Butterfly metaphor: the leftover goop

We LOVE to use the butterfly when we talk about people dying or people being transformed in huge ways. But nobody talks about the bloody goop that's part of the process of metamorphosis.

Because, I guess, it's pretty yucky.

On the face of it, if you look at the big salient bits, it's a nice image: caterpillar becomes butterfly. MAGIC. NATURE. Faith. We have lots of explanations.

So the living person is transformed into -- so much more beautiful! -- a soul. And the person who's being transformed -- hoorah! gets some rest time inside their chrysalis. We can use that. It's a good metaphor.

My daughter got a butterfly kit for her birthday, though. It was upsetting enough to me that she wanted to keep the butterflies indoors as pets, and didn't care that this would shorten their lives. Kids are cute, right? They have to learn their own lessons. OK, I chose not to fight that battle.

We watched most of it happen and it was some damn metaphor, really.

It was also gross. I have heard that the creature inside the chrysalis is a sort of chimeric soup... neither caterpillar nor butterfly. I tried, hard, not to visualize what it was doing in there, the pretty capsule that it wove from its own excretions. None of this, of course, was covered in the friendly brochure packed with the kit.

I knew my daughter was fascinated that seeing the wings emerge and dry would be something like seeing a human being born. But I had no idea the image would actually be fairly complete.

Because no one told me to expect the trail of bloody, mucus-y gook that would trail from the cocoons down the mesh of the butterfly habitat, leaving a brutal stain over the adorable pink flowers on its floor. 

Then the little light went on. I thought, how like my life.

It's been six years and I'm not a butterfly yet. There's a long period of living as something indeterminate on the way to whatever it is that's new. Living through loss and reaching middle age gives me access to the drudgery of deep work on who I am and how I was formed, that I might have avoided if Gavin hadn't died. (Maybe. Probably not.)

I can't be afraid of things being messy. I shouldn't be surprised that it takes a long time to change... if I really pay attention, I know I'm pretty different than I was 20 years ago (really substantially) and that there are more than three stages of growth, that caterpillar-chrysalis-butterfly was never really MY story.

And I'm not in such a murk, really. I get things done, I have a good life, life is immeasurably easier than it was during infertility, Gavin's illness, single parenting, or forming a new relationship.

I guess what I'm really saying is, it would be great if the common myth was, not that you change into a butterfly (or anything magical or natural sounding like that) but that human growth is big and slow: if the common wisdom was, not that it takes a year and then you fall in love and grief goes away, but that it takes five to seven years (at minimum) to build a new life after loss. And that it takes five to seven years for a step family to begin to gel.

It's slow. It has a bunch of stages, and some of them are dark and some of them are drippy. Sometimes a natural metaphor that you really like just doesn't fit. And it doesn't happen on its own.... it kind of hurts to grow.

And that goop is perfectly natural, you know you will leave some things behind and you won't always be pretty.  It's not a bad thing to be fascinated with it or to be pissed that the brochure didn't give you the whole story. You have to live with ambiguity, with muck and darkness. And someday, you will even fly, drink from flowers, and rest on dewy leaves, your true colors unfurled in the sunlight.

At least, if a scientifically-inclined 8-year-old doesn't insist on keeping you in the guest room for all 3 weeks that remain of your life.

Epilogue: After a fair amount of motherly nagging, my daughter agreed to let the last three butterflies "smell the air outdoors" from inside the habitat, and eventually gave two their freedom. (They probably got a few days.)

Boys will be Beastie, first interview, from Decline of Art magazine, 1981

Adam Yauch's death forces me to go back through dozens of boxes, to find relics of my high school history. The Beastie Boys' first published interview was in my fanzine, Decline of Art, which Jill Cunniff and I put together in 1981. This interview was in the second issue and typifies our teenage-bricoleur-meets-PereUbu style.

The Beastie Boys were a hardcore band in 1981, with John Berry on guitar and Kate Schellenbach on drums. Adam Horovitz had not yet joined. We were part of the same circle, kids in gifted-and-talented high schools running around NYC late at night. I took many photos of the band, as I did of any band we met or saw play, in this early stage. I am a little relieved I can't take credit for that much of the writing... though as I read it, I feel the tone of the times: constraints of that times' very grown-up TV and pop music scenes, the joy of being absurd and mixing things up that were part of hip hop the way it had to evolve before this digital era. The boss Grandmaster Flash, and gigs by Treacherous Three at a basement reggae club, were just around the corner but punk was here (possibly just across the ocean... we were always asking British bands about the riots) and now. Looking back reminds me how totally confusing it all was, even in its midst. None of us knew what to make of it even as we created the scene, and as kids, we were not really supposed to be there.

As I go through the boxes, I am surprised again and again. Nostalgia has morphed everything and as I review the papers, they change again. For one thing, I am  having trouble believing we were that silly, but there it is, in black and white.

