Dear Audrey

Valentine's Day

2012-02-14T21:17:00.000-05:00

I'm glad once again this year that you weren't big on Valentine's Day...that's not to say that I don't have special memories- especially when we were dating- of dinners out in trendy restaurants in NYC, special pieces of jewelry, and my favorite: homemade booklets and cards from you. I do...I do...in my timeless mind- those are all still going on...

But I feel like people thought today was a difficult day for me. I know it is for many widows and again, that's not to say I didn't feel piercings of the intense nostalgia of grief, remembrances, or wish a few times that we could go out to dinner together, or that you'd choose the prettiest flowers for me and later complain about how "all the prices are jacked up for this day," and mostly wish I could just... hold your hand. Mostly, I tried not to indulge in these wishes- they can not happen.

But overall, I felt triumphant today. It had more joy spots than usual. I might even enjoy Valentine's Day more than I used to. Because it's not about a commercial, romantic ideal, and there are no expectations. For me now, it's about the pretty aesthetic that accompanies it and all of the different ways I can make it special for our daughter. I think perhaps the Hallmark holiday suits childhood much better than adulthood. I cooped at Audrey's school today Dan- and I made heart shaped waffles, strawberries, and baked tortillas for their snack. I made photo cards of her for the kids' mailboxes. I decorated the door of her room with strings of hanging shiny purple hearts, and bought heart-shaped donuts for our snack this afternoon. A few days ago, I even mailed a package to a single friend- I wrapped up my favorite French soap, bath crystals, and heart-shaped chocolates in pink and red wrapping paper tied up with twine and with little slips of brown grocery bag, I wrote the words "faith," "hope" and "love" on each package.

You were here and present though. We did not forget you for a moment. We spoke of you often. I bought two helium heart-shaped balloons yesterday- to "send up to you" as we did last year. Probably the hardest part- is taking over your tradition of buying her a Valentine's gift. You came up with that yourself, and I thought it was just so sweet. I loved the gifts you chose when she was four months old and when she was 17 months old. You only got to do it twice huh. Still, it felt solidified in my mind as something you were going to always do. I gave her a book and a little fashion press with fabric and she loved both. I made sure to tell her that this was your tradition and remind her of the things you'd given her in the past- her stuffed dog, her Hello Kitty book, and told her that I was just taking over for you and that you would want her to have this.

I think a lot today about why I feel so light. I think I may have felt more sadness and misery before I had you...when I was still waiting and hoping there would be someone out there to love me and for me to love and not even knowing love itself, but just the theoretical, commercial ideal I saw in movies or read about in Austen novels. But now I know there is, and there was, and I feel your love even now. Still, there is the moment when I wonder if I'm numb and fooling myself. The moment when I sit in my spot on the kitchen floor and literally squeeze my head trying to wrap my mind around the fact that you are not just disappeared, but dead and buried. This is one I still don't get and it literally hurts like a muscle lifting weight when I try to. I give up. The weight slams down. I make another Valentine for Audrey's spot at the dinner table.

A tough day? It was a regular day of heartbroken living with spots of brightness. The day we met, that's a tough day. Our anniversary- another difficult 24 hours. Father's Day- very, very painful. Your birthday- probably the most difficult day of the year besides your death day.

I think today is about being a couple, having someone, and the notion of romantic love. It is not about us, our love story, and it doesn't come close to the mundane magic moments that we had. Each day though, I share an apartment with a living, breathing reminder of our love. Each cordate, broken, ordinary day.

But interestingly enough, something else happened a few days ago that has pushed me to a slightly different space...my daughter and I were heading out the door- and she was, as usual, dressed in princess attire including crown. She always says hello to the concierge I'm friendly with as she prances towards the door. He also happens to have lost his first wife while in his thirties- followed by their infant son. What he said to me as I was heading out the door has been ringing in my ears ever since. He said something to me that I did not think I would ever hear again. And when he said it, at first I almost questioned him: "What do you mean?" But then I knew exactly what he meant, and instead replied, "I know..."

What did he say?

"You're very lucky."

Last Week

2012-02-14T19:59:00.000-05:00

Last week was a shitty week...that is truly the best word I can come up with to articulate it. Not so much grief-related- just life-related. But of course, harder.

For different reasons every day, I wound up crying in my parked car a lot.

Audrey had a temper tantrum when we got to school one morning, screaming, foaming at the mouth, irrational kind of tantrum and even though I eventually got her up to her room, the teacher sent us home.

One morning I was on the phone opening up a Fed Ex account to try to get your blood sample over from Switzerland. The man I spoke to was telling me I probably wouldn't have to pay any government taxes because, "It's not worth anything."

Another morning the management of a rental I was supposed to look at calls and cancels because of my income level.

One afternoon I took Audrey to get her hair cut and wound up knowing the wife of the salon owner. I wasn't sure if she knew that you died, but she later said she did- "That was a few years ago?" and followed up with a quick, "But you're OK now?"

"It feels like yesterday to me," I answer. "OK? No, I wouldn't say OK," I reply.

Felt

2012-02-05T20:41:00.003-05:00

Unexpectedly tough day- which is always worse than the days that are expectedly so.

It's been lonely lately- I think for both of us. Audrey's imaginary friends who faded to the background after she started preschool are prominent again. Her ballet class and yoga class ended and we've lost our rhythm for a bit. It's funny- similarly to how I've felt about God- not angry just questioning his existence- I question friendships a lot lately- not because I'm angry but because I'm not sure who they are anymore or if I had all the great friends I thought I did in the first place. My circle definitely feels like it has shrunk since you died. It's hard to tell whether it's partly because I'm a mom now since that was still new, or because we had also moved fairly recently from the city. But it certainly seems like when you were alive we had a full schedule with different things, gatherings, events going on all the time. Now we don't. Maybe other families want to guard their own family time or maybe they think we'll feel sad being amongst another family- but it's hard coming up with things for us to do each and every day when it's just the two of us. Your absence is so present all the time. Even for Audrey...for whom I wonder what that must feel like- the absence of someone, something- a father- that you aren't used to having anymore or can't remember- but you still feel. A vague absence probably- felt mostly when she sees other fathers interacting with their children or when I bring you up. This morning she talks at breakfast about that vivid dream she had of you again...only this time it meshes with an identical new dream she tells me where Cinderella is the one who is in the playroom waiting to read with her, but when she comes in, she disappears. She stops talking and just stares at me after this word...disappears. Heartsink. I remember so clearly the sound of her screams that night when I found her, "I wanna play with appa NOW!" One of my lowest moments since all this began.

I try to fill our days. It's tiring taking a three year old to weekend family events by yourself. After church today we go out to a Korean restaurant- the same one where we all ate lunch after your one year memorial. I try to get Audrey's soondooboo to cool down, but it takes forever. We sit on the same side of the large booth they placed us in and I stare at the empty other side of the booth. The next booth behind that is a family of three- mother, little girl, father. I give Audrey some crayons and finish up my own soondooboo so we can go. When we get up, the waitress from your memorial lunch we had in a room there recognizes me. I'd told her it was your memorial because I wanted to pay for it but sneaky people were trying to intercept the bill. "Oh...it's you," she says. "Your husband...how are you doing?" And unfortunately that's all it takes sometimes. I can't really speak and my eyes are full and overflowing and then I answer, "The best I can, she's getting so big right?" pointing to Audrey. She gives me a hug and we leave.

Later I realize it's the Superbowl and think of parties we attended and which team you would be rooting for. I tell Audrey we're having a Superbowl party and put it on on our tiny TV while we have a spaghetti and meatball picnic at our small Korean table on the living room floor. I think of how I'd always predict which team was going to win, mostly in basketball, and tell you I could tell because of the "energy" but you kind of believed me- that was funny. I realize later that tomorrow is the sixth of the month. Ah- maybe that's why today was so hard. I do laundry and find that I've left a tissue in the wash. You always hated that and reprimanded me for not checking carefully enough or for keeping tissues up my sleeves (something my third grade teacher told us was a good idea and it stuck). Little wet, white pieces of tissue stuck on all the clothes as I throw them into the dryer...and I miss you so. "Yup- I left a tissue in Dan," I say.

Yesterday Audrey and I were decorating a cardboard fairy house we made and in going through some art supplies, I thought some felt squares might be useful. I open up a Ziploc full of a rainbow of colored felt squares. And then I see them- the leftover squares from shapes that you'd cut out for the felt board I was so into around the time you died. It was one of my projects that had great vision, but my end result didn't work out. Nonetheless, since you were much more artistic than me, I had asked you to cut out some shapes for the board. You did. An airplane. A bird. A sun or moon. A few other things I am forgetting. Those felt pieces I'm pretty sure I'd put away earlier on in a special place with things for Audrey...but these leftover scraps- these pieces, I'd forgotten.

These hurt more. I couldn't believe how much they hurt. There were the marks where you'd cut along with scissors. Where you removed your work and gave it to our baby. Remnants, scraps, a picture of this great absence- both vague and sharp- on rainbow colored felt.

Trinity

2012-02-03T20:18:00.001-05:00

There is an emotion that came to me new with motherhood. It's not just happiness or joy you feel as you marvel at this human being before you that began as a cell in your womb. It's not quite pride because it doesn't necessarily accompany any grand accomplishment or milestone. It comes suddenly in moments and leaps into your heart until it is painfully full. It is difficult to define and yet I try to tell her often. "I am delighted with you." Delight.

Delight, however filling, is inherently in need of at least one other spectator to be complete. It's like when I watched Audrey suddenly get up on the little stage at Barnes and Noble and sing and "tap dance" to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in front of a crowd of people. Delight. But then also- looking around to see who could share this moment with me. And it's like when she says something after which I ask, "What did you say?" Like when I asked her once what she was getting- thinking she was doing something she wasn't supposed to and she answered, "Stickers!" and then rolling her eyes slightly, "Oh for God's sake..." I had to reenact it later hoping someone would catch how delightful it was. Or when I ask rhetorically at dinner one night..."What is God up to Audrey?" and she answers, "I think he's takin' a rest because he's tired after all that...creating and every-ting..." Ah. No one here. I will write it down in the quaint book for quotes such as this given to me by a friend. I will write it down though it will never be exactly as it was in that moment.

The last moment of shared delight in our daughter that we had was shortly before you left us. The three of us were reading bedtime stories on our bed and Audrey hadn't said many, if any, two syllable words yet. Then while reading about the color purple, she did it..."Po pul" and at the exact same moment, we turned to each other with a jolt and wide eyes. It was a moment I hope I always remember. There have though, been so many more moments that begged for this common reaction since you left, and instead I get the heartsink. "You would love this," I think. And it doesn't seem fair at all that I get to see it and you don't.

There is another D word that I also never felt fully until motherhood. It's what we both felt when a crazy lady in a Mexican restaurant where we were having lunch, Audrey asleep in her stroller, told us to please "remove your child from here- I don't like children." It's what I felt recently when a little girl in Audrey's class started punching her in the stomach out of nowhere while they were in line to wash their hands the day I was cooping at her school. It's also what I feel when there's a show or story that focuses on a daughter's relationship with her father and I watch Audrey's eyes so carefully.

Defend. I want to protect her and be the one who comes to her defense, but it feels so wrong without you here to defend along with me. After the punching incident, I imagine what you would have said...how angry you would've been and I imagine you without a doubt, approaching that little girls' father at school, and maybe even Audrey's teacher to make sure it was known how unhappy you were about it. I did not do those things. I worry that I won't do as good of a job defending as you might have. I wish you were here with me. It hurt to see our little girl take those sudden punches. I almost cried myself as she cried in my arms and every other little girl in her class came by with empathetic looks and offered her hugs.

Many people love Audrey- her grandparents on both sides certainly do delight in her. But most of the time, they're not here during those unexpected, "Po pul," moments...and- they're not you- her father.

I think the Holy Trinity- is starting to make a little bit more sense. To truly delight in or defend one person, you absolutely need- another person.

Previous Life

2012-02-01T21:51:00.000-05:00

"Don't worry- I'm going to die first..."

"No!"

"Yes...if you died first, I just couldn't go on..."

At least once daily I flash back. Parts of it are sharp, while others are blurred. I envision myself floating from room to room. But one thing I remember is people calling me...brave of them...most seemed to say the same thing: "I just had to hear your voice and tell you how sorry I am..." And my newly foreign voice would reply, "Thanks...thanks...I just don't know how I'll go on...I just don't know how I'll go on."

And I didn't. And I don't.

And this refrain has been in my head again as of late.

I am literally stunned at how fresh the pain is. The time has taken me away from the painful struggle of thinking it's not too late to change things- during that circle when it seemed a little bit of the present still overlapped what had just happened and we could make it different. During that circle, I could still see and imagine you doing things with us so your absence was acute. It's not that your absence isn't acute anymore- it's just that now I can't really envision you playing with Audrey anymore- because she is much older. She talks. She jumps, sings, and dances. She's in school. One evening I try to imagine you coming in the door and how you would greet her, but instead I find my imagination inserts me literally introducing you to her- telling you, "This is Audrey..." and then going on to explain who she is now...this is the "healing" power of ...time.

Last night I somehow wind up hacking into your ebay account. Something I'd been interested in was sold out and I found it on Ebay through a google search. I'm not familiar with Ebay- but you bought and sold a ton of stuff on there- so I would usually ask you to sell something for me or buy something I saw on the rare occasion. I decide since I have to figure out how to do this myself without your expert advice (you had some tactic you were very proud of with the timing where you were always the winning bidder), maybe I will still use your user name and account. In grieving it seems there is always some dusty corner full of tearful debris. In your Ebay account I go through the archive of all of the items you bought and sold along with the comments from the people you had transactions with. In it, I see a picture of our life together- I recognize the CD's, DVD's, soccer jerseys, and a few things I'd given you. But what I'm most struck by is how much everyone likes you...I'm not familiar with this so maybe people always complement their buyer/seller in their rating, but these seem super nice..."Really nice guy- great transaction." "Really pleasant over email." "Really quick, professional, and honest." "Super nice guy and one of the best people I've dealt with." Things like that. I am amazed how even in these comments, I get a sense of your character. And I am very, very sad.

Today for some reason- I think because I am missing you...another crevice I haven't checked in- I look for emails from you from your old yahoo account in my account. There are only a few before you switched to gmail. But there is one to this couple from Germany we met in Mexico on our honeymoon. We had stayed in touch and I think on your last European tour you were even trying to see them, but it didn't work out. They also have one daughter now. When we met, we had both just been married. We were seated randomly at a big round table outside at our resort our first night there. It was a magical night...warm, tropical sweet-smelling air, and giant pelicans flying slowly overhead. You and I couldn't get over them- we thought they looked so much like dinosaurs- prehistoric. We chatted with this couple and one other couple from the US...but we didn't click with them as well. Then the next day, while I was laying in my bikini, you were on the defense as a man in sunglasses approached me smiling...neither of us had recognized him at first, but you soon calmed down when we realized it was the man from the German couple we'd met the night before. We chatted while in the pool and decided to have dinner at one of the outdoor restaurants that night together. It was breezy that night and we have a photo of the four of us sitting at the table as the sun set looking like...newlyweds. The couple commented that we didn't seem like Americans, but different- and you took that as a complement. It was mostly you and the man doing the talking as she didn't speak as much English and you were so good at making conversation with strangers whether it was about sports, beer, or cities in Germany. After we got back home to our new apartment in Brooklyn, we both exchanged a few emails of the photos we had and that was pretty much it.

I look through photos from that night and think about posting one here, but they're all blurry as well. You had some cheap camera that had enough memory for about five photos and we took too many or something so they all turned out with horrible resolution. When we got back and realized that, I was so upset to not have a decent photo from my honeymoon. All are blurred and grainy like they're from fifty years ago rather than eight. Appropriate now.

Today I decide I should write this man and tell him that you died. And I do- I tell the story very briefly- not even sure if he checks that email account from 2004 anymore. He writes back...they are both saddened about our "fate." He has business in the US and maybe can make a stopover in NYC sometime to see us.

I don't know why I do these things. Something in me needs to 1) tell the story, but also 2) lasso a rope to the places and people from my previous life just so that I know it was real and it happened, and simultaneously- revisit each portion of our life together in order to say a proper goodbye... The only other people now who remember my honeymoon...how I smiled at dinner and how you wrapped your arm around my waist on the darkening beach while they took our photo- is this couple I barely know living on another continent. But now they know - and now I know- that they are still there- still alive with their daughter- a picture of what we could have been...and I know, more importantly, that it all really happened- that you existed and we existed and it was wonderful- in another time and place.

Stonewall

2012-01-28T21:14:00.000-05:00

I've read a lot of relationship books. Ours was not an easy one, though I am certain we would've endured and even flourished had you lived.

In general, during arguments, men tend to stonewall. They shut down, don't talk, need a break. Women, in general, but this was true for us, want to talk about the issue at hand until they feel that, the problem isn't necessarily solved, but they are reconnected with their spouse.

These different ways of dealing with conflict can really be trying...one person is pushing to keep talking, discussing, working it out. This is her way of loving. The other is trying not to lose his temper, needing a break from the intensity of the discussion, shutting down and leaving the room or even the apartment. This is also, his way of loving. But the more she pushes, the more he shuts down.

Your death while abroad, away from me, on another continent, with so many things unresolved- not even two years after a rough and sudden move, a new baby, and a job change for you that took you away from us for a month at a time- we didn't get any time to settle back into ourselves as a couple- go on date nights, (oh how jealous I am of the people on FB now who are "out on a date night with the hubs!"), talk more, watch favorite shows together, share chores or tuck our daughter in together- your death, because of all of this- is the ultimate stonewall.

I want to cry and push and make you listen to me, but it is worse than any stonewall because there's no angry face walking away or slamming door or turning on your side in our bed without saying goodnight. There is nothing. You can not hear me. It is all over. The pushing and stonewalling and connecting and loving. This is a very, very hard thing to accept.

Family

2012-01-28T20:58:00.000-05:00

The other day, maybe while I'm pouring cereal, I have the random memory of eating my Cheerios...carefully. Small children, I don't think, can really separate things that are alive and things that aren't. And I was fairly certain that the Cheerios that stuck together while floating in my milk at the end of the bowl, were not just accidentally grouped together- they were families. If one in the group slipped off my spoon, I'd be sure to get him back on with his family before they all took the journey into my mouth. Do other people do this? I'm pretty sure they do.

The Cheerio families are not an adequate metaphor for how it feels to be a part of a broken family. The constant gnawing that something- someone is missing from your unit. They are not an adequate metaphor for how it feels to look forward to Audrey's preschool coffee social- a chance to sit around with other moms who understand mothering and drink much needed caffeine while the kids are in class one morning- but then find your loss smacking you in the face yet again while everyone talks about their silly husbands or their second or current pregnancies. I chime in as if those are not painful memories- my own pregnancy, birth, "Oh, my husband was like that too...he'd always get the wrong stuff at the store so he'd call to check because I was so neurotic." At one point when we're discussing how consuming children without siblings can be, one mother from Audrey's class, who must not know- I've never told her- laughs and tells me I better get started on the second baby. I just answer that it's not really the first thing on my mind right now and it's awkward because a few mothers do know- but the one who said it laughs as if I've made a joke again. I leave the mothers for a bit to go watch Audrey in her dance class from the gym window- and to gather myself...wipe the stray tears I barely notice are there anymore because they are so much a part of my daily face.

And the Cheerio metaphor doesn't come close to the feeling of having various realtors come through your apartment with clients because your landlord is selling your place and you have no idea yet where you're going to go...the place where you moved as a family when your child was five months old- where she took her first steps, where you slow danced to kids' music with your husband in the living room and made him fresh waffles with heart shaped strawberries for his last Father's Day a couple of weeks before he died. It doesn't come close to the feeling when these strangers meandering through my home tell me my daughter is cute or they like how I decorated the little nook that is her "room." It doesn't convey at all the heartsinking that happens when the Korean realtor, seeing our family photos, tells me, "Oh, you have a very handsome husband," and I answer, "Thanks, he was," as they smile not hearing the past tense and head out the door waving to Audrey who has just changed into her fairy outfit and is wondering why the "guests" are leaving.

The heartsinking is the best term- when the pain that's always there dips just a little lower than you thought possible- kind of like the pain I feel when Audrey has a wistful, shy look on her face watching another little girl play with her dad- or when she looks up at me one night before bed telling me she's so scared of the dark...I tell her we're the only people in this apartment and she tells me you're here. Then I tell her you're not because you died. And she tells me, "But we'll always be stuck together- we'll always be a family- " probably something I've told her at some point though I don't recognize it offhand. Then she tells me she wishes you would come to our apartment and call her name, "I wish appa would come to our apartment building and call me Audrey."

Heartsinking. Pulverizing.

How do I fix our family? I cannot. I can not pretend you are still here. I can honor the life you lived. But I cannot hold a place here for your return. I realize that even as I look at rentals and possible homes for us to move to- that thought that I've heard others in grief books talk about arises- "What if we move and he comes back and we're not there?" It's absurd because I really do get by now the circumstances of my life and yours. But still- that thought is there- we will be gone- what if?

What to do, what to do.

Buy matching pajamas for my daughter, her doll, and myself.
Buy matching mugs from Anthropologie with our initials.
Tirelessly put a unicorn puppet on my hand named unicorny complete with Julia Child-like voice because he's quite funny and she loves him and he's become a part of our
family.

From Where You Are

2012-01-17T10:58:00.001-05:00

It's a typical morning for me.

I wake up next to a head of black hair- but it's not yours. It's your daughter's. She's been terrified of sleeping alone lately and every night is a battle. Because she has such a hard time going to sleep, she sleeps late and I have to wake her up for preschool. "Wake up honey." Even without remembering them specifically, I know I've been dreaming of you and of us all night long. I am tired from it and it leaves a bitter taste behind.

Quick breakfast, getting hair, teeth brushed. In the car. In the school parking lot, a friend of Audrey's runs to her and gives her a hug, unfortunately knocking her down on the wet pavement. Her pants are soaked through. Inside the school room, I go to get her spare pants and change them. Before I leave, she insists I talk to her teacher about her fear of fairy tales. I do and her teacher tells me that she knows what it's in reference to specifically and that some of the kids play "monster" and Audrey bursts into tears. I tell Audrey they won't be playing that today, give her a kiss, and head out.

Today I head to the local Starbucks since I only have a couple of hours before she's through and we don't live that close by. I bring my computer, my notebook with all of my to-do lists and a big binder of ideas for things to do with Audrey. I keep my coat on. It's drafty at my table by the window.

My emails consist of writing back and forth to the realtor who is helping me find a home. Emailing my parents to see if they can babysit. Emailing between a medical center here and my contact at the US Embassy in Switzerland- still a year and a half later and a ton of back and forth and obtaining letters and certificates and faxes, trying to secure your "tissue" that they've held there for further genetic testing. Still wondering what the f--k happened and doing so at the recommendation of the pediatric cardiologist Audrey saw at her pediatrician's recommendation to rule out any genetic heart defect- since- we really don't know what happened to you my sweet husband.

After that putting up a few things on Craigs List that I've finally taken proper photos of. Audrey's old crib mattress- her stroller - her booster seat. These haven't been used for a while and are leaning up on walls in my room or in a stuffed closet in our one bedroom apartment. In the posting, "used by one child for about two years." One child. I take a long look at the photo of the stroller- the stroller I can see you pushing Audrey in- see us walking together along the river path...back when we were just a young family.

Three listings done on Craigs List- I have a lot more to do.

My parking meter will run out in a few minutes- time to go get our daughter.

Life feels hard and every thing I do infused with this sadness and tragedy. I miss you tremendously. Mostly, I miss you simply being alive- but I realize lately- I really miss your love and support as well- in this, what I hope is the most challenging time of my life. If you can, send me some help from where you are. I love you.

Grief You're a Lot Like Crazy

2012-01-15T19:21:00.001-05:00

Grief you're a lot like crazy. You are.
I am house hunting now and can not look at a house with the number six- the day you died- in the address. I look for sevens or seventeens- your birthday, our anniversary - not just in house addresses- but the minutes left on the parking meter I pull into, the defrosting time left on the microwave clock when it beeps, the time that an email was sent.

I smell a burning smell in our kitchen and repeatedly check toaster, burners are off. I still smell it. The oven. How could I forget the oven and the potato I was cooking in there? Sliced sweet potato chips turning black.

When I fly on the airplane, I no longer worry about dying in a crash. I worry about there being no remains of mine to lay beside you in our shared grave...the one place I am certain I will join you.

Grief you are the worst kind of nostalgia imaginable. You are.
When I reach in the cabinet I wonder if we bought this can of beans or this bottle of herbs when you were alive. Every day feels like a party room after a party, my living room right after we take the tree town, littered with those dried out needles from already last year. Every place I go to screams Nostalgia- the last time we sat in that coffee shop, your favorite chips in the chip aisle, our first movie in that movie theater I drive by and which is no longer a movie theater.

Every recent announcement of others getting engaged, married, pregnant, reminds me of our lost life- our holding hands by the Brooklyn Bridge at South Street seaport, my hair blowing in that photo of us on the Staten Island ferry, our phone calls to our parents, "We're engaged!" Sitting in the limo right after we are married watching our friends and family surrounding the church. "We're married." "Did you see that?" you say after I missed our daughter's heartbeat at our first doctor's visit. "No, I missed it." "It was amazing." "I'm pretty sure it's a boy, but if it's a girl, how about the name Audrey?" "I like it."

And you are...the nostalgia of a future yet to be and a future: could. have. been.

Grief you are the purest homesickness.
You have me always waiting, always expecting, turning my head to an empty doorway each night.
You keep me always searching, always unsettled, always a vagabond, carrying with me these boxes of homemade cards and letters, stacks of sympathy cards, photographs, and other remnants.
You leave me like a kid locked out of her own house. Sitting on the brick steps on a cold day until I -am- numb.

And grief, you are nothing if you are not LONGING.
Frederick Buechner, in a book I'm reading, tells me the word longing comes from the root of the word long as in length in space or time, but "also the word belong, so that in its full richness to long suggests to yearn for a long time for something that is a long way off and something that we feel we belong to and that belongs to us."

Grief. You are.

Publication

2012-01-15T18:40:00.004-05:00

I guess someone at Mamapedia stumbled across my blog and asked if they could publish my New Years post. As a result, I received quite a few emails from other young widows thanking me for articulating their own pain as well. It's amazing how, even though I am in the same situation as they are, when I receive their emails, hear their stories, and especially when they include photos, I cry because I am so, so sorry for their loss- as if I don't get at all that I am one of them.

To know that my efforts in writing here is in any way helping other women is a good feeling if there can be good found here. I always carry with me the words of a friend from our Brooklyn church in the early weeks- the woman who had battled cancer and brought me the first good tasting thing I'd had since you died- and told me, "There will never be anything redemptive about Dan's death, but there may be about your grief process."

One of my favorite things to do as a young child, since maybe the second grade, was to write letters- to anyone I could. I wrote my teachers letters. I wrote to the kids I met from Connecticut and Canada on our summers in Cape Cod. I kept my correspondences neatly tied up in ribbons for many years. I kept journals as well...from about age ten I wrote nightly. They are in a large file box in my closet now- and you can see them change from small pink books with gold edges and little locks to larger journals and notepads of varying designs as I too grew. I wrote melodramatic poetry as a teenager, and in college, I found that writing papers brought me extreme enjoyment which I realized was not the case with everyone. When I returned to graduate school for creative writing, mostly to get out of a job at Random House that I loathed...my teacher and the head of the nonfiction program wrote in my first evaluation "she has a writerly personality." I found that surprising and wasn't sure what kind of a personality was a writerly one, but recall thinking, "Maybe I am a writer?"

Well, you always thought I was. Recently I found a back and forth email between us of one of your interviews with a soccer player that you got published on ESPN. You had sent me your questions and interview for editing and I had sent it back with all of my corrections typed in red ink. There was quite a bit (I guess it was the English teacher in me- I had taught at a private school in the city for a year and college writing classes in Brooklyn for a year) and I can remember you telling me how you weren't going to send me anything anymore. I was only trying to help. But when I pulled it up recently, perhaps it was a bit of overkill. I'm sorry for that. As you would say so often, my intentions really were good.

Well, it saddens me love, but it is only since the time of your death, that I knew I was a writer...published or not- whether I'm brave enough to call it what I do for a living or not, it's who I am and always will be the way I feel most comfortable "being."

With your death, came a strange authority I could not write with previously. And...so I thought, also came the responsibility to try to articulate this ineffable grief- this madness that happens when someone you love so much, disappears from the earth.

But how to describe the nausea and sighing in those early days? The sickness you sleep with and wake up to. The way the sky is larger and time becomes a stage with scenery changing around you while you stand still.

