Category Archives: Widow

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Traveling Mercies

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Today’s poetry writing prompt is to write a travel poem about getting from Point A to Point B.  I took this with me as I walked with Steve to meet his mom for breakfast at a cafe on North Avenue.  Here’s what I came up with:

Suburban sidewalk, cement sanitation

Fighting blight from untidy dandelions

Writhing, withered stems polluted, poisoned

Preventing spreading superfluous seeds

 

Muddy raindrop crater-pocked parkway

Mini helicopter maples, twin neon confetti

Mossy black trunks, petal-splashed branches

Tinny worm smell, saturated iris-limp toilet paper

 

Hiking boots treading asphalt pathways

Longing for the purity beneath.

 

Yesterday’s rain has left a distinct damp chill over everything.  I miss the golden sun.  My mood is slow and overcast as well, but I think I’ve had an epiphany in the recent “relationship talks” we’ve been having.  A serious and positive epiphany, too complicated to explain.  I never knew that shock and denial could last four years and then drop in an instant.  I feel like a snail without her shell.  Perfect for crawling about a rain-soaked environment. 

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A Flower’s Name and Nature

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I learned that the blue flower growing in my garden and all over the Wehr Nature Center woods is called scilla siberica (wood squill) and is native to southwestern Russia, the Caucasus and Turkey.  I am guessing that settlers brought it over here about a hundred years ago.  I’m tickled that we have parts of our name in common!  I am thinking more about the settlers and their way of life while I wait to hear about the outcome of my Old World Wisconsin interview.  What did they find different about the flora and fauna here?  What did they miss from the old country?  How does the emotional connection to land, a place, a “mother country” develop, and what did it feel like to venture out from there to an unknown place?

scilla siberica

Memories are sweet; what is here right now is also sweet. 

I find myself using more energy to be present with what is right in front of me.  When I retreat to my memories, I take that energy and shelter it deep within myself.  It feels like I’m hiding, in a way.  It’s not easy to allow anyone else to inhabit that place.  It’s slow and calm and secret.

I have a memory garden.  It blooms with the flowers of the old country: my babies, my husband, my house, my youth.  I like to visit it and inhale its familiar fragrance.  I am alone there. 

The world of the present is all around that secret garden.  It asks to be acknowledged, appreciated, and invited into my deep consciousness. 

I could call this my “settler’s mind”.   But there really is no division.  Here, there, then, now…it’s all fluid, connected, like the roots and rhizomes of wild flowers.

“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day is the best day, every place you are is the best place.


 

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A Day With My Friend

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“There’s a giant millipede in your apartment.  And one of the rooms is filled with water.”

Those were the first words out of Steve’s sleepy mouth this morning.  “Say, what?!”  He usually says whatever thing left over from his dreaming thoughts is still floating in his brain when he first wakes up.  He rolled over and closed his eyes again.  I thought about how every day with him is surprising and interesting and genuine.  I told him that I feel very fortunate to have had such a good friend during the past tumultuous 3 years.  I wonder how my grief and recovery would have been different without him.  Would I still be drinking tumblers of gin after work and crying myself to sleep in an empty house?  Would I be knocking on the doors of half-interested acquaintances looking for more attention, more love, more support, parading my needs pathetically about?  I don’t know.  I believe that I wouldn’t have tried half the things I did without Steve or gotten through the necessary bits quite so well.  Steve then asked me what I thought was our best “best friends” photo.  We agreed on these:

The first best friend "self-portrait" I shot of us, holding the camera at arm's length, like a teenager would do

One I took by accident while my camera dangled in my hand during a spontaneous kiss

Today, we’re heading over to Kettle Moraine State Forest where Old World Wisconsin, the living history museum, is located for our back-to-back job interviews.  Ever gone job hunting with your best friend?  I did once before, in college.  My friend had a summer job as a camp counselor, which I thought would be perfect for me.  I went up to interview there and didn’t get offered a job, but I did find a camp closer to home which hired me.  I love the feeling of adventure, the unknown, the “let’s just try this; I will if you will!” daring.   With a friend beside you, it’s a win-win situation no matter what happens.