Boys will be Beastie, an interview from Decline of Art #2, 1981

I did the photos on this sid

Us: What kind of musical representation is evident in your music?
A: We don't believe in music.
M: We only lift weights.
A: Off the record, my mother was a hamster.
Us: What do you think of N.Y. audiences compared to N.Y. audiences?
K: Well, I think -- yeah.
M: Best in the world, because you can insult them yet they think they are being complimented.
K: My mother is in the Health and Racquet Club.
A: Hyper admonitory synthesism of monitory confusement within a statement.
Us: What is your favorite T.V. show?
A: Bill Boggs.
M: Phil Donohue.
K: Tom Snyder.
J: I hate my fucking self.
Us: What is your favorite restaurant?
K: La Rompa.
A: Uncle Wong.
M: Lord of the Chickens.
J: Enough embarrassment for one night. (John leaves)
Throughout the interview Adam and Kate were far too eager to write on Michael's head and Michael was squirting Windex at my head.
Us: AACKH, DISGUSTING. What are your musical influences?
A: Pink Floyd.
K: Larry's hair.
M: the Mills Brothers and The 4 Freshmen.
A: Off the record, my father smelled of elderberries.
M: Honestly, I am upset.
Us: Why, Michael, why are you upset?
M: Because I wish to abate this nonsense which is plaguing this society.
Us: What do you think of Crass' ideas?
A: Los muchachos son mui stupido?
K: Das ist miene bruder.
M: Ta mere est le beurre.
Us: What do you think of Act II Haircutters?
K: Budgie rocks da house.*
Us: What do you think of these awful riots in N.Y.?
A: What?
Us: What is your favorite radio station?
A: Dub-ya Dub-ya....
M: WKRP in Cincinnati.
Us: That was really funny Michael.
K: WPAT, the place to relax.
A: My favorite color is red no blue.
K: Adam steals all his jokes from Monty Python. What time is it?
M: Marvy Marker.
A: Kate only said that because she loves Budgie because he kissed her.
Us: Do you like to carry on?
A: Yes.
K: The third OI compilation LP and they thank Noise the show on the back! **
A: Michael, you're a dick. Stop that or I'll chop your peny off and hang it from the tallest yardarm.
M: (Pollywog imitation) Are you going to see T.S.O.L. tonight? They're from Boston! (by Michael with his shaved head, dancing madly).
A: I'm Big Bank and I'm the chief of the tribe that went down in the hall of fame.
(Adam lights up a three foot cigar)
Us: Do you remember when Brian Brain threw bananas at the audience?
A: And chicken.
M: No I remember I feel on my hootie on a banana peel afterwards when I was dancing afterwards.
(Michael continues to stick his fingers up his nose and talks to an imaginary John on the telephone.) I love you, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
A. Michael continues to babble on incoherently and continues to dance madly. 

 -----------------------------------------------

* Budgie was the drummer for Siouxie and the Banshees, who had just played in NY, and also featured in that same issue of Decline of Art with an even more nonsensical article but really first class photos by me.

**  Noise the Show was Tim Sommers' radio show on NYU's station. Two blessed hours a day, M-F, if I remember rightly, and the only place we heard the records we wanted to buy. The Beastie Boys had played a live gig on the show and a recording of that was circulated widely on cassette before their first EP, Pollywog Stew, came out on Rat Cage Records.

What he was thinking, 2

(What he was thinking, 1, is here)

After Gavin died, I found a post-it note at his desk that stated:

Ataraxia: a tranquil indifference to the world’s vicissitudes.

I can’t think of anything he strove for more than this: calm and ease with the world.

As time went on and I sat in his office where I'd found the note, doing "estate business," (har har!) I wondered how he had managed to stare at these words all day long during his frustrating and futile fight with cancer (which angered him on many, many occasions). But I had, somehow, lost the note (I’d put it in a “special place” #yeahright). So I looked it up. Wikipedia had a different view of its meaning:

 … For the Pyrrhonians, owing to one's inability to say which sense impressions are true and which ones are false, it is the quietude that arises from suspending judgment on dogmatic beliefs or anything non-evident and continuing to inquire. The experience was said to have fallen on the painter Apelles who was trying to paint the foamy saliva of a horse. He was so unsuccessful that, in a rage, he gave up and threw the sponge he was cleaning his brushes with at the medium, thus producing the effect of the horse's foam.

I could compare the two definitions and try to psychoanalyze him, but probably, actually, I couldn’t. And I’m not sure it would be useful, since I THINK he wrote the note before his diagnosis and I don’t know where his version came from.

But I love that the example quotes another artist. Gavin was always using his work to explore, and he was often, often frustrated. Looking for definition, and finding Apelles, was for me and probably for him, too, like running into an old friend.

I remember how often Gavin wanted to tear up his beautiful sheets of Arches (and how often he did), when all anyone saw was the tranquil and pristine result. How often his struggles were with the page or his idea, and NOT with the wicked and messy world we live in. It’s a kind of transcendence that the artist has, even with cancer and the whole bit.

He knew how lucky he was to be an artist, allowed to use his energy this way. And I know how often putting it on paper helped him find peace.

