Tag: grief

Full Fathom

The Violet Envelope (c) S. M. Glennon 2020

I did first ask if it was too soon.

In this case, to bowdlerize the first sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the run on spices that left the aisle as inexplicably barren as that of TP.”

A quarantined extreme extrovert and lifelong NYC friend had circulated a blog post updating opening lines in great novels.  Surprised that it did not contain an homage to social distancing encompassing a full century’s solitude, I contemplated a first line as ideally suited to pandemic as it is to every other aspect of human life: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father told him, ‘Stay the f*** home.’”

In some ways we’ve reframed love.  Or perhaps we just see a gloriously expanded array of acts which now express it.

Love is crossing the street when you see your neighbor coming.

******

Forever ago—that is, earlier this spring—maintaining a Smoot-length separation from one another did not neatly fall within our framework of an act of love, a noun that embraces affirmative physicality, not negative space.  I suspect most of us think of love as encompassing tactile expression, starkly incomplete as an interior experience.

Adopting a habit of strict distancing, on the other hand, is quite a bit easier than navigating the scope of a statute, a Commandment, or even an office-wide email.  It is not fraught with nuance; doesn’t entail awkward conversations with children or peers, or a foray into any framer’s intent; and seems impervious to miscommunication if one pays minimal attention, even with a pandemic-distracted mind.

When the love lies in the apartness….Well, six feet is six feet.

Or is it?

******

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
                                             Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
 
 
 

 

 

Dropping the sense of touch from love’s repertoire may be a sea-change for most, but it is nothing new to those grieving the loss of a life’s partner.  For years I’ve felt space change shape in a way that rewrites how love is shown–intimately, profoundly, and perhaps most of all at unfathomable distances.

My husband died nine years ago, from the speedy and ghastly exponential progression of a disease that had declared its end even before there was an outward hint it had arrived to occupy his his body.

An internist, he described to me by its precise reflected sensation, but before he or anyone else could see anything there: a small, persistent lower-quadrant “ping” that lingered just a little too long after his daily run with Rufus and Brady, our exuberant rescue beagles.

By the time he intuited that this sensation differed minutely from the muscle strain it resembled, the deadliest cancer’s cells had spread and could not be contained, having first staked their claim to his pancreas and irretrievably wrapped around his portal vein.  I could never bear to look at the projected scan that accompanied a doctor’s uninflected, oddly lyrical description of his tumor’s “labyrinthine varicosities.”

Suddenly, it seemed, we were living in José Saramago’s  Death  with Interruptions. Death, aware of the problematic unintended consequences of having taken time off, and having herself become flesh and fallen under the sway of its physical desires, had resumed her job but changed it up: now, as appointed dates approached, she dispatched handwritten notices to those whose time was about to run out.

My husband had been handed one of her violet envelopes.

******

Love whittled to its essence by the prospect of a loved one’s imminent death makes holing up in solitude—and the spatial do-si-dos when we encounter people outside–seem among the lightest loads to shoulder.

This is not to say that physical separation is insignificant.  Far from it.  Multitudes of people will be haunted by outliving those who fell gravely ill and perished, whom they could not comfort face-to-face and hand-to-hand.  I am  thankful that my husband was able to be at home, surrounded and enveloped by love when he died; as traumatic as his death was, it would have been ineffably harder had we all not been able to touch and be with him.

I’ve found mere measurable distance from my children as they’ve grown sometimes physically painful.  Dropping them off at schools and airports has been a minefield of exquisite sadness, pride for the people they’ve become, yearning for the spirits of their younger selves when we all were together, and profound regret for all I could have done better when we were.

When it comes down to the point of even impermanent separation, it always seems far too soon. Kiran Desei described such a moment in The Inheritance of Loss, writing of a mother whose son had left his home in the foothills of Mount Kanchenjunga to travel to New York City, and who “was weeping because she had not estimated the imbalance between the finality of good-bye and the briefness of the last moment.”

The dissonance is a function of the uncertainty of not knowing how long a separation will last, or how or whether it will end.