So anyway, as my mother would say, “Enuff zis luff-making!”  Time to shower and be off!  Life is rich; friends are golden!

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While You Were Sleeping

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As usual, he called me at the office that afternoon while he was working from home.  “Hi.  How are you doing?”  I probably mentioned something about my ordinary frustrations on the job or something about our daughters.   Then it was down to business.  “What are you doing tonight?”  It was Friday night.  Our youngest had a rehearsal at a church only a few blocks from our house, starting about a half an hour after I got off work.  “Do you want to go out to dinner?”  “SURE!”  It was cold, the roads were icy.  We didn’t want to go far, so we dropped her off and went to a bar & grill  that had just opened behind the strip mall in our little town.  It was full of activity: TVs were on, people bustled about, artwork from the public schools was displayed on the wall.  There was lots to look at and hear.  The menu was new to us.  Teriyaki green beans sounded good.  So did fried artichokes.  I ordered a beer; I think he did, too.  We had sandwiches as well.  Then he got a call on his cell phone.  Our daughter was not feeling well and was leaving rehearsal early.  We said we’d meet her at home.  We all talked in the living room for a little while, as he sat on the couch gathering his strength for the climb upstairs.  He seemed pretty tired.  He’d come home from the hospital just 10 days earlier with 2 cardiac stents implanted.  In the bedroom, he turned on the flat screen TV, took his medications (all 23 of them) and hooked up his dialysis machine and his sleep apnea mask.   In our big, squishy bed, we watched an episode of “NUMB3RS”, and then the movie “Regarding Henry” came on.  I’d seen it before: Harrison Ford and Annette Bening in a good story about marriage, change and intimacy.  It complimented the mood perfectly.  We were feeling secure, companionable, close.  I fell asleep beside him, holding his hand.   I awoke at 6:30 AM.  His body was still and cold.

That day was exactly four years ago. What did he dream about that night?  Did he feel any pain?  Did he try to get up?  Did he try to call out or wake me?  Did he see a brightness as his neurons flashed for the last time?  Was it peaceful?  I can only imagine.

I can imagine him firing up feelings of love and bathing in them, floating on a surge of endorphins while images of his babies rushed by.  I can imagine him strolling an endless golf course of rolling green fairways, tree-lined and bright.  I can imagine him soaring with the tenor section in an angel choir, his energy trembling and resonating with clouds and stars.  I can imagine him satisfied and proud and smart and good and kind.  I can imagine him wrapped in the embrace of the Universe…forever.

I can imagine him, but can I know him any better, any more?  I still feel open to him, and as I continue to try to expand my awareness, I wonder about that.  I know that I don’t know what I might be able to know.  What is memory? What is sleep?  What is consciousness?  What is death?  Are they ‘real’?  I don’t know.  What is ‘real’?  What I know is that I don’t know.  What I feel is that he mattered and still matters.  I feel that he is.

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Four Years Ago Today

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I’m feeling rather gray and gloomy today, like the motionless monochrome sky.  I went out with wet hair, first to breakfast with Steve’s mom, then to do laundry at the laundromat, then to the grocery store.  I feel thoroughly chilled.  I think my hair is still wet.  Yet, there’s no snow on the ground, so I can’t really blame the weather.  It’s still far from wintry…not like it was, say, four years ago…

Four years ago, there was a snow storm.  Four years ago, the Super Bowl was on.  Four years ago, my husband was in the hospital.

I could give you the whole background history on his medical odyssey, but it would come out dry and clinical.  What I’m feeling now is more surreal.  Let’s just say that he was in the cardiac wing, waiting to be stabilized enough for surgery.  Waiting.  Like waiting for Godot.   There was no sense of time after a few days.  Doctors would come and go and offer conjectures and imagine scenarios.  I got the feeling that I should simply camp out with him and see what happened.  So I did.

