All Saints Day

I awoke happy as always to be in my own bed in my own room, sunlight filtering through the lace curtains. But something was now different. Then I remembered. I retreated back under the quilts.  I simply couldn’t do this.

It was All Saints’ Day, one of my favorite days of the year, the anniversary of my ordination. Ironically, I had put together a lovely service of remembrance which I wouldn’t be able to do now due to the death of my sainted husband. I didn’t come out of my room until almost noon. All I could do was cry, write on Facebook, and write a couple lousy poems.

As I cried and wrote, I became aware of something giving way in me, like a boat that has slipped its mooring. Now that I was safe at home with no more details to attend to, I drifted out onto the sea of grief.

In the midst of writing a poem, I had to search the scriptures for some comfort, for some reason to go on,  before continuing it. It was Psalm 6 that enabled me to get up, rise, resurrect. The word for resurrect in Greek literally means to "stand up." Here’s how it came out in my journal--disjunct, a mess, raw and real:

A Keen


I want to die.
I want to curl up in a ball
and cry until my heart breaks
so that I can say to him
all the kind words,
all the affection,
all the love I have
that I didn’t say
that I should have
for these were more true
than all my voiced criticisms
of love’s past disappointments.


I want to die
not only for the loss
of my beloved
but for the loss
of my delusional pride
that has thought I was something
when I was nought.


I pushed him beyond his capacity
then criticized his lagging behind
threatening to go on without him
so he pushed himself
to tell me of his love
and I turned away, cold,
until he turned cold in death.

Psalm 6:
O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy hot displeasure.
Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my bones are vexed.
My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long?
Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies' sake.
For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who shall give thee thanks?
I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears.
Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of all mine enemies.
Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the LORD hath heard the voice of my weeping.
The LORD hath heard my supplication; the LORD will receive my prayer.
Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly.


But I have to get up/
stand up/
anastasis/
resurrect
for the sake of my daughters,
for the sake of others
whose hearts are breaking
to whom I can now minister
with some measure of tender understanding.


The cat needs fed,
The dog his meds
The girls their education.
So I stumble to wobbly feet.


But know this:
I want to die.


Along with Auden’s clocks,
I want my heart to stop, too.
I want to draw Bryant’s
drapery around my couch in sleep
never to rise again.

And then there was this doggerel:


A Postmodern Elegy

Nevermore will I mock
maudlin Victorian elegies
for they are true
more true than
the sarcasm of this present generation
filled with death-dealing words.


A cord of light has been cut
that tethered me to the path
of this world.
I wander, lost,
as in a darkling wood
where coyotes howl
in the dead of night.
and I am afraid.


Only Thy Word, O Lord,
can be my lifeline
I cling to Thy promises
to see me through this storm.
Give me the strength to hold on.

After penning these words, I ventured into the kitchen where my mother sat. “There’s oatmeal if you want it,” she said.

I had to eat, so I put some walnuts in it and took my bowl to the dining room where I opened the paper. The standard morning ritual—breakfast and paper. The normalcy of this both comforted and disturbed me.

I wasn’t sure what was real anymore. I wasn’t sure I was real. I was moving through the world like a ghost on another plane of existence, not really connecting with the earth. I was trying to find my husband, hoping he’d meet me in the strange liminal space I found myself in, wandering altogether lost and disconsolate.  Though all may have looked normal on the outside, I was beside myself.

A Widow Sleeps Alone

We vegged on the sofa and watched TV with the shell-shocked look that had become our default mode until it was time to go to bed. The girls crawled up on my bed, and we did evening prayer, lounging and talking.

Was I ok to sleep alone, they wondered.  As did I. There was comfort in the hotel with them in the next bed; I won’t lie about that. Barb offered to sleep on the floor next to me on a pallet like we used to make up for her when she was little and she woke early and didn’t want to stay in her own bed. She’d come into our room and crawl down in her comfy bedroll and look at her books. This bought us an extra 30 minutes’ sleep in the morning. Sometimes when she got scared at night she came and slept there as well, and we got used to checking to see if she was there when we got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom.  Now she was asking me if I wanted her to sleep there because I was afraid. 

Midas’ bed was now beside ours. “You can’t sleep with the dog,” I laughed.

Ariana teased, “You've replaced us with a dog, haven't you?”

I shrugged. She was mostly right.  Midas was to be our transitional object to ease us into the empty nest phase of life like a toy or bunny helps preschoolers say good-bye to their parents when they drop them off.

“I’m ok,” I said. “Go on to your room. Do you want me to come sleep with you downstairs?”