And how, how do you articulate what it is like to explain to your child that her father is never coming home, to hear a child as young as two tell people her father died- "he died." Or hear her, at age three, point to a cemetery you drive by and say, "Is that appa's cemetery?" excitedly.

How do you articulate the instantaneous dissolution of your marriage without your consent? How can you convey the utter sense of wrongness and artificiality when you check off the widow box or write "deceased" next to your daughter's father's name on her preschool application?

How can you possibly articulate what it feels like to pack away your young husband's clothes: socks, t-shirts, favorite soccer jerseys, or to tape a fingernail you find on a small piece of paper or to hold a lock, no a chunk, of his hair packed in a plastic baggie, packed by the funeral director at your request, for just a moment every time you open your sock drawer.

I used to think it was the responsibility of the writer to articulate these things. That is not possible. It's a bit like loving a spouse who has been buried for a year and a half. There is no response, no hope of a magical appearance, but that doesn't mean you stop loving him. Trying to construct some sort of narrative or brief on the wordless pain and reality of this kind of loss is just as fruitless, but as it turns out, the obligation of the writer is not to achieve it, but...simply to try. Sometimes, that is enough.

Trying to Make it Stay

2012-01-05T21:12:00.004-05:00

There is something in the human spirit- and I'm not sure what it is yet- knowledge of some truth about an end to all of this that will see justice and things made right, or maybe it's just survival of the fittest- evolution's way of keeping us alive even when we feel dead inside- but there is something in us that wants to affirm the goodness and beauty and value of life, even in the midst of our darkest tribulation.

I've seen myself attempting this throughout the past eighteen months- like hanging up a piece of loose clothing on a wire hanger that keeps sliding down. You keep trying to make it stay.

I've gone to buy a bowl of chicken soup for a homeless man on a frigid day in New York City near my counseling. I signed up to bring a meal to a family with a little toddler with leukemia. I respond to every email I receive from others who have known loss, trying to encourage them, even though I feel nothing but despair most nights. I've sent care packages to two widows I became closer to. Candles and tea and soothing things. I buy fresh flowers and take photos of beautiful things. I even take those flyers people hand out on city streets with a small smile just so they can feel they got rid of another one and have a moment of satisfaction. And the most life-affirming thing I do, I get up each day and try to create a beautiful childhood for my daughter, as well as prepare her for her future. I don't pretend to succeed each day, but I give it my best shot.

For Christmas, I wanted to send a beautiful young widow I met through this blog something special- because it was her third Christmas since her husband was killed on Christmas day in Iraq right after attending mass. He was a surgeon. They have three beautiful young children. He was supposed to come home. But he didn't. She and I share the refrain: "You died, you actually died" spoken loudly or sometimes softly. I felt the approach of her own "anniversary" the entire month of December as Audrey excitedly ran to her Advent calendar each morning. After some searching around, I chose a small gift handmade by an Etsy artisan. At first I accidentally put my own address as the shipping address so I confirmed that it was actually the address of my friend. Then, I wanted the artist to know who it was going to so I explained just a little bit of the story in our online transaction- the story that you see, must be told again and again to any captive audience. I stated only in parenthesis (I am also) - a young widow, but she wrote back inquiring about how my husband had died and if he was in the military, so I replied with...you guessed it, the story. I didn't hear back and thought perhaps it was too much information.

I had ordered the gift after her Christmas deadline which was fine. I somehow still trust that things have a way of arriving at the right time. On the day of New Years' Eve, while waiting outside Audrey's ballet class in the morning, I checked my email on my phone and found my friend had received the gift. She was grateful, but I know there is no gift that can lessen the feelings of loss at all. Still, there are things that must be done- despite this and because of it. This is the stubborn, life-affirming quality we humans possess.

But later that day, when Audrey and I went to get our mail, I noticed our package light was on. I figured it was left on by mistake from the previous day when Audrey received a package from her grandparents in Korea. But it wasn't. When I received the package from our building concierge, I noticed the return address was from the Etsy seller right away. "Oh no, I thought, she accidentally did send the package to me!" But then I remembered that I'd already heard from my friend upon her receipt of her own package. This train of thought happened as quickly as it did on the day of the phone call, when I thought, "Why is he calling me? Dan must be incapacitated. Why is he asking if I'm driving. This is really bad." and then "Dan is dead."

As quickly as that, but in a much nicer spirit, I realized that she must have sent me the same present. On the elevator upstairs, I choked up and Audrey asked me if the package was for her- most are. "No honey, this one's for me." I hid it away until just about twelve midnight, long after our eight pm toast. And then I opened it...alone, in our room on the cusp of another long year in a long lifetime without you.

If you'd like your own charm, Stephanie's shop is here.

Here I Am

2012-01-04T21:25:00.000-05:00

There's a reason I haven't been finding the time to write here- and it's not because I feel like I've wrapped things up. It's because I can't stand the pain anymore. It's like I reached the exact point in my labor with Audrey when, in the tub laboring on hands and knees, I literally thought- "I could drown myself and make this pain stop." It was then I let out such a scream with the next contraction that the nurse came running in and said,"Was that her?" It was then I told you I was ready for the epidural. "Are you sure?" you said. "I'm sure."

I'm sure. I'm prone to avoid numbing painful things. Instead I usually ruminate over them. Sometimes it's unhealthy. With you it's been healthy grieving- grieving is not ruminating. But sometimes I wish to get through one day without those moments of horror and realization that bring me to my knees. To shut out the realization and memories of a previous life and just proceed through the day. I still don't understand the whole, "You can keep the love and memories but lose some of the pain," concept. That seems like telling me I can feel the contractions while I'm numb from the waist down. I can't feel them anymore. I'm cold and shivering. The doula says I'm having double contractions on the monitor now. I ask for another blanket. You are at my side.

There's no doula, no nurse here. No one. And no outward representation of this inner pain beyond description.

I wish that you were sitting with me here tonight. I am hungering for a conversation with you. I want to tell you how sick Audrey's been the last two days. How I've been cleaning up poop all day and how upset she is that her diarrhea smells so bad. I want to tell you also how she burst into tears while the kids on Barney acted out Little Red Riding Hood as soon as she saw the boy dressed as the wolf. She tells me later over and over again that she thinks fairy tales are scary and that when there's an evil character, "in my heart, I feel lonely." She is so perceptive Dan, so in tune with anything sinister in this world. That trait may be difficult for her in the future...it is for me. I think it was for you as well.

Decisions. I want to tell you that I'm feeling stressed about moving and finding a place...that I'm not sure what to do. You promised you'd help us find a place. Yet here I am doing it alone. I think a lot about how decision-making is so difficult now. Before your career at least sort of guided us- to certain music cities, or even where we are now because the commuter buses were wide enough for your cello. It is also difficult in the same way that it was right after 9/11. I heard all of the stories about how someone was late to work that day because they had to drop off their kid- and lived. Or how they went in early for a meeting- and died. In the weeks right after that shocking reality- I was nervous every time I went to take the bus back to Jersey from my job in Times Square. I had to go through the Lincoln Tunnel. I would think to myself - should I take this next bus or wait? What if I am too early. What if I'm too late. It's kind of like that now because I wonder how many small decisions you and I made that led to your death. I question everything. I think there is also some PTSD just by receiving that phone call. My grief counselor tells me I see life now through the lens of loss. I imagine future losses and try to calmly plan my life around them. She asks me how I made decisions in the past. I tell her that I am methodical- I do all of my research. But I also trust my instinct. When I look at an apartment, I trust what I feel. I can live here, I think. I envision. But also- every previous move I've made- I've had you with me to agree. Our mutual agreement on an apartment was usually our sign.

When things get really bad I usually wind up back on the young widows board I looked at in those early weeks and again at the one year anniversary. Now I'm in the "one year and beyond" category of the forum. It comforts me to see the recent discussion about the second year being harder in many ways. Not the raw, searing pain- though that is ever-present- but the reality of your life without them...the sudden planning a whole new life from scratch thing. Where will you live. What will you do to earn a living. Your child has grown and changed and is starting to understand how it is just as she's starting to forget you Dan. As I'm taking down the Christmas tree the other day, I tell her to watch out because when I unscrew the base, the tree is heavy and may fall out of my reach. I'm not sure I can hold it. She replies quickly that this wouldn't happen "if my dad was here." We rarely use the word dad, but there you have it. That great big if we'll both feel all of our lives.

If you were here tonight, you'd be sad and make a sad face with your lip downturned when I told you about how sick Audrey was. You might almost cry. At least when she was younger, when you were here and alive, it brought you to tears to see her in any kind of pain. When I told you about the house/apartment hunt, you'd tell me not to worry- "We'll find something."

But you are not here tonight.
And here I am.

New Year

2011-12-31T21:30:00.001-05:00

I think a lot about time travel.

Last night I watch a Steven Hawking documentary on time travel and worm holes- the tiny holes that actually do exist in the dimension of time- through which we could conceivably travel if they were enlarged thousands of times. Apparently there are a couple of other sure methods of time travel- all you have to do is travel around a black hole in a spaceship (without getting sucked in), or board a train that travels almost at the speed of light around the entire earth. Of course, none of these methods will allow you to travel into the past- only the future.

We spent Christmas in California at Disneyland and at a close friend's home. I understand now why a widow I know with three children visits Disney World many times in a year. It is a fantasy world- an escape- and a distraction. Of course, the trade-off is, by late afternoon while I'm walking back to the hotel- I am stunned with the loss of you. Audrey falls asleep each day while I cry in the bathroom. Then, we spend another day riding Dumbo and Peter Pan. This is how it is.

My friend's husband is a pastor and we have one brief conversation over breakfast about the afterlife outside of time and space, and about the moments in the Bible where the other dimension breaks through to this world and the glimpse Jacob or Elijah catch- is enough to last them their lifetime. He tells me how his sister dreamt of his father, a man in a wheelchair in life, in a track suit in heaven- telling her he had to get back to a race and that he was having a great time. "Wishful thinking?" he says, "sure it could be." He tells me of a woman in their church who walked out of a bathroom stall where she was serving the poor and saw an angel smiling at her. "That'll last her a lifetime," he says. I tell him I have not gotten one of these yet.

My mother comments frequently on how it doesn't feel like Christmas- it's warm and sunny- in the high 70's at least while we sit on a curb watching a parade of princesses and Disney characters go by. For me, there is no real difference between seasons or holidays anymore. I was happy to welcome Christmas early this year along with the stores and catalogs. The holiday and even the natural seasons feel completely made up and put on now...like caked-on makeup or artificial snow. The time that has passed since your death feels...timeless.

I receive Christmas cards - most with no note- just happy families- but a few have notes that express the sentiment that by now hopefully time is helping me heal. I'm pretty sure I've said it before, but time is irrelevant unless it makes my sweet husband appear before me- alive.

I picture that also- a lot more lately. I suppose I'm trying not to forget you. I picture you coming into our bedroom after work- quietly so as not to wake up Audrey. And I think about how to see your body- with life and breath in it again- would be an absolute miracle. But then I think - I suppose it was also a miracle when you were alive.

The Stephen Hawking special has a close-up of Stonehenge- and talks about how these rocks- that are not alive- have been here for thousands of years. They outlast us because they do not hold the spark...the miraculous.

Our first New Years' Eve was the one where you kept using that same joke, "We're gonna party like it's 1999!" because it was.

Our last New Years' Eve was spent here at our home with two other couples with small babies. I made fondue and individual chocolate molten cakes...the babies crawled or toddled around playing in a tent of balls Audrey had gotten at Christmas. There is still in our cabinet an extra bottle of champagne that went unused that night to prove to me now that that night happened...here...in another time. Perhaps I'll pop it open, perhaps I won't. It doesn't really matter.

The last time New Years' Day fell on a Sunday was when we started attending our church in Brooklyn. We were churchless at the time and that morning I told you I just felt like going. You came despite your reluctance and growing cynicism. We found community and good friends there. Audrey would be baptized there a couple of years later.

On New Years' day we had started a tradition of opening up the notes in our "gratitude basket"- a basket with ripped pieces of recycled paper and a pen where we jotted down small things we were thankful for all year...mostly about one another. Maybe when Audrey is old enough to participate, I can get that going again. I'm certainly not averse to being grateful...

"Resolve to pretend you can start at the end..." a line from a poem I wrote in college. I wonder, when everyone talks about 2012, why everyone is so sure it's going to be a great year for them. I guess it's ingrained in our culture right now- the whole- dream it, make it happen, enjoy your life philosophy. I feel slightly perplexed when I read these posts proclaiming this will be the best year yet- and slightly worried for those who don't understand that their life- for the most part, is completely out of their control. While I too hope to enter the next 365 days with optimism and hope- I understand this very well now.

So, here I am. On the one hand, the new year, like autumn and Christmas and Disneyland, feels slightly artificial and put-on. On the other, it feels solid and weighty like another layer in the solid granite wall that separates us...a wall with no wormholes that go to the past.

For now, a toast with sparkling cider with my three-year-old at eight pm will have to forge the way. Time, whether I believe in it or not, fight it or surrender, does keeps moving.

Sweet Dreams

2011-12-17T22:40:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I think I can offer you tributes for the rest of my life. It's so easy for me to do, but it doesn't make all of this untrue.

I wrote some notes on an endless list of things that you did or accomplished or were...but less really is more and there is one story you told me when we were first dating that comes into my mind frequently so that is the one thing I decided to share with others tonight after a long day.

When you were in college, a little boy from Korea needed a heart operation in the States in Boston. I'm not sure if it was hooked up through your church (most likely), but you wound up "hosting" this boy and his mom in your dorm room. You didn't even have an apartment. You just gave up your college dorm room for this little boy and his mom. And not only that, but you told me how you wanted him to feel welcome so you taped up cute wrapping paper you had and drew him some pictures saying "Sleep well," and "sweet dreams." (above in first photo) Much later, while we were dating, a friend of yours came to "crash" at your apartment and wound up staying, oh I don't know, a year? And you, by your own choice, slept on the wooden floor next to him in a sleeping bag while he slept in your bed without complaining once.

Most people will remember your musical genius, loyalty, and great smile. I will remember these small and often unknown selfless acts...this pure and child-like way of loving others, including me, so very well.

Happy birthday Dan.

December Seventeenth

2011-12-17T21:39:00.001-05:00

Happy 35th Birthday, my love.

Bestwaytoforget instrumental

Best Way to Forget Instrumental

by Daniel H. Cho

Many Kinds of Tears

2011-12-13T21:21:00.000-05:00

Last night I think about how many different kinds of tears there are and I think I have cried most of them by now. I don't think I realized there were such different breeds of crying before this kind of loss.

There are angry tears, tears of rage.

There are tears of pure longing and denial.

There are tears of exhaustion and there are tears of surrender.

And then there are tears of goodbye. Grieving is really just that- saying a very long and complicated goodbye.

Lately I'll do something and suddenly realized I feel exactly like you because I've used a gesture you would use often, but something I never did. After I realize that, I do it a few more times and picture you doing it. I think about how I could possibly capture these because I haven't thought of them until those moments and might not again. Write notes describing them, draw a picture? No, I can't capture a gesture. So I just take them in for that moment and remember.

The other day Audrey was just at the sink washing some food off of her chin but the way she rubbed the water on was exactly the way you used to wash your face. I just stared. I wonder how many moments there will be like that in the future. Moments where I just stare.

In the Elizabeth Edwards book I read she wrote about a great analogy for loss. It is like someone who lost everything - all their belongings- in a fire and even years later, they remember something else they lost. "Oh yeah, that was lost in the fire too..." I know this feeling from having lost most of my belongings when we fled our Brooklyn apartment- and it happens all the time. So I can attest to the metaphor. Instead of a possession, it's usually a shared memory: "Oh, that was you too. That time was with you. Who was I with that time? You. You. You. " All lost.

The Stone Pillow

2011-12-11T20:28:00.000-05:00

Two analogies for how it is now:

It is just a little bit like when you're driving someplace you go often and you don't need to concentrate on the roads you take and turns you make. You drive unconsciously until that moment when you look around and say, "Wait, where am I?" You wonder if you missed the turn for a second because you were driving so unconsciously and suddenly everything looks unfamiliar. Is that house with the blue and white awning usually there? And then, yes, this is familiar. And you continue driving a little more aware and a bit amazed at how you got there without even noticing it. Where I am now, the mysticism lifting, the shock coming to a halt (not the horror which is more prevalent lately), everything looking completely unfamiliar as if I've been in another realm for the past 17 months. I find I am even shocked that I've been writing in a blog and all of the details I've shared. The difference is that, unlike the driving example, there is no moment of recognition now- just the realization that I must keep driving even though I'm off any map I've ever seen or route I've traveled before. This car has no breaks. The worst part is not the disorientation, or the inability to stop progressing through time, but it's the fact that even on a perfectly "good" day where everything has gone "well," the sense of waiting and incompleteness permeates every moment. I have been unable to come up with words or analogies to describe this sense of incompleteness.

And second, it is like finding yourself trapped in a basement or bunker with little light or warmth and spending a long while, many months, puzzling over how to get out. Looking for openings, windows, tunnels, certain that there has to be a way to get out as there was a way to get in.

Then you give up.
You try to get comfortable.
Like Jacob did before he saw his glorious vision, you put your head on the stone pillow.

The Transition

2011-12-09T20:48:00.000-05:00

I wear one of your shirts today- one of three or four I kept in your/my dresser drawer when I packed everything else away. It's one I always thought looked so nice on you- and like most of your clothes, something you got for a few bucks at a thrift store or flea market. I was surprised that Audrey said she remembered you wearing it. Maybe even a few months ago, I would've been really overjoyed that she remembers you. Today it made me kind of sad to know that she remembers what it felt like maybe to be a family of three, instead of just the two of us. That maybe she remembers you as her father walking around in that shirt.

Audrey's season of tantrums continue and one thing I've found is that it helps if I give her lots of warning between transitioning activities. If she's going to have to stop playing for her bath, I'll tell her, "Five minutes until your bath OK?" and then, "Two more minutes and you're going to have to stop playing and take your bath, understand?" It sounds really nagging, but by the time I actually call her, she's ready and comes rather than feeling rushed from her play.

I keep thinking about how I had years to get ready for the transition to college, five years of dating you to get ready for the transition to married life, nine months even to prepare for giving birth to our daughter and becoming a mother. And then.

"Bye, talk to you tomorrow."

Dead. Only parent. Widow. No longer married, family of two- not three, not four. Alone.

Maybe grieving involves some tantrum. But I sure wish I had a little more warning.

To Honor You on Your Birthday

2011-12-08T20:41:00.022-05:00

I posted this on FB and I'm up to 21 soccer balls. I know you'd be happy knowing little kids are getting to play with real soccer balls in your honor. If any of my readers who I'm not friends with on FB would like to contribute, I copied my message below and you can just click on the gifts to purchase. There's also a link to a great video at the end. World Vision is a great organization.

I am asking that in honor of Dan's birthday this year (Dec 17th), anyone who wishes to remember him in this way, purchase soccer balls for children from the World Vision Gift Catalog here:

You can choose from:
2 balls for $16
4 balls for $32
6 balls for $48

**When you check out, you have the opportunity to SEND AN ECARD. PLEASE send it to mungmungdog@gmail.com. I will keep track of how many balls we can contribute as a group from now until December 17th.

As many of you know, Dan was a serious soccer fan, and a writer for ESPN. But to him, soccer was much more than just a game; it was a chance for people to unite. I'd love your help in honoring his memory in this way for what would have been his 35th birthday. Thanks.

This is the link to a video with more information here.

Seventeen

2011-12-06T10:37:00.000-05:00

You were born on the seventeenth of December.

We married on the seventeenth of July.

Our daughter conceived on a seventeen.

Today you have been dead for seventeen months. Inconceivable to me.

This morning on our little wooden block perpetual calendar in the kitchen, I skip the day- turning to seven rather than six.

My intentions were for a natural childbirth...but after two cab rides from Brooklyn to the hospital in Manhattan, only to find I'd have to labor on a gurney between two curtains in triage because there was no open room for me in L&D, the nurse told me I should consider getting an IV. "It'll give you the energy you need to keep laboring- perk you up." Laboring for over fifteen hours already- mostly on my hands and knees- in our apartment, on the concrete sidewalk while we waited for the cab, in the cab, and on the gurney between the little curtains, something to perk me up sounded appealing. I got the IV.

Strange as it may seem, since I've made it this far, for the first time in seventeen months, I feel things coming undone. I sit on the kitchen floor in the late afternoon trying to summon the energy to make dinner. I think to myself yesterday while sitting there, what I need right now is an IV. Something to go directly into my veins. Something to help me keep laboring...

Off the Hook

2011-12-04T21:06:00.001-05:00

I am forced to move forward. My landlord is still selling our place and I've been throwing myself into searching to either buy or rent. Our lease ends in less than three months. I don't think I've ever moved anywhere without you there or helping. We didn't really move to our current apartment by choice, and we weren't here that long together- but it's still the place I can picture you- coming into our bedroom quietly after work or a late gig, raising your eyebrows and mouthing "hi" as you came in so you wouldn't wake Audrey. It's still the place where I can picture you swaying side to side as you finished the dishes because you had to pee. It's still the place where you played the Charlie Brown Christmas songs on the keyboard while our fifteen month old danced.

But, I try to tell myself, it's also the place where I experienced the worst moment of my entire life. It's where I ran to get my ringing cell phone. Where I heard, "Can you talk? Are you driving? Can you sit down?" Where I started to scream, "What the fuck happened!" And where I heard, "Dan is dead. He drowned in Lake Geneva." It's where I screamed again, "I'm a widow at 34?" It's where I ripped down the tour schedule from the wall and paced around in a wet bathing suit unsure what to do next, while Audrey walked at my feet, babbling.

I try to tell myself it will be good to leave. But still. It is the first step forward in the "new life."

Something strange happens lately. Instead of finding it impossible to recognize this woman I am now, I have a hard time understanding the old me...what was driving her and what was her center?

Your brother got married yesterday in Korea. I felt the event for the entire week I think. We should've been there. I "should've" been holding another baby while Audrey walked down the aisle as flower girl. You should've been standing up there next to your brother. I am sad for your family. I made the decision that going to Korea right now for the wedding would not be the right thing for us, but I feel our absence there the whole day.

We've gone back to our old church as per Audrey's request. It doesn't matter to me since I don't get a whole lot out of any church service right now. But she repeatedly asked to go to the church we all attended together. She probably hasn't been there for over a year, but she seems very happy there and the kids program is good. So I go. But while I'm there today, I feel your phantom more than usual. I see you walking up to the stage with the rest of the band. I see you from behind- the way your jeans hang, the way you drag your feet in that boyish way as you head up there. I see you behind the keyboard, and I hear your simple, beautiful playing. When we take communion, wet soggy grape juice bread in my mouth, I realize taking communion with you was one of my favorite things. You never went overboard with the Christianese stuff- that wasn't your style at all. But during communion, you always took my hand or put your arm around me and prayed for us- short, simple, earnest prayers.

During the rest of the service I can't help thinking how hard it is to be a believer without suffering in your life. I know this sounds paradoxical since I'm clearly struggling with belief, but what I see is that without suffering to part the veil of this world- you really just have to "try" to be a believer. You have to "try" to be concerned with the invisible and do Bible studies to think about your frail life and your human condition. You have to go on retreats and clasp to spiritual disciplines. Suffering and grief...are meditation. You don't have to suck up to a God for fear that something in your life might go wrong - it already has. You realize that believing in a God has nothing to do with being spared from suffering or being "blessed." The fruits of your life might not be on the outside at all- a beautiful family, a home where people pray together before dinner, a successful career or even ministry. Your eyes are opened. You're off the hook.

Another Daniel

2011-11-29T20:22:00.001-05:00

Today when I opened up the email account I have for this blog I found an email from "Daniel." It's funny because even when your friend Dan sometimes write me, I always think for a moment, it could be you. I am always eager to believe in some kind of loop hole and the thought goes through my mind so quickly "I knew you'd find a way to reach me- I knew it." And that's over in about one second.

Except when I opened up this email, it was from Daniel Cho. A true loophole?

No.

But interesting nonetheless. If you have a Korean name, there are usually always quite a few other people with the same exact name. And so this Daniel Cho had come to know you because of your shared name only via the Internet. Even without ever seeing your charming smile or experiencing your loyal friendship, this man came to respect and admire you. And when he learned you had died, he wrote to me:

Hi, I just wanted to express my sadness in your husbands passing. I did not know him personally but your husband and I share the same name; Daniel Cho. I did read about him years ago when I was searching my own name on Google, just to see if there were any information on the internet about me. My initial search showed information about your husband and I read about him and his accomplishments in life. I remember thinking, 'this other Daniel Cho is really up to great things in life' and I could not help comparing his life to mine. Often people online have mistaken him as me and someone did post a comment on one of social media account that he really enjoyed my music. I did tell him that I was a different Daniel Cho and not your husband.

Anyways, the more I read about him the more I came to admire him, and that was that. But just today I did a search of my own name again and I read about the passing of your husband. I found myself feeling deep sadness and I just had to write to you and express my condolences. I love what you are doing to keep his memory alive for your daughter's sake. I too have a daughter and your story really made me think about what my daughter might have to go through if I passed.

Thank you and please accept my condolences.

Daniel Cho

I write Daniel Cho back and tell him that I share his admiration of you and that I have a lot to learn from you as I figure out my new life now. Your determination, focus, and refusal to live a mediocre life.

The funny thing is, a few years back you and I were also googling our names just for fun together and I bet you came upon this man as well. I guess this is how mysticism and human connection functions in modernity...via Google. He was so right about one thing- that "other Daniel Cho [was] really up to great things in life." Great, great things.

Dark

2011-11-28T21:22:00.001-05:00

It is dark so early now. It adds to the intense malaise I feel in the afternoons. It's on these afternoons when I really think about what's going on and the lighting adds to the nightmare effect. I move very slowly as I heat the pot of boiling water for our soba noodles.

I can't stand it. A thought that comes into my head so often I'd call it my theme. I can't stand it.

Later I get back on your computer to send one of your brothers a song he had asked for. While I'm on, Audrey asks to see her baby videos. So we watch a few. I can always tell before a word is spoken, when you are the one holding the camera- by the angle you film at and especially if it's silent. You would get annoyed if I'd come in and start blabbing away while you had been taking an artistic film of our daughter. We hear your voice talking to her and she tells me she remembers you. I miss your voice so very much. "I hate my voice," you used to say. "I love it!" and vice versa. What is it that makes the sound of your beloved's voice so, so sweet?

Today I am finalizing the draft of my will with the lawyer while Audrey's in preschool. The thought of leaving Audrey makes me sick so I skim the draft quickly. It's also the reason why it's taken me so long to complete it.

The first year, you are getting through each season, each holiday, each milestone. It is shocking, raw, intense. Around now, I have a new clarity about the permanence of your disappearance. It's not just "getting through" anymore. There is all of life. July 23rd, the day you were to come home to us, is not coming. I can't stand it.

Divine Orchestration

2011-11-28T20:57:00.000-05:00

In the late 1980's, I was one of those girls who loved the New Kids on the Block. I know, I'm ashamed. But it was true. My room was plastered with posters of them. My favorite was Joey McIntyre, otherwise known as Joey Joe. On my list of life goals was 1) marry Joey followed by a bunch of other stuff like combine my passions by becoming the first female president, redecorating the white house, and singing at my own inauguration.

After about age 13, I took down all those posters and hopefully, my goals started to change a little bit.

So, imagine my surprise when my husband tells me he and his band got a gig touring and opening up for Joe McIntyre, who was making a comeback as a solo artist singing this Frank Sinatra style in a three piece suit and hat. The same girls, apparently, were buying tickets and going to those concerts- my husband told me from the road.

And then, I was one of them- at BB Kings in the middle of Times Square. I came straight from work and reapplied my lipstick too. Except I was there for you. You played both cello and keys in your set and looked very handsome. I was very proud.

And then you said you'd take me to meet my very own teen idol. And you went in his dressing room and found him asleep, and woke him. We took this picture. I hung around after the show standing by the lines of girls getting autographs from Joe while you packed up your equipment and introduced me to the guys from Joe's band. One did magic tricks and you really liked him. Another one had asked me to take photos of him to email so he could show his wife which I did. Joey Joe saw me standing around still waiting after all the girls were gone and I even got another "Take care" and "Nice meeting you," or something like that.

Afterwards, you and I headed back to our apartment in Brooklyn, and even though he was married with child(ren?) you told me you thought he liked me. That was just you- thinking that everyone would find me as attractive or pretty as you did. It was laughable but oh so sweet and I miss it.

Back when this happened, I believed in God and divine orchestration in a very different way. I thought it was sweet of God to let my then husband introduce me to the man I'd dreamed of marrying as a young girl. I thought maybe God had a sense of humor. I thought everything was fitting together. Who knows, maybe it was.