Which is nice, because I tend to dwell on the hurt.

Which might be what makes writers.

Somatic Identification, Part 2

What is somatic identification? For me, in widowhood, it describes situations when I’ve seen my body imitate his, even though he is no longer here. It’s a little like sympathetic pain. Since he's no longer in this world, maybe it's more like a phantom limb: I want to keep caring for him even though he doesn't need it?

Usually it feels more like my own reluctance to move forward -- my desire to stay back in the world of the ill, to understand where how he felt when he knew he was leaving.

First I had the typical grief symptoms that manifest in the body: fatigue and depression and needing more extra sleep, combined with insomnia. I’m going to guess that these don’t really count as a sympathetic response, even though they mirror what his body went through to some extent, because grief is, itself, very physical. It isn’t well understood, but it is typical.

The somatic identification that affects me has happened late in my grief: as most other factors in my life are fairly resolved, no longer raw, and stable, I am a peculiar hypochrondriac. This area of my body’s response to loss is part of my own complicated grief – and I am pretty sure that in order to progress I have to get past it.

Here’s the form it’s taken in my life as a widow. First, of course our life with cancer (and with several issues before that) was what I called “highly medicalized.” So after he died I avoided doctors. All appointments were made late, many were broken and rescheduled multiple times. (I was much better but not perfect with my daughter’s health.)

Second, Gavin had a heart problem when we met, lived through open heart surgery early in our relationship, and had an arrhythmia and pacemaker for the last 12 years of his life.

When I finally got to the doctor for a physical she saw an inverted “T” in my echocardiogram… an odd pattern that could indicate a heart defect or heart disease. In the overall picture of my health, and given the odds, it was unlikely to be something serious. It scared me, but not enough to do anything.

When she wrote the referral, I saw that it was to the practice that Gavin went to for his defibrillator checkups. They always liked him so much and told me so. The technician came to hospice to turn off the device on Gavin’s last day and stopped on the way in (or out?) to tell me how sorry he was and what a lovely man Gavin was.

My poor primary care doctor had to write that referral three times in three years before I actually went.

It wasn’t easy to go to the appointments there, but I had to go over and over because insurance kept not authorizing one of the tests. I suppose repetition and negative focus on Blue Cross helped the visits get easier, and I did bond with a lovely nurse who asked me, “you wrote that you’ve had exceptional stress in the past few years….?” I spilled and she revealed that she’d been widowed ten years prior with two young kids.

I suppose I turned it around by making this new connection (and I’m fixing her up with my friend’s brother, too). All the tests came out fine: no problemo.

Third, I got weird visual disturbances. The first one, I thought was just because I hated my job and it went away after 20 minutes. The second one might have been PMS. My eye doctor looked at me worried and said, you better ask your primary care about that.

The doctor hesitated, saying it was likely migraine “auras,” but those were unlikely to come on for the first time at my age. Her pen hovered over the referral as she considered the many unnecessary MRIs performed each year and how my insurance might treat it.

I told her I’d err on the side of caution because of my husband’s cancer. I might be hypervigilant but I couldn’t put aside the thought: BRAIN TUMOR. BRAIN TUMOR. Gavin had two tiny brain tumors discovered during his last week. Although they were asymptomatic, they were one of the few things that actually spoke to me of death: I had just heard of a paper showing that most patients with brain mets survive 30 days or less. It was a number to fixate on. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have told him the result of that scan that last week.

We turned down that treatment – whole brain radiation, even without knowing how late it really was. It’s famous for awful side effects and as it turned out, he was gone 4 days after they would have been able to “squeeze him in.”

With these traumas on hand you might think my vigilance would have been productive, that I would have had an impulse to preserve myself, but no. While I could ask the doctor for the referral and promise to take care of it, I couldn’t actually call or show up for at least two years (two referrals or three?).

The test, which was held at the imaging center where Gavin used to go for his scans, including the disastrous ones, and the ones that were misread, and the one where he threw up, went fine.

(I celebrated not having a brain tumor with my first-ever two-day migraine.)

Fourth was one -- thankfully -- panic attack. Gavin was plagued by dozens per day during the period of his worst/best therapy, the one which stole his breath and marked the worst paradoxes of our time in treatment.

Will my body become unstuck when I have the last tests and find out I really AM going to live?

Or is this my body's way of teaching me to have more empathy, more compassion? A way of putting myself in the way so I can be sure to forgive and heal myself? Our bodies know, in grief, and in this way, I finally hear that my body has been holding something back.

Hard times

Dear readers, I’m having a hard time posting lately. Recent writing has dredged up ugly stuff, about my husband's death, about the miracle of my daughter’s birth, about who I used to be. I’m working on about a million things and seeing hope and horizons everywhere, but I’m tired. And everyone’s been sick.

None of it's a surprise, but this stuff is hard to do.

I told my church that my resolution in the New Year was “I will no longer apologize for who I am, and also, I'm gonna stop pretending that I like pie.”