******

I gratefully accepted the privilege of an opportunity for home confinement with one of my sons only a little bit before it become au courant, and well before the first shelter-in-place order expressed the alchemy of an act of isolation as a commitment to community.

I found myself trying to put my dread into words for someone whom technology permits me to see and hear on a wee screen. My subconscious seized on those who will survive the pandemic. (Cue, as ever, Hamilton: “Dying is easy; living is hard,” and Eliza, who outlives her husband by a half-century).

I finally stammered, “It’s the grief that’s coming, for so many, so soon.”

Six feet apart is essential, but my husband would also have been early to understand that for countless people it comes too late to escape six feet under, or whatever measurement we may assign to the “thin” space we can no longer breach between heaven and earth once people we love are no longer within our reach.

These thin places are where I best understand how touch can be the least important of our senses.  According to Eric Weiner, those who originated the term “almost certainly spoke with an Irish brogue. The ancient pagan Celts, and later, Christians, used the term to describe mesmerizing places like the wind-swept isle of Iona . . . . Heaven and earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.”

A thin place involves only one corporeal presence but is soul-to-soul.  It lacks complicating barriers and layers, physical and otherwise; it cannot accommodate pretense or posturing or guile. It cannot sustain a space in which “furtive things [begin] to crawl.”  Although we cannot reach out and touch the person we love within that space, it is hard to envision a more intimate connection than that which happens there.

******

This new practice of love-at-a-distance has helped illuminate something that’s been nagging at my sleep-deprived subconscious for nearly a decade.  At about the two-year mark of widowhood, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm and tactlessness, friends started suggesting that I should try to “meet” people.  Even yours truly, who married the boyfriend I met when I was not quite seventeen, could understand an entreaty into the world of dating into which many of my divorced friends regularly and readily dive.

To some I was direct.  To most I merely demurred, having not yet identified that my unwidowed friends and I think in different languages.  “You might as well get a rocking chair and a shawl,” one separated friend, summonsing years of unresolved aggrievement to which I cannot relate. What could she possibly think is wrong with that? I thought.

These conversations, which I abruptly fled, were focused on one sense: the physical.

I suspect that is not even within the top 100 of the list of missing pieces from the ranks of the grieving so many are  joining.  The experience of watching someone you love so deeply at the end of life can consolidate sensory memory and distill the essence of intimacy in love, to which touch may be tangential.

Were I forced to pick something physical that catches my heart still, it is a memory that doesn’t even involve touch.  I can still see every detail of my husband’s left shoulder, rising and falling with the subtlety of a shimmer as he, always on his right side, slept the “sleep of the just,” as he called it with a twinkle whenever I incredulously asked him about his capacity to occupy the present and disengage for restorative rest from what he could change in this world and what he accepted he could not.

******

Inside my shuttered window on the world I have come to think that disorientation by physical distancing has little to do with the physical, including romance; it has everything to do with love, and quite a bit to do with grief, anticipatory and present.

The fathom as the unfathomable.

******

On an icy early spring day in New England, just like the March day my husband died, snow had dissolved and darkened into finely-crimped crêpe a sizeable cohort of a bed of violet crocuses which just the day before had sturdily faced the sun.

After I darted across the street to avoid them I watched an elderly couple, gloved hands on wool coat sleeves steadying each other, as I hope they still do and always will.

Sensational Sunrise

 

Already in this young calendar year, I have become irrationally upset at having missed a sunrise.  This dazzling world‘s irreproducible morning display.

I voiced my sadness to a colleague later that day, telling her how extraordinary the color had been, white-gold waves seeping into bright pink and variegated plum.  It was, I told her, similarly as saturated as the Valentine’s Day sunset I had chased into her west-facing office (from my windowless one) last year, sliding her vertical blinds aside and pointing to the enormous bruised purple heart cloud floating on a wavering sea of yellow-orange crepuscular rays.  (Mmmhuh, she nodded politely.  Evidently I was the only one to see it that way.  It was another particularly tough February 14th.)

Quite rationally, she wondered how I could so vividly describe a sunrise that I had missed.