After Every Milestone

2011-11-27T21:09:00.000-05:00

Another holiday down.

Up next- your birthday. Usually the time when you're catching up to me- but not this time.

If you had lived, I would've bought you an old-fashioned metronome for your birthday or Christmas. This was already written down on a list of random ideas when you died. You told me you liked the way they looked. I had already been looking around on ebay and etsy for one. I miss buying you things. I miss having new ideas to write down. I have no new ideas.

I have a few more entries to write here and then, I am done. It's not because I am done grieving but because I realize I never will be. It is not because I am done puzzling over your death, but because I accept I will forever be puzzling over your death. I will never make any sense of it...any progress in understanding what happened on July 6, 2010.

"That is truly, truly tragic," the mother of the girl in Audrey's class says on Thanksgiving as she cuts the remaining turkey meat off the bird. In the kitchen, before dessert- she has sensitively asked me how my husband died. We've had a few playdates, but I honestly didn't even remember whether I'd told her or not. After I tell her, this is all she can keep saying. And I think the last few days- yes, that is what this is: tragic. I can't find any definition that really captures what the word means to me - it's so much more than sorrowful. The word tragic is more about the fact that it could have been prevented and yet this sense that there was nothing one could do to stop the dreadful path from unraveling. In that way it is so different from an aged person passing away, or even a death by disease. Tragic. Accidental. Never supposed to happen, but somehow ingrained and foreshadowed in the characters and setting.

But now what- what comes after every milestone? Alternations of rawness and numbness? Your clothes are packed, but I still see them in the closet instead of mine, and the sense of relief I got when I first put them away- is over. I want to see them back there where they belong- next to mine. The wedding ring is back on- but with the promise ring instead of the engagement ring which just felt too sparkly. The tiredness and difficulty in smiling that I have by late afternoon reminds me of how I felt when you were just away on the tours. I just had a really hard time smiling- even with Audrey. The sadness of knowing you were on another continent sat with me all day, while I played with our baby. For she was a baby, back then. Lately I contemplate lying to myself that this is where you are- just a continent or two away- so that I can go on living- the way I did while you were away- with at least the expectation that you were happy, doing what you loved- and would come back to us. I just had to be patient.

After every milestone, the tragic loss isn't any less raw. It is just further away. I am more different than the woman you (or I) knew each day. I have a harder time imagining what you are like at almost 35 years old. A harder time imagining you interacting with a daughter as you never knew her. I keep losing you.

Second Thanksgiving

2011-11-25T20:42:00.001-05:00

I can't sleep. I stay up late. Until 1 or 2 am. I stare at your chair and your desk. The bus tickets you left for me on top of the extra napkins you always carried around in your pockets on one speaker. "You can use these to go into the city." A baseball hat, your glasses, belt, and wallet on top of your other speaker.

The widow dinner group I had attended a few times is emailing about getting together and hiring a psychic to do a private reading for them at one of their homes.

The psychoanalyst at Audrey's school stops me one day as I'm leaving the playground with another mom after dropping Audrey off. "Can I talk to you for a second?" The other mom runs away. "How are you?" "Oh you know, doing the best I can. Ask me in ten years...haha." (See my joke.) He looks at me seriously and says that he's concerned and it shouldn't take that long. He is caring and I like him but later this bothers me. I know a lot of widowed people at this point- and he is not one of them, and yes, it can take that long. "It's just that you've suffered loss upon loss," he tells me. Thanks.

I take Audrey to a "Princess Ball" where I imagine you would've danced with her on the little dance floor surrounding by the motley crew of women dressed up as the Disney princesses. Instead, I dance with her- to Girls Just Want to Have Fun- spinning her around and rolling her in and out on my arm the way you did to me when we danced just for fun in our apartment, a long time ago.

Audrey has entered a new and terrible phase. She has tantrums for the first time. She gets overtired and doesn't know what she wants screaming for me to help her with something and then pushing me away. She is conflicted. It is a draining time for us. Most everything from taking a bath to brushing teeth, going to bed- has become a battle. I wonder how you would've handled it or what you would've said to me if you were here.

I correspond with a friend who was a pastor at an old church of ours who lost his wife at 32 from cancer. We hadn't spoken since her funeral. He is the one I mention in one of my early posts about what not to say to people. "She was really great," is what I had said as we stood near her open casket, Dan by my side. He tells me that he went for walks from about midnight until 3 am for almost a year just crying and thinking. And that one night he had a breakthrough and God told him he could handle whatever anger he had so he opened up his mouth and uttered every profanity. He is remarried with children now and lives in Bolivia. He tells me to close my computer and give it a try. "I hate you," is all that comes out...quietly.

A friend's husband volunteers to come have a "date" with Audrey. He takes her for Korean food and helps her learn how to use her scooter. It is the first time she's had alone time with a man since you died. He tells me it must have been hard for me, but it wasn't. I am just sad that it is so luxurious for her to have an afternoon like that.

A friend of yours comes over to help me with the music files on your computer. I want to make sure I save them well. There were a few that I had been unable to open. He opens them. One is a song of mine you had laid down cello tracks for. I had never heard this. Another is a nursery rhyme you loved to sing to Audrey to your own tune. Turns out you created a whole instrumental to the song you made up. You never got to play it for us.

After he organizes the files and converts some of the Logic files to mp3s we sit and talk theology. He's the liberal, cynical Christian and he admits that none of us really know what happens after death. I am not comforted by our conversation.

Later that night I sit and cry and keen. I am crushed. It is debilitating. I wonder if it also has to do with Thanksgiving.

A day before Thanksgiving Audrey's school has a "Thanksgiving Celebration." For the first time ever, I watch her parade into a chapel with her class and sing a few songs. Parents are taking photos feverishly and my eyes well up with tears. It's quite possible I might have done this anyway, but I can't believe you're missing all of this. And how much is still ahead. This is just a taste...just a taste.

I plan Thanksgiving. I will host, I decide, ordering a turkey from Whole Foods. Last year I was on the run during the holidays. "Don't stay home; do something different," people tell you. So, I did. Last year we went to the Macy's Parade. Got up at 4:30 am and got a spot right in the front. Then we ate an early dinner out at a restaurant. Standing in front of giant Snoopy and Hello Kitty balloons on Central Park West without you was devastating. Picking one of three "Thanksgiving meals" at a restaurant was depressing. This year I'm tired of running. I invite my parents and then when I hear another couple from Audrey's school has no family here and no plans, I invite them and their daughter, from Audrey's class- as well. So what if I have a one bedroom apartment.

I sit up in our bed at 1:39 am wearing your socks. I read poems about gratitude. I recall one Thanksgiving at my mom's the sleeve of your shirt caught on fire on a candle as you reached to pass someone something. It was forever singed after that.

I shop for three days at three stores. I make the cranberry chutney I made at your last Thanksgiving. I make the stringbeans the way you did, with soy sauce and sugar til they are shriveled. I buy persimmons and freeze them the way your dad does, Asian pears, and your (and my) favorite beer: Boddingtons.

I am in charge of bringing coffee and drinks to Audrey's school party so we're up early at Dunkin Donuts and then to school earlier than I'd planned. So we sit in the car in the school parking lot and I play her the songs that are now mp3's on my phone. She still knows the words to the nursery rhyme. I try to explain that you'd created that music for her before she left, but I don't think she gets the concept of music production and recording.

Yesterday I set the table with flower arrangements and candles, napkins tied with twine and this poem by Robert Herrick:

Here, a little child I stand,
Heaving up my either hand:
Cold as paddocks though they be,
Here I lift them up to Thee,
For a benison to fall
On our meat, and on us all. Amen.
Audrey dances around singing about Thanksgiving parties as I dust all of the framed photos of you. I tell her that I'm missing you. "It's...it's hard to be thankful for someone when they died," she replies.

Actually- I think, it's quite the opposite. Sometimes it's really hard to be thankful when they're alive. And then after, it's just really, really hard.

The day is busy; I do feel thankful. I think of your singed shirt, toast you with a beer, and let the loss of you fill me up like the fragrance of the thanksgiving meal in my small apartment.

Stuck

2011-11-15T19:55:00.000-05:00

I'm back in the anger phase, but I'd hardly call them phases. It's just that now I feel angry again.

When I feel most angry, it usually has to do with the fact that Audrey has no father now.

why why why why why why why.

Today I watched her class and another at the playground before the end of school and noticed a father was cooping for the other class. The kids looked excited because it's usually moms that coop. I instantly pictured you doing this. Even if you'd had a day job, you would've taken a day off to do it- of this I am certain. You would've gotten to know all the kids and you would've talked trash about the bully in her class. I know which children you would've found particularly endearing as well. I see Audrey proudly smiling at you on the playground.

Then the illusion disappears. This will never be. I know I'm not supposed to think about the could'ves or should'ves. I know. But sometimes you can't help it. And even though the further time takes you away, the less close you are to what could've been...it still feels possible.

Tonight we measured Audrey on her growth chart and when I got it out, we stopped to look through a few other special tokens in the box where it's kept. There are a few drawings you did- there is a hat you bought her, and a few other gifts you got her. There are even three I haven't given her yet- that you'd gotten in May of 2010 - just shortly before you'd die. There is a little flute recorder, and colored pencils, and a mobile (even though she wasn't a baby you thought this one was cute...) and a candle with a metal carousel around it that moves when the candle is lit. I put these aside before she can see them. I imagine as she regrieves at older ages, it might be nice for her to get something "new" from you. But she seems enthralled with the other items, including a little jewelry bag you'd gotten from Korea. She grabs it and goes to her current jewelry box, taking out every last thing, and placing it in the bag. "I wish Appa could see me from heaven," she says. "I think he can," she adds. "I bet he can," I say. I do not know because I do not know if there is a heaven or if he is in it or if they can see us. None of that...is known.

But those moments, like today as I sit in the car watching that dad on the playground...I imagine how feasible my "should've" really is. Just a slight alteration of your path that day- just ever so slight- and the course of our entire lives would be different. Such a small, small margin got you there on that day...sometimes it is easier to believe it was meticulously planned than randomly accidental. Sometimes I think that Steven Hawking's multiverse theory applies to our lives and that somewhere in another universe, that other life we would've had- is still going on. I'm just stuck in the wrong universe.

Poem

2011-11-15T10:21:00.000-05:00

i haven't been with you in july

since two thousand and nine

you left on the thirtieth of june.

Unraveling

2011-11-14T20:27:00.002-05:00

It is sixteen months. It is very, very quiet now. I am pretty sure I am lucky that the emails/correspondence/visits lasted for as long as they did. I remember now how the grief counselor told me to ask myself why God would be giving me this quiet time and what can I gain from it at this point on my journey.

I'm sure the more time passes, the more others breathe a sigh of relief that we're traveling away from the horror of your death, and therefore, I must be doing better. It defies words to try to explain how little I have been able to process your death, even in all of these months so far. It is obvious to me now that it will take many, many more. I stop rushing. I stop running. I let it come over me- the pain- the reality. Any griever can tell you how the death of a loved one warps time in such strange ways. It's almost as though the initial grief is time thrown upon you- you can envision your entire future life without that person in an instant. I have envisioned my daughter at 21 months- walking down her wedding aisle as a young woman. At the same time that you're seeing your whole future - you're seeing your whole past- the life review they call it in near-death experience literature. Only you're still alive.

This compression of time happens in the early days and then, I think, the grieving process means you are slowly unraveling time back to its proper place- past and future. You cannot possibly continue living with it all at once this way.

I have already had a few days where I have thought- wow- in another eight months it will be two years. And that sounds ludicrous. I am still waiting to hear from you. Still waiting on your return.

While Audrey is at preschool today I go to the Dr. for my yearly gynecological visit- the first time since you've died. Pregnant women everywhere. A crazy old lady crocheting a cream colored blanket "for my king sized bed" in the waiting room asking everyone if it was their first and if they're finding out what they're having. Then all the questions from the nurse and the doctor. I have to tell them. The nurse, probably feeling she's found just the right words, "Have a beautiful year OK?," as she exits and I go to put on the gown behind the little curtain.

It's another task done. Taking care of myself. Another long day.

A good friend put it this way: The days are long, but the years are short. In some ways, I'm kind of counting on that.

Sundown

2011-11-12T20:46:00.000-05:00

"We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions- waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking- that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out into a mere blur."
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

The first time I spoke to my old therapist on the phone after you'd died, I told him my fear of Audrey forgetting you, and he answered back with that therapist smugness in his voice: And you'll forget him too right?

I never had another session with him. His words have echoed in my mind ever since. Because, although his timing was way off, it is true. You can not store a human being in a memory. You also cannot choose what or when you remember something. There's a rich storehouse in there, but it's not in alphabetical or sequential order and a lot of it remains dormant, hidden.

The other day Audrey and I see a bee and I tell her about bee stings and how I've never been stung. I start to tell her that you had, but then I realize, I really don't remember if you'd ever, in your life, been stung. The thought that I don't know and can't ask you, is debilitating. Bees were always a point of contention for us because I'd been shown by example to run like hell while you'd remain still and calm. You got so annoyed with me for that.

It's like Lewis says, I can still see all different parts of you in my mind's eye- the freckles on your left cheekbone, your earlobe, your eyelashes, but it's harder to imagine your stature when you walk in the room, and I'm pretty sure I'm not getting it all right anymore. If I see you in a video or a photo, nothing is surprising. It feels like you could still walk in the door...but more and more when I try to imagine that- I'm not sure how you look- whether your hair is long or short- whether you actually look older. I'm older now.

"Today I had to meet a man I haven't seen for ten years. And all that time I had thought I was remembering him well- how he looked and spoke and the sort of things he said. The first five minutes of the real man shattered the image completely," writes Lewis. And then he admits that is already happening with his memory of his late wife:

"Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes- like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end...The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone."

Two days ago I checked your email which I rarely do anymore. Just incase...just incase someone who doesn't know what happened writes you. And someone had. I love imagining that for at least one person, you have been alive all this time. A friend from Berklee was asking so casually if you were still in the NYC area because they needed cello tracks for a certain TV network. I respond from your email and mistakenly (I think I've done this before), cc myself so the friend can respond if he wishes with the usual condolence. Then in my inbox when I return to my own email- your name and my stopped heart beat for a moment.

In her book, Elizabeth Edwards talks about how, even though her eldest son had died, she still felt the need to parent him. "You don't, I discovered, leave the need to parent the child just because the child has left you." As your wife I didn't parent you, though part of being a wife is being motherly in some ways...so I'm not sure what the word would be for me- but I've felt this need too- to continue being your wife in some way- watching over you the way a wife does. Making you look good- taking care of the little things. So, I check your email and respond. I renew your domain name online. I create memorial projects for myself including a photo book of your music tours- something I'd been planning to surprise you with. I remind others of you and speak of you with them. The eleven years of looking out for you did not disappear on July 6th.

Audrey is afraid of being alone at night lately. Terrified, in fact- even with her light on, to be left alone in her bed at night. She's never had any separation anxiety issues- but I realize that even though she'll never put up a fight when I leave her with someone or took her to her first day of preschool, it doesn't mean she's not feeling things. She articulates it differently- like when we drove home from her first day and she told me the teacher had read a story at story time about a little girl whose mom died. And she articulates it at night.

I think I am like this too now, at this stage. I go about the day. I'm sure I appear mostly normal to the other mothers at preschool or the people at church or the grocery store or the library. But by sundown, like Audrey- I can't hold it together much longer.

Tonight while I sit with her until she falls asleep, tears keep coming out of my eyes because that's what it feels like- different from crying- just tears crawling out on their own- as I think about simple memories of being together- putting her to bed together, going out to a cafe on her eighteen month birthday, getting in the car and driving to church on a Sunday morning, bathing her while you finish washing the dishes, sitting around talking after she's asleep. I know now what a treasure those moments were, but do I think that even by reading my revelation others whose loved ones are still alive will get it? No. It's impossible- you may think you do, but you don't. That seems so very unfair.

But I wonder to myself most, what we spoke of, what were our conversations? On some random night or morning or afternoon? Never have I longed to be myself- that girl married to Daniel Cho, sixteen months ago or more of course, than I do now.

Close Call

2011-11-10T21:29:00.004-05:00

A mom in our neighborhood got hit by a car while crossing the street a little over a week ago. Thankfully, she broke her leg and had a few stitches on her head, but was for the most part- OK. She has two beautiful daughters, both who've attended the library program with us for a long time now, and the older one is in Audrey's ballet class as well.

When her husband recounted what happened to me last Saturday at ballet while us parents lean into the glass door to see what's going on (usually Audrey's going around hugging everyone), he told me how she'd been looking down as she crossed our busy road to get out quarters for the bus and the car hadn't seen her. How she felt the hit and then just felt like she was in the air for a long time, thinking, "This is going to hurt when I land." Probably to add lightness to what could possibly have been a very grave situation, he tells me she was more upset about her new jeans and coat that they cut off and destroyed in the ER. While I'm sure they were really shaken up, as I offered my babysitting services or other help, I felt the relief of what it feels like to have a close call. It is the mending, recovery time that comes after something scary- something that could have had permanent repercussions, but didn't. It's the whoah, that was scary- that was close- but everything's OK now- as it should be...the trial- the safe retrieval and recovery, possibly lessons learned.

The other day I watched one of those TED video talks (Dan loved them) done by a man who survived the plane crash landing into the Hudson a couple of years ago. It's a short talk in which he describes the thoughts that went on in his head when he heard the words from the pilot, "Brace for Impact." What he says isn't really surprising or revelatory- he learned what was most important to him was being a father and the most painful thought to him was missing out on his kids' lives. There were a couple of other points, but they were even more obvious. I wonder if you thought that same thing, if you knew it was the end for you. If you were conscious at all, I know you thought of our daughter. But mostly, I think while the audience gives him a standing ovation that this too is more one of relief than epiphany. Thanks to a very skillful pilot, everyone was alright. He was OK and didn't die in the end. He can now take with him on his journey a greater appreciation for what's important in life.

We had an experience like this- you were attacked and stabbed in the subway. I received a phone call that night too- but it was different- it was your voice telling me you'd been stabbed and that you were at the hospital. I had let out a horrifying scream and seen myself hunched over, crying in the mirror. The two cats at the apartment where I was staying jumped on my furniture and cried as if they knew something very wrong had happened. We spent a night in the ER together- I watched your heart on a monitor. In it you saw a little stick figure beating a drum. I saw it too after you mentioned it. We clinked the liquid you had to drink before the cat scan. "Cheers," we said. I watched you walk to the restroom in your bright green hospital gown- thinking how much I loved you. The stab wound had been 1/2" from your heart or other vital organs...but you were...OK. I wrote then too- later writing an essay in grad school about the experience as a part of my thesis. But as I say, you were OK. You came home to your apartment to friends and Playstation 2 from your officemates. Then you came to my parents' house where I lived at the time where you slept on my childhood twin bed, and I planted myself on the floor next to you. It was a close call- I didn't want to leave your side. We got engaged later that year.

Close calls seem like they'd give you some insight into what it'd be like to not be so lucky- to not get the "Everything's OK," - the recovery time. The sigh of relief. But trust me, from someone who's experienced both- they do not.

A close call cannot and will not teach you just how tenuous the strand that holds us to the earth- that holds you to your current world.

In the close call, there is hope and a future to love better, live out those lessons learned. There is a fullness- lists of things you will do better, appreciate more, things you don't think matter anymore, things you won't put off another day. If you've had a close call, do not try to empathize with someone who has actually lost- it will sound hollow.

When the real deal happens, there are just the permanent words, "Dan is dead," that hit you like granite. There is no worrying or praying or hoping. There is no time of recovery and telling friends and family, "Yeah, it was scary..." There is no lesson learned by you, the survivor, that you wouldn't trade in an instant for ignorance. There is emptiness- nothingness- annihilation.

There is no one to mend or nurse or promise to love better.

Life is like a blackboard. We write on it the things we are, the things we do. We fill it up, sometimes erasing what we have grown out of. ...And it seems, when we step back from it as we grow up, that our blackboard is as filled as it could be: I was a mother, a wife, a lawyer, and a soccer coach and a Goodwill volunteer. Write those down. Go to sports cards shows with Wade or doll shows with Cate? Write those. Mark down going with the family to watch the Tar Heels. There is my book club, and there's the PTA fundraising. Decorating the beach house. Sewing a Halloween costume. But there is always a corner into which some new friend, some new dream can be tucked. There was always room to add one more thing to the board. In the spring of 1996, my board was crammed full, and I had chalk in my hand.

And then Wade died.

In an instant, all of my blackboard was erased. And for the longest time, the blackboard stood empty.

Elizabeth Edwards, "Resilience"

Wedding Video

2011-11-10T20:55:00.000-05:00

This morning I watched my wedding video. Somehow it must have come up with Audrey, and I, yes I, suggested watching it if she'd like. So, after breakfast, at the kitchen table, on my laptop- we watched me getting out of a white limo, smiling...we watched her dad standing at the altar- waiting anxiously. And there I was walking down the aisle, so slowly- so nervously. And being handed off by a tearful father.

I don't think Audrey noticed how much I cried while I pointed these things out, "See, there's mommy- I look like a princess right?"

We watched the whole thing- she wouldn't even let me fast forward the long first dance we had, or your brother's long toast. There is so much talk throughout about our life together. The pastor praying over us for this fruitful, new union and home we were starting. Your brother's toast. The Korean tea ceremony afterwards where I dressed in my hambuk and your parents tossed dried fruit into the scarf we held out to represent blessing and future offspring. Everyone, I realize, seemed to expect that this was just the beginning of something that was to last our whole life on earth. It did- your whole life was just a lot shorter than anyone had imagined. The day after I buried you would've been our six year anniversary.

Those five little words seem small amidst the flowers and candle-lighting, hors d'oeuvres and wine and dancing and cake cutting and guest signing "We wish you a wonderful life together" "What a great couple," "May God bless your life together..." They're in the shadow though, in the background beneath the dance music and glasses clinking together- this, the most joyful day of your life, but intrinsic in that joy is verily the prelude, should you be the one left behind first, to the most painful moments of your life.

"Til death do us part."

Something is over. In the deepest levels of my existence something is finished, done. My life is divided into before and after. A friend of ours whose husband died young said it meant for her that her youth was over. My youth was already over. But I know what she meant. Something is over.
...
Sorrow is no longer the islands but the sea.

Prof Nicholas Wolterstorff, "Lament for a Son"

Lifting

2011-11-07T20:40:00.000-05:00

Catching me off guard, some of the mystical quality I've been living in for the past sixteen months is lifting. It's dreadful - like eyes adjusting to the sun after living in solitary confinement for months. You get used to the dark. The sunlight's excruciating.

There is the tiniest taste of continuity between this life and that one- the one before. There is anger and the immense desire for time travel and negotiations of all sorts are revisited. There is the sense that all I've been doing here is rambling in the hopes that it would grant me some kind of authority which in truth I don't possess.

Maybe it's the fact that I'm actively facing the future now...that I am looking for a place to live, thinking about how I'll support us, and hearing my daughter sit coloring in the other room and say to herself aloud, "I don't remember my appa because he died."

The idea that something redemptive could come from my grieving process seems foolish all of the sudden. Hope falls flat. You are dead, not away or traveling. This is it. I sit here, wearing your socks and your t-shirt...asking your photo to tell me what happened on that day- "What happened Dan?" Shouldn't I, your wife, at least know how and why you died? I don't want to write anymore or think about a future without you tonight. I don't want to read any more books or take any more notes. I am exhausted. I am not sure I can take another step forward, so I think I will rest here for a while.

Hidden

2011-11-07T11:06:00.003-05:00

"Then perhaps there is a third kind of loss - the loss that comes when you notice the limits of your knowledge of God, when you feel bereft of guidance, when you feel the loss of God's saving power or of God's grace. This feeling of loss is really a way of noting, and mourning, God's hiddenness."
Lauren F. Winner "Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis"

Hiddenness rather than absence. Perhaps. Less lonely and terrifying for the would-be-believer. More frustrating.

I stop Audrey before our meal to say a simple prayer of thanks, "Dear God, thank you for our food." I've been at a loss as to what thank God for since your death...since I'm not supposed to hold him accountable for negative events- I wasn't sure how to continue for positive ones. (Holding God accountable sounds quite ridiculous though, doesn't it?) But for whatever reason, I feel it important to teach Audrey thankfulness.

I did not grow up praying before meals. It had never even occurred to me. When I was a first year in college at the University of Virginia, sitting in the first year cafeteria, I saw another student, stop before his tray of cutlery and plate of food, and bow his head silently. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd seen. I wasn't in the "Christian" culture yet, the one where everyone does this and it means a lot less.

After I say the short prayer with Audrey, she answers back a short while into our meal, "God doesn't say anything."

"What?"

"He doesn't say anything."

More theology with a three year old. I think about how I could answer that the Bible is supposed to be the inspired Word of God and when we read it, he can speak to us through it. But this is confusing to even me, so I decide against it.

All I can say is, "No, you're right...he doesn't does he?"

The Old Order

2011-11-07T10:06:00.004-05:00

And even if I don't return to doubting this new reality, I will refuse to make peace with your death- and with death itself. Your death will remain an absurdity.

As Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff, whom I've quoted before and who lost a young son writes- anyone wishing you can make peace with the death is wishing fruitlessly. And why should we?

"We cannot live at peace with death," he writes. "When the writer of Revelation spoke of the coming of the day of shalom, he did not say that on that day we would live at peace with death. He said that on that day, 'There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things have passed away.'

I shall try to keep the wound from healing, in recognition of our living still in the old order of things. I shall try to keep it from healing, in solidarity with those who sit beside me on humanity's mourning bench."

And so the challenge is, to acknowledge the new reality, while at the same time warring with the enemy that took you. Putting down those arms will not happen as long as I'm honest with myself and don't run from the pain, but with it on the rest of life's journey. To forget the pain would be to forget you, despite what people want to believe about being able to let go of all the horridness and just smile happily at frozen photographs. Instead, to live like a calm, waiting, warrior.

You see, what I realized recently, is that no matter what I do to push forward in the physical world, I will as much make peace with death as an amputee makes peace with a lost limb, the overused analogy in grief circles. You don't accept...you adapt. That leg is never coming back. "It's the neverness that is so painful," writes Wolterstorff.

The amputee will feel the "phantom pains" in the lost limb. We will envision the Twin Towers as they stood in our mind's eye- just as the blue laser beams that memorialize them yearly reach up to the heavens...and I find, even though your clothes are packed away in bins and each drawer in this dresser is mine now- I will still open it up and know it is yours- I am still just tossing around my disheveled clothes in your drawer.

I quoted 1 Corinthians 15 in the tribute I got up and spoke at your funeral. I've thought about that quotation quite a bit since then. I had inserted it quite intentionally right before my last sentence, the one where I told you I would see you again, even though it stuck out and didn't quite fit with the flow of the short tribute I'd written. (which can be found in one of my July 2010 posts I believe.) Why didn't I take it out? I often ask myself- it didn't fit. And the sting, the sting was everywhere- it permeated the church where I stood speaking a few steps above your casket. Was I being untruthful in my words- something I strive against? I have asked myself. But they are not untruthful, I see now. They represent, as our old pastor used to say often, the living we do here in the "near...but not yet" of the kingdom. Speaking those words on the most horrifying public speaking engagement of my life- I see now-was the calm warrior in me quietly dressing for battle.

"Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?"

The One Before

2011-11-05T21:38:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up the Elizabeth Edwards book entitled "Resilience." She would know about this- having lost a young son, grieved unfaithfulness in her marriage, and finally battled breast cancer until her death last December.

As seems the case lately- and I'm not sure if this is because these books are choosing me or because grief is just so self-centered, but already just a few chapters in, I am nourished by metaphors that articulate my own place.

She grew up in Japan because her father was in the military and she speaks of the wounded soldiers in the hospital during the Vietnam War:

"they all talked about the same thing: going home. Even if they knew they would be headed back to combat, all they wanted to talk about was home. And the home they talked about was the home they left- left when they had two legs, left without shrapnel scars across their chest and neck, left before the images of war that would scar the places where the doctors couldn't reach. That's the home they craved. The one before."

Now, I would never compare myself or my situation to that of a Vietnam veteran; though they both dig deep into the nerves of our humanity- war and grief seem two different things to me. And yet they both hinge upon loss and this craving for home- the one before- certainly fits.

She goes on to tell the story of the closing of a Maytag plant in Iowa and how many of the the workers who lost not only their jobs, but the center of their community and lives for decades, symbolically took off their work boots and left them at the plant, neatly standing side by side, walking to their cars in their socks.