But I am sorry to be slow. These are heavy topics, and even though I’m so much better now, and in love, and I have a happy healthy child ... there is a lot going on under the surface and I only have a grip on a little bit of it.

Please be patient with me. The two dozen half written posts (and the end of my daughter’s birth story) are good stuff, even if I end up publishing them in imperfect form.

(Now there’s a resolution. To accept imperfections in myself and others!)

(Maybe you should be praying for me instead?)

National Day of Listening

This may not work.

But I am going to try to talk to my damn mother for the Story Corps project, the National Day of Listening, on Friday. Maybe you can do it, too. It's a great legacy to leave, to include in the history of our real country, and a fantastic opportunity to connect with a loved one in a different way. The website offers tips as well as starting questions for your "interview."

There are a million ways and reasons I love what storytelling has become: a significant method that we use to frame our lives and our history. I never thought I'd see the day that ordinary people were recognized for their experiences and perspectives. I always thought that was the job of the Great American Novel, not reality TV, not computer networks, but things have changed. Thank God.

I love that I spent an hour on Monday selling a corporate client on how we'd help put faces to their "story," which they already value as a central part of their brand. I love that I have a chance to sell without lying, and use my skills to accomplish something rewarding while getting paid.

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The day after Thanksgiving, if I follow through on my National Day of Listening pledge, I'm supposed to listen to my mother for a full hour. We have a difficult relationship, but she is here for the holiday anyway.

Why don't I turn away when opportunity knocks like this? Maybe I'm strong enough to plunge right in to a challenging learning experience, perhaps flowers will pour from her mouth in a surprise fit of something-or-other. Could be that this process is just part of some rebellion I'm having against being healed, maybe this is my way to insist on banging my head against a familiar wall one more time.

I know part of my mother's annoying behavior is caused by illness, but after 43 years I still have trouble being around it and making room for my real live self.

Around her I feel like the child I was, the one who was constantly asked to be different; at other times I'm in the shoes of her parent, whose job it was to take care. The one who failed so miserably. If I saw my mother as a child who needed only love and empathy, I'd probably accept her and feel more sad than angry.

The sadness is like a well. I don't want to shine a light down there.

But an hour? With my ears? I'll try. Wish me luck.

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What Is Grief?

Grief is a monster. It rips and roars. It has a thousand eyes and eight kinds of fur. It’s furious and it bursts into your home. Grief rapes and pillages, it spends you, but it never leaves you alone.

Grief is an embezzler, green-shaded and officious, sapping you from a back room where he carries on vital aspects of your business. You’re not sure exactly what he does but everyone seems to trust him. The first day he doesn’t show up you find you’re hollow.

Grief is a saboteur, a pickpocket, a bastard. A hurricane, an elevator shaft, a muddy puddle, a pie in the face. Grief stains you, breaks you, kicks you when you’re down. Grief surprises you and changes constantly.

But we often forget that early on, Grief is also a companion. Grief is true, constant, honest. It won’t run if you stare or yell. Grief is always up for a conversation or a really juicy fight. Heck, Grief even shares jokes, some of which must be kept just between you two.

Grief is your intimate, your confidante, your own.

It takes, but it gives back, too. It plays Good Cop, Bad Cop. You have no defense.

You think maybe Grief protects you from worse things. It’s hard to say.

Grief feeds you and slakes your thirst. It embraces you when no one else will. It will never leave you alone. It helps you feel special and keeps you apart when, sometimes, you need to be distant from the rest of the world.

Grief can be an object. It’s easy to blame Grief, and satisfying to beat the shit out of it.

It will step back a bit over time, and you two will grow apart. It never looks the same the same two days in a row. Like you, it learns.

But gradually your life will recruit new characters and more feelings. When you are busy with them, Grief begins to starve. You gain strength.

Grief is not the thing that hurt you, it's made out of you, so it will always be there for you when you need it.


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Three Cliches, Including "Till Death Do Us Part."

Leave it to me to question the truisms that everyone says without thinking. (For some reason, I am still fun at parties…)

“It didn’t work out.”
I never understood why people would say this about a relationship after it was over. What was supposed to be the endpoint, which didn’t end up fulfilled? Is it that they didn’t “close the deal” by getting married? Surely they could enjoy their time together without having an end in mind. Did it “not work out” because they didn’t stay married until one of them died? Is a marriage that ends in divorce like the sound of a tree that falls in the forest when no one hears it? Surely those years together were worth something in this world, at least in the small sphere of your time in it.

Is it just that it’s one of those nonsense phrases that everyone uses, of which I have so little understanding or tolerance? Or is “it didn’t work out” truly contemptuous of time? Whatever it is, I always take a step back from any friend who says it. (Did I mention that I still have friends? ‘Cause I do. I’m not even lying.)

“Happily ever after.”
Who cares what it’s “after?!” Yeah, I get that you’re closing the book, so “after” the cover’s shut. What is it until?