It took me more than a few beats to realize I hadn’t missed sunrise at all.  I had seen it at its glorious peak as I exited the highway just as the sun was about to emerge on the horizon.

What I had missed was the chance to take a picture, to commemorate a part of it–to be able to share it, to pass it along to someone who had indeed missed it.

I collect sunrises, but do so very imperfectly, and without the overwhelming synesthesia of solitude.  My photographs don’t dance with the glittering indigo diamonds of cross-wakes as fishing boats glide out to sea.  Living things become one-dimensional shadows–a viewer can see only the  most recent vogue pose struck by a silent cormorant atop a mast.  Looking at a picture, you cannot taste the sea air or feel the crunch of underwater barnacles or hear the morning light lyrically unfold.

And in my friend’s observation I may have discovered a key to my writer’s block.

All I can ever capture of loss, of my husband and all other missing beings who have become some part of me, is what I can put into the language of words and pictures.  I want to tell their stories, but the tools I have are, in the supremely elegant words of Primo Levi in A Tranquil Star, “inadequate and [seem] laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather.”  That language “that was born with us, [is] suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are. It doesn’t go beyond what our senses tell us.”

Perhaps it has become difficult to write because I feel I should have moved forward–that I have nothing useful to say now that I am somehow on the cusp of a second decade of living with this never-ending grief, now augmented by the half-life of the additional losses we all accrue.

All I can ever capture of a sunrise is what it looked like, but maybe that is–or should be–enough.  Maybe that dollop of beauty, which I am almost always the only person in sight to behold, is enough to share.  And maybe it’s enough to be able to write about what you know of the people you love and have loved, especially those who can no longer tell their stories.

I did not, after all, miss that sunrise.

Let me tell you about it.

I have known people who live and have lived lives filled with kindness, humor, wisdom, and grace.

Please allow me to tell you about them…

 

 

 

 

Blindside

The title came first.

I had something else entirely in mind when I arrived on my own blog in the wee hours of this morning to find a season’s worth of recent posts inexplicably wiped off the face of the internet.

They hadn’t just disappeared into the ether, but all previous drafts (but for one weak early one) had evaporated, never to be reconstituted.  I have no idea how that happened; it’s never happened to me before.

I couldn’t truly rewrite a post any more than I could recreate a quilt, or ever fully repair my bruised heart.  The only things I can replay in vivid photographic detail are technicolor memories of human connections.  Some of them are glorious, some quotidian, some so terrible thy hover beyond the limits of language.  As we grieve we shift the balance among them.

It’s impossible to entirely rebuild something that emanates from your heart and mind, to which dimension and nuance is added by revisiting and reevaluating.  Even something as simple as a blog post.

Were I to even have the heart to try, I think I would re-write tightly and tentatively.  I might wonder if the words now were as apt as I thought, whether even the experiences I wrote about were, after all, what they seemed when I first wrote it.

A college classmate wrote “The Blind Side,”   which I only just realized has an extended title: “Evolution of a Game.”

I’ll get back to that.

“The play is now 3.5 seconds old,” he writes, describing an infamous football game that resulted in a grisly on-camera injury.  “Until this moment it has been defined by what the quarterback can see.  Now it — and he — is at the mercy of what he can’t see.”

Anyone who has experienced reactive depression, or I suppose life itself, will understand the power of momentum that gathers out of your sight before you find yourself with the wind knocked out of you.

“Surprise me,” I or one of the children would say.

“Pleasantly, or unpleasantly?” their father would reply with a twinkle, and the infinitesimal crinkle of a winking eye, though he would never grow old enough to display what would have been gloriously earned laugh lines.   

And some of us are far more susceptible to the blindside than others.

An even, “That’s disappointing,”  as Jim raised his eyes to the surgeon who had handed him a report on his tumor’s invasive offshoots, while my own healthy body and heart crumbled.    

It’s been very close to eight years since my husband died.

At about the two-year mark, I met someone who had lost a sibling to cancer at the same young age and very close to the same time.  If I’d written about this just four days ago an entirely different story would have been preserved in amber, about the person I considered my best post-widowhood friend through all those years.