Elizabeth writes,
"The longer a Maytager sat pining for what he had lost, the more lost he became. Sometimes we have to give ourselves space to grieve what we have lost: a person, a way of life, a dream. But at some point we have to stand up and say, this is my new life and in this life I need a new job."

I know that she is right. I have never believed in longing for the past. I have often quoted Ecclesiastes 7.10 "Do not say, 'Why were the old days better than these?' For it is not wise to ask such questions." That verse quelled some of my longing over time periods in my life- like when I graduated college and left most of my close friends in Virginia and returned jobless to my parents' house in New Jersey. It was so much easier to say then- in my early twenties, single, just starting out.

But this is not a season or a chapter in my life that has been lost. It is not a job or a time period- but a person...a human being that knew me better than any other, and I him. With him have gone the way of life, the married status, dreams of other children, a home, and many, many more plans. Those are painful to let go of, but I would give them up and accept another life if it still included him...even if he was alive but on some other continent, I often think. It isn't the missing so much as the mystery. Is it the pure sting of death- or is there still the hope of justice and beauty and mercy?

Ms. Edwards' words are difficult to read- they are not comforting, but more like a push on this forced march. You cannot go back she says quoting Edna St.Vincent Millay, "How easily could God, if He so willed, set back the world a little turn or two! Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!" But the turn or two is not possible, says Edwards.

"This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these landmines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality. The life the army wife knew before her husband went to war, the life of the patient before the word 'terminal' was said aloud, the life of the mother who sat reading by her sons bed and not his grave, these lives no longer exist and the more we cling to the hope that these old lives might come back, the more we set ourselves up for unending discontent."

This is a pep talk for those who grieve. Definitely not one you could hear too early on in the journey because it wouldn't make much sense. But I seem to be reading it at an appropriate time. Sixteen months tomorrow.

Yes, there is a new reality. This I cannot dispute. Acknowledgement, not acceptance- I still prefer. I cannot get back my old life, though every cell in my body screams for it, though my unconscious mind dreams it every night, and though there is a small human being made with your DNA growing right before my eyes each day.

Resilience. I think I and every other widow still breathing has already shown this if they've kept themselves alive, as JCO says in her epitaph. Unending discontent- this isn't something that I wish for, but it's also not something I fear. Contentment and peace seem artificial if there is no greater meaning to life. They become just gaudy accessories on a lifeless mannequin if we live in a universe where children can starve and men can die in war, and you can drown on your day off...just one day, a few hours. (Why, oh why didn't I call you at your hotel that morning, stall you, talk to you, tell you I love you- I think this every day...) Everything in me screams that these things are not OK- and I'm not sure I can say any of them are unjust without God and meaning and a much larger picture than what I see here.

It's a fairly simple argument, but Tim Keller puts it like this:

"People, we believe, ought not to suffer, be excluded, die of hunger or oppression. But the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak- these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust? ... If you are sure that this natural world is unjust and filled with evil, you are assuming the reality of some extra-natural (or supernatural) standard by which to make your judgement."

Today, at just a few hours until sixteen months since your tragic death- a death that could have been so easily prevented- I am able to say that this - your death- is my reality. But it is not all of reality. I will not consciously hope for our old life to reappear (though I can't help it if I still beg you aloud to come home every now and again, or if I dream it nightly ), but I will hope just the same. And I cannot just hope in this life, in my own resilience or contentment. But I will hope in goodness and beauty, and the victory of the underdog. I will grapple with faith and theology and philosophy and both shake my fist and bow my head at the hidden Creator. Because, I have finally realized, I have been grieving the loss of not one, but two great loves for the past sixteen months. I believe tonight (with the very real allowance that this belief may change tomorrow) that your body is buried, but you are elsewhere...and very much alive. A new friend reminds me in an email, "Maybe not everything makes sense but cling on to what does in your faith. You have to hold on to these tethers, however frail, because at the end is Dan."

I'm not sure if this hope will one day lead to contentment or endless discontent, but I do think it is the doorway to my own personal resilience. I am holding fast to these tethers.

Insipid

2011-11-05T20:15:00.001-04:00

This is the word running through my head all day today.

I try so hard to make meal time fun for Audrey and I- the special family time I always wanted it to be when I dreamed of a family of four or five at a large wooden farmhouse table and mismatched chairs. This, I see now, was just that- a dream.

We don our matching aprons this morning and she picks out a french toast recipe from her cookbook. I make fresh-squeezed orange juice and leave two slices to decorate our plates. We both have a glass of milk as well. There are little pumpkins and fall leaves on the center of the table. Real maple syrup and powdered sugar. All appears as it should be.

Insipid.

It's the same with lunch when I make a chickpea soup from a recipe in a good friend's handwriting - a recipe we once sat making together in her Brooklyn kitchen in my other life. We eat it with toasted bread, honey crisp apple slices, and grape juice. It's my favorite meal of the day because I put extra lemon juice in mine and the grape juice reminds me of the ice pops my mom made from it when I was a child.

Dinner is the worst. The sun is already down and our kitchen feels dim. I make whole wheat couscous and salmon. I am too lazy to chop the broccoli that goes with it. I always manage to dry out my fish. One thing I never do anymore is force myself (or Audrey for that matter) to eat anything that didn't turn out well or I just don't feel like eating. I toss most of the salmon.

My taste for sweets- is still gone. I don't know if it's depression or another of your traits I'm taking on since you didn't care much for sweets. I start to think my craving for drinks rather than food isn't just about some symbolic, unquenchable thirst as it is about taste. I usually drink mostly water...now I crave juice, iced tea, coffee...anything with flavor.

It will be sixteen months tomorrow, but I think I can count on one hand the number of meals that I actually "tasted" and enjoyed. And I'm pretty sure when I think of each of them, they were eaten with others. I miss tasting food. It feels an almost grotesque thing to keep making things and putting them in my mouth but not tasting them. It helps that there is a little girl waving her fork around like a fairy wand and saying, "You're a good cook mommy" while she eats every last bite.

I don't need to be happy. I wrote someone the other day in an email - that happiness is not that profound of an emotion and not the one I'm aiming for. What I do hope for though, is that life will not always be this insipid. It doesn't seem in my power or will to simply bring back the flavor. But I will do my part. I will keep making meals. I will keep serving them. And before we start, I will take Audrey's hand and bow my head and be thankful for this food.

The Atmosphere

2011-11-04T22:20:00.000-04:00

"It's not true that I'm always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs- nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time- but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this...."

"This is one of the things I'm afraid of. The agonies, the mad midnight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?"

C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed

I read this book last Christmas, but I kept thinking of this passage today. This is how life is starting to feel now when I am distracted. I still wouldn't say I ever "forget," but that I am simply not able to hold the processed, understood, grasped, event in my mind at all times. So, then when I do- let's say I see a photo of us I keep in the kitchen- it is sharper than ever now. That is you- that is what all of this is about. This universe of surreal day to day, get up, go here, take care of this, sit alone each night. It is then, when I remember exactly what your spine felt like below my feet when you begged me to walk on it and crack your back- or when I remember the feel of your hand in mine- or when I force myself to imagine the look on Audrey's face should you walk in the door right this moment- that the old life spills out like a giant accordion photo card with snapshots of eleven years of life and love. Until it hits the floor.

I am tired of this now.
I hate that the guaranteed emails in my inbox are from the drowning support network (I really should just unsubscribe from this at this point) and other widows. That the notifications I get the most on Facebook are all for groups called "Hope for Widows" or "The Widowed Parent."
I hate that we are a broken family but other families feel uncomfortable asking us to join them on a Saturday or Sunday because of that fact.
I hate that every time I tell Audrey something about you- I know I'm in a sense "creating you" for her- and it just doesn't come close to the real you.
I hate the time that is passing right this moment and that you are never coming back.

This pain is with me like a piece of hair on the wet sponge as I wash the dishes tonight. It gets twisted around my finger and I can't shake it off. It's disgusting.

Extinct Everyday Phrases

2011-11-04T20:57:00.001-04:00

In addition to the private vernacular I mentioned in a previous post- the one of inside jokes and nicknames that vanishes with your beloved, there are just everyday phrases- that you will not be saying again.

I've made mine into a poem of sorts...

I'm kinda tired...can you drive?
Hey- it's me. (on the phone)
Take these away from me- I can't stop eating them...
Don't forget to call your parents.
I'm sending this to your dad for his birthday- do you think he'll like it?
Let's go out to eat.
I'm ovulating next week.
Can you massage my neck- it's killing me.
Hey- can you bring me my razor. (from the shower)
Did you take your lunch I packed?
No, I won't walk on your back. I feel like I'm going to crush you.
Wake up. It's late.
Can you bring me a glass of water?
Can you take Audrey for a second?
Call me when you get there.

What time do you think you'll be home?
What time do you think you'll be home?

What time do you think you'll be home.

Ambushed

2011-11-01T23:37:00.001-04:00

I remember reading on widow boards that it might not be the holidays or anniversaries you're dreading that get you...you'll have prepared for those emotionally- expecting the pain. But instead, that the pain would hit you when you least expect it, on the ordinary hum-drum days- at the grocery store, in the car, when a certain song comes on the radio.

But...I haven't had that experience yet, because as I've explained there has been no contrast- no space for grief to sneak up on me or coming and going so that I might feel those "waves" of grief everyone talks about it. It has abided with me, day and night- even while I slept. In a sick way- I was protected from those surprise attacks.

But now, with the contrast- come the waves- and I found this week- the sudden pain completely unannounced.

Halloween morning. I hadn't given a lot of thought to Dan missing seeing Audrey dressed up- maybe because he wasn't home for a single Halloween of her life. The first he was working until she was asleep. The second he was away on tour. By the third, he was dead. So I guess it's always been just me and her. Also, we'd been traveling and only gotten back to the snow covered Northeast late Sunday evening so I was tired on Monday morning, got Audrey dressed in her fairy wings, grabbed her orange plastic pumpkin and drove to preschool without much thought.

I knew parents were allowed to stay a few minutes later than usual to take photos of all the three-year olds in their costumes, but I hadn't expected so many dads to come. Ambushed. Blindsided. Women introducing husbands to other women. "This is my husband..." "Oh, this is my husband..." Couples. Father and Mother smiling at their child.

I took a few pictures of Audrey waving her star wand, hugging a ladybug, and fluttering her best fairy flutter, and found out she didn't need the orange pumpkin for their trick or treating to the few other classrooms. "Bye!" the couples say to me. I walk quickly to my car but the tears are already coming. How strange, I think, that during what is possibly the loneliest moment of my life, I am walking across a snow-covered playground holding a bright orange plastic pumpkin.

Objective Reality

2011-11-01T23:20:00.001-04:00

Have you ever seen yourself in one of those video screens hanging in a drugstore or other retail store? You look up and see a woman walking into the store. You're surprised. It's you. We don't see ourselves from that perspective or angle very often. From above, a woman, pushing open a door, looking up. I've always found it strange but now I stop and stare for a moment at that woman and her child entering Duane Reade. "There I am."

Last week I finished the Hawking book and tried to wrap my mind around the model-dependent realism with which he explains the origin of our universe...where "one can use whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration." In the chapter entitled, "What is Reality?" I find familiarity when he quotes the view of philosopher David Hume, "who wrote that although we have no rational grounds for believing in an objective reality, we also have no choice but to act as if it is true."

This is where I am at: as if observing myself as I go about daily tasks on a small screen from a foreign angle. Pushing myself forward in a reality that I can not comprehend or believe but have no choice but to act as if it's true. Everyone else is, and then there is the fact that I have not seen you in almost sixteen months. So I watch: There I am. I have no choice.

The Working Out

2011-10-28T22:16:00.000-04:00

The paradox of the permanence of death.

That at the moment I heard those three words, I instantly understood the permanence of them more than I had ever understood anything in my life. And yet at the same time, I have also been coming to understand the permanence of them over the past sixteen months and still am.

It seems now that with each passing day I understand more that I will not see you again. No amount of grieving or sorrow will bring you back or even keep you close. No lesson learned or personal growth will issue your return. An A plus in grieving does not bring the one reward I wish for. There is no prize to keep my eyes on now- though I'm not sure I fully got that in the beginning. After all, it goes against the cause and effect principle so engrained in our culture: Work hard and you'll achieve. You can have anything you set your mind to, if you just work hard enough, envision it- heck, make a vision board-that's the "secret", and don't forget prayer- pray, fast, weep on your knees before God Almighty- be "religious." All of these pretty much express the same philosophy: you, a human being, can control and shape things.

And we can. I can choose from a hundred different toothpastes with which to brush my teeth- do I want whitening, fresh breath stripes, peroxide, or baking soda? I can choose whether I buy organic or conventional bananas. If I eat right and exercise, I can maintain my natural body weight. If I get a certain degree, I can work as a lawyer or doctor or teacher and make a certain amount of money each year. If I'm lucky I can choose the city where I live and the color I paint my walls- do I want Decorators White, White Chocolate, or White Linen?

But really, all of our choices- amount to the small stuff. Maybe we focus on it so much because we know too well, even if hidden in our collective unconsciousness- we know that ultimately we're here and we didn't choose to be or make ourselves- and that we will leave one day- and we won't have much choice over how or when that happens either. We just live, and wait. Maybe Ernest Becker is right- that every aspect of our culture is really about the denial of death.

And just as my grief has no reward, your death was not a punishment or result. This also goes against the principles of achievement in our society. You did nothing wrong. There is no reason we know of for your death. You did not work less. You were not cruel. You were not lazy or less of a visionary or saint. And yet, you died. At thirty three years old. "Who sinned, this man or his parents?" the disciples asked Christ before he healed the blind man. It has been natural for thousands of years to want to know the cause of illness or death- to want a reason or person to blame for disaster. But what are we to do when there is none. This is a large part of what grief is, I now see, a working out of the idea that something so horrible has happened without real cause or reason. You will never reason or make sense of the event even though it is the most crucial in your life. Even though you scolded me so harshly for leaving my keys in the door, I cannot scold you in this same way for dying.

Because the giving and taking away of life is ultimately not in our power. Frozen embryos in petri dishes and ventilators that pump air into lungs of brain dead people are far cries from power- but they are the best we can do.

Not unlike the paradox of the permanence of your death, in my life I know these things about life and death with certainty, and I also come to know them as I live.

Faith, perhaps, is similar. We know it instinctively at some point, but we must spend our lives working it out, coming to know it.

And art...art is like this too. Any artist can tell you, somewhere inside they hold and know the whole novel or song or poem from beginning to end before they begin it. Before we write a word or note, it is actually finished. This is what provides the urgency and motivation to complete it. Then, the incarnation.

And maybe our world is like this too. Maybe creation was just the picking up of the pen. Then, the incarnation. Christ's, "It is finished," the ending- still in the mind of the artist.

Now- the working out.

The coming.

The completion.

All of this philosophy just to say,

I miss you desperately.

Progress

2011-10-23T20:44:00.003-04:00

I have taken off my wedding ring- not permanently because I don't wish for my wearing or not wearing of the ring to mean "too much." I am in no way "better." I am in no way "available." It's a lovely piece of jewelry lovingly chosen by you that I have always loved wearing (You don't understand how many books I had to look through to find one like the one you showed me!) One day I simply forgot to wear it. I realized I'd reached the point another widow had mentioned many months ago on her blog when someone asked her when she'd take off her ring and she answered "When I don't feel married anymore." It's not that my heart isn't yours anymore- but just that I don't feel married I guess. I feel alone. I clearly have no partner in this earthly life. That's why I'm so frickin tired.

Instead I wear a simple silver band- you had a matching one that's in my jewelry box and is almost identical to your wedding band. We bought these matching rings on a city street somewhere only a few months after we'd met and fell instantly in love. I think we called them promise rings. And they meant that we had a future together. I am at ease wearing this ring lately because it feels more truthful.

I have also experienced for the first time what is referred to as the "waves" of grief. People who have never experienced grief or have on a much lesser scale have been telling me for fifteen months now, "It comes in waves right?" in empathetic tone- to which I'd always have to respond- "Well, no, not really...it is with me every moment- there is no contrast." But now, although I don't forget- I am sometimes distracted enough, or simply have reached my limit of months for the level of intense processing I was doing- so that, it will suddenly hit me more ferociously and I will gasp and cry. Then the wave comes. So I finally have these more intense waves from time to time. There is now some contrast.

In the very early days, someone, I think another young widow, asked me if I would give up having known and loved you to avoid this incredible pain. I had to think about it- it was so raw and I was in such shock but I fairly quickly knew the answer was no. But later, much later- even a month or so ago, I began to think maybe the answer was yes. It's too painful. Now I am back to no. I would not give you up. If I had to, I'd choose the love, and pain, again.

Audrey and I drove by a cemetery the other week (not yours) and she noticed it and asked if "that's appa's special place?" I told her no but that if she ever wanted to go, I would take her. She said she did and she wanted to bring flowers, so this morning she picked out red spray roses and we went. We sang songs, placed the flowers, and I prayed (and cried). The sun filtered through the clouds in the distance over the Manhattan skyline and I took a few photos although you can barely make out the buildings. For the first time, I saw a hint of beauty in that wretched place. "We miss you and love you, honor you and respect you, and trust you are in God's loving arms." We leave.

Then we visit a nearby church someone has invited us to. Afterwards they serve lunch. There are many Korean men there and I notice Audrey looking around as she eats. "Remember that dream I had about appa?" she asks. "Yes, I do..." I realize though now, that though Audrey will forget, at least consciously, many or most things about you, she will, in the end, be alright. I will make sure of it. I tell her all the time that love never dies and that if she forgets everything else, all she needs to know is that she loved you and you loved her- very, very much.

I went to counseling last week for the first time in a month or so and realized at some point while we talked that for the first time, I understood why I was there in that office speaking about this sad story to this woman. Every other meeting in the past fifteen months- I would ask myself quietly why I was there and if it was real. I tell her that I've packed up your clothes, finished the death-related paperwork, and stopped wearing my beautiful wedding ring. She tells me I keep pushing forward and have done so much since we last met and she knows how exhausting it all is....how much energy it takes. Before I go, she tells me that I look pretty- that my countenance has changed.

All of this, I suppose, is getting me an A plus in grieving. It is "progress"- and the worst kind of progress I've ever achieved in my life.

Closure

2011-10-19T20:20:00.004-04:00

Words haven't been writing themselves throughout my day lately. The pain is still there, bereft of insights, epiphanies, themes. The grief, I think today, has gone stale. I create my own three stages of grief: fresh, stale, and rotten. The key, now that I'm in the second stage of my new three-tiered system, is to seal this up before it grows foul. But how does one do that?

A while back, a widow friend had forwarded me an interesting article on a new book entitled, "Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us." The pop psychology of recent decades has created this notion that in order to be healthy, there must be closure. This book suggests that by aiming for this invented notion of closure, one may actually do more harm than good. After all, my husband is not coming back to life. I am not being given the missed opportunity to say goodbye or I'm sorry or tell him the cute things his daughter said today. He is still dead.

"The closure narrative assumes that grief is bad and that it’s something that needs to end, and it assumes that closure is possible and that it’s something good and something that people need to have. Grief is a difficult, messy experience and can be very painful. A lot of people carry loss and grief for much of their lives, but that doesn’t mean that the pain is as intense as it was the first few months. You carry that loss and grief, but you learn how to integrate that into your life . . . .We grieve for a reason. We grieve because we miss the person who died, or because of whatever loss we’re experiencing. Our grief expresses how we’re feeling and allows us to acknowledge that loss. So asking or expecting someone to try and end that quickly is really misunderstanding the importance of those emotions."

There will never be a day in my life that I will not miss you. So, there will never be a day without grief. That is very difficult to acknowledge- maybe even more so for others than me. No one wants to believe this is the case. People want to believe maybe you'll marry again and start over...find happiness. Maybe. But as my widow friend and I agree- this is irrelevant to our pain. It is not a matter of shutting or opening the door to any future happiness, big or small. That is simply irrelevant to the loss. The loss, you see, has staying power.

This goes against every grain in our culture. People don't keep things anymore. They throw them out and get new ones. If a new political leader isn't getting rid of our debt in 24 months, we want to reelect someone else. Twelves months after buying the latest gadget, a new cell phone comes out and people line up to get it.

Perhaps in decades or even centuries past, people didn't have this same need for closure because they kept things. My great grandmother was allowed to wear black for the rest of her life after her husband died. Her visits from Italy left a four year old me referring to her simply as "the one who wears black." And my grandmother - she was allowed to keep an entire enclosed porch filled with shelves of rinsed out jars and tins. And my grandfather wouldn't let me throw out a crumb of food from my plate. They came of age in the Great Depression. Whatever you had, you held on to it, I suppose. And grief really, is no different. The economy of the soul has taken a hit.

It is different though, in this: the lack of closure is not hoarding. It is more as if prior to your death, my life was thread on fabric, weaving in and out and stitching a design. And then suddenly, I became the fabric and grief became the thread tied around a sharp needle. It is that integral now and always will be.

Someone posts on your Facebook wall, something nice, but it all ends with that qualifying word I loathe: "still." "I miss you dearly still." It reminds me that for others, a lot of time has passed. There is a loyalty and a certain diligence in that word. But the widow, she doesn't need that word. It is unnecessary. Because you are still dead. As long as you remain so, I will miss you.

We joked so often that I should've been born in Emily Dickinson's time (though you threatened that I wouldn't be able to handle the medical practices at the time), or even in the 1930's or 40's. Back when people kept things. And you, Dan, you kept things. You wore the same clothes for 15-20 years. Now that I write that, it seems crazy, but it's true. The basketball shorts you'd had since high school and wore when I picked you up in Staten Island the first time we played music together are one of the few items I didn't pack away. I kept them in my drawer. Even when I'd try to convince you to let me buy you new things, you'd always say, "But I like those..." You didn't toss things aside. I bought you a desk for your production equipment/computer when we first got married, but later in one of my design makeover crazes, I said I was going to get a different one and sell that one. "But I like this one...you got it for me."

Things meant something to you. And your life meant something to me. Integrate it? I will. And we already do. Audrey and I never fail to sing your peanut butter and jelly song when she eats that- the one you wrote as a little boy and sang to me. We clink glasses and say "Cheers" often, the way you did. We listen to the "tour mix" on your ipod while she plays with play dough or paints with glitter glue. I subscribe to updates about your favorite soccer team and do pushups before bed the way you did. I suppose this is all integration. But it is not closure.

The closest thing to "acceptance"- that horrible, clinical grief word- is realizing that you will not have closure, that you will always have this piercing ache- sometimes dull and sometimes sharp, that on that last day when you take your last breath, your last thoughts will surely be of him- even years and years from now. "And will I see him now? I have waited, so, so long." You can not put this away or seal it up- I cannot end these months of writings with one final zinger of a post. I have not hidden my grief or ran from it. It will not grow foul. There is a difference between foul and kept. It will be kept and kept well. Because it is, after all, my love for you turned inside out. It is messy and full of loose ends and stitching, but it is still love. The best I can hope for is that as it ages, this ache becomes familiar and reminds me of a love I once had- like the desk sitting in the corner of our room tonight, like our daughter as she grows into a beautiful young woman, and like your old basketball shorts, soft, worn, still with your scent upon them, folded neatly in my drawer.

Exquisite

2011-10-12T20:59:00.000-04:00

I still think of you every moment, Dan. But I don't sit and try to process and understand what is really going on as much. I remember in the early days I'd just sit here on our bed staring at your desk trying to figure out where you'd gone. I told the psychoanalyst Audrey sometimes used the word disappear interchangeably with your death. "He did disappear, didn't he." he answers suavely.

But sometimes, when I'm not really trying to process it or think about it now, it hits me. And then I feel that cool sensation of shock in my upper chest the way I did every day for weeks after I received that call. And then I get just a tiny glimpse of it. Of what I've lost. The pain then is, as another good widow friend called it once in an email and I think is the best one word description I've read yet: exquisite.

And sometimes when I'm feeling the reality and yet also feeling disconnected - so very long since I've seen you- I go into your email where you have every email since the day we got married. Tonight I just go back to about December of 2009. There in these sometimes long, and sometimes curt back and forths, I see our love relationship. I think we were both writers really so I see the truest us in these words. I see apologies, tension, and lots of i love you's. I am surprised now to see how kind I was in many of those emails. I realize that I've been dwelling on my shortcomings since you died and forgotten how good I was to you - most of the time, or at the same time that I was often resentful and bitchy. There are short emails with the subject "i" and content, "love my wife. your husband, dan." or "I have a good man, Your wife, Julia" And in that last year there is so much planning and organizing of our finances, health insurance, your plane flights, Audrey's nap schedules- all in those emails. I am overwhelmed to read a marriage in all of that....a partnership- a working out of life's details by two people who had once been madly in love. I feel completely inadequate to put into words what all of those emails say and mean because they are our life together- it can't be summed up. But reading just a few of them from our last few months together- is jarring. In one I end with a prayer, "God please bring Daniel safely back home to us. I love him." I stop and cry because on this particular tour, I guess "God" did, but later, he decided not to. There are so many words with double meanings now- about how much Audrey misses you and how much you miss her and wish you could stop touring and spend more time with her. It is so strange to me - this setup of your slow disappearance. Was it purposefully done to lessen the sting of your final and last disappearance? No, I think the sting is greater because of all that. But maybe if I collect them, one day Audrey will have a sense of how he missed her when they could not be together and that will give her a sense of things now as they are. How devastated he would be at this loss of watching her entire life.

Today she watched a cartoon where there was a whole segment about the boy's father. I watch her expression carefully. And then in her favorite music class, the teacher ended with a song about loving mommy and daddy and what a happy family we are. I watched her then too. She continued singing the song as we walked out to the car in the drizzly rain. "I'm so sorry," is all I can think to myself. This is going to keep happening, isn't it? She will have this shoved in her face time after time after time.

Last night while getting out some paper to print out my "routine to survive"- an enormously long document of each day's schedule I typed in a special downloaded designer font- a document that I probably spent much more time creating than I'll use- for this is what I do best- I spotted a post it with your handwriting on it. It was a respite for my eyes to see your writing and I sat staring at it for a while. One of the most beautiful things about a marriage is this coming together of two single, separate people- finding someone else's handwriting on a post it in your home. Someone else's favorite beer or hot sauce in your fridge- that is different than what you would have in there. There is this sweet sense of pride in the belongings, handwriting, food that is in your home because it belongs to the one you love. The one who is different than you and yet you have access to these things because you are now one. It is such a comfort in life's journey to have someone else combine their life, their stuff, their interests with yours.

The other thing I keep thinking about this week is how much when I hear your imaginary "voice" in my head talking to me all the time, the majority of things you say are teasing things...sarcastic, mocking, but not in a malicious way- the way we spoke to each other- the way we were able to joke about ourselves. This is what I hear all the time. And I almost smile because you are still making fun of me in my mind. Sometimes it's not even words but just an expression on your face I see. Because this too is one of the most precious things a marriage brings- being able to laugh at the things about yourself and about your life together, that are often the deepest, darkest things you've had to encounter. Then somehow over time they are tamed and chuckled at together. JCO puts it this way in her memoir, which I thought one of the most striking truths in her book, "what the widow has lost- it would seem a trifling loss, to others- is the possibility of being teased." Yes, this is a tremendous, tremendous loss.

Snow Globe

2011-10-11T20:36:00.001-04:00

Tonight you fall asleep with your head on my belly. It's not often at this age I get to feel your warm head on my body the way it was so often when you were a baby. But you took a late nap yesterday and couldn't fall asleep until almost 11 pm. As a result, you were so tired today and all I had to do was sit beside you on your bed for a minute. You come and lay on me looking straight into my eyes, also the way a newborn does, and you never do anymore when you're more awake. "Audrey, look at me," I am always having to tell you now. But I caress your hair and you look straight at me until your eyes close tonight. I am programmed to think, "Yes, this is my time!" and cautiously place you back on your bed and head out. But I sit back and stare at you for a little longer. I even put my fingers under your nose and feel your breath- the way we both did when you were an infant and we were constantly worried about SIDS. This is the breath of life, I think. And she is part of you Dan. I think that more lately. Sometimes when she hugs me really tightly, tears stream down my cheeks because I get more that she is part of you and you are part of her. For some reason, I didn't get that before. Maybe it was too much for me. She was just Audrey. But now I feel like you've truly left me a part of yourself. Someone with your eyelashes and eyes, and skin and fingernails. It is an awe-inspiring thought when I really get this. Miraculous. She is, I think, like a snow globe of our life and love. There we are in miniature floating around, encased though, so I just can't touch us. But she is also so much more than that.

The Long Weekend

2011-10-11T20:10:00.001-04:00

I remember when you wouldn't realize you had off on a day like Columbus Day and then you'd find out and we'd both be so excited. A whole extra day to spend together. It was like a treasure. On Friday afternoon I'd be on a high waiting for that long weekend to begin.