On the other hand, we cynics today, we sophisticates, make so much fun of “fairytale endings.” What would be wrong with just plain being happy until we each individually (don’t forget, we all do die alone) fade out, hopefully in our sleep and at a good ripe age. So much contempt. Don’t you deserve to have joy? Wouldn’t most of us be happy to remember one moment of bliss at the end as the chapters shoot past our fading eyes?

“Till death do us part.”
How much do any of us really contemplate this statement? Gavin and I thought we were pretty serious about our love in the face of Death. We married in defiance of his heart problems and several near-death experiences. We requested that our friend Pat, glamorous jazz singer, sing “One Hand, One Heart” from West Side Story (“even death won’t part us now”) at our vows (and, um, “Like a Prayer”). And then we went to Mexico for the Days of the Dead (including a cemetery tour) for our lunes miel.

But seriously, who wants to fulfill those vows? We love to picture ourselves on the porch, white haired or bald in last year’s hiked-up pants giving lollipops to sticky grandkids.

But being the caregiver to a dying love, whether old or young? Recovering alone from the shock of a car accident? Romantic? Pfah! Research shows it takes 10 years off your life.

We cherish the Norman Rockwell picture of “till death do us part,” but none of us is ready for the Norman Cousins one.

Should I be pleased that death parted me from Gavin? I’m not sure. I did enjoy entering dating with a “successful” relationship (ah! There’s that endpoint!) behind me, and I certainly hold it over your everyday divorcee. And look, widowhood is a big part of my identity. (Today.)

But surely a marriage in which my husband died didn’t “work out,” did it?

Mr. Fresh says he hopes I die first so that I don’t have to go through this kind of loss again. I’m not sure how much of a kindness this is. I joke back, “Yeah, um, no thanks. I love you too, but be my guest.”

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* (I’m not endorsing divorce. I think it’s a grand waste and injustice 90% of the time. But seriously? Marriage and death? Not really on the same page for any of us.)

** (Is that time only valuable if it’s permanent? If we are mortal, shouldn’t our feelings be mortal, too?).


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The "Grief" Category: Ruminations on BlogHer09

I finally figured out what was getting me about the BlogHer conference back in July. Why I went in expecting to feel different from everyone else, and came out disappointed that the only thing different about me was that I had hoped to be left out, but no one would play along.

(I’ll leave the psychoanalysis aside for a moment and just talk about grief in blogging.)

I went to BlogHer expecting grief in blogs to be like grief in real life: a difficult issue that no one is willing to talk about. I often found myself frustrated that there was no real category for me in the indexes (BlogHer, Bloglines, Blogopedia, Technorati, AllTop, Blogarama, Scribnia… ). I’d list my blog under “family life” or “parenting” even though those choices cut me off from single widows, with whom I generally feel great comradeship.

Checking the wrong box left me feeling misunderstood. After all every widow has a story about the first time she has to check “widowed” on a form, and another about some clueless organization that expects her to select among “single,” “married,” or “divorced.”

When I was at this conference with 1300 other people, mostly women, largely Moms, who write for different publics, I found that grief in blogs really is like grief in real life: a deep vein that shows bright if you scratch the surface. A stone a lot of people are carrying in an inner pocket. You can’t see it, but they might even be fondling it while they talk to you. Grief is so common and such a part of life that it doesn’t make sense to put all those people off in a separate room.

(Leaving aside for a moment, again, that a grieving bloggers conference would be TEH AWESOME). (See. I learned blogger lingo. I’m a pro now.)

We all hope to be lucky enough to write only occasionally about our loss and adaptation. Then we could talk about other subjects: recipes, cute things our kids did, politics... the whole world. Of which grief is, yes, an important part.

Maybe we grief bloggers are just stuck. I’m sure that’s what it looks like from the outside.

Or in some HEY LOOK AT ME phase of tearing hair and rending garment. I suppose it’s a good thing that we might move on to something else.

Blogs that serve only one need for the author do tend to die out. There are abandoned grief blogs all over the place.

But my demands are often unreasonable. Maybe topical categorization is less useful for subjects that span our serious, lumpy, camouflaged, ever-changing emotional lives. Seems we bereaved people do a fairly decent job at finding one another online using the same vehicles we do in real life: through friends (and their blogrolls).

What’s so wonderful about blogs is that they are as in-between as we are. A fresh source of rich, personal information and perspectives that shows humans in all our color and glory (leaving aside, for now, the skew towards people with internet access).

If this diverse democratic distribution of words and images favors the creative, the trouble makers, those who don't fit neatly into one category, who am I to complain?


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No Longer in Active Grieving? HA!

Three years after my husband’s death, it seems I’ve picked up a new hobby: trumpeting how much better things are. How I’m still a widow, living and integrating the loss into a good life, and how much easier this is than active grieving. Tales of how I regained my mojo, dated, remarried and started to settle in with what I refuse to call “a new normal.” (It’s just life!) How my kid is growing to understand that she has had two Daddys and how I am so glad I escaped the Single-Moms-Can-Cope claptrap.

