Wild Birds Flock to Me

“I don’t have a name. I don’t know what to do. The only thing I know for certain is that I must begin to heal. Just like every time my life was re-created, I had to begin restoring the foundered part of my being: the lost relationships, the familiarity of a neighborhood, the sense of the person I might have been. There is an algebraic term for the technique for distributing two binomials, called the FOIL method. It stands for first, outer; inner, last. And that is exactly how I have learned to repair myself time after time: from the outside in.” — David Cristofano, The Girl She Used To Be

I don’t have a name. I don’t know what to do. I am not the person I used to be.

I went to the doctor today after feeling that I wasn’t recovering quickly enough from the flu – I’ve had this nagging, lingering, omnipresent cough that won’t leave me be.

Doctor: “have you had any pain in your legs?”

Me: “um, no, the flu doesn’t usually affect legs…why?”

Him: “I just want to rule out the worst thing first, like persistent coughing being the result of a blood clot that’s gone to your lungs.”

That poor doctor didn’t know – how could he know? – that it was that exact thing that took Will from me. Pulmonary embolism, or so the team that tried to save him had concluded. But this doctor didn’t know that, didn’t know until I broke down in loud sobbing hysterics in the middle of his office on a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t the first time something like that has happened to me in recent months.

I’m a crier now. Uncomfortably fragile. And it’s just so uncharacteristically me. Sensitive? Absolutely. Dramatic? Sure, sometimes. But never a crier, and certainly not in public. I’m the girl who my 93-year-old spitfire grandmother refers to as “a tough broad.” Crying is not my thing. When emotions grow to large for me to handle, my m.o. is to bottle them up, lock them down, bind them and gag them, sweep them under a gigantic and ever-growing rug that’s still never quite big enough.

Southern girls are raised to be strong, raised to swallow our sorrows in pleases and thank yous, to bear the weight of the world on our shoulders with a toothy smile because complaining…well, that just isn’t ladylike. So when I break down crying around strangers, I don’t just feel sad, I also feel ashamed. Ashamed of being sad. Ashamed of grief. Ashamed of not being strong enough or everything that I’m supposed to be because these shoulders… they’re broken. They can’t hold any more.

The shame is unavoidable because these tears come regardless of whether I am laying in bed alone, wrapped in a cocoon of the comforter that we shared, or whether I’m walking down the street on a sunny day when I happen to smell his cologne on a stranger.

I am not the person I used to be; I’m a crier now. And it makes me feel weak, like this cough makes me feel weak, like everyday living without my partner here to hold my hand makes me feel weak.

I’m taking this course on writing my grief, but I’m not going to write about fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what comes next, fear that I’m doing this wrong, doing grief wrong, fear that I’ll say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. Fear about never seeing him again, fear about how far I’d go to see him again. Fear of those little doubtful voices that slither into my head during the quiet moments asking me if I did enough, if I loved enough, if I held enough, if I kissed enough. Fear of not having said all the things that could and should have been said. Fear that talking about our life together will make me feel like I’m losing him all over again. Fear of how preposterously, unacceptably, painfully brief existence is. I’ve allowed fear to dominate too much of that existence, making it my companion, trying to prevent and protect myself from the worst case scenario – and now that the worst has happened, I realize how paralyzing and ultimately futile it was; fear broke every promise it ever made. So I won’t give it a voice anymore.

“If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.” — Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“I accepted all this counsel politely, with a glassy smile and a glaring sense of unreality. Many adults seemed to interpret this numbness as a positive sign; I remember particularly Mr. Beeman (an overly clipped Brit in a dumb tweed motoring cap, whom despite his solicitude I had come to hate, irrationally, as an agent of my mother’s death) complimenting me on my maturity and informing me that I seemed to be “coping awfully well.” And maybe I was coping awfully well, I don’t know. Certainly I wasn’t howling aloud or punching my fist through windows or doing any of the things I imagined people might do who felt as I did. But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.” — Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

I was told recently “at some point, Leslie, you’ve got to get over this. You have to get back to normal. You can’t let it change you.” My only response was “how could it not?”

What they don’t know is how much I still love him. It’s like they’re surprised that part didn’t die, too – like it’s a light switch that can be turned off. They wouldn’t understand how I still ask him for advice sometimes and wait to hear a response. Or how sometimes I think I hear him or see signs from him, and then how I hyper-analyze every experience, telling myself that I’m crazy or imagining things or guilty of wishful thinking. What they don’t know is how angry I get in those moments, how many times I’ve turned skyward and screamed a bloodcurdling “fuck you” at the god they all tell me I should pray to “for comfort.”