My husband was a sports fan, and the Super Bowl game was a big party occasion on our calendar most years.   During the regular football season, we’d watch games together on Sunday afternoons and nap through a good chunk of them.  I can enjoy the game and root for the underdog or a sentimental favorite, and usually Jim would fill me in on some of the finer points of strategy or history.   I guess you could say we were companionable about it.  Jim watched a lot of TV in his later years, and in the hospital, there’s not much else to do.  “Camped out in the cardiac wing” meant that during visiting hours, you could find me squeezed in next to him on the bed, cranked up in sitting position, watching whatever was on the box suspended from the ceiling.   But I thought the Big Game should be more festive.  So I asked the nurses if we could watch it from the visitor’s lounge on the floor, on the big screen, and invite a friend or two.  They gave their permission.

It wasn’t a party.  It was just me, Jim and one of our church friends who stopped by for a while.  I brought a couple of coolers with snacks and drinks.  I got in trouble for bringing beer.  Not that Jim was drinking it, but I guess it was against some rule, because a nurse came by and told me I couldn’t have it there.  Jim was comfortably situated in one of the lounge chairs with his IV pole and beepy-thing beside him.  We were in clear view of the nurses’ station the whole time.  A few other hospital visitors peeked in periodically, but mostly, we were alone.  Our friend Dave told us that there was a huge snowstorm outside.  Toward the end of the game, we actually lost power for a while.  When it was over, it was past visiting hours, and I was concerned about digging my car out of the parking lot and driving home, so I packed up my coolers and kissed Jim good-bye pretty quickly.   Three days later, he had his surgery.  Ten days after that, he was dead.

I found out today that the two teams that are in the Super Bowl this year are the same two teams that played four years ago today.  They will play on Sunday.  And I won’t be watching.  I haven’t watched a football game in a long time.  We don’t even have a TV.

Life changes.  Waiting only lasts a while.  Those days, suspended in gray like a snowflake, drift down slowly, but eventually, they evaporate, and something else takes their place.

I’m okay with that…I think…  Yeah.  I’m okay.

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Existential Sunday

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I mentioned yesterday that I was moody.  I come around periodically to a place of existential crisis, and I’ve come to believe it’s good for me.  When I was raising children and nursing a sick husband, I rarely got this privilege.  I always had someone to pour my heart and soul into and frequently felt that my existence was thoroughly used up on a daily basis.  Trouble is, this way of living was often an unexamined habit that I could go through sleep-walking.  I kept my head down and convinced myself that everything I was doing was noble and important.  It may have been, or it may not have been.  I wasn’t really paying attention that closely.

Living with Steve is different.  It’s challenging.  He doesn’t want me to pour my heart and soul into caring for him.  He wants me to fly on my own.  I blink, open-mouthed.  Fly?  On my own?  What the heck does that look like?  He redirects my attention from outside of me to inside…all the time…and I keep imagining an empty room.  What if I don’t have any inner life?

So I sit with that.  Emptiness isn’t a judgment.  It can be the beginning of openness.

I went poking around on the internet, looking for an answer (from outside, again…old habits die hard) to “what is important in life”.  I actually found something kinda cool:  this community project.  An abandoned building in New Orleans is covered with chalkboard paint and stenciled with the prompt “Before I die, I want to ___”.  Chalk is provided.  People approach.  Existential assessment goes on, and the sentence is answered.  I imagine myself standing there…clouds gather, rain falls, people pass, children grow up…and I’m still scratching my head.

I thought of re-phrasing the question, changing “What is important in life?”  to “What are two things you cannot live without?”  They’re not exactly interchangeable, I discovered.  I also discovered a great irony: I lost the two things I thought I couldn’t live without, and I’m still living.  So, either they weren’t that important, or I’m not really living.  Or I didn’t answer that truthfully.  I thought I could not live without my husband.  I thought I could not live without my Christian faith.  I was wrong.