Maybe grief makes me preachy. One morning while I lie in bed wondering why I can’t get anything done, why I’m overcommitted to everything, why my back is starting to go again, and how slow I'm making progress on the packing and moving business, it hits me: low motivation. Muddy thinking. I may not be full-scale depressed again, but I’m back in full grief.

Knowing this allows me to give in. Dinner’s been impossible. I’ve been cooking from scratch, for better health and better taste, plus I know I need to stretch and work my cooking muscles in order to reach full adult height again. But it’s still a damn mess between shopping and cleaning up.

Surrender means I get that one day’s worth of stuff done. I make a giant list to contain my stresses and stare at it for a few days (it should be in the recycle bin by Sunday).

And then I return to Trader Joe’s. Even as I tumble back through the welcoming automatic doors I’m grateful to have permission and something decent to fall back on. I search for the breaded eggplant and decide I’ll give their pizzas a second chance. Short Stack and I relied on Trader Joe’s frozen pizza for “movie night” for more than a year, but they deteriorated and finally jumped the shark. On the other side of the shark we found Paul Newman and he’s been fine for a year now.

(Why has no one else noticed that Trader Joe’s pizzas started to suck? I’ve been Googling it for nearly two years and either I’m the only one, or Google’s broken. But I can taste that Trader Joe’s suppliers have been using different flour and inferior sauce. Mr. Fresh thinks this is another case of the “rising standards” I’ve developed, but I remind him that “bait and switch” is a very profitable and extremely common strategy which most of us don’t want to see.)

A return to active grieving explains why we were two hours late for the dolphin show at the aquarium. Perhaps a normal person might just take the road they’re familiar with. But that is the same way we used to go, sometimes weekly, to Gavin’s oncologist. As we passed the sign for the alternate route we never took, I picked an internal conversation with Gavin. “Someday we’ll take the tunnel,” he used to say. He would have loved it. As we sped through miles of industrial zone, vintage warehouses, piles of salt, gravel, asphalt, unknown substances in cones, silos, hills, pyramids, and under fields of tarp blue, I told Shortie how Daddy would loved these images for his “industrial landscape” drawings.

But fuckit if we didn’t miss the damn exit and end up miles and miles out of our way. Thirty bucks down the toilet. (They did let us see the fish, just not the ticketed event. How could I argue?).

Grief is a saboteur. It explains why when my doctor referred me to Gavin’s cardiology specialist I said, “No, it won’t be a problem” but two years later, I still haven’t had the stress test. (They always liked Gavin. And someone from the office had to come to hospice on his last day to switch off his defibrillator. Of course they had to stop and tell me what a great human he was.).

Am I back? Back there, or back to myself? I don’t know.

Most of my minutes take place in my new life. But I don’t believe I have a “new” life any more than I like the term “new normal.” It’s just one life. We only get one (man, do we ever only get one).

It must be grief: I’m thrust back, every fall, to thinking about my Dad a lot. Because every loss recalls the first. And he used to say, when we fussed about what food was touching what other food: "It all gets mixed up in your stomach anyway." (He thought he was being funny. You know, in that “pull my finger” way.) But in some ways this is a secret of life: don’t spend too much time being careful about categories. They’re not very comfy to live in.

More coffee, some nice Piñon (Gavin spent his early years in Albuquerque and loved the smell) from Trader Joe’s, and I’ll try to get back to packing.

(And I'll report back on the pizza).

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First Day of Kindergarten, So Help Me God

Have you ever seen anyone shinier and happier than my little girl on her first day of kindergarten? Me neither.

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This morning we arrived a speck late and I heard them start the pledge of allegiance. Staff and students took it so seriously: stopped, even in the hallways, faced the nearest flag, hand on heart, recited the hallowed words.

In high school as I was healing from early childhood I adored William Safire’s essay on mondegreens:
I led the pigeons to the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the republic, for Richard Stans,
One naked individual,
With liver tea and justice for all. Amen.

I have not been civic as a widow. The world outside was “one more damn thing.” I cancelled the paper before the memorial service; Gavin was the one who understood Bosnia. (I have a weakness when it comes to understanding “sides,” political or in dramatic movies. And I was the household’s economics department.) I pared down. I pretended I couldn’t care. To this day I barely follow health care reform, though I know it’s vital and even have a strong sense of mission about it.

But let’s be honest, I’m not an ironic teen any more; I feel the oath in my bones. I’m the kind of person who cries when singing the national anthem, even at a baseball game.

And here we are with a black President.

I’ve had such a hard time figuring out how to talk about the dread I’ve felt as my daughter approached her first red brick schoolhouse. Elementary school was almost hell for me and my sister; we were in a white minority, our parents too blinded to the virtues of the civil rights movement to apprehend anything. We learned of the holy saints Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, and trilled like good Castillians over “rrrRoberto Clemente.” We grew gnarled inside, wishing for black-is-beautiful cornrows.