Now. Now the long weekend is just that. Long.

Long.

Now it is the quietest time. No emails. No phone calls. No plans. This one was particularly difficult because I find myself sick again with a bad cold/sinus thing. I know my body is just worn out from all of this. So I fall asleep at 10 instead of my usual late hours because I am too tired and because there is no real reason to stay awake. It was also worse than usual because of the unseasonably warm weather. If I have to go forwards and it's taking every ounce of my energy to do so, I hate to feel the weather is rewinding things. Eighty degrees in October, whereas my previous seasonal affect disordered self would've relished it, is now quite irksome to me. Let's just keep things moving or I may not be able to keep it up.

I think about what we might have done if you were alive. It doesn't really matter. It's not about what we would have "done." Just having us all together we could've sat around our apartment and it would have been great. I wouldn't have thought about checking my email or chatting with a friend. I would have instead been guarding our time. Asking you not to play at church or do an extra session so we could all spend time together. Even though Audrey and I are together, that whole dynamic is just so different now. We are together every day. There is not that third person to break things up or remind her that I'm a real, true, certified grown- up and not just her playmate.

So it's just a weekend of small things- which isn't always bad, but with my cold I feel much more emotional and cry more which doesn't help my already runny nose. It's a weekend filled with something I try to lock away on a daily basis because it's clearly not productive: self-pity. I am bitter and angry at the world. But really that's just a veneer for the deep sadness and loneliness for you. And I can't help feeling I'm being punished because no one else I know seems to be going through this.

So, we skip church and go to the Korean restaurant instead so I can get the smoking hot tofu stew, soondooboo chigae, that usually clears me up with its spiciness. I tell Audrey it's our "ladies lunch." Then I buy her Tinkerbell sunglasses in the drugstore where I go to buy more medicine. Then today we go to eat bagels for lunch. The patrons in a bagel shop on a holiday are a motley bunch. A group of three old people commenting on the freshness of the salad. An odd woman who reeks of loneliness. It's OK though since I love fresh bagels and our whole day (and weekend) feels a little like we're an old couple who have settled into a routine of splitting entrees at restaurants. Still, I stop and take this photo of the yellow leaves on the island in the parking lot because it's pretty.

Then we go pick up more tissues for me at Target. At Target I'm amazed at how I can let Audrey see and play with every princess toy there but she doesn't have a tantrum or ask me to get her anything because I tell her we aren't buying anything today. She is mesmerized by a little Tinkerbell jewelry box and pushes the button that makes Tinkerbell go around and around on top, kneeling down saying quietly, "Isn't she bootiful?" but when I tell her it's time to go, she says, "I'm going to put this back." I see another child grasping for dear life onto a large toy while her mother tries to offer her a measly carton of goldfish as an alternative. "You can have this!" I wonder why this is and I think it's because I do get Audrey a lot of things and she trusts me- that I get her good stuff. That she doesn't lack anything. It's the same as her experience at the doctor's office. Since she was eighteen months she will sit calmly while having two or three shots because I've explained everything to her prior to the visit and because I've told her it's good for her and just a pinch. So even in her pain, I see she trusts me. The psychoanalyst at her school asks me about this the other day and tells me about all of the studies he's been a part of having to do with Dr.'s offices and assures me we have a very significant bond and trust that will help Audrey as she grieves. I can't help correlating both of these instances- this patience for what is good for her- for the receiving of gifts, and this tolerance for pain-this bearing with what I say is a good thing- to the spiritual sense in which we're supposed to trust our creator in this same way. I suppose Audrey has more evidence than I do. I do give her good gifts. The immunization really is a pinch that's over in a moment. And most of the trials of my life up until now were pretty much like that. But this is not. It is so much more than a pinch and it is permanent. I suppose if there's any hope of trust in pain of this magnitude it will require something in addition: forbearance.

Forbearance.

Empathy

2011-10-08T20:06:00.000-04:00

I've always been an empathetic person. I'm not sure what made me this way- whether it's genetic, environmental- whether something instilled by my parents, or a sensitivity resulting from the difficulties of my youth. I could not watch someone else cry without joining in. I was aware of others suffering and prayed every time I heard an ambulance siren, imagining that someone was in need of my prayer.

I have assumed that this tragedy - my first, real, true tragedy- would heighten this sense of empathy greatly. And I think it has. I feel the pain of other widows intensely. When I hear of sudden deaths on the news, I consider the family left behind now more than I used to. I know what plans they're making and how they move in shock outside of their own bodies.

But...

on the flip side...

I have a really hard time now feeling empathy for life's little tribulations. When people are upset about their career or their dream, I don't feel much of anything. The biggest lesson one learns from this is that only death is permanent. Everything else can and usually does change. So you can still succeed in your career or maybe you won't, but either way you're still alive. Right?

Well, on Thursday as I was waiting for the ferry from the city, a young girl was walking to my line with a tear going down her nose and sniffling. She was texting on her phone or reading something. When she stood behind me on line she continued to let out a tiny sob and then some sniffles.

I debated about whether or not I should say anything- New Yorkers are usually very private and independent and I myself have sat quite obviously crying on subways numerous times (once on my way to the Dr. when I thought I was miscarrying for a second time) and no one's said a thing. I think no one wants to get involved because it could get..."messy." I know this firsthand. I once saw another woman looking distraught on a street corner near my workplace on 26th Street. In fact, she was slamming down a pay phone and so I stopped and asked if she wanted to use my cell phone and if she was OK. She broke down sobbing telling me that this boyfriend was using drugs and he wouldn't take her call. By her babbling I soon realized she herself was the addict. Anyway, still she wound up sobbing in my arms while I prayed for her. Then we went our separate ways. But I told her about a recovery group at a large church I knew of and got her email. Twice we planned to meet there- I told her I would attend. I did. Both times, she never showed up. Finally, I mailed her a few books and ignored any other emails from her asking to get together. So yes, it can get messy.

Still- I finally put my hand on this girl's back and ask her if she's OK. Inside I am wondering what kind of sorrow has entered life. I think to myself, "I am a woman of sorrows- I should be able to comfort her." Very dramatic, I know. I even think about saying this- "I'm a woman of sorrow- tell me what your story is." Ha. I chuckle just thinking about this now.

Since she was on her phone, instead I just ask, "Did you get some bad news?" She manages to get out that she was promoted and then the promotion taken away from her. I'm slightly disappointed by this "sorrow." But I try to be empathetic. "All in the same day?" "Yes!" she says. "Wow- that is upsetting." And that's all I can manage. "That is upsetting." But then I slowly turn back to the line and the ferry comes and we get on. I can think of nothing else to say. I know that in the past I would've given it more. But it seems to me this girl is young and has a career that has even the prospect of promotion- and though she's suffered a blow- her life is bursting with possibility and hope. I want to tell her that- but I don't.

This Week

2011-10-07T21:25:00.003-04:00

On Monday of this week I finally made it to the orthopedist. I was upset to see the night before as I was filling out the patient history forms I'd printed from their website that it asked for the disease history of your spouse and if they were deceased, the manner of death. I'm aware that I usually fill out my family history- including the medical history of my family of origin, but I don't think I've ever noticed this before. Anyway, I fill it out.

While I wait for the Dr. in the little office, I read Steven Hawking's recent book, "The Grand Design," the one where he lays out the theory of the creation of the universe- the one that doesn't require a God at all. It's something mind-boggling like a million universes may have come about- all different- but we just appear on this one because it is suitable for us. By way of introduction, there is a paragraph explaining how modern physics has changed the perception of reality.

Today's approach is called "model-dependent realism" and "is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. " He goes on to say that if two theories or models exist and work, you can use whichever one is most convenient.

I stop reading and look around the room. Thin grey drawers are labeled with white labels and black type: "syringes" "casting." Modern medicine always feels so primitive to me, so I wonder for a moment if I can imagine some other reality for this place and successfully explain where I am. I start to feel maybe everything around me is somehow made up by me. It's scary. The door is open and I hear a nurse on a helpline: "I was right in the middle of a study and I got the message, "Error, Must input ..." I forget the rest, but she went on and on about this. It seemed satirical to me because everything in this office seemed very hi-tech. When I checked in a small camera on the receptionist's computer took my photo for my file. "Just smile for me," she'd said after I got back my insurance card.

And of course, when the Dr. comes into the room, an elderly man with kind eyes, who sits and looks through that history I'd filled out, he has to turn to me and say very slowly and pronounced, looking over his reading glasses: "You're very young to be widowed," almost as if I'd done something wrong and was being scolded. He was kind, and said he didn't mean to bring up anything painful. I told him no not at all, it is there all the time. He gives me some shorts to change into and does the exam. Bend forward. Do you feel this? And as I suspected, I need the MRI- he prefers a closed one.

On Tuesday of this week I meet with a psychoanalyst they have on staff at Audrey's school. Being that Audrey is my first child, and I have no way of knowing what is normal in her development or might be a result of her grief, I am happy to have someone to run things by. Usually, when I meet with anyone, I have a lot of handwritten notes in front of me, but usually, I am left frustrated because I never get through them all. So this time I decided against this, partly because I just hadn't had the chance, and instead just wanted to tell him the "story" and ask how he thought I could best help her. Of course, I was just jotting down one or two things as he walked in his office. "You're a writer," he said. "Well, sort of," I answer. He was good. He looked me in the eye after I'd told part of the story and asked me who I cried with. "Who hugs you?" he asked. These are hard questions. He makes connections between my grief and Audrey's grief. When I try to write one thing down, he stops me. "Don't write, just listen." He interprets my family of origin, how that affected my marriage and my grieving. When I tell him about my early fears of Audrey forgetting her father, he tells me any specialist in his field will use this phrase, "the body remembers," and that of course she will remember. I tell him her dream and how she thought it was real. "Let me ask you this- was it? " he asks. At the end of just an hour, he assures me Audrey is doing really well, and that it's more me having trouble. Yes, this is true.

On Thursday of this week, I go to the city to meet with my financial advisor because I have finally transferred your 401K to my own account. It was the last of the canceling, erasing, duties I had to do.

As I take the ferry across the Hudson I am thinking about how the island of Manhattan represents our old life. It's where we met, fell in love, got engaged, had our child. Now I am separated from it by a river. Now I am on the sidelines. But when I cross over, it's like I step into a diorama in a museum set up to remind me of our prehistoric life there.

After the meeting with the finance guy, I go downtown to a string store on Walker street to give them your electric cello to sell on consignment- which they have volunteered to do at no commission. I take the subway, for what is only the second time since you died. I tell your friend who I eat lunch with before heading downtown how strange it is that NYC public transportation is my greatest grief trigger. Who would've thought- the smell of the subway or the exhaust fumes of the buses at Port Authority could cause me this pain. But I suppose more than any holiday traditions we had, we spent the most time together, a large portion of our relationship, traveling on mass transit. Where I go under, there is the S train- the columns there are the ones you jumped out from behind when you met me there on the day you proposed. I stop and stare before going down more stairs to the N train. Once there, I am remembering how you always told me exactly where to stand, which car to get in depending on my destination- so I'd be at exactly the right place when I arrived at Canal Street. You would've done that today. I stand right at the bottom of the stairs. I know nothing of these things.

I carry your electric cello in front of me on the train and speak to my reflection in the window across from me: I miss you. There is a man sitting across from me with a single tear tattooed to his face just below his eye on his left cheek.

It is an emotional drop off. The instrument itself you'd only had for about six months, but it was something you'd been working towards for so long. We'd been pricing them and then you got this great deal so you could rent to buy and you did, and now here I am returning it. As I left my apartment with it that morning on my shoulder and headed to the ferry, these are the simple words that come out: "Damn, this is upsetting." And it is.

What's more, I am entering part of your world that I never entered. I remember you trying to sell your other cello there and I felt worried about who you were leaving your cello with. I didn't understand then how well you know the music world in NYC. But you did, and everyone knew you. And I get that now. And I feel horrible about it...all the times I questioned you.

Anyway, I know as I'm walking towards this place, that you have walked these same paths many times- and I realize again, what every widow comes to learn, how her husband led so many waking hours of his day, without her. How these two things, otherness and intimacy- war with each other.

I shake hands with this man who knew you, and we go upstairs and talk for a while beneath the high white tin ceilings of the Soho building, in a room filled with large basses. The contrast of the white and wood is beautiful to me and I wish I had a camera. I tell him the details of "the story" and he tells me about a car accident he was in at 19 where he lost a girlfriend and a close friend- how you never get over it. He talks about other things- realities we can't see...how he felt everything in his life had been moving to that moment. How I knew also. He has intelligent eyes and also is married with a three year old daughter. When we go into his smaller office to print out the contract, I see her pictures everywhere. "Can you imagine?" I ask him. He shakes his head. He gives me a kiss as I leave and promises to try to get me the best deal. He is leaving tomorrow for China for business. I wish him a safe trip.

Then I shop in a few of my favorite stores in SOHO. Stores I haven't visited since I was pregnant with Audrey...our last "date" before I gave birth actually- we came down here and had brunch at Balthazar and you bought me a trench coat that I could barely try on over my belly at Uniqlo. I buy myself a vest there and a dress that's on sale. I know you'd be happy. You were always encouraging me to buy things for myself more and take care of myself.

Then I take the N from Prince Street back up to 34th. Then the ferry shuttle, and then the ferry back across the river. It's a long day, but I feel something. My eyes have been full of tears for most of the day...just full enough that the tears didn't actually fall but stayed in my eyes as I walked. I'm not sure what it is...is it that I've gotten to be "your wife" again just for this one errand? I hope I reflect well on you. I hope I play my role well. Sometimes I'd embarrass you with my lack of knowledge about how things work in the music industry when you were trying so hard to get "in." I hope I haven't done that. I have sincerely tried. But the something I feel...is it just because I've had a day off from being with my preschooler in an apartment? Is it because I'm back in the city we loved together- where we fell in love so hard? Is it because I wore my contacts or because the computer voices on the subways sounded exactly the same as they always do, "Stand clear of the closing doors..." Is it because it was a beautiful Fall day- 15 months exactly since you've died. I'm not sure, but I'm going to figure it out, because for the first time, in a long time, those tears that just stayed in my eyes, that something that I felt that I couldn't quite put my finger on- I think what I felt was almost...

alive.

Before or After

2011-10-07T20:09:00.000-04:00

In the beginning, this is so easy to distinguish. Each time you go somewhere- the grocery store, the zoo, a restaurant, you are aware that the last time you came was with him.

You know that the roll of paper towels that you're using were purchased by him when he ran into Target and you sat in the car with your child, the very day before the last day you would ever see him or hold him. You know and so you put that last roll away before it is finished- up in the linen closet- because you cannot bear to watch the last towel - the one that kind of sticks to the cardboard roll- come off.

You know that the sneakers your twenty one month old is wearing were purchased together with him. "Should I get her the pink or the blue?" you'd asked. (Only now do you realize consistently how much you relied on him and his opinion- meanwhile, all the time you thought of yourself as the decision maker). You know when she's outgrown them a few months later and you put them away that those were the last shoes that had anything to do with him. That everything else now will be new.

You follow the dates and feel them in your bones- the anniversary date approaching each month.

But later.

You look through your pantry one day and have no idea what items were bought "before" and which ones were purchased "after." You wonder if there is even anything left from "before."

You realize most of the places you visit and even the people you know - your daughter's preschool, moms of her classmates, your grief counselor, a new church- are places he has not gone to and people he does not know and never saw his smile when he greeted them or heard him tell a corny joke or were moved by his cello playing.

You look down at your own outfit one day and realize he has not seen any of the things you are wearing. But you are still wearing a pair of his socks. That comforts you.

And then one day you find a half used roll of paper towels in the linen closet and can't remember why it's there or why you didn't use it up. And then you do.

And you realize one day- that you are quite accustomed to saying, "My husband was..." or "Dan used to do that," when in the early weeks those sentences sounded absolutely ridiculous and false to you. "Why am I using past tense?" you would ask yourself, because you do the very day you receive the news...but you can't understand why. "I spoke to him yesterday?" why am I telling everyone, "He was..." It kills your heart to use those words. But now you do. And it is rather matter of fact. But still, in all honesty, kind of ridiculous- it's just that now you haven't seen him in so...very...long.

And then another day, like today, you realize that yesterday was the sixth of the month, and you repeated that date to numerous people as you had appointments in the city and paperwork to be signed, but it never occurred to you that this was the date- the anniversary until ... today.

This is what time does. And this is what is presupposed as "healing" by those who do not know better. Time blurs. It is quite sad in itself and not healing at all. It is ruthless really because it is just another aspect of which you have no choice or control. It just happens. Perhaps this is soothing to some people. It means you let go, whether you want to, or not.

Any true healing is worked for- for me that means talking and therapy, processing, and writing and crying- taking painful "steps," like packing up clothes or giving things away. It means closing bank accounts and going to the DMV to change titles.

But, even if you did none of this towards healing, or moving forward as they call it, time would do something else for you. It would give you practice. Each morning when you get up and think the first thing, "This is true - Dan is dead," while you still lay in your bed...you get a little more practice at the sick feeling in your gut. You get a little more practice of putting your feet on the floor. You get a little better at the inhibitory control it takes to go against everything in you and start the day- do it all again. It is a little like practicing a piece of music on the violin or piano over and over again. Your fingers finally surrendering to where they're supposed to go. Except that that has the reward of beauty and satisfaction. This does not.

Thinking About

2011-10-03T20:27:00.000-04:00

how you slipped away from me in an instant- in the physical and spiritual realms, again when I received the phone call, and slip away slowly now- each day. That is what time brings...slipping away.

Thinking about how I hide in each moment, each day, like a bunker.

How my world lost all of its parameters and definition. There really is no weekend now- or even end of the day. There is just doing it again. I don't experience seasons the way I used to- I just move through them- I notice only slightly that it is hotter or colder and change Audrey's clothing in her dresser and closet. I don't have the same sense of dread I used to with regards to cold weather. It is all flavorless like eating with a cold. I know there's food in my mouth but I don't taste it. I know the days are getting crisper but I don't truly feel it. It's almost as though even the existence of seasons are in one's mind and therefore one's reality. There is no calendar- no organization on the interior. It's like being a blind person led by the hand- "Turn right here...there's a step here." This is October. This is the time for apple picking and a holiday called Halloween. "Oh, OK." I follow along.

Thinking about how hard you worked your whole life. I feel like only I really know the hours and time and mental energy you put into succeeding in the music world and just in living and providing for us in New York City. People make it seem like it's so great that you achieved your "dream" right before you died- like it was your crowning achievement so don't I feel so glad that I let you go- that you got to do that before you died? The only problem with that is it was just the beginning, just the cusp of what you would have accomplished- not the end. I am in the process of selling your electric cello- the one you'd wanted for years and then finally- after renting it for your last gig numerous times, got to buy for a couple hundred bucks- a cello worth thousands. I said it was your Christmas gift from me. So you used it for six months? That's all. And now I sell it back? I was rooting for you- pulling for you- you were making progress- on your way finally- to this? To this swim in a lake thousands of miles away from me? To die?

Thinking about superstitions - the ones ingrained in me from my mother in my childhood. Did a black cat cross our path while we were in the car before you left? Do I vaguely remember that? Were there two people that died before you? Michael Jackson did. Was there another? Because people die in threes right? At Audrey's first birthday a bird flew into the window of the party room overlooking the Hudson River. You can hear it on the video right before the Korean doljabi ceremony. My brother makes a big deal of it- is that a bad sign, or something like that- he says. It irritates me then very much.
This is all nonsense- but even people who mock religious people must admit signs and superstitions are somewhat ingrained in all of us.

Thinking about how I never understood the loss of a spouse before at all...about my mother's aunts who lost their husbands when I was in middle school or high school. One died of a heart attack while they were driving to Florida and she woke up to find him dead beside her in bed. I can remember her, this Jewish woman who pronounced each word so carefully and slowly, telling the story over and over again one Christmas at my grandmother's house from a tufted green velvet chair. I wondered why she had to keep telling it. She herself seemed strangely fascinated by it. Now I understand this. The other aunt I greeted at her 95th? birthday a few years back at a restaurant the family had rented. Dan of course was with me. She told me unprompted as I wished her well just that she missed her "Nat" so much and thought about him every day and said goodnight to him each night- and this was years- maybe fifteen or twenty? since he'd died. And my own grandfather, who also awoke to find my grandmother passed away in the bed beside him looked at me when we were alone and just said, "I looked over, and she was gone." But because all of these people were older and carried on, I assumed that they were "healing" and doing alright. After all, they were older and must have expected this.

Now I am thinking about how when I was young and dreaded getting immunization shots at the doctor, I'd ask when I needed the next one and if they told me, "When you're 19 or 20," I'd feel anxiety but I was sure I'd be a different person by then- it was so far away...I'd be able to handle it for my little, younger self. In the same way, I think, we all know one day our spouse (if we are the survivor) will die, but we think we'll be much older and so we won't think about it now because it is unbearable to think about really. So, we don't.

Found and Lost

2011-09-27T22:10:00.000-04:00

Somehow having Audrey in preschool three mornings a week has made the days and especially the afternoons- even longer. She gave up napping a long, long time ago. Today I realize that what's missing is those little points of contact and interruptions throughout the day from you. There's not even the hope or anticipation of the phone ringing- "hey..." is all we would need to say. There are no emails that say "Just saying hi." There is no anticipation of a key in the door, no relief, no end. It's dreadful. Even though I am safe, in an apartment with an adorable three-year old- it is dreadful.

A friend commented a while back after she had just potty trained her daughter but Audrey wasn't potty-trained yet- how quickly you forget entirely that you were wiping poop off their buts two or three times a day every day just a week or so before. It's a crap analogy, but this is how it is now. I find it hard to believe that you, a man, lived here with me. That Audrey ran to your open arms just like in television and movies when you came in the door. That you took showers and brushed your teeth next to me each night.

Well, except for the teeth brushing. This I do feel and believe unfortunately every single night as I stand there brushing my teeth. We usually brushed our teeth together. We'd both be looking in the mirror- sometimes brushing really fast to be funny. Each night, ghost-dan brushes his teeth beside me. I wish he'd go away actually. I just want to brush my teeth and go to bed for God's sake.

I keep thinking of the manner of your death, and how this is real and happened to me. How others must assume when they meet me that I'm "used to it," the whole idea. I am not and never will be, I accept. I keep thinking- if you had died in a car accident-something I feared- would this have been "easier?" Why did you have to be alone like that? When they found you, were your eyes open or closed- is always in the back of my mind. What happened to you!

I also think a lot about the particular loss of spouse versus other kinds of loss. Other losses are painful- I already anticipate and dread the loss of my parents. The loss of a child is heinous and brutal. But all of these familial losses are those bound by blood. You are born into your family. Your child incubates in your womb. But only the spouse- is at one point in your life- alive, living somewhere else- maybe another country even- a total stranger for many years- even decades.

The loss is malicious and spiteful because only a spouse, before he can be lost, is first-
found.

There You Are

2011-09-27T20:32:00.000-04:00

I came across this video that has you on it today. I've never seen it before. You never mentioned it that I can remember though there was probably some night after Audrey was born (I can tell this by your hair length) when I was up all night nursing and you told me, "I'll be home late tonight- I'm doing this video-thing with Rachel." It's strange to watch because I can tell they "dressed you" including that weird glove on your hand- to fit the part. But now that you've been gone, I don't really want to see you "dressed" like this. It's hard enough to remember what was real.

Still, it was good to see you Dan. Tears fell down my face and then Audrey came in and I asked her if she wanted to watch. She did, a few times at her request. "That's appa," she said. The look you give the singer at the very end, raising your eyebrows and smiling a bit- is one I've seen so many times- it's the look you give the singer you're playing with. I received it myself back when we played together as a band and in church.

There you are, I think. And I marvel at your forearm and fingers and sideburns and skin. There you are. Your death it seems, is still incomprehensible to me. You...are buried? You are that strange figure that lay in a casket. "We need clothes- suit, underwear, socks- no shoes." No shoes. That bothered me. There you were on display for all to see. And underneath that closed half of the casket- shoeless. A broken body with no consciousness- dressed by strangers- the ultimate vulnerability.

I am left today starving for the real, live you. It's like the video was some kind of backwards appetizer. Still I'm thankful for the chance to see you like that- alive, moving, doing what you loved. Because the only thing worse than questioning your death and trying to comprehend it, is questioning your existence- yes you were really here.

The Most Horribly Untrue Cliches

2011-09-27T20:14:00.000-04:00

You will always have your memories.

First of all, no you will not. Ever hear of aging and not remembering everything from thirty years ago?

Furthermore, the reason you have only the memories, recollections of a past life, is because your spouse is dead and your old life gone in an instant. This is not a comfort. Still you do cling to them, gather them up, write them down, put them in a very safe place- because there will not be any more- because the weighty importance of them signifies the end of something- it is finished- it is done.

Time heals all wounds.

Definitely the least true cliche. Over time, one adapts as has been said numerous times before- as an amputee learns to walk on one leg. I'm not saying some kind of healing is impossible, but that time - the progression of existence- does not bring about healing.

Time takes you away. This is the secret you know instantly when you learn of the demise of your loved one. That you will forget. That you are on a train ride and the train is already speeding ahead and the landscape will change and you will have to acknowledge that you can't get off. Time is a kidnapper that holds you captive and let's you watch the place you left from the last car, leaning painfully over the rail, until it's completely out of view.

More importantly, integral to any kind of healing in this kind of loss- is something else- justice. The sense of wrongfulness and injustice- this does not fade or even evolve with the changing landscape.

The Most Horribly True Cliches

2011-09-26T21:18:00.000-04:00

Home is Where the Heart Is

It is. The widow is struck homeless. The house- painting my own walls, the American dream- none of it matters. The home you have lived in suddenly looks unfamiliar. Oates says that's because it is drained of meaning like colors faded by the sun. The security, comfort, familial quality of a home- vanishes. It is all just stuff- materials- rug fibers, plaster walls, popcorn ceilings. The materialness of it all overwhelmed my senses in the early days.

You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone

You don't. And you won't, even if you give it your best effort as it is the trend in self-help these days to write gratitude lists and live in the present and slow down and enjoy the simple things. I believe this is a major, vital thread of the bittersweet root of being a human being. You don't, and you can not. In parenting you get just a short while to savor each stage before your child transforms, ever so subtly each day, until the one you'd loved seems gone completely. You look intently at their face for the eyes of your baby that smiled at you. Are they still there? Did you miss it? Were you not appreciate enough because you were so tired or so nervous. And then while you are thinking that thought, you have missed the next stage for they are already someone else.

With a spouse, it isn't the rapid development as in a child, but it is the closeness- the intimacy that sometimes makes it harder to see and value the way one ought. Here is yet another of the paradoxes of life and loss.

Another great line I'll borrow from JCO:
"and though I am sure that Susan understands how her energy, her confidence, her good humor and her zest for work are inextricably bound up with her husband and her marriage, I think that she can't quite realize the degree to which this is so. And it is good for Susan, and for other non-widow-women friends, that they can't know.

Love Never Dies

It doesn't. But the relationship does, I soberly realize. It cannot continue over this great of a divide. You go on loving- but you are loving the memory of a human being- it does not have the beautiful back and forth growth of a living relationship, like soil and green veins. This love is fixed, like granite.

Easier

2011-09-26T20:46:00.002-04:00

I am still rounding the bend, but I can feel it. There is an end to this writing approaching. Every writer sees the end of their project when they are only at the beginning and perhaps this is why I wrote as well. The abrupt truncation of our family has no end- but these words will. Maybe there is some solace in that.

Someone I've met only once at church but knows my situation through a mutual acquaintance asks me in the elevator yesterday, "But it's getting easier right?" "Well, no I wouldn't say 'easier.' I definitely wouldn't choose that word. Different...it changes and evolves."

Don't ever ask someone if it's getting "easier."

These days I think I am hungry and I'll go get myself something sweet or savory as a treat in the kitchen. But then when I get there, nothing is appealing. Especially chocolate- something I used to relish. Instead, I am perpetually thirsty. For iced coffee, iced tea, lemonade, any drink with flavor really. Perpetually thirsty.

The other day something caused me to utter a few words (which I now sadly already forgot) that I realized I hadn't uttered since I'd said them to you. You see, when you lose a spouse, you lose an entire vernacular. Think of all of the things you speak to your spouse that you don't say to anyone else.

In a kids clothing magazine I see a t-shirt with the words "I MISS U" in big letters. I seriously ponder wearing something like this for quite a while. I say these words aloud all of the time, sometimes nonchalantly, sometimes whispered, sometimes crying. I might as well wear it.

No, I am not thinking clearly lately.