Okay, dammit, what IS important in life?  What about the obvious answer…’life’?  As in, “Before I die, I want to Live.”  I want to live, be alive, be awake, be aware, spend myself, give my love, explore my autonomy, visit that inner room and see what’s there.  But not in an ego-driven way.  In an open way. The Western way prompts me, “Yes, but what will that look like when it’s all finished?” as if there’s a finish.  It wants a goal, a check list with little boxes to tick, just to keep track so that it can say, “Good…I’ve done it!”  That’s ego talk.  The Eastern way says, “Forget the goal, the check list.  You don’t need to keep track; keep open.  Engage with life and have a relationship.”

That’s where I’ve gotten to so far today.  How about you?  What is important in your life?

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The Rose

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I think I have a pretty active dream life.  I usually remember something of my sleeping hours upon awakening.  Perhaps that indicates the level of my anxieties and neuroses; I’m not sure.  Steve says he hardly ever dreams, and he thinks it’s because he is so aware of his conscious mind while he’s awake.  Well, fine for you, then.  I blink my eyes open and forget where I am.  I need decompression time every morning.  My dreams almost always include my late husband, who has been dead almost 4 years.  It gives me a rather fluid sense of reality.  Jim is real and Steve is real, they’re just never real at the same time, in the same place.  Is that weird?  Oh, probably.  I’m getting used to it.

The other thing I do in dreamland is sing.  I wake up singing a song, or with a song stuck in my head.  This morning, it was “The Rose”, a song Bette Midler recorded some years back.  I think I learned it from one of my kid’s elementary school music programs. The line I was stuck on went like this: “Some say love, it is a river, that drowns the tender reed.  Some say love, it is a razor, that leaves your soul to bleed.  Some say love, it is a hunger, an endless aching need.  I say love, it is a flower, and you, its only seed.”

Now why in the world would something like that be dominating my waking transition?  I thought about that for a while.  Then I began to cry.  This is how I know when I’ve hit on some repressed emotion, some way that I think about myself that I don’t like to admit.  For some reason, I was associating with that tender reed, drowned in a river of love.  I was 15 when I met my husband, 21 when we married, 45 when I was widowed.  My youth was engulfed in loving him.  I don’t feel a great resonance with the bleeding soul bit.  Ah, but the hunger, the aching need; yeah, that gets to me, too.  I feel that for my kids as well.  I call it “yearning”.  I yearn for my kids all the time, no matter where they are.  It’s a visceral thing.  I once learned in a Bible study that there is a Hebrew word for God’s loving-kindness that translates to a verb form of the same word that’s used for a mother’s womb.  Womb-love.  God “wombs” us.  I “womb” my kids.  I also “womb” my dead husband.

Now the last line of that first verse, I will take exception to.  “You, its only seed” just sounds too exclusive and attached.  It doesn’t fit the scope of the rest of the song, either, in my opinion.  Second verse: “It’s the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance; and it’s the dream afraid of waking that never takes a chance.  It’s the one who won’t be broken, who cannot learn to give; and the soul afraid of dying who never learns to live.”  Okay, you could probably guess that verse gets to me all over (see yesterday’s post).  Although, in my case, it’s the heart that once danced, the dream that once dared, the one who gave everything already who is afraid to live again and invest all that…again.  So, here’s the key change and the big finish: “When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long, and you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun’s love, in the spring becomes the rose.”   At this point, I want to give credit to Amanda McBroom who wrote these lyrics.  Good job.  I love the idea of seeds beneath the snow.  It appeals to the naturalist in me, even though we STILL don’t have any snow this winter in Wisconsin.  I love the idea of hope and new life.  And this is where I get to re-write that last line in the first verse.  The seed of love isn’t a person.  It’s LIFE, life itself.

Steve and I were talking about this yesterday as we drove out to hike the Ice Age trail.  He was urging me, again, to talk about what I want in life, how I want to live, why I want the things I might want.  “Why do you want to have land and grow food?”  I want to nurture living things; I loved raising kids.  I loved because they lived.  I want to live life loving.  Whatever I do.  It’s a cyclical thing, the flower that comes from a seed and begets more seeds that become more flowers.  Life begets love which nourishes life…and so on.  Okay, maybe this is sounding like drivel to you.  There is something going on here, though, and it’s about a flow of energy passing from living thing to living thing, and some of us call it love.  I don’t like the idea of that energy being confined to one “beloved”.  That’s where I think I’m getting stuck.  I say love, it is a flower and all of life can be its seed.