What they don’t know is that there are images lodged in my brain that I’ll never be able to remove, try though I might to hide them with bourbon and Marlboro lights. Images like being led down a dark corridor at the back of an old funeral home that I didn’t choose, arriving at a fluorescent hellscape where the love of my life was laying cold and blue on a steel table. What they don’t know is how it felt to run my fingers through his hair, to keep waiting for him to open his eyes. What they don’t know is that, as his mother forcibly pulled me away from him and out of that room because my time was up, all I knew is that I should be with him. That, when I collapsed on the other side, weeping and repeating the phrase “I was going to marry him” over and over, his mother chimed in with a “well, now you’ll just have to find a different Will.” They will never know that there’s no such thing.

What they don’t know is how it felt to go days (weeks, really) without eating or sleeping and how very little it mattered. What they don’t know is how it felt to watch the home he and I had shared emptied out and boxed up and taken 6 states away because I was “just the girlfriend” and his family’s grief was worth more than mine. What they don’t know is how it felt to have his family take our dog away from me because I had no rights to her. What they don’t know is how it felt to have the man who was with him in his last moments fall into my arms at his funeral, begging me for forgiveness.

What they will never know is that awful ache I feel in every pore anytime I’m around children. How I instinctively grab for the locket around my neck that holds his ashes while wishing that the test I’d taken two months before losing him had been positive, because then… then at least some part of him would still be alive.

They don’t know these things, but they sit waiting and watching and judging so they can be sure everything goes back to “normal.”

“In the desert, turn toward emptiness, fleeing the self. Stand alone, ask no one’s help, and your being will quiet, free from the bondage of things. Those who cling to the world, endeavor to free them; those who are free, praise. Care for the sick, but live alone, happy to drink from the waters of sorrow, to kindle love’s fire with the twigs of a simple life. Thus you will live in the desert.” — Mechtild of Magdeburg, Jane Hirshfield’s Women In Praise of the Sacred

When I think about the desert, I think about The Little Prince. About shifting sands in the Sahara, baobabs, foxes being tamed, and stars that laugh. Will and I lived in the actual desert, under skies so dark you could see the Milky Way each night. But I don’t live there anymore. I couldn’t stay.

I left less than a month after I lost him – I turned toward literal emptiness and sold off most of what I still owned, donated everything else, and moved a few hundred miles away. 8 months later, I still don’t own furniture, all of my clothes could fit in 2 big bags, and my silverware is drugstore plastic. Calling how I live these days “minimalist” would imply that I wanted this. My home was once Shangri-La and is now Sparta. It’s not what I wanted.

I got rid of things because everywhere I looked, there was a memory. I never wanted memories – I wanted him. I never wanted to look back and reminisce about better times – I wanted to be living those better times, with him. I didn’t want to hurt, and so I pushed and I eliminated and I cleared away anything that I thought was capable of hurting me. Various tchotchkes, neighbors, friends, and family members were all forced out of my surroundings because I had this belief that pain was external and that I could escape it.

I still really wish it worked that way, that the boogeyman lived outside, that I wasn’t him and he wasn’t me and that fleeing the him-that-is-me was in any way possible. But I don’t know that it is, or if I can.

“People always say that it hurts at night and apparently screaming into your pillow at 3am is the romantic equivalent of being heartbroken. But sometimes it’s 9am on a Tuesday morning and you’re standing at the kitchen bench waiting for the toast to pop up and the smell of dusty sunlight and earl gray tea makes you miss him so much you don’t know what to do with your hands.” — Rosie Scanlan, On Missing Them

I don’t know what to do with my hands when I smell honey or coffee.

His hair always smelled like honey – thick, shiny, beautiful dirty blonde hair that every stylist at his salon would fawn over every time he sat in one of their chairs. “It does what it wants, I do what I want” he always joked. My nerdy rebel… Every night as we laid down in bed, he’d curl his 6’4” frame up next to my 5’3” one, lay his head on my belly, and tell me stories while I played with that honey-scented hair. I swear I must have memorized every strand. Then every morning, he’d roll out of that bed to make us coffee (and sometimes even cinnamon rolls). The smell was intoxicating enough to wake us both a little, and he’d always carry the goods back to me in bed. And there we’d sit, talking about the sunrise and our silly dreams, playing with the dog. Our little routine was so ordinary, but it was everything.