“No,” they said. “We’ll be fine.”   There were hugs and kisses all around.  And then we fell back into the  bedtime rituals we'd had when the girls were little and I tucked them in at night:
"I love you to the moon and back."
"I love you."  "No, no, no.  I love YOU." 
"I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always."
 "You're the best." to which the other responded,  "No, you're the best!" and then the other: "No, you're the best." Back and forth we went until we were caught up in profuse protestations of love that could hold them secure through the long night.
 These were games of love we'd played when they were little that we picked back up now without missing a beat. 

Only this time they tucked me in and withdrew. 

I slipped under the blankets. The last time I’d been here was with Bill. Now, nothing. Before, I’d been his wife, now I was his widow.

Widow. The word seems to embody what it is—a wide gulf between life and death and a cry of dereliction-- Oh! For me, the word conjures up an old woman bereft of what she had to live for, someone with unkempt gray hair who carefully counts out pennies at the grocery store and looks forward to joining her husband in death. Cats and shawls are also somehow involved, though I don’t know why, in my picture of what a widow is.

Yet here I am 51, blonde, vibrant, at the peak of my career making a professional’s salary, ready for my time now that my daughters are raised. And . . .  a widow. You go to bed a wife, you wake up a widow. How can this be?

With the gracious help of Ambien, I slept with the light on, the prayer book and Bible beside me with the tissue box on top, Midas breathing heavily below. 

The Midas Touch

Inside we were greeted by our new exuberant golden retriever named Midas that Bill and I had rescued from a golden retriever rescue club 200 miles away. Midas had been our 30th anniversary present to one another just two months earlier, and it had been a great weekend when we got him.

On the Friday night before our anniversary, we’d driven halfway and stayed overnight in a decent hotel in the middle of nowhere.  We enjoyed the comfy bed in every way, then got up and drove the rest of the way to meet Midas to see if we’d really be a good fit.

The moment we saw him bound out of the door we both knew we were in love with Midas. “Could this be our dog?” Bill had said, as though he couldn't believe that anything this wonderful could be for us.

“Yup, that’s him,” I said, confident that I had chosen well after months of searching petfinders.com for a big golden retriever with silky hair that wasn’t too cream or red with a friendly, well-behaved disposition. He was perfect on paper except for one thing—he chased his foster parents’ cat. After a flurry of emails, we still weren’t sure what he’d do with the bunnies we had. But having rescued another golden, I was sure we could handle him.  We finished fencing the yard and went to bring him to his new home, his fourth in six years. 

Midas loved Bill. They romped together every day in the yard and played a game of chase around the library table downstairs.  I think they were about the same age.  Bill had even managed to teach Midas how to fetch, though at first the poor dog thought he was having sticks thrown at him.  

Because the girls were away at school, they’d not met their new Golden. But he loved everyone who came to see him, so he promptly greeted them with vociferous tail wagging and a “Hrumph!” as he fell down for them to rub his tummy, grinning from ear to ear as they did. There in the entry, they, too, were in instant love, only this time in the midst of all the baggage.

Then, after greeting me with the same unending joy, he went to the door and looked out, then turned back to me with a look that asked, "Where's Bill?"  I knelt down and hugged his neck and tried to explain, "Oh, Midas.  Bill has gone to the happy farm to romp forever in joy.  But I know he misses being here with you.  Will you be my special buddy now?"

As if he understood, he attached himself like Velcro to my thigh and didn't leave my side whenever I was home.  Trying to maneuver my body with a new 95# furry attachment to my leg, I turned to greet my mother who was wiping tears from her eyes.   

Coming Home

We pulled into the driveway, like I'd done a million times after trips to where he and Ariana had been living after I'd moved to the new home, awaiting her graduation and the arrival of the family. 

It felt the same.  I'd left him behind in some other city and come home without him. 

In some strange way the two years apart helped me prepare for Bill's death.  I learned how to manage just fine on my own.  I liked the peace of being without him, of being able to do what I wanted without having to consider him. 

We'd had a hard time coming back together. 

We never had come back together well.  The year before we were married we were apart, and when I came to see him, he didn't rush to meet me with any fervor.  He held himself back, opening the door with an acknowledgment of my presence, perhaps a quick peck on the cheek, a rush to help me with my bags.  I'd gotten more excitement from my dog each evening than I did from him after being away from him for weeks. 

And nothing had ever changed.  After 28 years of marriage and living 400 miles apart he greeted me with a kind of punishing coldness, like Barb did when she was 18 months old and I went away to lead a week-long retreat.  She wouldn't have anything to do with me for two days after I came back, upset that I'd been gone.  When you only have a weekend, two days of trying to reconnect pretty much encompasses your time together.  So what time I did see him constituted struggle for reconnection, and it had done nothing to help the marriage.

In the three months he'd been living in this house, his presence was mostly that of silent hovering, standing behind everyone else watching TV on the couch, puttering around in the house or yard, tapping away on the computer.  It was like I had someone whom I had to consider in the house without really having anyone in the house.  Except that I no longer had the bed all to myself, which was both good and bad.