Outside this home, every person had their own ideas and motivations. In second grade, a little boy showed his penis under the table and told me he’d kill me if I didn’t meet him in the playground after school. I believed him. It was a crowded classroom after a teacher’s strike. My parents wouldn’t hear, couldn’t have helped, given their own serious limitations. I fabricated a conflict with the teacher in our overcrowded classroom and managed to just barely escape. I receded into a cocoon of depression because those above didn’t think I was worth protecting. This event shaped the damages in my life. I’m still working, still hurting, still showing open wounds as I plead for help from above.

It’s not right to talk about it when I'm protecting my own precious jewel of a child, in her perfect pink raincoat.

But it was real, and it was then, and I’m not a child. I’m a mother. I can own my pain and accept it’s only my job to heal.

I know that my parents’ blindness, and their histories, which I’m still uncovering slowly, were more of the culprit than that little boy was. I know that growing depressed kept me intact, safe, from what was much worse. It was adaptive, now it’s not, and I’ve taken about a millions steps through and out of the pit.

I can take care of my girl. Remarrying (and a big macho man, at that) demonstrates that I can act appropriately. She’s not me, and I’m not my mother.

I was isolated. My mother felt contempt for the world. I’ve just been through enough of that, and I’m starting to love it, warts and all, again. I trust it (but require that all others pay cash). I like the complexities of our differences enough to look at them straight.

My daughter will be part of the world. As everyone reminds me, her challenges will be in some area that I can’t even imagine.

Will I be awake?

I face the flag of our land, which I’m so lucky to love. Let me not be afraid to ask for help. Let me know my limits. Let me be a good enough Mom for my joyful, secure daughter, keep my eyes and ears open. May we be safe. Please.

Amen.


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First Marriage, Second Marriage, Part 1

I married for love the first time.
I got together with Gavin because I needed a ride to a party, but the summer night helped me hear his gentle voice.
I was growing up, learning about the real world, money, and emotions. We loved the same books and music.
He was 20 years older than me, an Irish mama’s boy with a pinch of the ascetic.
We felt lucky to have each other.
We faced death and decided our commitment mattered.
He loved this world but didn’t really accept it. I was the breadwinner, making choices about my time so he could continue his life’s work.
We bought an old house, paralyzed over palettes and too poor to upgrade any of its “charming features.”
We were idealistic and often chose not to fight.
His Chinese horoscope sign was dog, I am the horse.
Where I was brash, he was kind and calm.
I wanted him to soften me.
I carried all the fire, and I brought him a child, a new life he looked forward to with an appreciation of the divine and the temporary.
We faced death again and he lost.

I married for love the second time, too.
I met Mr. Fresh half a lifetime ago, when I was studying with his teacher.
When we got together recently we were both mature, bouncing back after our different losses. We didn’t look crushed or burned any more. Beneath sarcastic smiles, we were tough.
We’re both intense and goofy, lucky and fierce.
We bring equal fuel to the fire.
He’s fire rooster, I’m fire horse.
We’re both practical, but where I stall, he finishes.
We both tilt at windmills, but we’ve demonstrated appropriate use of the “off” button.
When he lacks faith, I bring him shelter, tools, and love.
I worry like a Mom, but he supports and protects us.
I’m considering the range of real choices and talents I was born with.
I love our world well enough to believe that somewhere, it needs me.
He hasn’t stopped changing, either.
Till death do us part.


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The Posture of Grief and Recovery

During active grieving, most of the young widows I knew described their cars as perfect compartments for crying: soundproof, childless, portable, and stocked with Kleenex. I was fortunate enough to be held by a faith community instead. Every Sunday church was a refuge where I could cry in peace or on a shoulder, and sing brokenly as loud as I wanted to.

By instinct and feeling, over many months, I adapted my own posture. The position is a little like Eagle Pose: my upper and lower body twist to enclose the heart in a knot, but it’s smooth on the outside and every part plays a role.

The legs are crossed, right knee over left. Left elbow nests on the right inner elbow, resting on the lap. My back is bent but just enough to fit the puzzle together. Two fingers of my left hand pinch the earpiece of my splendid eyeglasses, which dangle out to the right to avoid harm. The chin tucks naturally. The right hand is all business, cradling the bridge of the nose, offering a span of Kleenex to both eyes at the same time. The tail of the Kleenex is ready to spread down to the two nostrils if they flare or bubble. A dozen more Kleenex wait on the blue cloth seat of the chair next to me.

Unlike other slouches, in this one the lower back pulls up and forward and the head can still float like an egg about to hatch. In this position, you can really feel the breath elevate and spread the spine. It’s a bow being slowly released. You’re free to cry, well protected, still available to hug and somehow, you can even provide your shoulder to someone else.

I wept at service a few weeks ago, at a song or a sorrow, and it came back to me. I remember that grieving is a physical process and one that uses your entire body.

Being unemployed and newlywed has changed my body, too: I’ve been lifting weights and feeling as that strength helps my hard, crushed chest to open up by slight turns. I’m using my hips more freely when I run, and the wonky alignment of my right knee seems to be gone.