A couple of months after I lost him, I was recounting all of this to a friend and she responded with “you know your relationship wasn’t perfect, right?” as if to remind me not to idealize things, as if to put me in my place a bit because how could anyone’s story about their partner be primarily about “normal” things and tenderness? But our story was. And it was perfect to us. We spent all of our time over the moon, crazy in love happy. Who gave a shit if the bed wasn’t made? We had each other and it was all that mattered to either of us. But now… now I don’t know what to do with my hands when I lay down at night, and I have no idea how to work the coffee maker.

Grief personified…

I think my grief is the 14-year-old emo kid version of the Hawaiian fire goddess, Pele.

At 14, she’s the quiet kid who wears a lot of black. Heavy eyeliner to hide the dark under-eye circles that never fade, fishnet stockings to show the world that she’s trapped, black combat boots because everyday feels like going into battle. Her singed black hair has been dyed hundreds of times because she’s trying to figure out who she is, and she’s covered in piercings because she keeps waiting to feel something… to feel anything. Most of the time she keeps to herself, but occasionally she asks me to play sad songs for her at night. “Play ‘Hurt,’ Leslie” and, when I do as she commands, we both end up in a puddle of tears while gently singing “everyone I know goes away in the end.” Then when I wake the next day, she always taps my shoulder and says “he’s still not here; we’re still alone.”

Anytime I tell her to stop, or ask her to let me have one day of respite, the tantrum begins. Because she spends so much of her time sitting dormant in quiet reflection, she does not like being told to be quiet or to exercise restraint. And, because underneath that teenage exterior she’s an emotionally unstable devourer of land, her tantrums burn things to the ground. The moment she blows her top in anger, pure pain begins to spew forth from her mouth like magma, and it incinerates everyone in her path. Relationships and homes and cities turn to ash. Her words leave trails of devastation behind them, and anyone lucky enough to escape their initial impact is left cleaning up the mess. It’s a mess that no amount of “I’m sorry”s can undo.

I know that while she’s destroying things, she’s creating them, too, but the force of her tantrums terrifies me because I can’t suffer any more loss. So I try to avoid rocking her boat. If she wants to hear sad songs, I’ll make her a playlist, and I’ll buy her a new black hoodie, and I’ll give her these things as offerings because I know she is more powerful than I am.

“Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind.” — Peter Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel

“Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness, The Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

“All of us are pushing a wheelbarrow through life,” my godfather once told me, “and as we walk down the road, people tell us things about ourselves, or make demands on us, or the hardest things in life happen to us and each of these things is another brick that we load into that wheelbarrow. The best thing you can ever do for yourself – the secret of life in my estimation,” he said, “is to turn it over, dump it out, and refuse to push it anymore.”

Kindness, I think, is the undoing of burdens.

It’s one thing to think about bricks being given by others, and refusing to take on the external junk and experiences of pain that weigh us down… and maybe just ridding myself of those pieces is as close to self-kindness as I can get. But those bricks are hunks of styrofoam compared to the boulders that I expertly carve and hand to myself. I don’t know how to offload the self-made burdens. The shoulds, the what-ifs, the whys, the if onlys are all so heavy, but how could I convince myself I don’t deserve to carry those forever?

Found poetry, from the Houston Chronicle:

Harrowing minutes

How can that happen?

It never really sank in

Roaming the expanse of desert

Relying on instinct and experience

Major move

Course unclear.

She can feel the building pressure

It’s more complicated than that

We can’t allow ourselves to get trapped

Yes, it is still outrageous

A revolution in consciousness

One dissonant chord reverberating

Future unsure.

A dramatic reshaping

Comprehensive reform

Clear-eyed about virtues and flaws

Harnessing love and decency

Lacking hope

They just have to put their mind to it

How far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go.

“We all need a mentor, especially inside this wholly disorienting grief, inside a culture that cannot and does not understand.” — Megan Devine

Finding a grief mentor is a challenge for 2 reasons: 1) I remember very little about anything that happened or anything that people said to me for the first couple of months after I lost Will. I’ve had people mention conversations we had during that time, and I can’t even access a memory for them. I don’t know how I ate or dressed myself, much less what I or others said. And 2) nobody I knew ever handled grieving in a way that made sense to me. Maybe their techniques had worked for them (though, they didn’t seem to), but in general, it always looked like they were pretending. I know that, after this happened in my life, all I wanted to see and hear was honesty – for literally anyone to access some genuine emotion – and I couldn’t fathom that anyone who said “I’m fine” after experiencing loss actually meant it.