We were still trying to work the kinks out of coming back together under one roof when he died.

I yanked the bag Bill had packed for the weekend out of the trunk along with my own suitcase.  This was to be my life for the next months--carrying his baggage as well as mine.  In a sense, it was nothing new.

Through the Thin Veil

It was Halloween, I remembered as we drove the five hours back home in a kind of stunned silence for the first two hours.  Just a few days before Bill had helped me make an All Saints ribbon banner with a ribbon representing each saint.  Now he was one. 

I've read somewhere that half of all the bereaved experience the ghostly presence of their beloved.  It was All Hallow's Eve, the night when the veil between the living and the dead is supposedly at its thinnest.  Just as it was the last harvest, so, too, it was the time, according to Celtic tradition, when the souls of the dead who'd been wandering the earth were harvested and crossed over into the other world. 

I'm in the God biz.  I know my JEDP source material and that Christianity is a tradition that has grown in its understandings over time.  Ancient Jews did not believe in an afterlife; we're only alive after death as long as someone remembers us.  Once we disappear from historical consciousness, we're obliterated.  Some later Jews had conflated other religions' understandings of the afterlife with heaven, a place you go when you die, which Christianity continued.  I know all this.

But I wondered where my husband was.  Hoping I'd perhaps catch a glimpse of him through the thin veil, I watched and prayed.  I wanted to say, "I'm sorry.  I love you.  Why didn't you take better care of yourself?"  But he was gone.  He was in that long line of saints being gathered up into the Light of Christ, so I waved at the moon and whispered, "Bye, Bill.  I'm sorry.  I'll always love you."

Then we put in some episodes of "This American Life" that Ariana had downloaded into her ipod and sped on through the night of souls.



  

Viewing the Body

Another true confession: I actually took pictures of my dead husband.  I found I couldn't touch his body.  But I took several pictures, something I've always thought of as morbid.  I don't know why I did this, and I haven't looked at them since.  I think I took the pictures because my mind couldn't take in the picture of reality it was faced with.  I felt like one of those big Victorian cameras but with no glass plates.  I wanted to remember, but my mind had no film in it at that point.  I needed the help of a camera.

At the funeral home I remember chatting and even joking somewhat, as I am wont to do.  I remember sitting with Greg and the girls reading scripture.  But we sat across the room, away from the body.  There was a definite elephant in the room, but we weren't going to acknowledge it. 

Bill's hair looked better than it had in forever.  There was a little bruising across the bridge of his nose where they'd taken his eyes.  Otherwise, he looked just like any other corpse laid out in a funeral home, except he was on a guerney, not in a casket.  He had a heavy quilt over him so that with his jacket and turtleneck on he looked like himself--only dead.  The funeral home had done a terrific job.  The only thing I could have liked was perhaps a skirt on the guerney, but then he might have looked like a big cake on a reception table, which wouldn't have been good. 

My chest ached.  And I was still a bit shakey.  When Bill's mother and sister Sherry and her husband Mark got there, I was relieved to see them.  It hadn't been until that moment that I'd realized how isolated and closed to the world I'd been.  Bill's mother, Ettie, was frail but beautiful as she hobbled in with her cane.  Sherry was nervous, and Mark quietly helpful, as he'd been when my father-in-law died.   There was no wild emotion, just perplexed confusion, like that of victims coming forth from the rubble after a tornado.   

"How?" I gave them the details without the awful reality.

I'd always wanted to be holding my husband when he died peacefully.  That's a dream that's not likely to happen to anyone, I know now.  In truth, I was holding him--after he'd already died.  And I was trying to shake him awake, feeling instead the dead weight of limp limbs.  "Come back to me!"  I remember crying.  "You can't die.  The girls need you.  I love you.  Don't go!"   I spared his family the histrionics.

But he was gone.  And we were sitting around him discussing strange things.  All I remember is Ettie mentioning something about almost wearing her new blue dress instead of the beautiful brown suit she had on.  At the mention of a blue dress, Barb quipped that Bill Clinton might do more than just call her, as he had done during one Presidential campaign, if she'd worn that one.  "Yeah, be sure not to have that dry cleaned," someone said.   For all I know, it might have been me. 

Looking back, the conversation seems so callous, so trivial, even disrespectful.  But it's how we got through.  Pastor Greg looked on like he'd fallen down Alice's rabbit hole, but he, too, was shaken by Bill's death and, at one point, moved to tears.  He was soaking up our grief like a gravy mop, and he represented that a caring God was indeed our fortress in whom we could take shelter. 

When Bill's family got up to leave, I wanted them to take me with them.  I felt like a  lost puppy who needed someone to take care of her.  I was grateful for their presence.  For some reason, perhaps because this is the way my life had always been, I honestly figured I'd have to do everything alone and was pleasantly surprised to find angels surrounding me with the gifts of themselves. 