There is the dejavu that I've been having so much lately. Nothing extraordinary will happen and suddenly I'll have the memory that I have dreamt this scene before and even told you about it- was it in our first Brooklyn apartment maybe? "I'm in an apartment with our child but I somehow know that you've died. It was horrible."

There is the feeling constantly that I'm wearing sunglasses with fingerprints all over them and just can't see reality clearly.

There is the realization that I loathe anything swiss made- even swiss cheese? I almost can not let Audrey get a scooter that is designed by the Swiss for her birthday because of this. A friend asks me, "What about IKEA?" I remind her that's Swedish. It's a joke. We laugh in our email exchange, "phew...you can still love IKEA- haha."

Oates, in her memoir, mentions the Gestalt philosophy where one says to oneself, "I choose for my husband to be dead." I laugh that anyone would give this a try. I much prefer the mantra she takes up instead, something like "You have no choice. This is the way it is." This seems more helpful in living.

The only thing worse than the shock and disbelief that your husband is dead is the lack of shock and disbelief that your husband is dead. The only thing worse than the magical thinking that he might still return and reside with you again is the certainty that he will not.

I Do Not Wish to Keep

2011-09-26T20:32:00.000-04:00

"Are you taking suitcases as well?" I emailed the church administrator. "I have a nice one that I do not wish to keep."

Last week I dropped off your suitcase at a church that was collecting donations. This is the suitcase I searched around for when you first got your "dream gig." It was the second suitcase I purchased. I purchased another, more expensive one at a luggage store at first and then found this one at TJ Maxx. I can still remember carrying Audrey and lugging the first suitcase back into the store to return it. I then packed up this one with every travel necessity including lots of things you didn't need and never used- small packages of paper towels, a blow up pillow for the plane, ear plugs, vitamin C cough drops, etc. and placed a photo of Audrey wearing a onesie that said "My Dad Rocks," on top of it. It was your Father's Day gift. Your first Father's Day. You would have just one more just a few weeks before your death. It is the suitcase I saw you packing up the night before you left us for the last time. The very one I saw you place your bathing suit into and thought, "Why are you taking a bathing suit? Are you going on vacation while I'm here alone with a baby?" but then, "No, I won't say it. He'll get mad. He'll throw it out and say, 'There, happy!'" No, I'm not happy. It's the same suitcase with the lock that we both said should have the same code simultaneously- our daughter's birthdate. It's the same suitcase that was all taped up and addressed to the funeral director when it came back along with your body. But they didn't pick it up so they had to go back and get it along with your electric cello after you were buried. "I deal with this airline all the time, and now they're going to charge me more for this? I'm going to have to charge you for another trip," the funeral director had told me. "Fine. That's fine."

I've looked at this suitcase for months up in our closet and it made me sick. I'd ripped off all of the tape but it'd left the impression of the words in the glue still stuck on it, "Air Transit" over and over. I'd thought about bringing it to our garbage room and just letting one of the workers take it or throw it out. A friend suggested selling it on Craigs List so I could at least get something for it. "No, I couldn't deal with showing it to people. I just want to get rid of it." So when the church where Audrey's preschool is located sent a flyer about their donation collection, I knew it'd be nice to get rid of the suitcase before her birthday.

I took a photo of it first. Then I wheeled it outside of our apartment, realizing that the last time it had taken this same journey down our hall, you were holding this handle, setting off on your final trip. It's raining and when we get there, I pull up next to the gym that is already full of donations and wheel in the suitcase after everything else I've brought- including a few bags of your clothes. These are mostly dress shirts that have no special memory. And also the black t-shirts I'd bought you for the tour. I get rid of all of these. As I quickly wheel in the suitcase and Audrey waits in the car, a woman walking around busily says, "Oh great, thank you so much." I ask her where the donations are going, "if you don't mind my asking," and she tells me they have contacted social services and the most needy families will get to come through and choose what they need. I am glad I didn't throw it in the garbage, and glad to get back in the car, and drive away.

Near-Death Experience

2011-09-26T20:12:00.000-04:00

In a book I managed to get half-way through before it's due date- mostly because for some reason I keep taking out five or six books and trying to read them at once- entitled, "Consciousness Beyond Life," near-death experience findings, particularly in a Dutch study, are cited and examined. This is not the first book I've read on the subject since your death. The accounts given of patients who have no brain function explaining how they watched the whole scene from someplace up on the ceiling, are fascinating if nothing else. Little children who have them sometimes return to tell of a brother or sister that greeted them that their parents had never told them they had. People who have been completely blind their entire lives return to describe the sights in the room or the room next door while they were supposedly dead from cardiac arrest.

This time what I found interesting was a chapter entitled "Changed by a Near-Death Experience." The author cites similar, lasting changes in those who have had the experience as further evidence of its validity.

What are these changes? The person has greater self-acceptance and a changed self-image, and is less dependent on approval from others. There is a hunger for knowledge in theology or philosophical issues. He or she is more compassionate, forgiving, and less critical. They appreciate the simple things in life and have a greater sense of purpose/mission. They no longer fear death because "death turned out to be not dead." While their religious affiliation declines, their religious sentiment and spirituality increases. There are even physical changes like hypersensitivity to light and sound. One NDE'r writes, "After my NDE I felt like a child learning to walk. The world around me overwhelmed me. I couldn't find my place in the world. For months I couldn't bear light and noise, TV and radio, not even music, which I used to love.

Finally, there is something called "enhanced intuitive sensitivity." This can mean you are "inundated with information from or via another dimension," or have a "very acute sense of the emotions of others," or "feel like you can look right through people."

A part of this includes something called synchronicity. The best way to describe it is the example they give: "Most of us have had the odd sensation of thinking about somebody only to find that when the phone rings it is the person we were thinking of. " It is "the not strictly causal, or seemingly accidental, concurrence of events."

I conclude that I myself have had a near-death experience. Understandably, when a loved one dies, one will think about life and death and perhaps become more spiritually-oriented or awakened. But I believe that when you lose a spouse- the person you were one with- you come as close to death as you possibly can- while being alive. Your out of body experience is constant in those early weeks. You see your body, not from the ceiling of a hospital room, but from the long aisle that takes you up the casket where your spouse- part of you- lies. Yes, you do see right through people suddenly. I can remember a friend of mine telling me I'd answered for her thoughts in her mind she'd yet to speak throughout our conversations and she'd thought to herself, "How long will she be like this?" Yes, the world was overwhelming and foreign- a complete sensory overload. No, I no longer fear death.

The widow is the body laying brain dead or in cardiac arrest on the table while they watch the whole horrific scene from somewhere near the ceiling- hovering in the air- bodiless. There are no visions of tunnels or bright lights or dead relatives or Mary or Jesus coming to greet you. There is just the dreaded feel of your love's hand slipping out of yours and into an unreachable world.

Come and Gone

2011-09-26T19:48:00.000-04:00

Audrey's birthday and Princess and the Pea party has come and gone. I sent you an invitation to the party via email.

Mostly I threw myself into it creatively. It was an outlet. I realized that it wasn't a sad occasion the way her birthday party felt a year ago. Sorrow was a guest at that one. I felt it even as we marched around our apartment with instruments following the singer I'd hired. I saw it in my face in the photos afterwards...my smiling, shocked, sad, face.

Instead of sorrow, I imagined your role there throughout the day this year. Instead of my dad, you would've run out to Whole Foods to get the cupcakes and to Dunkin Donuts to get the coffee for the grownups. You would've called instead of him asking me about the flavors the way you always called from the store with questions. It usually started, "OK, so..." I would answer the phone simply, "Yes..." You would've washed dishes and vacuumed the crumbs up afterwards. You would've made much fun of the Cinderella I hired to stop by for a surprise visit. I try to imagine the funny things you would've said. But I can't. Because that's the problem with someone being dead. Anything you imagine is from you. Not them.

At night I hear Audrey in her bed by herself talking - as she constantly does- (and is in fact right now) "Dear God- please let me have another dream from appa. And I pray appa has a good birthday party like I did because everyone has birthdays."

You are three years old. Another birthday, the second of many, has come and gone.

Happy Birthday Audrey

2011-09-19T20:51:00.002-04:00

It is Happening. Just as I knew it would the moment I heard the words. Because those words are pregnant with years and years of loss. "Dan is dead."

We are living and aging through the years without you. Audrey's third birthday is tomorrow. Even though it's only her second birthday without you, tomorrow she will have had more without you than with you- well, if you don't count her actual day of birth- the day we welcomed her into the world together- as a couple- the day we became a new family.

There is still no continuity between that world and this life. I have searched for it and given up. I tell myself to embrace this world- whatever it is. I am a mother. I am a woman. I live in the year of 2011 on this planet. I try to will myself to just enjoy this life as a separate, totally different life than the other one. But I fail at this.

Three years- three years- that's all it has been since I lived in a Brooklyn apartment and went into labor with you, my husband, tears and nervousness about what was to come in your eyes at the kitchen table, "I love you..." Three years. I live in a different state. I have a three year old. (This one makes sense) I am a widow.

Certainly one of the toughest things about the last fifteen months of grieving is that we had no set routine to fall back to after we buried you. I had no job- no career even. Audrey wasn't in school or daycare. It was waking up each morning trying to come up with a plan. There were lots of days with visitors; there were many trips to the library, Target, and walks along the Hudson. But I felt almost like I was running from being in the house every day. I had to get out. "It's a beautiful day," I'd hear. "I must take my child out," I'd think. And so I did.

Because of you my dear sweet girl, the first year of my widowhood included raspberry picking and apple picking, and getting up at 5 am to go see the Macy's Thankgiving Parade from the upper west side. It included keening in showers and sobbing late at night, but it also included birthday parties with pizza, cake, and your head in a pointy pink party hat. It included a trip to Virginia and Arizona and Maine- more crying late at night this time in strange beds in hotels or the homes of friends, but also your first train ride, teaching you the word cacti, and visiting a lighthouse.

Now it feels like the gateway to your life Audrey. You are turning three- you started preschool last week. No more filling up fourteen hour days with things to do when I felt I could barely get out of bed, no more self-imposed structure- dragging myself out of bed each day to do play dough and painting and cry while I walk behind the stroller. Now there is a structure again- the world reminding me it is still there and will kick me along. I am happy for the kick as it feels much better than dragging.

My dear Audrey- thank you though- for giving me a reason to get up each day- for giving me a year littered with happier things- and mostly filled with you. I want you to know how grateful I am and how much your father loves you too. You may forget every single detail about him- you may not remember his voice or the color of his eyes or the way the scruff on his chin felt against your head or fingers, but you will know this - that he loved and loves you still. That I am finding is really the same story that the Bible tells- the Old Testament is full of all the stories and rituals- like the ones I tried so hard to do with you in the early days- but the New - the New Testament, reminds me so much of what I hope you'll know of your dad- just that he loved you and would've given his life for you. It's all important- but if the first part is just too complicated and hard to remember- the Old- then just hold onto the new- the love that overcomes death itself.

I will go now and wrap little presents for a birthday "treasure hunt" from the birthday fairy which, I have made clear, is me, lest I get no credit for Christmas or birthdays. I will write her a card and put together little goodie bags for the children in her class. I will wonder if my joy, even in my child's birthday, can ever be complete again- not laced with such tremendous grief. I wonder what this feels like, to celebrate your child's birthday without the sadness of all that is missing. If it is possible, and it seems that it should be- in this grieving world exploding with paradox- with joy incomplete, and at the same time, with complete joy- I will celebrate our daughter tomorrow. Because she deserves nothing less.

Disappearance

2011-09-18T21:58:00.001-04:00

Yesterday Audrey and I bought big bins for your clothes. She chose the color orange, which in retrospect, I've been a bit unhappy with since it's more like a neon orange and the black handles make me think of Halloween- but I just didn't want a dark, unhappy color for your clothing. I thought it'd look too foreboding and sad every time I glanced up at it in the closet. Now it will look bright and Halloweeny. Oh well.

After Audrey was asleep, I took your shirts and suits and pants out of our closet one by one, smelling each one. It is amazing that your clothes can still smell so strongly of you, or do I have some kind of sense for them that others would not have? I neatly fold up your shirts, picturing you in each one for some event, or freshly showered, buttoning up your shirt, flinging your wet hair behind your face. After a short reprieve, I tackle your dresser drawers. I try to tell myself that I'm just decluttering- getting rid of a few things of yours as I would have every fall, but I also sense a clearing in my processing - that no, you are really not going to come home and wear these clothes. I also try to tell myself that these are just clothes- that you made them so- but still, I will keep them in these bins in our closet and take them with me when I move. I had posted a brief summary of my Saturday night events on one of the widow boards on Facebook and was imagining these widows, who are mostly further along than I am, responding with support and understanding- but what I found was that most of them have not done this yet. "I'm at two years- I need to think about doing this." "I'm at 23 months- I just can't bring myself to do that." I worry then that I am having too easy of a time doing this horrid thing- I feel uneasy- that you might suddenly come in and ask me what I'm doing with all of your clothes...but mostly- I need the room. My own clothes have been strewn on a chair for the whole year and I'm tired of it. That's been the summation of my grief process I suppose- going at my own pace, waiting...and waiting...until I can't stand it anymore- and finally, it's a relief to do it- change my bedsheet, put away the quilt, wash your towel, take your clothes out of the laundry bin, and now- pack up your wardrobe.

I leave a few things for myself in an otherwise empty drawer- I can wear most of your socks, a few t-shirts, and your Korean soccer jersey.

The other day Audrey was looking for some glitter she sprinkled on her "fairy house" in the flower box. "The glitter that I put here died," she tells me. After confirming her word choice, I realize that for her, the word "die" really just means disappear. All she knows is that you went away and never came back. I wish it was just that- disappearance. But sometimes it really does feel that way. I smell your clothes; I listen to your voice notes on your iphone, and I stare at your desk in the corner and your empty cello case, and it really does seem that you have done just that. Disappeared.

Audrey turns three on Tuesday and I intentionally wanted to push forward for her sake- because she has her whole life ahead of her and should not live with her dead father's clothes still in his drawer or a mother who cannot take them out. A sort of sacrifice went on in this room last night. The incense was the smell of you- which filled the whole room by the time I was done. The act was done to the sound of empty wooden hangers hitting against one another like wind chimes or a somber Gregorian chant. It was appropriate but chilling how they went on and on.

Alexia Sine Agraphia

2011-09-18T20:37:00.000-04:00

Interestingly enough, though not surprising really since I felt led to read the Sacks book- I have found another apt metaphor in "The Mind's Eye" by Oliver Sacks similar to the previous one I posted where the woman could see everything, but recognize everything. Each essay in this book is in fact, some kind of neurological loss that requires the adaptation of the person thus affected. I suppose this is why the metaphors are relevant to grief- loss, adaptation. But the types of studies Sachs does are also quite unique and not as known as typical physical impairments like blindness or a loss of short-term or long-term memory. They are complicated, surprising, and I think what they do so well, is get at the heart of our human predicament- our helplessness and lack of knowledge about the very bodies and minds we inhabit- that are supposedly "us."

In this particular essay, a man loses his ability to read one morning. The newspaper appears to be written in Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. Books and newspapers were suddenly unintelligible to him, followed by everyday objects also appearing strange, "familiar objects like apples and oranges suddenly look [ed] strange, as unfamiliar as an exotic piece of Asian fruit. A rambutan."

The interesting part is that he could still write. It's called "alexia sine agraphia." Reading and writing- two things that should go together, but apparently do not. This man could write out a thought, but not read back what he'd just written. Another earlier similar case study shows that a man with alexia sine agraphia could also still learn new music by ear even though he could no longer read the notes.

This man's livelihood was writing, so he describes being able to write without reading like this: it "was like being told that the right leg had to be amputated but that I could keep the shoe and sock."
This sounds very familiar to me. The loss of a spouse is often described as an amputation. Except in my case, the shoes and socks I'm left with are my husband's- in my closet and in our dresser.

Another paragraph that seemed a perfect metaphor for the newly bereaved was this one, describing this man's return home from rehab three months after his stroke:

"The house looked strange and familiar at the same time....It was as though a movie set had been assembled from sketches of the real house and its rooms."

I feel hopeful though, after reading these accounts because in each study described, the recipient of the loss manages to adapt and overcome it. The men described in this essay learn to "read" audio books. Another learns to read by acting out the writing of each word with his finger in the air. The main study, the writer, goes on to write painfully a novel about the very illness he had incurred.

My heart feels light while I read about the separation of the seemingly inseparable - writing and reading. Writing without reading. Living without you living. But in each case here, the sufferer does adapt and go on living, usually with other senses heightened. I feel this way too- although the sense that is most heightened is not one of the five but another. I close the book inspired- finger in the air tracing letters, learning music by ear- as you did so well- relearning
how
to
live.

Inhibitory Control

2011-09-13T20:27:00.000-04:00

Living in grief, if it is anything, is sheer exhaustion.

It is doing something- living- that every cell in your body screams against. Not because you are suicidal, but just because you do not feel alive. It is something you must convince yourself to do on a conscious level- "Yes, I am alive. I am here. I have to get up out of bed and live today." People who are not grieving, except for perhaps the severely depressed, do not have to have this thought consciously.

I found a perfect description for why it is so tiring in a book I've been reading about the seven most important skills for children to learn called "Mind in the Making." Skill number one is focus and self-control. The fourth point in the chapter is called "Inhibitory Control." It reads:

"Think about your day so far and tally up the times you were on automatic pilot- when you didn't really have to think or make tough decisions about what you were doing, such as getting up, getting dressed, brushing your teeth, or getting your favorite food for breakfast. These tasks didn't require much conscious focus or self-control; you just did them."

Not so for the griever. Every act- getting up, getting dressed, eating, takes deliberate effort and focus. The limbic part of the brain is always on overdrive and there is little room for anything else.

It goes on:

"Now think about the times that were just the opposite- where you had to make a real effort to stick with the task and be intentional about what you wanted to achieve. These times demanded what is called inhibitory control- or what some researchers, such as Mary Rothbart of the University of Oregon, refer to as effortful control."

Yes, effortful control. The examples given: you inhibit when you pay attention to your child even though a conversation with a friend is distracting you; you inhibit your strong inclination to give up after a failure; you inhibit your behavior and think before you act; you continue doing something even though you're bored or otherwise uninterested.

Effortful control. When your'e grieving, it requires this kind of control almost 24/7. Yes, not only paying attention to your child when you're upset about a conversation with a friend, but singing with her, reading with her, laughing with her, and caring for her when inside you are trying to process the fact that her eyes look just like her father's and he is now dead? Yes, not only not giving up after a failure, but not giving up when you feel as though you are done. Yes, filtering your actions and words- inhibiting the desire to scream or cry in public. And yes, continuing to do something- which in this case is live- even though everything in you calls to the contrary.

Effortful control. I would also liken it to trying to walk a straight line to prove you are sober when you are obviously quite drunk. That is the kind of effort it takes each day. For me personally, I've noticed the three toughest times- the ones that feel like I am climbing a mountain are: 1) getting up out of bed in the morning 2) getting out of my chair at the table after we eat a meal so I can clean up. 3) Getting out of the car after we pull into our parking lot. Sometimes Audrey asks me, "Mommy, why are we sitting here?" "Mommy just needs a minute..."

And the most challenging task requiring the highest level of inhibitory control that I face: standing at your grave and believing that you are not there. When all evidence is against it- that you are not lost, but found. That for you, it is not the end, but the beginning.

"This is the end-- but for me the beginning -- of life."
Last recorded words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer to a friend right before being hanged by the Nazis for a plot to kill Hitler.

Five Years

2011-09-11T20:39:00.000-04:00

I just discovered a blog I kept very infrequently at your request back in 2006. I wrote this on the five year anniversary of September 11th:

it's important to remember today, not only for those who were lost, but for those are still living. we go about our lives, feeling like we've got all the time in the world. but on sept. 11th, the stark, raw, nature of our mortality and smallness, cut into our world. i want to carry that rawness with me in many ways, so i don't forget to love, and live. and so i don't forget that

"Man is a mere phantom as he goes to and fro: He bustles about, but only in vain; he heaps up wealth, not knowing who will get it." psalm 39.6

Reading something I wrote just five years ago is like reading my journal from eighth grade. That is how mature and profound my pre-widow thoughts and faith now appear to me. I had to "try" to feel the rawness, feel our phantomness...now...I do not.

Ten Years

2011-09-11T20:25:00.004-04:00

On September 11, 2001...I opened my eyes half asleep to see the Twin Towers on my left...I was riding the bus into Port Authority and seeing them was my signal that I was almost there. At Port Authority, I looked at the digital clock as I walked briskly in the crowd. 8:45 am. Arriving at work at the Random House building in the middle of Times Square, a coworker had a live picture of the first tower hit on her computer. "It seems like it was a commercial plane." That's strange, we all thought. Still, my co-worker and I go downstairs to get our morning bagel in the cafeteria. By the time we come back upstairs, the second plane has hit. It is apparent.

My friend and I walk across town to your building Dan- you were working at CBS then in the BMW building all the way on the west side. From there, you can see the smoke downtown from your window. The phones are not working. Four of us, you, me, and your friend and mine, head outside into the surreal streets on this perfectly clear day. We decide to head uptown to your apartment on 125th Street and we catch a cab together after a long time waiting. Subways and buses are not running.

Interestingly enough, in the memorial letter about you my old coworker and friend still today writes me after you die, she remembers that day. She remembers how we found someone's blackberry left behind in the back seat of the cab. How we decide we should take it and try to find their number and return it. The cabbie, a crazy one, hears us talking and starts screaming that she has to return it and to hand it over. We know by her tone that she is not planning on returning it. That day, you see, like any day, though it is full of heroes, did not bring out the best in everyone. You put up a fight- even then, on that insane day- wanting to return it to the proper owner - wanting justice to be done on both grand and small scales. That was always so important to you. The result: after only a few blocks in traffic- we are kicked out of the cab. You are furious. I am angry with you for what I felt like was provocation on your part and now here we are- the four of us- still needing a ride uptown.

Funny, I don't remember how we got up to your place from there. (We did). But my friend still remembers that incident and writes in the letter- that she never forgot how you tried to stand up for what was right- and that it was you who made her feel safe and protected on that day.

I never thought that now, ten years later, you would be dead. I never expected I would be friends with a few of those newly widowed- the 9/11 widows. But today has felt, I realize, familiar- the drawing near of an anniversary of sorrow. That day was just as surreal as the event of your own death. Except that, untouched by the event ourselves- it could remain just that- surreal. It was other people jumping from those buildings- other women widowed- other children orphaned. We were together. The thing that couldn't possibly happen- happened- but ...not to us...not really. Yes, we were there, in that city - but we were alive- together. For those for whom that tragic event did not remain surreal- but became painfully, wretchedly real- for those who did not have the luxury of watching the news replay the horrific scenes together but instead were planning funerals alone without bodies, to them I extend my deepest sympathy.

1 Samuel 2.8 "He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap..."

Tasks at Fourteen Months

2011-09-10T21:09:00.001-04:00

This was a long week. It was fourteen months on Tuesday- and you died on Tuesday the sixth. Unconsciously I think I sensed this day and date pairing up to tackle me, and they did.

On Thursday, I impulsively find myself starting to clean our closet. I have not used this closet except to throw things into it until it was so crammed, I could barely peer into what is supposed to be a walk in closet. I still have to buy bins to put your clothes in, but I carefully remove your gloves/hats from our joint bin and put them in their own bag. I find your shoes strewn on the floor. I place them also in a bag up on shelf. First I try one on and stand the way you sometimes did with the heel of one off the floor while you were on the phone or talking to someone and about to leave a room. Then I notice in the light, the complete imprint of your foot on a black flip flop. There it is. I think for a strange deranged widow moment of how I could trace it or make a mold of it, etc.

Then I move all of your clothes to the right side behind the door and move mine to the side yours were on. It is a relief now to see my own clothes rather than yours when I walk by the closet.

Later that day, a friend and I go to the cemetery. I have felt it calling me and wanted to tell you that Audrey is starting preschool and about to turn three. Not that I believe you're there. I bring bright green flowers and one breaks off in the car so I have it beside me now on your pillow. I like knowing that the rest of the bouquet is on the top of your headstone. At the cemetery, I cry a lot. I kneel on the ground even though I see a lot of small bugs in the grass that has now grown over the dirt. I am wondering what the protocol is, if I need to weed, if I should plant flowers. I eye the surrounding stones for "ideas," and can't help noticing most of their birth dates are in the early 1900's. The rain had let up and the view of the NYC skyline is clear from your hill. The stones we left there on the one year are all still there. The river rocks I had painted with Audrey to say "We love you," are just black now. The paint washed away in the storm. I lift one and see a little paint on the top of the stone.

My friend is walking around the cemetery nearby. She finds it peaceful she says. No more stress, worries, just peace. I tell her that I do not find it that way and that I hoped the visit would be more cathartic but I just can't process that Dan is under there. "What do you say?" she asks. "I don't know, I don't know what to say, it always comes out wrong and awkward." "So...Audrey's starting preschool...wish you were here." Something like that. I think it's difficult because I don't come here that often and it's in a strange place that neither of us had any connection to prior to your burial there. Prior to the purchase of "our plots." I drive us home.

Then that night, it's back to school night at Audrey's new school. I sit in the in the parking lot when I arrive watching mothers and fathers get out of their cars. I know that if you were alive, we would've gotten a babysitter and you would've come. You would've make small talk and jokes with her teacher, I think later after I go inside. That's just how you were. You missed only one of my doctor's appointments when I was pregnant and that was because of your job.

Inside I chat with the director and a few parents I've already met. I am surprised by my strength. I get a cup of coffee and a rugelach. Then I sit down in the gym on a folding chair next to a couple from our old church. I secretly hope they don't mind. While the director and chairs speak up front, I notice the husband and wife beside me do this little trade off twice- he motions his hand and she instinctively takes the cup he was holding and hands him the folder with the information. Later, they switch back. Without a word. Oh yeah, I think. That's how it was. And I imagine you there next to me right then. I use every faculty I have and can see you holding your cup of coffee and with your leg crossed. I am the crazy one, taking notes, listening intently, whispering my neurotic thoughts to you while you roll your eyes or smile. Now I am not like that, I realize. I am not that person anymore. Instead, I am choked up as they talk about what a special, momentous time this is for our child- I almost burst out crying loudly, uncontrollably. Instead, I am composed, listening, my hands clasping the blue folder with a sticker with Cho, Audrey, on it.

Afterwards, we go to the individual classrooms to hear from the teachers. After the teacher speaks, before I leave, I am asking her about the tissue boxes she has assigned me to bring in. (This is a coop school and parents contribute both time and supplies). "Just two boxes- I'll bring them the first day?" I am asking so serenely.

Then I am in my car. The car, any widow knows, is the place of wailing, and trying to see through a mess of tears and snot. I am screaming until I am hoarse as I drive away, "Cooome baaacckkk here riiiight nooooow!" Then I am calm again. This must be the derangement Oates talks about so much in the memoir I am still working on.

Then I am calm again.

The Things I Tell Myself

2011-09-10T20:39:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I tell myself things- I try to comfort myself.

Everyone dies. Dan would have died anyway. Most of my friends will experience the loss of their spouse- just not for a long time.

Dan lived his dream the last year of his life. He traveled the whole world playing his music and met all of his favorite musicians. He accomplished what he set out to do in a short period of time. Maybe that's why he always had that sense of urgency about it.

Upon seeing an aged person: Dan didn't have to age and grow old. He would've hated that. I'm glad he didn't have to experience the degradation of aging.

Drowning is one of the better ways to die. His death was so dramatic, it's almost as if God just took him and left us his body. (This is what I suggested to his parents and family when they came to my house a few days after he died- they concurred)

I am lucky to have been loved. There are many women who are still single and in their forties- and no one has ever loved them the way I was loved. I should be grateful for the passionate and beautiful romance we had.

Sometimes when we go to events - like Audrey's first ballet class this morning- and a birthday party at the Little Gym this afternoon- I can pretend you're with us because I can hear what you might have said and imagine you there quite well. Driving home I tell myself that if I just imagine that, it's almost as good as you being there.

Life is not that long, I tell myself, and at this age, it flies by so quickly- before I know it, I'll be dead too. We are all mortal, after all.

None of these thoughts comfort me. Though I try. Because:

Yes, most people will experience the loss of a spouse, but not before they watch their children grow up together, and welcome their grandchildren into the world. I am really sad this won't be the case for us and don't understand why.

True, Dan lived his dream- but really he was just on the cusp of a burgeoning career. The connections he was making was setting him up for a brilliant career in music. He would've played sessions for his favorite artists; he would've written more music- music that was still inside him and is now lost to our ears.

No, he didn't have to age...but growing old together is certainly better than growing old alone. This is what marriage is about.