That said, I think back in November, my friend’s 6 year old son became my mentor. We had taken him to see that animated movie Coco (don’t do it unless you want to cry, by the way), and it’s entirely about Dia de los Muertos and the connections between this world and the next. At one point in the movie, one of the characters mentions a belief that we’re only able to connect with those we love who are no longer with us on these 1-2 days every year, and this sweet, innocent little 6 year old boy turns to me in the middle of a crowded theater and loudly says “um, no…that’s just not true. That’s not how it works. They’re around all the time and you can talk to them all the time.” I hugged him and nodded agreement and wept. That’s how I want to do grief – like him – with the certainty of a child who doesn’t believe in eternal separation, who wouldn’t tell me that I was crazy for talking to the air or for seeing signs and messages everywhere, and who can loudly proclaim that there’s another, kinder way to see loss.

It’s a weird thing to realize that you’re being mentored by a child…

10.

“I need a shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don’t see that type of blue around here.” — Cath Crowley, Graffiti Moon

Yellow. Your favorite colors were sky blue and grass green, but you always looked the best in yellow. It brought out the flecks of yellow in your dark green eyes, and I always remember you with the sun radiating yellow behind your head. Looking up to kiss you as we stood outside in the mornings, desert sun blazing over us both, baking us in warmth and love, there was the yellow glow behind you and those golden flecks shimmering in your eyes.

Yellow was the color of your favorite sweatshirt, the one you were wearing that morning when the sun left my life. When they handed me your yellow sweatshirt after your funeral, I had never been so glad to see a stupid piece of cloth and I took it from the crinkly plastic they had wrapped it in and I held it to my face and breathed you in. It was like I was breathing in the last bit of sunlight that existed anywhere in the universe. I put it on and it came down to my knees, and the sleeves were so much longer than my arms. How did I never realize you were that much taller than me? And as I wrapped those sleeves around myself wishing they were your arms, I turned to your family and told them that yellow sweatshirt was the one thing I wouldn’t let them take. To say I wanted it wouldn’t suffice – I needed, I had to have that part of you, the part that was wrapped around you when you left, where I should have been.

I still wear your yellow sweatshirt at night, when I want to remember the sunshine and the way your eyes looked when you looked at me. It still smells like you.

11.

“Melancholy suits us.” — Megan Devine

Evening falling –

a soft lamenting

that is far from soft,

that resounds as profoundly as the thunder

that shakes the earth and my windows

in the wake of the fire that falls from clouds

sent down like some celestial judgment

to rend the oak trees and my life.

Strike me, lightning,

overcome me.

Make the electricity and pain shaking my heart

visible and audible and noticeable.

Make it matter like a tornado, like a hurricane

that forces its residents to evacuate the area,

running in fear from the devastation that

this “soft” lamenting summons to their homes.

What I have loved I cannot hold,

What I have lived I cannot forget.

There is no such thing as a gentle upheaval;

loss is only piercing and deafening,

the opera singer’s high note that shatters

the fragile glass in my windows

just like the sonic boom that accompanies

this storm.

12.

“I was determined to make space, inner space for a poem. Loss made everything sharp. I suffer from these brief weekends, the tearing up of the roots of love, and from my own inability to behave better under the stress. The poem is about silence, that it is really only there that lovers can know what they know, and there what they know is deep, nourishing, nourishing to the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. For a little while, it is as if my nakedness were clothed in love. But then, when I come back, I shiver in my isolation, and must face again, and try to tame the loneliness.” — May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

I’m an avid gardener who once fantasized about studying horticulture, so “the tearing up the roots of love” speaks to me and made me think about the steps that preceded the roots. Taking this dry seed that seems on its surface like nothing special, but which is pure potential, and making it a home in a warm place. Giving it time and the right conditions so that it can evolve into something full of life. Watching it slowly crack open its own shell, splitting forever and leaving its tiny green contents vulnerable just so it can form a root. And, at first, it is just one root – this radicle that anchors it to the world. Then the others attachments follow, knitting themselves to the earth and each other until they become indistinguishable from each other. They’re so much stronger together, and everything on the surface thrives as a result of that beautiful tangle.

For even the simplest of plants these steps hold true (except for maybe air plants, and I feel like one of those lately – no longer tethered to anything solid), but most of the time it’s happening underground, where people can’t see, so they take the roots – the most fundamental of anchors – for granted. A person watching from the surface might think the plant and the root are different things, might not understand the connection, how they feed off of each other and grow each other and exist only for each other. They wouldn’t see how they are one thing, and how disconnecting one from the other kills both. Someone watching from the surface might think that plants don’t cry when their roots are torn up, and they’d think it because they can’t hear it. But those once-green tendrils scream as they wither.

