin and making copious notes about these texts and his thinking. My husband, the scholar. In January Benjamin's One Way Street and Other Writings was what he was mostly reading and thinking about and it is this book that I find on a book shelf in our home. And though we never discussed this outright, I knew he was reading and writing such dense text in order to save his mind.

Save his mind.

100 days in hospitals can kill more than just your spirit. It is a mind killer.  In addition, all of the narcotics used to curb the increasing pain from the spinal lesions and then the rapid spread of the cancer from his right lung to his left lung, his sternum, ribs, spleen and liver also undermined his capacity to think.  Reading Benjamin helped him to hold his world a bit more steady, to remind of him of the future he thought waited for him just beyond the cancer.

Reading and writing showed Rob's determination to live connected to the world and to not let the illness diminish his life. I think about this in light of the national interest, if not global interest in best ensuring literate learners. Today, I retweeted Noel Drew's (@Drewedu) tweet based on Neil Gaiman's insights about reading.

And then commented:

When I think about Rob's reading and writing life, I know it was these behaviors that helped him to keep positive and negotiate the difficulties that arose after his diagnosis. His intense love of reading and writing developed alongside the agency he felt in choosing when, what, and how to read and/or write. 

Poetry Break: The Cold Night

Pastoral (M.A. Reilly, 2012) THE COLD NIGHT by William Carlos Williams

It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars -- like the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife -- among her five children . . . No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold . . . ! White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April . . . In April I shall see again -- In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife perfect still after many babies. Oya!

#SOL16: The New Normal

Downtown Columbus, OH (M.A. Reilly, iPhone, 2016)

Devon and I were in Ohio this past weekend, attending a Counter Strike tournament which sported a $1,000,000 prize purse and had teams from around the world competing. I know almost nothing about the game or the teams that competed. Devon began schooling me last week as we watched a few matches at home and I quickly began to get a handle on the teams, the objectives, and some of the strategies. E-sports are big in our home and before Rob died he told me that I needed to step in and support Devon in his interest in this computer game like he would have.

At the Tournament

Months ago this tournament was announced and it was the first time a Counter Strike major tournament was being held in the United States. Devon plays on a team and competes and so he was excited about it being relatively close to home. Unfortunately with Rob sick at the time we couldn't commit to going and though Devon is 17, he is too young to rent a hotel room. Like most things, Devon understood all of this and said it wasn't a big deal, but Rob and I each knew differently. With all that was going on with Rob, he and I forgot about the tournament and Devon didn't bring it up again.

A couple of weeks after Rob died I asked Devon about the tournament and if it had happened. He told me it was happening the first week of April and I asked him whether he still wanted to go. He was able to secure two tickets and we made the trip here. At that time when we were having these discussions most everything scared me. Losing Rob undermined my capacity to make simple decisions and to take almost any initiative. Even as I felt paralyzed, I recognized the need to act nonetheless. I have traveled all over the world with and at times without Rob. Traveling from the east coast to Ohio was hardly a sojourn. It felt important to do this and be here for Devon and so I booked the flight, arranged the hotel, and actually had a very good time with my son. It has been a long time since we were able to get away and though I had a few weepy moments thinking about how much Rob would have enjoyed this with his son, overall the long weekend went well.

This is the new normal. In getting on with living, Devon and I need to create new rituals, new memories. Nothing is harder and yet, nothing feels more necessary.  And though it may not seem like a big deal, going to Ohio this weekend was a start.

Poetry Break: April in Maine

Spring Ice on Pond (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2009)

A friend, Nelson Campbell, posted the poem below as a reply to a poem I posted yesterday. It is so grand, so perceptive that I wanted to share it more widely.  Years ago, the first time Rob and I went to Maine it was early April. We left Manhattan and it was 50 degrees and ten hours later we finally stopped in Freeport, Maine because the snow kept falling. At first we thought it was nothing more than a snow shower, but as we travelled north, we realized we were in a bonfide snow storm. We ended up staying at an inn that had just been open. We would return to that inn annually for the next 27 years.

Thanks Nelson and of course, thank you May Sarton.

April in Maine 

         by May Sarton 


The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.



April in Maine" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.