There.  Sorry Amanda, but I have re-worked your song so that it fits my dreaming and waking life a little better.  Hope you don’t mind.

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Bridal Wave of Memories

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On this day 28 years ago, I was married to my high school sweetheart in my parents’ church in northern California.  I was 21 years old.  Jim was 23.  I wore the veil that my mother and grandmother wore on their wedding days.  I wore the hoop petticoat that my mother wore in 1955 under her similarly long-sleeved and high-colored wedding gown.  I also wore the wedding present Jim had given me a year before: a beautiful cameo pin that he had purchased on the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze.  My dress had been made by a local seamstress using pattern ideas, material and trim that my mother and I had picked out.  My mother and I selected the caterer, the photographer, and the florist together.  My mother secured the musicians: a flute player she knew to play in the church with our organist, and a jazz trio to play at the reception.  My parents issued the Banns of Marriage in the bulletin of the mass the week before my wedding, inviting everyone in the parish to attend.  The reception was held in the Parish Hall behind the church.

My bridesmaids included my two older sisters and two friends.  Jim’s groomsmen included his half-brother, my brother, and two friends.  We selected other friends to participate in reading the Scriptures.  Since we knew so many semi-professional singers personally, we decided not to have any soloists.  Instead, we included congregation hymns that we could all sing together.  The whole affair was pretty simple, but elegant, and definitely traditional.  I did not have a manicure or pedicure, I did my own hair and make-up, we did not have a DJ or MC or dancing.  I did throw my bouquet, but I gave my garter to my husband…to keep.  We did have lots of champagne and loaded the unopened bottles into the station wagon (nothing like a limo) when we took off afterwards for our honeymoon, driving back down to Southern California where I would continue the second semester of my senior year at college.

My grandmother was appalled that Jim and I arranged to meet each other the morning of our wedding day to drive out to a county arboretum and spend some time together.  She kept insisting that it was bad luck for the bride to see her future husband before joining him at the altar on her wedding day.  She also kept asking if someone was going to sing “I Love You Truly” at the service.  These were not the traditions that we were interested in honoring, though.  We were not about superstition or sentimentalism, or so we thought.  We wanted to be sacramental and sincere.  I suppose there are slippery slopes and fine lines involved in those distinctions.  What I do remember thinking about is how to conceptualize a lifetime together.  I figured that might be 50 years or more.  I could barely conceptualize the two decades I had actually experienced.  I realized that it had to come down to faith.  I couldn’t imagine or predict what our marriage would be like.  I could only promise  to live it moment by moment as lovingly as I could “until we are parted by death”.  I did that to the best of my ability, I believe.  That parting occurred almost four years ago, now.

January is often a month of looking into the future, making uncertain plans, vowing to try to live in particular ways.  “Pointing your canoe”, as we like to put it.  Don’t let it frighten you.  Paddling is slow work, with plenty of time to correct, re-align, look around, and get inspired.  You can even drift for a while, if you like, without causing harm.  Forgiveness can arise.  Consequences will arise as well.  There’s no need to cast blame.  Look lovingly on the scene, on yourself, on your partner, on the world.  I enjoy marking the milestones, and I’m finding I even enjoy moving on.

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Christmas 1982

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Ever had a piece of music bring up a memory, a time and place from the past, with such clarity that you felt you were actually there?  Last night it happened.  I came home from my Memoirs class, having read my essay aloud with such a rush of nervous adrenaline that my heart was still pounding.  I decided to have  a glass of Chardonnay and listen to some of Steve’s recently acquired CDs with him.  So, I was relaxing and in “memory mode” when he put on a CD of the Tallis Scholars singing a mass by John Taverner, written around the turn of the century – the 16th century.   Oh, the flood of my heart!