Is there any "good" way to die? Any "pleasant" means to your end?

Sure I'm thankful for the love I was given. And that is why it hurts like hell to have lost it.

No, it is not the same as having you there to imagine what you "might have" said or done. And when I do hear you, you're still talking to Audrey in a baby voice. Will that be the case when she's thirteen? No, this isn't helpful.

Yes, the seasons and years do seem to go quickly. But in my heart I fear I have a very, long journey ahead.

Everybody Knows

2011-09-09T21:38:00.001-04:00

I read a very good apologetic by a British theologian a few weeks ago. It was full of clever, convincing arguments and trains of thoughts, but one sentence in the book struck me more than any other. A very simple sentence:

"Everybody knows that love is the greatest thing in the world."

The context of the statement is that this is one of the ways, in a small list, that man differs from animals- his social relationships- "human beings hunger for the authentic relationships of love. Love is not just a disturbance in the endocrine glands!" John Stott writes.

I am aware that there are physiological and psychological aspects to love. But if you have experienced this kind of loss and grief for someone you love, you will understand that it is very difficult to believe that all of this is simply part of the physical makeup of my creaturely body.

And I think as I read the above statement, "Of course, of course everyone knows that." This is what every archetype and fairy tale reveals. This hunger to be loved and to be known. It's tempting to read the statement and shrug it off as sentimental, but it is much more profound than that. The love spoken of here is not lust or romance, or the hormones of "falling in love." It is love in the truest, purest sense- putting another above yourself- being willing to suffer for another. At their root, humans are selfish and self-absorbed. Despite what humanists want to believe about the goodness of human beings, any mother whose had to teach her child how to share can recognize that sharing and putting others first is certainly not inborn. It must be taught. So, where does this love we all seek come from? Because this love stands out so much from any other offering in life- it seems to be a clue, a remnant, of the creator.

And I ask myself, if my relationship was just another wheel in the mechanism of our evolving creatureliness- and if I was attracted to my husband to procreate, then why, oh why, do I find myself adoring the shape of his shoe after it had taken on the shape of his foot? Why, oh why is the imprint of his handwriting to me loveliness itself? Why then do I search the figures on the streets for one whose walk resembles yours, dragging your feet just a little, pointing the toes in ever so slightly- just so I can pretend for one moment... What would I have to gain from these subtleties? Anyone who has grieved knows that what they knew of their love before was only like the tip of an iceberg showing; only upon striking it, does one uncover its immensity, power, and divinity.

Everybody knows that love is the greatest thing in the world.

"...and to know this love that surpasses all knowledge..." eph. 3.19
This must be a whole other kind of knowing.

Moments

2011-09-09T21:04:00.000-04:00

Every day I am absolutely amazed at how infiltrated you are into my consciousness. I am tempted sometimes to try to capture it- by using a notepad or the recorder on my iphone- the stream of consciousness way that everything I see or touch leads to you. The other day I'd wished I'd been doing it when I just opened a dresser drawer to find clothes to wear. It went something like this: grey pants- the grey pants- I thought those went really well with a black silk top at Ann Taylor loft- the pants were on sale, the shirt wasn't- I bought them both. I came home and tried on the outfit for you as I often did. I ended up wearing that black silk shirt to your wake. Shirt- now I need a shirt. There's the white cotton t-shirt with little bows you brought me back from Japan a couple of months before- I said it looked really Japanese and I was happy with it. There's my "Brooklyn" hoodie purchased on 7th avenue. You wanted to get it for me- the brown DKNY short sleeved hoodie we saw in Century 21 in downtown Brooklyn and you said, "This is your style," - the grey and brown striped shirt from Anthropologie that you picked out when we were living out my parents after I'd just had Audrey and I was wearing the same black maternity pants and oversized sweatshirt of yours for a month. "I want to buy you this." "I have good taste right?" you said.

The problem with trying to capture the way these distinct memories come at you all day on top of the fact that you're constantly aware that you're very, very sad- is that they happen very, very quickly The paragraph above that takes a reader thirty seconds to read played in thoughts in about two. Trying to capture the stream of consciousness of grief and loss got me thinking about thinking altogether. Am I the only one amazed that my thoughts seem to come and come before I've thought of thinking them? I don't have to put any effort into putting a thought into words and running it through my head to hear it. They are there, instantly. Without a thought, we have thoughts. So it is with grief thoughts.

Just one simple act of opening a drawer and it is as if I am walking through a sticky invisible web that we spun together of our lives and ourselves. By the time I close the drawer, "Mommy's just going to get dressed," I'm live prey for the grief monster who walks this web.

But also, besides the web of connections and memories, there are the moments that stay with me. A moment before you left on one of the trips where you played a beautiful song I didn't know on a CD and danced with me on Audrey's play mat while she crawled or walked around us. I was shy and resentful you were leaving...but I loved it. The moment when I was leaving the ER after a series of tests after giving birth when you came to get me and just held me. "I love you." "I love you too." The moment I first saw you coming towards me with that guitar on your back, "Julia?"

These moments come to me at least seemingly with no prompt or symbol. They do not come in a flood or a torrent. They come slowly and sit with me, like a companion beside me while I grieve. I close my eyes and believe, momentarily, in time travel.

Beauty cont.

2011-09-04T20:37:00.000-04:00

The day after the hurricane, on our way back from the library and playground, the skies in our neighborhood were strikingly beautiful. Every single cloud in the sky was a weightless wisp. I have never seen a sky like this in my life. In the clouds, I saw a beauty born of surrender to the winds and torrents of the storm.

Intermission

2011-09-04T20:30:00.000-04:00

There is no intermission when you're grieving, but I wish to implement a kind of break anyway. I want to take a moment and do something that feels really strange and almost perverse: be thankful.

You were always thankful Dan. You told me that one day at a retreat in high school, I think it was high school, you realized you just didn't want to complain anymore- and then you really didn't- rarely. Of course, you were human. But I, the perfectionist, the critical one, found a lot more to complain about. I'm sorry you had to hear that so much.

What I am thinking about today are not just random things I am thankful for, but underneath them all is the fact that- yes, this actually could be worse. No, you could not be any more dead, which is the worst, but- at the same time, struggling financially, or being completely without friends and family, would certainly add an even more unlivable quality to the life I now must live. I am thankful for:

a year of free grief counseling.
financial provisions that enable me to stay home with Audrey for at least one more year. And that I am not destitute like many people, widows or other, are.
help from a friend to get Audrey on state health insurance.
my lease was renewed six more months so I didn't have to move before I felt ready.
I recently received a giant box of beautiful hand me down clothes for Audrey from a friend's sister.
Audrey is potty-trained for a few months now and sleeping well in her big girl bed.
She is bright and is already articulating her grief so that she will have less work to do later on.
I recently found an art therapy program that starts as young as three years old and the fee per session is small.
I am very pleased so far with her preschool and we also received some scholarship there.
I have two loving parents who adore my child.

That are many more, different kinds of things I could be thankful for right now, but I think I'll stop there. This is an awkward post to write- it does not flow naturally.

These gratitude notes are just crumbs in the giant crater in my life now, but they are important nonetheless because this is my life now and I have to still live it. One of my favorite "grief analogies," described the loss as a giant tree stump in the ground- what remained of a beautiful, fallen tree. A grieving person cannot remove the stump, but what they can do is start to plant small flowers around it. These notes of gratitude are like that, but instead of being planted, they've grown up on their own- like wildflowers around the remains of my life.

Tired

2011-09-03T20:19:00.001-04:00

I am tired of talking theology with a three-year old at dinner. "I wish appa could've stayed here," she says. "I know, me too." Tired of analyzing her every word and deed, looking for ways to help her deal with her own, apparent pain. Tired of each picture she colors meaning something about her grief- "That's appa and me, and that's you and that's our house we're peeking out of," instead of just being a picture my adorable three-year old drew. A drawing I could hang up and enjoy just for what it is.

I am tired of hearing about her imaginary friend whom I might have found charming if her father hadn't died, but now I constantly worry is an expression of grief and loneliness, a placeholder for a missing family member, or a substitute for the lack of warmth and joy that I bring to our home as a grieving woman.

I am tired of feeling guilt and "already-regret," my own term for it, for the future when I realize how much I missed out on my child's most precious years.

But I am tired also of the fact that it really isn't in my will or choice at this point when I'm "done" grieving. I have tried making this "choice" before. I have rallied, psyched myself up, given myself the pep-talks. It has not worked. I push forward.

I am tired of envying the other widows I know who were married longer. Twenty years? He was so young- 47? I am tired of envying their stories because I know they are just as painful and raw, but I still feel that twinge of jealousy for the time they had. And when I read Joyce Carol Oats' complaint that her husband was just far too young to die- he was 77. I chuckle when I read this. I suppose no wife will ever say it was the right time for her husband to die, would she.

I am tired of being angry with you- when I am, instead of telling you aloud that "You died," i tell you that "you got yourself killed." I am tired of cursing constantly when I am alone.

I am tired of the visions I conjure up of you in the apartment. Tired of laying on Audrey's bed with her because she wants me to sit there for a while, and seeing you turn the corner to our room outside her door, and give me that silent wave and expression you gave when you came home and she was asleep or I was putting her to sleep. "Hi! I'm being quiet!" it said. And then I knew when she was asleep, I'd open our bedroom door and find you there. Tonight tears drop silently while Audrey puts her legs up on my body, because I imagine you there. And I imagine what it would feel like to see you and hold you. "Go to sleep now, mommy has to go now..."

I am tired of hearing what every widow hears, how amazing and strong I am, when I am not. When most days I am alone, crying, trying to understand that this reality is as real, if not more so, than the one I was living before.

I am tired of staying up late, staring at the computer screen. Tired of "family weekends" with no plans, tired of food tasting insipid, and tired of puzzling and searching, reading and writing out the pain- the story.

Today I read some beautiful thoughts on humans and the need to tell stories by fiction writer Sue Monk Kidd. They point me to yet more reasons why we tell this story- over and over.

"Story allows me to enter the tension between memory and hope," she says.
I remember.
I hope.

"The very process of kneading the events into meaning became a ritual of nourishment. My story became bread through which God mediated grace," she writes. This has not happened for me yet. The "kneading" does not feel nourishing. Not yet. It is painful, but yes, it is, in a way- my bread.

And finally, "Through story we draw connections between the happenings of life and the lessons of God. We catch God suddenly in the thick of our days, disclosures unraveling out of the mundane. Such awareness transforms life from a series of random events to the poetic realm of a sacred tale."

No- this has not happened yet either. I am desperately trying to draw those connections. This is what I have done previously in my "old life," and it has worked well enough. In the "thick of" these days, disclosures must be slow to unravel. Or something.

Poetic realm of a sacred tale...wait for me, be patient with me; I am not there yet.

2011-08-31T21:07:00.002-04:00

Futility.

Eleven Years

2011-08-29T22:13:00.000-04:00

Today a new and terrible thought occurred to me- seems that always happens in this "predicament." I realized that in just nine years, Audrey will have known me longer than you did. And that if we both live to when we're "supposed to," she may know me for nearly fifty more years than you did. Since you and I conceived her together and were together before she was even conceived- this is a very unnatural, strange thought. "I missed you before I came out of your belly," Audrey tells me today while she's looking through albums of us long before she was born. "I missed you too," I say.

Even though we were only together for eleven years, I went from a young girl fresh out of college to a young wife and mother who had worked three or four different jobs, gone back to graduate school, and moved five or six times. One day I was struck by how much technology alone changed while we were together.

When I went to meet you on that very first day, I used a token to take the 1-9 train up to Columbia at 116th Street. There are no more tokens. There is no more 9 train.

When we met, I was using a four track to record my songs. I considered it a luxurious purchase. It used cassette tapes.

Shortly after we met, I bought my first cell phone down the street from my first job. It was a big, square clunky thing and I couldn't hear people very well on it, but I felt "cool" walking on the city streets and picking it up when it rang.

When we met, I used a search engine for the grant work I did at the time, called "metacrawler." Does that even exist anymore? Ah, it does. Metacrawl it. Doesn't have the same ring.

We wrote three or four emails to each other every day from our office jobs. We both had hotmail accounts.

Sending ecards was a novelty.

We started chatting on aol instant messenger from our respective cubes. It was your first time. I can still remember your excitement, "This is so cool! (Smiley face.)" A year after this excitement, I'd find myself with severe carpal tunnel syndrome.

It'd be years until we heard the word "blogging" and then it was xanga, on which you acquired quite an audience.

Nobody bought Mac computers.

Times Square was still grimy and had a ton of porn stores surrounding port authority instead of the large chain stores and restaurants that are there today.

The Twin Towers still stood. We took photos of ourselves at the base with our faces and the towers rising up above us. I bought a pair of earrings with you in one of the retail shops under the towers for a wedding I was attending. Earrings I have long since lost.

Agnosia

2011-08-29T21:37:00.001-04:00

This writing lately is like taking something out of a hot oven with no potholders. If I leave it in, it will burn, but while I take it out, I get burned. So, I do it as quickly as possible and cry out as it drops onto the table.

Lately there is the feeling that I am slipping. I need something solid to hold onto. Something fixed. I've been thinking of how ballerinas learn how to spot. I remember learning this technique when I took ballet as a child. When doing a turn or pirouette, you will obviously get dizzy, and you may lose your balance. But if you choose a spot on the wall ahead of you and keep your gaze fixed on that spot, returning to it each time your head whips around, you will not get dizzy- you will remain balanced.

I have not found my spot yet, though I am hoping it will be God.

What I do instead now is soak myself in ritual and routine. With Audrey starting preschool soon, our schedule will be changing a bit. I've typed up a routine for each day of the week with every detail of our day, from drinking a glass of water for me at each meal, to fifteen minutes of quiet play for her while I clean up the kitchen each night (do dishes, wipe counters, vacuum floor). It's sick really, but then it's all I've got right now to hold on to.

I read about a painter and poet named Mary Jane Q Cross who had to relearn the painting craft after she was struck with permanent tremors on her right side. Her career ended abruptly until she relearned how to paint with both of her fingers as well as prosthetic devices she invented. In her own words, she felt like "a live dead artist."

Yes, yes, I get this. Every widow does I think.

And then in the Oliver Sacks book, "The Mind's Eye," each chapter tells the story of someone who lost a vital sense but also had to adapt and find a new way to navigate the world. In the first chapter, an accomplished pianist named Lilian who, one day, just could not make sense of the music notes before her. It turned out she had a neurological disorder called agnosia in which she basically could see everything, but recognize nothing. Yes, I thought, yes, this is exactly how it is. When cards of objects were flashed at her, for example, she could sometimes tell if something was living or non-living but not identify it. She could recognize things by color or shape but not name.

So, she adapted. And this is how:

Though Lilian could scarcely recognize anything in the kitchen visually, she had organized it in such a way that mistakes, rarely, if ever, occurred, utilizing a sort of informal classification system instead of a direct perceptual gnosis. Things were categorized not by meaning but by color, by size and shape, by position, by context, by association, somewhat as an illiterate person might arrange the books in a library. Everything had its place, and she had memorized this.

This description, of a true neurological disorder, is the closest I have found since entering this world, to the disorder of the widow. To see everything- but recognize nothing.

So, I've been going about things, trying to adapt as this woman did. Because like the disorder, there is no cure for widowhood. I write out routines, morning routines- up at 6:30, make bed, potty (for Audrey), get dressed- choose from preselected outfits for the week, eat breakfast- choose from list on refrigerator; afternoon- craft time, snack time, tea time; evening routine- dinner, bath (bubble baths on Fridays), storytime at seven, sip of water, one story in bed, two songs (Jesus Loves Me and Amazing Grace).

If losing a spouse is anything, it is disorienting, dizzying even. And widow brain means you do things like chop up a bunch of strawberries for your daughter, and then head to the garbage with the cutting board and throw them all out. Then look around for them so you can give them to her. It means leaving the electric burner on sometimes after you take off what's cooking until you feel heat rising from it. It means searching for your keys every single time you come back home- even though they're always in your purse, and getting out of the shower and realizing you haven't washed yourself.

I've never had a great sense of direction. I keep thinking lately, of how when NYC was still quite new to me, I'd often be standing on a busy corner, on my cell phone, as you asked me to look around and tell you what I saw. "I see...a Wendy's and that building with the slanty curve." Then you'd tell me where I was and what train to take if I needed to. Thank you for that.

But you're gone now.

I see everything. Recognize nothing. A "live dead" woman. Looking to find a reliable hope that I can use to spot as I spin around each day. Until then, I try to create my own informal classification system. So that I can stay alive, and even thrive. So that I can navigate my way home.

What is Left

2011-08-29T21:00:00.002-04:00

I wonder how long I'll dream of you nightly. The other night you shook your head at me and told me that my taste in music was slipping. So you.

The truth is I can't really listen to music anymore. Or watch movies. Or even eat a good meal and thoroughly enjoy it. These were your things, and our things. We met because of music. We fought because of it. You died while you were away from me doing it. You were full of pop culture knowledge. We thoroughly critiqued each movie that we saw afterwards but I had a very bad memory in that I never remembered which movies I had already seen. You were in charge of telling me, "You already saw that...don't you remember?" I never enjoyed food, truly, until we were together. We introduced different kinds of foods to each other. We ordered as a duo- choosing things we both wanted to try so we could try them both. You'd never order something I didn't like also even though I'd sometimes insist, "No, please just order it!" Eating felt celebratory together. Now it just feels kind of gross and lonely.

Thus, I've found the only options left to me, are the things that I did by myself and that were thoroughly mine. Like decorating, homemaking, making to-do list after to-do list. Writing I suppose, like this, which is always a solitary occupation.

I remember how frustrated I would get when you were alive, especially when we were first married, that you didn't take an interest in some of those more domestic subjects. Then one day I had an epiphany. I pictured you actually taking an interest in those things, in a humorous way. Coming to me with ripped out pages from catalogs to tell me what new throw rug you thought would like nice in the entryway, or if you nagged me about leaving the sponge full of water (wait, you did do that- you were after all, the dishwasher), or telling me to spray the shower spray every day like I told you to. I laughed at this image and later shared it with you. I kept it with me whenever I became frustrated again, and I would think, I would not want him to be like that, so it's OK.

So, those are the things I am left with, and they aren't much, and they aren't that satisfying, and mostly- they're not really "fun." Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever have that again...fun. Watching my daughter have fun is good, but not the same.

I am missing sharing those things with you very much lately. I am envious of a couple walking hand in hand by the river, sitting across from each other in a restaurant, or even in the car next to me while we're stopped at a light. I look in the car for just a moment and sense the casual ease, the unspoken companionship, and the feeling that things will always be the way they are. I know better.

Cheers

2011-08-29T20:30:00.001-04:00

"The Widow's Handbook"

'Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.'

This is the only thing on the last page found behind the epilogue of the memoir by Joyce Carol Oates, "A Widow's Story." Haven't started it yet. (Yes, when I read a book I read all of the cover copy first, and then, the last page. Not all the time, but usually.)

I have kept myself alive. Plus a little girl who was 21 months old and is now almost three. I know other women who are keeping three, four, or even five people alive in the midst of this. Here's to them.
As my husband liked to sign his emails,
Cheers.

The Story Retold

2011-08-28T17:23:00.000-04:00

This is the story.

You were on tour with a well-known singer. It was your second time in Europe. You had gone in 2009. The day before you left, I made sure you had your teeth cleaned, we went to the park with Audrey- she rode the carousel. We rode the train together and took a family photo. Our last one. We ate BLT's I'd made that morning at Whole Foods. You and I fought on the way back about something that'd happened on the drive there. Something about driving- always a source of tension. Because I was afraid one of us might die. After a longer fight at home, I told you we'd resolve it when you got back. When you got back.

The next morning, we went to a bakery we heard was good. You got something called monkey bread. You gathered your stuff and we said goodbye. Did we hug? Tightly? I don't remember. I don't think so. "I can't take this anymore...I don't want a long, sad goodbye," I said. You said goodbye to Audrey, "Bye Auuudrey!" Did you hold her tight? Did you kiss her softly? And close your eyes for just a moment. Your long eyelashes pointing straight down. We closed the door. To you and your suitcase, the one I bought you, backpack on your back, the one I chose carefully. I cried. Wiped my eyes and went to get our lunch ready.

The sound of the door opening. "I figure I'll leave my house keys here. I won't need them." No, you won't. You didn't. "OK, bye...have a good trip."

I had a list of the schedule pinned up on the kitchen wall. I looked at it every day counting down the days with Audrey until the day I received the most atrocious phone call of my life and ripped it down and threw it in the trash.

To this day, I don't know what happened to you. I know from the guy you had swam out to meet that you repeatedly said you were cold. I wish he hadn't left you to go in by yourself. I wish you hadn't swam out there in the first place to where he was. I know you were just being obliging. Sometimes that bothered me, how you wanted to please others. How you were willing to go along. But you usually knew when to assert yourself and you did. You said you were going back while this guy went further. You never got back to the shore. What happened Dan? What happened?

I got the worst news of my life, I called your family to tell them and hear the worst sobbing I've ever heard. I, at 34 years old, planned your wake, and your funeral. I visited three cemeteries. I bought my own plot. I went through countless albums and journals trying to pick the most special things for the program. I contacted every musician I know you respected and asked them to play at your funeral. I ordered a black dress that fell below the knee with three-quarter sleeves.

Can you believe it?

You're dead.

Here's the really big news. This was all over a year ago. Audrey is now almost three years old. The other day she got a big box of hand me down clothes from a friend- her favorite item- a little leotard with a tutu and ballet slippers. When she put it on, I choked up before I could realize why- I couldn't believe you were missing it and in my head the words, "You know who would have REALLY liked this?" You would've Dan. You would've been in tears I think actually. Because that's how sensitive you were- mostly when it came to your daughter.

In the beginning, I had to keep talking aloud telling you, as I paced around our small apartment glaring at your clothes, your computer, "You died." Now it carries a different weight, "You died...over a year ago. Audrey's almost three." She was 21 months then. Remember how little she was? I wish you could've seen her jump for the first time with me, or sing her first song, or tell me she loves me. I wish I didn't have to feel so sad at each of these milestones. Having a child, I'm finding, is bittersweet in itself. Loving someone who is constantly changing into someone else right before your eyes. But knowing that you're missing it all...and there is no going back- it literally makes me sick.

Why am I telling you all this, you might ask? Because this is what I do to heal, I'm told- I tell the story over and over again. And I do- I tell it to strangers and to friends. But I'm starting to fear I'll never be done telling it, because the one person I shared everything with, the one person I most have to tell this spectacularly tragic tale to
is
you.

Dust and Glory

2011-08-22T22:18:00.000-04:00

More beauty, and truth (are these always companions in some way?) this time in words:

"This is my dilemma... I am dust and ashes, frail and wayward, a set of predetermined behavioural responses ... riddled with fears, beset with needs... the quintessence of dust and unto dust I shall return... But there is something else in me... Dust I may be, but troubled dust, dust that dreams, dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own...So my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness and transfiguration. I am a riddle to myself, an exasperating enigma...this strange duality of dust and glory."

Bishop Richard Holloway

July 3, 2010 3 Days Before...

2011-08-22T22:11:00.001-04:00

I remember having this small epiphany about my faith in God sometime before you died, but only recently did I discover I had articulated it to you just three days before your tragic death.

It seems foreboding and hopeful at once:

In an email to you July 3, 2010:

"I keep thinking about my belief in God and how I thought believing would bring me safety and security and now that I see it doesn't- wondering what it's about to believe at all then? and if not, then what is the meaning of all this madness?"

Beauty

2011-08-21T22:16:00.000-04:00

I am looking for beauty everywhere.

These are the discarded old petals off our flowers on the balcony.

Thought I might just post findings like this from time to time. I am stuck and need to change things up.

Maddening

2011-08-19T22:02:00.000-04:00

Today should have been exciting and good. Audrey's preschool class had a playgroup at someone's house. It was our first time meeting the other little children that will be in her class. Instead, it was quite terrible really.

I guess I will soon become accustomed to it- anticipating that I will feel sad and awkward when gathered with other moms instead of excited and "one of them," as I mistakenly keep thinking I will.

The playdate was supposed to be at a park actually- one that I have not been to since the last time with you and Audrey at about 19 months- maybe a month or so before...I wound up sitting chatting with a mom by the sandbox about nursing while you followed Audrey around having such a good time. It was moved to someone's house because of the rain we had, but it was a few blocks from the park, so I still had to drive by. I drove slowly in disbelief that there it was- exactly the same.

Young mothers who don't know each other mostly wind up talking about pregnancy, second pregnancies, and parenting in general. Three or four moms had little siblings along with their child and a few were pregnant. "Does Audrey have any siblings?" I got asked while they were discussing when to have the second. "No." Then she follows up with something about how it's good to space it out to the other moms.

And then during small talk with another mom, when I'm talking about where I've lived before here, is it odd or untruthful when I say, "We lived in Brooklyn" and "we moved here almost three years ago?" because it feels like I'm creating this picture of my present life that isn't congruent. "Where do you guys live now?" they ask. I know they mean my family- Audrey's father and myself. But I answer for just Audrey and myself.

It is all I can do while Audrey plays in the sandbox, eats her snack, and later discovers Barbie dolls for the first time in their basement- to not cry. By the time we leave, I am absolutely drained from holding a lump in my throat and moving my cheeks upward into what I hoped looked like a smile. You always told me I wasn't good at hiding how I felt about others and I should work on that. I kept thinking about that, and I did my best for Audrey's sake not to appear the "unfriendly" or "unhappy" mom.

The car ride home lets me cry a little bit while Audrey is buckled in in the back seat.

I realize while I'm driving that I have been living in grief for the last thirteen months or so, but now I am grieving in life...actually living out all of the future pain and emptiness I knew was awaiting me the second I heard the words that you were gone.

By the time we arrive home, I am more composed. I want to scream and curse over the unfairness of it all, but instead, I make her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sing the song she likes that her dad made up when he was just a little boy. "Peanut butter and jelly- put it in my belly...yum yum yum yum yum yum...Oh, ham." She sings along. Sometimes though, I wonder how long I can keep this up- this huge discrepancy between what I feel like doing and what I do. Sometimes it seems like something in my brain or body might eventually snap.

Later in the day, Audrey accompanied me to my physical therapy consultation for the herniated disc/sciatica that's been causing me such pain and the office just happened to be in the gym of a big complex that also does catering and hosts weddings. One that we drove to and priced when we were shopping around for our own wedding.

I leave there heading back to the car past the doors that actually look familiar still. I can picture you speaking Korean to the woman who showed us around and gave us the pricing (it was a Korean catering place) and both of us looking around at the ballroom together. I can remember and feel the excitement of that season of my life so clearly.

And then...here. Back in that same parking lot, thirty-five year old widow walking our almost three year old daughter to the car.

The juxtaposition of time and places and memories and moving is maddening.

The Comfort in my Low Estate

2011-08-19T21:28:00.003-04:00

I am lately finding comfort in the thousands of species of animals. At a visit to the zoo yesterday, we marveled at the long snout and bushy tail of the anteater, the ancient stillness of the alligator, and the majesty of an elk's antlers. While I understand evolution and even how it can fit into an intelligent design, I find it very hard to believe all of these wondrous species (not just a few) had to evolve.

I am lately finding comfort in primitive peoples. Seeing photos of people who live a very different life than I do. People who paint their faces and live in tribes in particular. You might think these images would be disheartening to my wish- that we are truly different from animals and created in the image of God himself, that instead I would fixate on our intellect, accomplishments, and artistry- which I think I have at points in these writings, but sometimes our sophistication is just a distraction from the truth- our primitiveness- it reminds me...we are creatures.

Similarly, I am comforted by my place- a very small one- in history. I am comforted by black and white photos of dapper men in hats waiting on soup lines during the Great Depression, and by Shakespearean sonnets on death, and even the dinosaurs my daughter plays with. It hasn't always been this way- this modern, I am reminded, and yet, the most basic troubles of humanity- death the foremost- have always been with us and run a common thread through the centuries and even millions of years.

The smaller I am, the more mysterious, and somehow, the more certain.

Bogan and Dickinson

2011-08-17T21:33:00.002-04:00

It's just horrible getting home from an event and not having anyone to talk to about it. Audrey and I went to a concert of one of her favorite singers tonight. She danced, sang along, and got her photo taken with Kimmy Schwimmy. I was somewhat surprised by all of the fathers there- I am mostly used to weekday playdates/classes where fathers are not present. I suppose at some point I'll get used to this.

The other day as I took apart her crib, I tried to calculate how many occasions there might be in her life where I'll have to take on a typically "fatherly" duty or task. Taking apart her crib and setting up her big girl bed. Check. I guess there's playing soccer- building with legos- two things you said you were going to do with her when you were interviewed for my baby shower. And I suppose it all culminates with that walk down the aisle. But I guess I'll find out the rest as I go along.