But one morning about a month ago I woke up in hell. The weak spot in my right side middle back was throbbing, unstretchable. It’s happened before, and usually goes away after 3 or 4 days. I saw the allopath and got two Rx’es, which help, but mornings are almost unbearable. I can’t stay in bed and stretching is hard. Sometimes I just get up at 3 or whenever the pain wakes me and I stay up. It creates a constant present where I want only one thing: let the pain stop.

Boy, pain really has a way of focusing the mind. I remember all the pain that Gavin suffered when he had a metastasis eroding his spine all summer long. I empathize with his long-lost daily struggle and remember all the pain meds he took.

Even as the pain seems to be stepping back, slowly, it’s still hard not to look at the metaphors. At 42, after years of unbearable stress, I am waking up. What is my body trying to tell me?

Perhaps I am strong enough at last to confront some demons and kill some gremlins. Surely one of the new directions pointing at me is the right one. Maybe I could throw out about 1,000 pounds of STUFF. I'm sure it was impulsive to remarry so quickly, though I have no doubt Marshall is the best man for the job.

I am on the verge of insight in several areas of my life, if I may be forgiven for hubristic navel-gazing on my blog (what else, excuse me, is it for?). But I know it will hurt to pull all those band-aids off. I suppose I’m not doing it fast, but can I handle it at all? They’re flesh colored; I’m sure no one can see them.

I’m surrounded by loads of natural, situational stress. We’re in the process of moving (nearby), girl begins Kindergarten in a month, Marshall’s new job starts Monday. These things are hard to untangle.

The only way out is through. I guess I’m going to stretch out my legs, slowly, at 5 a.m. as I have been doing, and listen to my poor neglected muscles and nerves with brave ears.

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Butterflies vs. Mermaids

In this blog, I'm obsessed with change. “Widow” is a transitional state for a young woman, and the title I still use even though, by the formal definition, I’m now a humdrum, presumably settled married woman.

One unsurprising but loaded image of transformation follows me everywhere: the butterfly. You can pay $8 at a local nature center to hang out in a tent full of imported ones, gorgeous as your favorite painting or poem, and have them land on you like eyelashes. At 5, my daughter knows the story well: The caterpillar builds his own refuge (from, anthropologists alert! his own secretions), where, with patience and thanks to fate, he emerges with fantastical wings and the talent of flight. He hasn’t a care in the world, and he’s beautiful: completely changed.

Ah, metamorphosis, lovely 99 cent word: you can almost hear the music rising.

Visiting a friend with a disability I note how they provide a decorative motif in her independent apartment. I presume the metaphor is freedom from the body: we’re more than our shells, we hold the hope of change. But these creatures of pure color are delicate and tragic, too lovely for our world. When my sister’s young boyfriend died, she collected dozens of butterfly objects. The butterfly seems to leave his body behind, which is also what we say when the soul leaves. Like all dead things, the butterfly is the Christ, one being born holding the promise of another, transcendent, to be fulfilled.

I’m not happy with butterflies, even though they provide such a perfect package for discussing our growth and change through life.

I’ve been using mermaids throughout this blog because (1) they are all over my house and (2) they represent the kind of imaginative world both my daughter and I lived in when I rediscovered parts of myself, feelings of joy, and the ability to find meaning again after Gavin died.

The little bitches also never fit in, half one thing, half another, longing to be whole but different. (Does she fit in under the sea, really, with her mammaries? Does the ocean really accommodate an entire subculture of these beings? Are there different races of mermaids? What bigger fish prey on them?)

In Andersen’s telling, the mermaid gets her wish, losing the tail and finding legs for land, but when she presses her sought-after shoes to the blessed street, the pain is excruciating. Her two feet are stumps of the tail God gave her. (I’m skipping over so many delicious analogies and interpretations to make my point. This post is too long already). In the end, she becomes a creature of neither land nor sea, but air. (I don't think anyone is satisfied by this ending, neither fairytale nor Hollywood.)

Here’s the thing. I’ve put half my life into changing some things in my life that weren’t working. Some might say ditching depression is like getting rid of a tail - - it kept me moving in one environment, but was useless in the adult world. But most of the progress I achieved was leanring to believe that I don’t need to be someone else.

I’d like to fly, or fulfill my destiny. Not yet free, I’m on the path. I’m full of hope (butterfly) and determination (mermaid).

But here I am at BlogHer, a day late, a couple parties short, unprepared, un-made-over, recovering from an injury. Yet I missed last weekend’s National Conference on Widowhood, where I would have found soul sisters galore and cried in honest happiness to see how we all are becoming.

Is it stupid that I often choose not to fit in? I was much happier at my college reunion last year (college was where I first really felt among family) than at my high school reunion last month (where I was cruelly catapulted back into adolescence, feeling a fish out of water). I deserve both comfort zone and challenge.

Which will I find at the Sheraton in Chicago? Will I fly or thunk? Sink or swim?

You know what I’ve learned? I’m the only one who’ll be able to tell, and I’m the only one whose judgment means anything.

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