I was 20 years old.  Jim and I had become engaged on my birthday over the summer.  I went back down to So. Cal. to school, to continue with my bachelor’s degree in Vocal Performance.  Jim and my mother were in a Bay Area singing group together, called Renascense (or some archaic spelling pronounced ren-NAY-sense).  I came home for Christmas and was invited to one of their concerts.  I close my eyes and picture them:  Jim in his black tuxedo, ginger mustache,  the smatterings of a beard he’s grown for Rigoletto.  He is 22, teddy bear-like with twinkling blue eyes, blonde hair and a killer Italian grin.  But while he’s singing, he is an angel, mouth perfectly forming straight vowels, eyebrows imploring heaven.  He is a tenor.  His voice melts butter.   My mother is dressed in a mail order catalog nightgown, polyester, rust-colored, that has been trimmed with gold & black cord around the waist and across her bosom in an X.  Only women who have sung in choirs can imagine how absolutely ludicrous these outfits can be.  No woman looks good in a choir uniform, let alone one that has been made to look “period” on the cheap.  It is ridiculously embarrassing, but I forgive her.  She sings alto in a hooty voice that blends well.  Her quality is not stellar, but her musicianship is indispensable.

I have been so homesick away from school.  I have been staring at my diamond ring, counting the days until break.  I sit in the concert hall and look at these two people whom I love more than any others on the face of the earth, and I am so proud of them.  I’m proud of their dedication to music and their fond relationship to each other.  I admire them completely, and I am jealous.  I want to be with them; I want to be them.  I want to feel the music in my breast float to the clerestory of the church and entwine in that beautiful polyphony.  I ache for this memory.  And then the tenor line soars above the rest, and it is Jim himself, singing to me.  The recording is perfection.  I can tell that it isn’t Jim, but there are moments when it definitely could be.  My will takes over and I make it him, in my mind.   I am there, in that sanctuary, and Jim is singing to me, alive, young, vibrant with love and mystery and warmth.

Jim before his Carnegie performance - 2001?

Music folds time in patterns that defy chronology.  I sail far away on its transcendent waves.  It is a grace to travel toward those we love without limits.

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Giving Thanks

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One year ago, my house had been up for sale with no offers for 8 months, despite making huge drops in the listing price.  We celebrated our last Thanksgiving in the home we had occupied for 20 years with two of my daughters, my eldest’s First Mate, and two college friends of my youngest.  We filled the place with warmth, laughter, good smells and love.  Two days later, I got the offer.  Closing date was January11.  Without hiring professional movers, except for the baby grand piano, Steve and I moved out everything in the house, basement, patio and 3-car garage.  Numerous trips in the van distributed the contents to Madison, Chicago, Harvard, charities, storage and Milwaukee.  We had help from the First Mate’s dad and fireman friend for the couch and a super-heavy TV, but the rest we managed ourselves.  I remember trying to corral the cat after everything else was gone.  She had nowhere to hide, poor thing, and she refused to get into a cat carrier.  Steve agreed to drive the van with her in the passenger seat in the bottom portion of the carrier, top removed.  He petted her and talked to her soothingly as he drove the two hours here.  I drove Jim’s car, grateful not to be distracted by her.

Steve’s place was stuffed to the gills with boxes, furniture, books, and cat.  I marvel at how he made room for us.  He’d been living alone for about a dozen years, five years in this place.  We lived, worked, played, loved and engaged in our relationship intensely, doing the dance of supporting, caring, giving and taking.  There were many tearful times, there was a 4-week adventure on the road, there were late-night Summit Meetings and many long walks through the countryside.  I woke this morning and began to think of giving thanks.  I looked at him sleeping next to me, and my nose prickled.  A quiet stream leaked down my cheeks.  I am so lucky to have a best friend, someone who truly loves me.  I am so grateful to be here, to have a life I love, to be at home again.

For all of you, whatever your situation, I wish you Godspeed to your home.  Welcome.