She is into hiding things lately Dan, which makes me think of a paper I wrote on the poet Louis Bogan in college when I studied American women poets. She wrote about hiding things as a child just for the gift of finding them later on. It is cute to watch her run off with something. And it stirs something in me too when I have asked her where something is and then later, I stumble upon it in some strange place. I sit down on the couch, sometimes there's a lump- a stuffed dog, under the cushion; a puzzle piece under my sheet; a whole cup of butterfly and heart shaped sequins from her craft box tossed into the plastic bag her new big girl mattress was standing up in in the hallway for a few weeks.

I've been feeling a bit stuck lately. I realize the "first year" had something that what follows does not. It was contained. It was "the first year," a countdown of days and holidays and anniversaries until that great and dreadful anniversary came again.

What lies afterwards is just open space. The rest of your life. Without. There are not as many "death-related" chores or paperwork. There is life. My "previous life," before this, appears now before me all the time like a time-lapse video. Flashes of mundane moments and close-ups of your face and body.

Strangely, I feel more comfortable lately in open space- outside. It feels like being indoors is just not large enough for the pain- as if it's a physical object. When I walk outside, there is room. I feel it can spread to the skies.

But another odd thing- nature doesn't look huge to me anymore. I feel like it's supposed to inspire me, or remind me of the majesty of creation, but everything actually looks really small these days. Even the NYC skyline looked like a miniature diorama the other day while we walked along the river. Like something from the opening credits of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. I had to look back twice to be sure it really appeared that small. The only thing of majesty is the endless universe beyond this small planet.

And this interchange, this swapping of big and small realities, reminds me of another american woman poet, Dickinson, on whom I wrote my college thesis. In #352, she writes:

Perhaps I asked too large --
I take -- no less than skies --
For earths, grow thick as
Berries, in my native town --

My Basket holds-- just -- Firmaments --
Those -- dangle easy-- on my arm,
But smaller bundles -- Cram.

I realize lately that even though I had a strong faith and trusted God with my life, I never entrusted you to him. "Please take care of him," I ask now. That was my job for quite a while. Taking care of you. In the end I didn't get to do that at all. I packed your vitamins and gave you a coupon for the taxi to the airport. But I was not there when you needed me most. I was not there to suggest you not go out that far, or to keep my eyes on you if you did. I was not there to hold your hand while the life had just freshly left. I am sad lately that the first time I saw your body was ten whole days later.

It's silly really, but lately I also think a lot about how we would connect if there is an afterlife- if I live for fifty more years and do see you at the end of this bizarre journey- I try to understand how we would connect. We have been greatly separated. I am changed from the girl you knew before all of this. You, would be too. So I try to understand if there is a part of us- even in eternity- that would remain the same. That would be, of course, the soul. I think about my "self" as a child and whether or not there is a piece of me that is the same now. Is that piece more than just a compilation of memories in the brain? Will I still be "me" when I leave here and will you still be you? I recall a moment - when I was very young, I lay on my bed and placed my feet on the wall for some reason- taking a photograph of my little feet there, and saying to myself simply, "Here I am- remember this moment." And I do remember it, and it was as if I was attempting to send myself a message in the future- though I'm not sure what it was. "Here I am," is what I said.

I think though, what this thought process is all about in terms of grieving-
is the letting go.

It's about wondering, if I go on and subject myself to change and experience- (which in actuality, I cannot avoid anyway though I can go willingly or with burning blistering hands that cling to the doorknob)- will I still know you and you me. Where will I carry the love with me and will it be safe. I want to believe there is a special place where it can remain unchanged amidst all of life's other changes. I suppose that's part of what this "space for wordkeeping" is all about. Maybe it can be like a hidden pocket for treasured possessions, or reappear like the message I sent myself so many years ago, "Here I am- remember," or maybe it will surprise me in the end- like a gift, like those butterfly and heart shaped rainbow sequins our little girl spills and sprinkles behind a piece of furniture in a dimly lit hallway.

Home

2011-08-15T22:15:00.000-04:00

Lately being with people feels more painful than being alone.

Everyday familial scenes, a child saying the word dad or appa, sting.

And something else strange, I realize yesterday: it has been a while since I experienced friendship- a get-together with a friend, a chat, outing, even a play date, without feeling that I was on the receiving end of someone's "ministry" to us. This feels isolating and sad. I'm not sure if I bring anything to the table anymore. I feel like I exist in the minds and hearts of most people only as a tragic figure, and a prick to their conscious. I feel that when they make plans with me they feel relieved and their conscious can rest for a while. They are trying not to be the ones who disappear back to their own life even though we each must live our own life and this is mine and that is a simple truth.

So, I am scheduled in, and I go. "Thanks," "Thanks," I'm always saying. It is humbling in a way I'd never known before this. Then, even if I tell myself beforehand that I will just ask them about their life and listen, there I go still talking about "it." I feel bad that I can't give them any news of some great progress or change. Even I am tired of talking about all this.

But the worst part is that the whole time they are with me, they nonchalantly receive text messages, calls, and check their phone to see the time, because there is someone who loves them- someone who is the life they will get back to when they are done here. And that is OK and that is as it should be. I had that once too. I simply ache for it. For the person who isn't taking a moment out of their life to listen to me, but the person who shares this life with me. For the person who I am eager to get back to after my own outing with a friend. Who after we share a meal, will wash the dishes and bring me a glass of water in our bedroom while we talk about our day with those "other people." For the person who calls me and I answer, "Hey...we're just leaving now. I'll be home in about five minutes." Home.

Disassemble

2011-08-15T21:53:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I took apart Audrey's crib and put together her new "big girl bed." I'd bought it at IKEA and the boxes had been sitting in the hallway for a few weeks. I was waiting until the new bedding I'd so carefully selected came in the mail. I was waiting until my sciatica wasn't as disabling. I was fearful of my toddler, who refuses to go to bed nightly, suddenly having the choice to stay in her bed or not.

But mostly, I was dreading taking apart the crib that you put together for her.

I had offers from a few other men to do it for me. But I knew, for this very reason, I had to do it myself.

Then, without much thought, I decided at around 3 pm yesterday, I would do it. "Audrey, mommy's going to put together your big girl bed," I say getting out my toolbox. "Say goodbye to your crib."

But really, it is me who must say goodbye to the crib. To the baby I had who is now almost three years old. To the crib because there will not be the "second baby" we were planning on. To my season of being a new, young mother. Before I was a widow.

It takes a matter of minutes really to disassemble the crib. (Assembling the bed took a lot longer and included various profanities and vows of never purchasing another piece of furniture I need to put together.)

Each screw I turn and un-tighten, is one that you tightened and put in.

Tears run down my face. I do it quickly. The pieces of birch colored wood fall to the ground one by one. I stack them neatly against one another in the hallway.

In the Light of a New Morning

2011-08-14T21:52:00.000-04:00

I am awakened to Audrey's cry. I pick up my phone to check the time: 3 am. I want ignore it and hope she goes back to sleep. But then I hear her words, "I want to play with appa NOW!!!!"

Without pause, I get out of bed. (This is just horrible. I must have done something. What did I do to deserve this?) It isn't until the next day that I realize this is truly the first time I have ever heard Audrey scream out for you. It is different from her routine, "Appa died, " Or "Sarah misses her appa." My heart breaks then. On this dark night, it shatters.

Entering her room, I find her standing in her crib opening the small curtain that looks out into the living room screaming those same words over and over, "I want to play with Appa now!"

(What have I done in some past life...what did I do to deserve this kind of pain) I pick her up and try to calm her, carrying her with me back to my bed. There are tears streaming down her face. In my bed she calms a little bit but is talkative, "Appa ...disappeared...heaven..." These are the words I hear at 3:30 am on a Friday night. (This is the lowest point, I am at my lowest point.) Finally she lays down beside me. But it seems we both lay there for a long time, eyes open, unable to sleep. Twenty minutes later, she is sitting straight up again saying those words, "Appa, disappeared, he went to heaven." "I know," I tell her, "I'm so sorry Audrey- I'm so sorry."

Eventually, we sleep.

In the morning, we wake up, she goes potty, we eat breakfast, the usual thing. Later while I'm picking out her clothes, I ask her if she remembers her dream about appa. We talk about her dreams quite often so she has a context for the word. One night she awoke screaming that she dropped her lollipop, another- she wanted her umbrella-another, she needed ice cream. These are the dreams of a two year old apparently. And in the morning, I usually ask her if she remembers and tell her what she was saying. She laughs about the dream and later we all laugh as we tell grandma and grandpa. She acknowledges them as dreams and even her imaginary friends she calls, "My imaginary friends."

This morning, she looks pensive for a moment and then as if she suddenly remembers with excitement says, "No, that wasn't a dream! That was real. Appa really appeared. He appeared. He was alive. He came to read to me and play with me."

I realize that the previous night when she was saying he appeared, I just assumed she meant disappeared. Sometimes in the light of a new morning, everything has a slightly different context.

I am a skeptic these days. Even in the context of belief and theology, I don't think it'd even make sense for a "visit," but nonetheless, tears stream down my face as she goes on, without any prodding from me. "He came to read to me and play with me. He came back from heaven." She seems delighted. So when I heard her talking about heaven while I was half asleep she wasn't confirming that he'd gone to heaven but that he'd come back.

3 am is a time of wakefulness in the sleep cycle. This would explain it. Her unconscious mind is revealing some of what she's felt and buried there. This is profoundly sad to me.

And yet...and yet, there is a brightness about the way she speaks of this- not her typical, look around and search for ideas toddler talk, "I need something...um, I need a tiny sip of water!" It's not thought out, but just told. And theology and science aside, no one knows if we live, where we go, or what is possible. I do know that this sounds like you- I've thought it so many times since you left us, "If he was still anywhere in existence, I don't care how great the separation, he just wouldn't be able to stay away from her."

I am curious. I ask her if he said anything to her.

Without hesitation, she tells me, "Yes, he said, 'I promise I will come back again.' "

I do not prod any further. I won't try to extract questions with answers that I would wish to believe. I leave it at this.

A Cup of Coffee

2011-08-10T21:56:00.000-04:00

I'm having one of those moments, right now, at this very moment, where I am absolutely winded with disorientation. With the fact that you lived here, with me, were my husband and Audrey's father, and our life was "normal," and now it's not and I haven't seen you in a long time and you don't live here and you've been gone for just about a third of Audrey's life.

Two weeks ago I was sitting at church and before the service began, I saw a husband come in and hand his wife a cup of coffee. Then I watched her so casually receive the cup as he passed it to her, not making eye contact or saying a word to him, placing it down beside her feet, her child between them. I envied her very, very much. I have thought about this image for two weeks. A cup of coffee passed to a woman from her husband, so absolutely lovely in its casualness.

I had this too.

Please women, do not call yourself any form of "widow" when your husband's away or at a conference. This is not the proper use of the term, and yet people do this on Facebook quite often. I even heard a Susan Vega song the other day in the car with the refrain: "Call me a widow boys" about her relationship troubles. No, no no.

Sometimes I open your sock drawer and take out an old watch- a watch you got from McDonald's for a couple of bucks with a meal. This was like you and you wore it for at least a year straight. Homer Simpson is on the watch eating a burger and says "Mmmm, burgers," when you press the button. Can I tell you how pissed I am that this watch still works and you're dead? Still, I press it a few times standing there at the open drawer, "mmm...burgers."

Time doesn't heal, but it blurs. I realize lately I am having trouble determining before and after. Did I have that basket of books in her room when he was alive? I ask myself? Did we go there or did I have that thought or conversation with him or was this afterwards and with someone else? It is getting harder to tell. And that is difficult to take in. Not healing. Difficult.

I've been having nerve pain down my left leg for some time now and just wanted to ignore it, but recently it's become quite debilitating and I see it as a wake up call that I need to start taking care of myself more for Audrey's sake. I'm fairly certain I'll need an MRI. I had two MRI's a few years back when I tore the hip joint in the same leg. The first time, I had to ask to be taken out of the tube because I am quite claustrophobic and I accidentally opened my eyes for just one second and saw the round machine wall an inch from my face. "Please, please, I need to come out," I told the technician.

So, the second time I went to a different facility with a more open MRI, but still I had to go in the tube. The main difference I think was, you were there. The technician gave me headphones and I chose the Beatles as my music genre so I didn't hear all the noise the machine makes as much. But she also gave me glasses or a headband- I can't quite remember which- that had a mirror so I could look into it and see you standing behind the plastic window smiling and waving at me. I've been thinking about this memory a lot lately. I've said it before in other posts I think, but it's not the occasions- the birthdays, the anniversaries, that you grip onto when the person's gone from this world- it's the moments like this one- where you're in a dark place, but together just the same. And then, well, you make it through.

Discovering you're really dead, on the other hand, is more like my first MRI experience. It's like in order to live, the part of me that knows this must be closed, shut down, for most of the day, but every now and then, I open my eyes, and see that wall right in front of me and realize exactly where I am.

Please,
please,
take me out of here.

Not the Standard Protocol

2011-08-07T22:06:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think I should just give up completely trying to connect the old life to this one. Forcing myself to realize, that not only have I not seen Dan for a long time now, but it's because he's frickin' dead and buried. A disappearing Dan I can manage, albeit broken-hearted. A Dan that is no more- I can not bear.

I wonder if it's like when you have an argument or conflict, and you keep rehashing the words said over and over in your mind. You think of one liners you wish you'd said and replay the newly written scene over and over as well. Your blood pressure rises. That, I have always been quite sure- is not healthy or good. But grief is so set aside from any other life things- it is hard to compare. I do know that I've heard it is healthy and necessary to tell the story over and over again. As I wrote quite a few months ago, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross says it often brings you answers or solace through the listeners unexpectedly. I have found that to be very true.

But I suppose, at some point, even with this otherworldly emotion, you decide it is enough. I don't mean enough of feeling the sorrow-that is yours to keep- but processing the physical death- the facts that led you to this dismal moment in time. Like when I read the signature on the widow board that made me laugh my dark humor laugh, "all grieved out." But does one have to fully comprehend that your husband drowned over a year ago and is buried and this is not a really long dream to be all grieved out? Or should I give up on that part as well...the comprehension.

Perhaps comprehending your death is going to take a kind of faith just like the faith it takes to believe your soul is alive and doing just fine. And maybe in each case, I need to believe before I can understand. This isn't usually the way we do things, but then again nothing about the grieving process follows the standard protocol for life as we once knew it. A belief that yes, you did die. No, I won't see you again on this earth. A belief that you are not lost and when I follow to the "real world," I will indeed see you again.

"I do not seek to understand so that I can believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that unless I do believe, I shall not understand." St. Anselm

Unsearchable Things

2011-08-06T21:40:00.000-04:00

When you experience tragedy, even in all its finality and permanence, the grieving process sets you out on this desperate, insane journey to find clues, look for signs, or discover some piece of truth that, when brought to light, will give you the strength to go on, will extract the thorn in your flesh, somehow produce the pearl without any more pain. Really- all of this, I think now at 13 months today- is just a way to distract yourself from your bedridden heart.

In your grief process, if you look and listen, you'll discover essentially-who you are and have always been. I have always been thorough and detailed- a close reader and amalgamator of experiences and writings. I have always loved and trusted the written word. So- I've been hammering on these keys for thirteen months trying to get somewhere.

But also, I discover, I have looked up to people very much in my life. I have viewed certain people as spiritual mentors- as possessing some secret wisdom or closeness with God that I did not have. Unconsciously, I now know, I would think, every time I met someone who seemed to have this, "Ah, maybe they'll have some answers for me." This was before I suffered this tragedy. I believed in human beings. Often they disappointed, but sometimes, they did not.

But now, the list of people I could look up to and hope had some answers, shortened drastically. I soon came to realize as I questioned many believer friends that they weren't as sure of their faith as they had seemed all along. I wasn't sure if they were trying to be polite, but very few reassured me that my husband was in heaven with God- in the interim place before the new heavens and new earth. Perhaps they thought it would seem wrong to tell me that at a tragic, painful time- too Christianese- too small a consolation.

My old therapist, in one of two sessions I persisted at with him in the first month, when I described how the sky even appeared different and it was a strange surreal world I found myself in, told me the world was exactly the same as it had always been. He'd always been someone I admired before, but no, the world is not exactly the same. Later after I explained what a trip to the grocery store was like- how I felt I was carrying this huge secret about me no one could see- he told me, "Yeah, but you don't really want everyone to know, 'Hey, I'm a widow- my husband just died.' " I was silent. "You do?" he asked. Yes, yes, I do.

I meet with a well-known pastor to whom I'm able to pose some of my theological/crisis of faith questions- I come away with intellectual surmises, but the realization that counseling widows or reading apologetics can't come close to the experiential...to suffering as a teacher.

A spiritual mentor from many years before mailed me something when she heard the news almost a year later, which I hoped would be a long letter full of wisdom and instruction. It was a postcard with a poem that I didn't connect with.

My current therapist, who has experienced sudden loss, tells me simply, "It's very painful," a lot. When I tell her, "You'd think God would give me something- some kind of assurance," she just answers with "Yes, you would," in that calm therapist way.

I used to think pastors knew something I didn't. Now, the pastor of the church we're attending seems type A and overly concerned with order and structure.

It's like I have been given X-ray vision and see people as they truly are- weak and unsure of what all of this is about. It's possible I am projecting- seeing now myself as I have been all of these years. And I am not as bitter or silly as to blame anyone.

Even those who have been through it, the ones I am connected with and call up hoping to hear a cheerful, peaceful voice tell me that it gets better- instead sound tired and some even start to cry when they tell me their own story.

But I can say- after over a year of still holding out the hope that there was someone out there- someone that could tell me how to make this better- there is not. There is no one that can do this.

This means accepting silence.

This means accepting crying by myself at night.

It also means more openly accepting what people can and do have to offer without hoping they have the answers to the universe.

Strangely- this thought- that there is no one with the answer, is no longer frightening. It is restful.

Just as in marriage, your husband can not possibly be everything to you- and if you try to make him this - you both suffer- so not any one single person can bring me the comfort or answers I am seeking. Instead, I can do what that one pastor suggested- use each bit of wisdom as a foothold on this climb up the mountain.

This searching for answers has been a necessary delay- not a waste of time. I haven't been dilly dallying or pulled off the trail following the wrong scent.

There is simply no one here who has ever died and come back to tell us what the f--- this is all about. And that- is really what I'm looking for I suppose. Even the books on near-death experiences and documentaries on out of body experiences leave me feeling flat.

So I'm back to Jesus- the only one who even possibly did die and come back and possibly offers me communication. I don't pretend to really get prayer anymore and I don't want to make up answers in my mind, but maybe I am (almost) ready to listen if there are any. If I am anything- I see in my grieving process- I am methodical. This seems like the next logical investigation. I am ready to sit in silence with my eyes closed- waiting for that presence- not a strange New Agey one- not an emotion-based charismatic one- but one that is just that- a presence. The way another physical person's presence is felt in the room before you, even when your eyes are closed.

"Call on me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Jeremiah 33.3

He'd Want You To Be Happy

2011-08-03T19:59:00.000-04:00

I remember in the beginning posting on the widow board, trying to encourage some of the other miserable sounding widows further down the line than I was, "they would want us to be happy." I was still in shock then.

Now, people still use that line on me sometimes. But although I know my husband loved me and would never want me to feel this kind of pain and sorrow, he also never experienced a tragedy like I now have. Therefore, I think it's naive to pretend I know how he would feel or what he would tell me to do. I do know that he would feel tremendous sorrow if he knew the devastation introduced to our lives. I imagine he would be crying, like I do nightly- his faith and worldview, shaken to the core, as is mine. I do not see him telling me to "be happy." Of course all of this is the Dan I knew here on earth, and if there is an afterlife that he now has knowledge of, I can't really know what that Dan would say because he would be a Dan I have not known. He would have knowledge and completeness I do not.

"Be happy." Those are not the two words I hear him telling me anymore. If happiness was the meaning of life, I'd be in big trouble. And so would a lot of other people. But to acknowledge that in a world of suffering, the meaning must somehow be built into the suffering - not away from it- helps.

So, what I have decided on, what I can hear him saying to me, for some reason- in both Korean and English- are two very different words:

Jal ji neh.

Live well.

August 3, 2003

2011-08-03T11:31:00.001-04:00

I'm pretty sure I wrote about our engagement last year on this day, but since then I finally was able to hack into Dan's old xanga account and find his own version of it. He had published it back then, but later saved it to a draft setting.

You have given me every extreme now, I was thinking the other day. Our wedding day, the most joy-filled, your funeral, the most devastating. Wake- most horrifying. Day our little girl was born, most awe-filled. And our engagement day- the most anticipated and most exciting day of my life. Four years of dating and singing at every friend's wedding and finally- you asked. When I read this now, I read how young we still were. 26 and 27 years old. You had only seven years left to live until the day of your most preventable and ridiculous death. I am very sad today to find that all of that is over.

People want to believe your memories bring you comfort or happiness or something. Maybe with other losses, but not with a spouse. For what is a relationship but a compilation of all shared memories and experiences. They are the concrete foundation on which future memories will be built. This you only really find out when the relationship is severed and broken and ended. The memories then are like the tiniest shards of glass sprinkled on your kitchen floor after you drop your favorite vase. It's the shards you must watch out for more than the larger pieces even. You tiptoe around them in your bare feet, those beautiful, sharp shards.

Tuesday, August 05, 2003

i was planning to write in today's entry about the time i met chris webber in the building i used to work at, but something came up over the weekend that changed my life forever. w/ my sincere apologies to mr webber...

so... as some of you may already know, ...after 4-plus long years of dating, julia and i got engaged on sunday, august 3rd

i'm not a big fan of those corny emails or sites informing the world about their whole proposal event in over-dramatically written cheesy romantic details. however, since people have been asking me non-stop 'where & how did you do it', 'what was her reaction' type of questions, i decided to just do an entry on the proposal, so that folks don't bug me no more. i'll try to describe it the best i can

lies after liesi really threw her off good. actually after this, i realized i could be a pretty good liar or a con artist. hmm...

lie #1: i first made her believe i was playing music for the evening service at 6pm (which our church started recently) in midtown near grand central
lie #2: while she was on the upperwest side trying to park her car for an hour (she was planning to come to the service, but it's impossible to park in midtown), i called her cell and said i decided not to play for the service, that i'd tell her details later
lie #3: when i met up w/ julia at the s line platform in times sq, i told her the real reason i'm not playing is because i got into a fight w/ siki, the music leader for that service. i was going to say i threw a chair at him, but i thought that would give it away, so i just said it was an argument

we took the s line shuttle across to the east side and entered grand central...

grand central
by now she was furious at me. first i immaturely get into a fight, then i irresponsibly decide not to play just because of that silly incident... she said she was starting to question my character. we were on a ramp going down to the downstairs concourse to use the bathrooms, when i stopped her to show her a cool feature of grand central called 'the whispering wall'. (there are 4 corners to the whispering wall. when you stand in one corner and talk even in the quietest voice, the other person on the opposite diagonal side can hear everything)

me: (in a quiet voice) hi julia
julia: hi
me: can you hear me?
julia: yeah! can you hear me?
me: yeah! isn't this cool?
julia: yeah!
me: i love you
julia: i love you, too
me: ...will you marry me?
julia: (shocked and speechless at first) ...naw... naw... you're not...

i had to ask twice more but i kept getting 'no, no's. so i walked across to the corner where she was standing, did the one knee drill w/ the ring out and asked her again. there, trembling and almost crying, julia said yes! and we hugged and kissed. the cop standing near by clapped for us as we were in each others' arms.

(why there, you ask?i thought about doing it in central park, but everyone does it there, and couldn't think of anything that creative. julia has always been fond of grand central. plus, i like it there too! let's just say, it's no port authority or penn station. besides the fact that it's always crowded, she has always been fascinated by the classic architecture of the building, stars on the ceiling, huge glass windows, the light that shines through those windows, chandelier lights... everything about it is elegant. like julia. oh, on the way down to the whispering walls, julia even pointed out how cool the chandeliers are, which was a good sign)

celebrationafter we embraced, julia got very dizzy and had to sit down to take this all in. we sat on the bench in the downstairs concourse for a few minutes till she felt better, then went to celebrate at the w hotel lounge on 49th and lex. we had our first drinks as an engaged couple as we chilled on the trendy comfy sofas. (by the way, you have to check out their bathrooms. they're so cool) at the 6 o'clock service, they announced our engagement, we were congratulated and got prayed for, several times

so, that's the story of our engagement. yay- hope you're happy. cuz i am

they say attractive women are drawn to crazy phycho men... muhahahha!!!

funny thing is, since sunday evening, julia's been saying 'hi fiance' a lot. she's so cute

More of the Same

2011-08-01T22:19:00.000-04:00

These writings feel more disjointed. There are less themes. More of the same.

When I hear your old bus put on the brakes outside our building, I barely notice it anymore. I can't even conjure up the excitement I used to feel knowing you'd be on that bus. Though I saw you do so recently, in a hazy dream the other night. You're always in my dreams now. Always sad and always lost to me somehow.

I love that my therapist, who lost her daughter at 18 in a car crash, told me her husband, a pastor, said when he got to heaven he'd have to say, "You're gonna have to step aside Jesus, because I need to see C------." I feel that way too. Step aside.

In the car today on her way to swimming lessons, Audrey says to me out of nowhere, "Some other kids don't have daddies that died." "Yes, that's right," I try to explain briefly that this is very unusual and sad and Appa never thought he'd die but got into an accident. Later in her bath, the two little wooden people in her wooden sailboat with the rainbow sail are according to her, "a little girl and her daddy."

I see, my beautiful daughter, by the look in your eyes when others play with their dads, that you miss him. You miss having a father. It's not fair to you and I hate it. I hate how all of the t-shirts and pajamas I see for you the other day are for "Daddy's little girl" or some variation of that. I put the hangers down in a hurry. I hate the look in your eyes when I read a story that has a dad in it. I hate that I want to give you everything in the world but can't give you the one thing that you need.

Now that Audrey's so verbal and so much more like a miniature person saying things like, "I'm not a fan of that," or "my pleasure," as she helps me unload groceries, I often find myself wondering where she came from. And I think, even though I know scientifically, biologically, how she arrived here- there still feels like there's something extra missing. But where did you come from? I think. And I wonder why it isn't enough to marvel at the science of it- the tiny fetus developing over nine months in the dim water to the muted sounds of the waiting world.

And it's the same way with your death. I know rationally what happened to your body and I even saw it ten days later. I know it's now buried. But still- I am always left thinking, "But where, oh where did you go Dan?"

These two, life and death, are not ours to know.

"Where are you? Where are you?" I ask nightly.

It Seems Like Madness

2011-07-31T21:37:00.000-04:00

I've been alerted that my email subscription- 365 days of grieving devotions- is about to end. I'll miss those because they were the only email I could count on in my inbox just after midnight each night even though their titles often made me say "ha!" out loud- things like, "Take up a new hobby."

I finally understand why people put away photos. In the beginning this went against everything in me. I did quite the opposite- leafed through every memory, journal, photo, video I could find. Now, I understand this. This putting away the photos- bludgeoned hearts hanging on walls. Ours will remain out, but I understand this now.

Probably it was last July when I wrote about the things I was thinking of doing- one included brushing my teeth with your toothbrush. Check. I found some solace recently in redecorating my bathroom. I bought a pretty vintage looking glass from Anthropologie for our toothbrushes- Audrey's and mine. But before I threw yours out, I brushed with it dry. I tasted the toothpaste you had used the morning of June 29th, 2010 before you took your packed suitcase and backpack, and said goodbye. Then, I threw it out. It was a new toothbrush you'd gotten the day before at the dentist- so you'd only used it twice.

You do crazy stuff when you're grieving- things that make you feel like you very well might be raving mad. You tape down the finger nails you found in the little box with his nail clipper on black paper and tuck them in a tiny envelope. The same ones you almost yelled at him about the day he left when you saw them there..."Hey- can you please throw out your nail clippings!" echoed through your mind, but you held back and didn't say a word. It seems like madness, but really it's just love which it turns out, is fierce when bullied.

The other night, while reorganizing the cabinet below the bathroom sink- all a part of my redecorating project- I see something that paralyzes my muscles. I swallow hard and stare while squatting. There, right above the child safety locks you installed on our cabinets, are two thin gray pencil marks. There, you had marked where you would put the screws that hold the locks in place. There are things all around me that are yours of course, but these markings, I had never seen. And then, there they are. Pencil markings. A picture of your love as a husband and father.

Pencil markings on the interior of a dated bathroom cabinet.

Love written in grey graphite.

I squat there for a while.