As Edward Gorey once wrote, “Yesterday I did not know that today it would be raining.”

But after nearly six years, deep into an exceptionally stressful winter, which anyone who knows me must know swaddles my soul in degrees of icy darkness, I found out–through a single flipping email (terse, yet encompassing abuse of the adverbial form; anyone who knows me is aware that’s going to be poison icing on the cake)–that, at best, things were not as they had seemed.  That maybe I was even part of the “evolution of a game.”

So that can’t be reworked, rewritten, rebuilt.

Maybe I’ll start on those missing posts instead.

Anniversary in Amber

 

A date announced itself on this summer’s calendar, swooping in to mark what is known in our household as an anniversary “of significance.”

Such milestones ordinarily are divisible by five, and are of extra note if divisible by ten.

If Jim were here I’m fairly sure that for this wedding anniversary he would have spirited us away to some outdoor place where we could behold birds and summer flora.  Chances are high that an ocean would have been involved.  He would have done all the planning, certain to minimize travel and avoid tiny modes of transportation: I always viewed as suspicious the smaller ratios of protective steel girding to numbers of passengers.

No camel safaris would have been involved.

If he were here I still would be profoundly afraid of flying, so he likely would have kept us close–perhaps winding up the coast of Maine to Bar Harbor.  If so, he undoubtedly would have been at the wheel.

In the steady comforting voice that still greets me on two of our children’s telephone messages, he would be reassuring me about my cataclysmic geopolitical fears and my worries about our children, each one of whom has now graduated and set out into this dazzling world without him.

He would have securely packed up what I think of as the “real” camera equipment to photograph what we saw, carefully waiting for images to take shape.  He would carry home these preserved pixels, refine them, and catalogue them; he would pare them dispassionately and keep only what was worth keeping, then tag them and star them so he would know where to find them.

I, on the other hand, would have merrily clicked away on my wee camera’s “Auto” setting until the battery, memory card, and/or shutter plum wore out.  I would have been photographing him and other people instead of landscapes and seascapes.  (I haven’t quite finished psychoanalyzing my change of subject matter yet.)

But instead…..

“In dark New Hampshire where his widow wakes.”

Widow “wakes”–not “awakes” or “awakens.”  A far cry from “rises.” It’s not simply alliteration.  If I am in any way typical of what  happens once those wedding vows have been lived out, I remain mired in the moebius of my spouse’s last moments: now that I have occupied the marriage alone for years, my senses often revert to an echo of a wake (though we did not have one), by his side as he and I were then, as if both of us had stopped aging at the end of his life.  Our almost-anniversary preserved in amber.

Poet Donald Hall recently passed away.  He had first lost his far younger wife, poet Jane Kenyon, and written of the osmosis that continues in a marriage that endures after a spouse’s loss: “In the months and years after her death, Jane’s voice and mine rose as one, spiralling together the images and diphthongs of the dead who were once the living, our necropoetics of grief and love in the singular absence of flesh.”

In his case he found that some of his wife’s poetic voice had slipped into his, the rhythms and soul of her writing transforming his own poems, making them into the best artifacts of both.

“Memories will rust and erode into lists/Of all that you gave me/A blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest/The best parts of lonely….”

Before another summer wedding, I met someone who voiced the sentiment that a spouse’s death signifies the death of a marriage as well.  I turned to a friend who was herself at the wobbly state of raw widowhood that rendered it necessary gently to physically pry her from her house and into a world of suddenly conspicuous couplehood.  We simultaneously shook our heads with the loudest silent “No” we could muster: “Dead wrong.”

At the ceremony one of the bride’s friends would read the same passage from 1 Corinthians 13 that the bride’s mother had read at Jim’s and my wedding: “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”

Love endures all things, even death.  If love never ends, the marriage does not die with either or both of us.

For better, for worse.

So I suppose my view of the marriage I still celebrate boils down to a cross between Corinthians and a Canadian singing group.

When one spouse departs this world, he or she doesn’t leave the marriage, but does leave behind, for whatever we earthbound spouses make of them, both the best and worst parts of lonely.

As long as we both shall live.  

And then some.