Maybe it's just me who wants to remove the dead and march on, not society.

At the last I wanted to be alone with the body, but I wasn't.  Like so many other things in my life where I'd had to move quickly, I only paused for a wistful glance back at the past before moving into the future.  I kissed the ice cold forehead of my husband.  Then I shut the door to the warmth of the funeral home to face the chilly wind outside alone.

Unreal

We arose the next morning rather late.  It was Sunday, but it didn't feel like the Lord's Day.  We did our own church service in our pjs. 

We were still in shock, though I'm not sure as I write this almost three months later that that's still not the case.  We were together, but each of us was encased in our own grief bubble, which we respected.

The girls went to the pool while I answered all the email and Facebook messages that were pouring in.  They, too, were contacting their friends by phone while sitting around the pool.

We were still moving slowly, as if in a dream.  I was pretty sure none of this was real.  It just couldn't be happening. 

Isn't it odd how the most important days of our lives seem like dreams?  My wedding day was like floating on  another plane of white-laced existence.  I was overwhelmed by all the emotion, with all the family and friends, and then saying good-bye and moving 500 miles away.   My ordination day I was so emotional I was numb, which doesn't make any sense.  I remember the excellent sermon, the heavy weight of hands being laid upon me in a sea of shoes, and long reception lines.   The days following each of the girls' birth were dream-like, too, as though I were moving on auto-pilot.  I moved into another world wrapped in light and sleeplessness as I cuddled, rocked, and nursed my babies.  I also recall stinky nightgowns I finally was able to shower out of, but the days are a haze of impressions, fuzzy like a Renoir painted in beauty filled with the smell of my babies' sweet heads and the sounds of their coos and sucking hunger and big eyes searching mine till I tumbled into eternity wondering about their preexistence and how I had come to be so blessed to be visited by such angels who'd chosen to abide with the likes of me.  The days of my dissertation defense, I sailed with my sister down a southern backroad with my nephew in his car seat while French South African protest songs blasted on the radio as we went to have high tea in proleptic celebration.  The next day I walked into the wood-paneled room outside the wall of windows looking out onto the magnolias in bloom, thinking, "This is it?  Eight years of my life come down to talking with a handfull of people around a conference table?"  Unreal.

The last day I visited my good friend in Hospice who was dying of lung cancer, I remember little except the way the light fell across the room in the blessing of that time together and her reassurances that it was all going to be ok as the big sister she was for me.   When my father-in-law was dying, I remember glances between us in which I knew a full three months before he died that he knew he was dying.  He was having body parts lopped off piece by piece, and it was too awful for any of us to deal with so we went into lala land even while we also knew he was dying.  We played the game that he'd need a wheelchair ramp to get into the house and had it built knowing he'd never use it, but he let it be built because he knew it would help his wife.  When my father died three months later, I retreated into a haze of poetry and took a week planning his memorial service.  I couldn't come out of the world of words.  When my mother-in-law fell onto her head at my father's funeral, reality was simply too much.  Though I called 911, all I could do was float between the front and the back of the church waiting on the EMT's to arrive.  I couldn't engage until she was bandaged with her diagnosis of a hematoma in the hospital later in the day.  By the time my grandmother died in the next three months, I was completely numbed out and don't remember anything of her funeral.  My grandmother was the single most important person in my childhood, and I can't even remember her funeral, though I was there.  All I remember was that she didn't look right lying in the casket with make-up on her face.  She never wore make-up, so she looked like a Hollywood corpse, an illusion, not reality.  Three months later I found myself sitting in the dean's office mesmerized by the colors of the hard candies in the crystal candy dish as I heard I would not be getting tenure.  All this loss simply couldn't be happening.

Yet another three months later I was sitting in another room with another two men talking about a job I had only dreamed about in seminary which I would be offered.   And in another three months, I had bought a dream house in a dream location and was signing the papers on a full-price offer on our other house just three hours after we'd signed the contract with our realtor to sell the house.  It was all a fabulous dream. 

All the deaths and changes in 2007-2008, though, had taken their toll on our marriage.  We were each dealing with our own griefs and weren't much consolation to the other.  We were too overwhelmed and numb with grief.  But I hadn't seen that at the time.  We'd been walking around like the girls and I were the day after Bill's death--together but separate, each doing our own thing without much consideration of the other.  Except the girls and I were kinder and more tender with one another. 

We needed to get something to eat and buy a veggie tray to take back to the Interfaith House after viewing Bill.  His family might be hungry.  So after going to the store, we picnicked on Panera in the car.  Then we made our way to the funeral home where we greeted our pastor friend Greg and filled him in on the situation.  He looked nervous, but we sat and read through scripture until Bill's mother, sister, and brother-in-law arrived.