My friend’s sister lost her husband this year to cancer. The sister writes a beautiful blog, Homemade Time, that started before he got sick, recounting their lives together with their three kids, but she kept blogging after the cancer arrived, and continued through his death this spring. She’s a gifted writer, and her posts were always deep and thoughtful. As things turned, she didn’t pull any punches, and her gut-wrenching, harrowing prose will rip your heart out, yet still the beauty of her words shines through.
Here’s a few quotes from the last couple of posts:
So. This night I got onto her toddler-sized mattress and wrapped my arms around her and waited to relax, and let go of the irritation, which indeed thankfully happened. I felt her body relax too. I felt quiet and sleepy and so in rushed thoughts of my husband. Mike, Mike, this girl of ours! Mike, how will we get through this without you? Mike, I’m worried I’m messing them up. Oh Mike.
Suddenly Beatrice pulled her head back and looked at me, hard.
Mama. You’re going to start crying.
I guess I am. How did you know?
You started breathing like this – and she demonstrated a pattern of inhales and breath holding.
The girl knows before I do.I guess you’re right, Bea. I was about to cry. I’m just thinking about your Papa.
I know.
—homemade time: things we’re all too young to know
My mind goes back to the hours before and moments during Mike’s death all the time. Every day, many times a day. When we knew he was dying, that there was no way around the fact that soon he would not be able to breath, he looked at me. A moment. His eyes, so very beautiful, so very him. He gave me a little wave that felt unbearable – that was how he acknowledged that we both knew this was our goodbye. He typed on the iPad: you know how much I love you.He knew about that small sad part of me and he knew it was getting tinier with each passing moment. I told him I did. And that he knew how much I loved him. It was the truth.
But how extraordinary, that I keep on learning about us, in this time of sorrow and weight. I like to hear about us from the outside in. It affirms all the yearnings of my heart. Let it be truer and truer still.
I persist in tree mode with Mike. Each significant moment – Frances’s choir concert, the arrival of our two new kittens, a terrible conflict with one of the kids – is an opportunity to miss him afresh. To feel the strangeness of his absence, and to anticipate his response to the situation. And the thing is, a good sandwich is a significant moment. So is a beautiful flowering tree, or learning last night that our old Annapolis contractor is caring for his wife who has a rare brain cancer, or going to the New School art show and watching various kids we know perform, or finding ants in the kitchen. Again. Oh Mike, can you believe these stupid ants?
If you pay attention, what moment in your day isn’t significant? And so he is with me, and not with me, all the time. It’s sadder than I can properly say.
I found many, many journals. It would never occur to me to open one of them when Mike was alive, though he kept them in shared places, like living room bookshelves. I understood them to be mainly intellectual journals in which he would work out things like dissertation and lecture ideas, preferably in a pleasant caffeine-enhanced state of focus and flow, esconced in a quiet cafe corner. But on Tuesday I opened them all, desperate to hear his voice, desperate for him to talk to me. They were indeed personal, and searching. Mike’s intellectual passions were so connected to his spiritual yearnings and psychological particularities; what did I expect? One journal from early 2002 described how irrationally angry he was at me, and how he knew it was rooted in his depression, and how he wasn’t ready yet to seek help for his depression, and how terrible that was to endure. A couple of pages later he described the ways I helped him shake off that heaviness and anger for the afternoon, and how he loved me, and how he wanted to marry me. How he would marry me.
Then I couldn’t bear another page, and had to leave the basement for awhile.
—homemade time: my life in books
My dad always said never put your head on the bar. By the time he was advising me (probably around age seven, maybe when I dropped a sleepy head on a restaurant table) he was a long-sober alcoholic. Meagan, they’ll kick you out the minute you put your head on the bar.
Maybe it was a general warning from one person to another, both of whom knew that the other knew just how good it can feel to settle your forehead on a cool smooth surface, especially when life is getting you down. It’s a comfort, but the world doesn’t always look kindly on that kind of thing. So in the end I tucked my legs up tight like a chilly bird on a branch in the snow (how many times did Mike’s doctor at Penn comment on how I looked like I was about to take flight, perched on the edge of the extra exam room chair during those long visits?) and wrapped my arms around my knees and somehow made it through. Now they will send us benefits for the children. I’m grateful.
In writing this, I realize that more than anything I am longing for the very best place to touch down, which is Mike’s body. Yes, there is comfort in landing my flail-prone limbs and heavy head somewhere steady when I am so full of hurt and sadness that I’m afraid the doors will all fall off their hinges with a crash. I find containment for this sorrow in a hug, a wall, an open car door. The hinges are, miraculously, functional. But I think when my third eye is seeking contact, I am really seeking Mike. His warm shoulder, his elegant jaw, refuges for me in the hardest of times, even when he could barely tolerate my touch because he was in pain and the sight of him had to suffice. I held his hand often during the days and hours leading up to his death; he was holding mine too.
My beloved. It has been a month. How terrible it is to be without him.
Just going back through the blog to cull those posts made me start to tear up. But I’d be doing her an injustice to make you think that it’s all sad. It’s beautiful, and she definitely is deserving of your time and attention. I love it when a new Homemade Time shows up in my RSS reader’s inbox, even though I know it will probably make me cry. There’s something so beautifully human about her voice, and even though our two situations are different, somehow I find something to relate to, something that she says that relates to something that I’m going through at that moment.
I used to be really into social media, because I thought that instead of websites serving us up canned content, we’d finally get the avenues to tell our own stories. I’ve really given up on that for the big social media services, but when I find a blog like this, that has something to share, I really appreciate what it brings into my life, and feel like this is something that should be shared. I wish that more things like this would pop up in my inbox.
Just keep the box of tissues close by.