13.

“As we breathed into the truth of what had happened in our lives, safe in the protective community we built together, we began to discover that the unbearable became bearable, that by whispering “yes” instead of screaming “no,” an ineffable grace began to fill the space of our shattered hearts. Soon, not only could we carry our own impossible grief, but from there it was a small move to take in the pain of the whole world, and offer our own most tender prayer of peace. Try it. If you’ve tried it before, try it again. Find the smoldering ache of loss inside of you and soften into it. Allow yourself to gently and lovingly explore exactly what it feels like to hurt in this way. With compassion for yourself, disarm your wounded heart and breathe quietly inside the wreckage. No need for fancy formulas or prescribed affirmations. No goal. Just be. Right here. Inside the fire of grief. One breath in front of the other.” — Mirabai Starr

Ok, Pain… in order to feel safe enough to face you, I would need:

A bottle of tequila? A Xanax? No, those only make you calm down for a few hours, then you’re worse later – there’s something about me trying to shut you up or hide from you that always only makes you louder and more aggressive later on.

3 boxes of milk duds? Maybe. Chocolate actually does seem to soothe you. Not super healthy, but c’est la vie.

Talking to friends/family/pretty much anyone in the “other person” category? Probably not. I find myself guarding my words and only sharing what I feel in snippets so as not to burden people, plus even the people I was closest to before this now always contort their faces into that horrible and not even slightly imaginative pitying “poor you” look when I talk and it’s just gross and it makes me even more self-conscious than I was before. People really don’t like talking about you, Pain.

A lack of distractions? Probably. I saw an episode of The Twilight Zone once where this man woke up trapped in a solid white cube. No doors, no windows, no furniture, no people – nothing. Just him and the contents of his brain. In the episode, he was terrified because of all the usual “where am I?, how did I end up here?” types of thoughts, but also because his only companion was himself, which meant he had to face his demons. Sometimes I think the only way I’d be willing to deal with you in your entirety, Pain, is if I had no other option.

Entirety… Hmm. See, truth be told, you’ve been in my life forever, so on some level I’ve always been facing some part of you, but something about this loss has taught you how to behave like a Hydra – as soon as I feel safe enough to confront you in one area, you grow 3 new heads elsewhere in my life. It’s an endless (and, as a result, overwhelming) battle. Like an internal round of whack-a-mole. And I’m honestly not altogether sure what prize I’d win at the end, except for probably more tickets to go play again.

14.

Imagining myself as the old, uninvited witch in a fairy tale… a la Maleficent…

If I were the old witch, I’d be the one everyone actually tries to drag to the party. They *think* they want me around because, before loss entered the picture, they used to want me around. Or they want me there because they (falsely) assume it will “help” me to attend. “Won’t you feel so lonely if you’re not there, Leslie?” they ask, not realizing that I’d feel lonely either way, that loneliness has very little to do with how many people are in the room. So I go, because the going is what they think they want from me.

I show up, then come the attempts to dictate my behavior, because the other thing they want is to control me (controlling the witch who seems uncontrollable makes them feel better). “You’ll get to the other side of this, here, have a drink.” “When do you think you’ll start dating again?” “How’s single life? I have this great guy I want you to meet but, like, when you’re ready, you know – maybe another month? Will that be long enough?” “You still wear a lot of black, it’s kind of morose…” “Cheer up! Smile!” And once I’ve reached my bullshit quota and consider leaving, then come the weird and forced-seeming attempts at compassion with the overly-long hugs and pursed lips, and when I try to pry their well-meaning but misguided arms off of me, then, in their assessment, I become the bad guy – the REAL witch – the she who is “cold” and unfeeling, and “how dare she not accept our ‘love’” witch.

Sometimes it all makes me feel like the “witch” I am is a circus freak or some sort of 3-headed animal or an ugly 20-car pileup on the freeway; people crane their necks because they want to watch everything I’m doing, judge it, and add some creative narration… but they also want to maintain their distance – even as they’re hugging me.

15.

About the picture on this website…

My Will,

This is the park where I go every morning now to watch the sunrise. It’s 552 miles away from where we fell in love. I couldn’t stay back there without you, couldn’t live surrounded by emptiness and memories, couldn’t keep looking around at a place that resembled a wasteland after your family removed every trace of you. It hurt too much. So I carved our initials and the words “love lived here” in the wall of our bedroom, locked the doors one last time, and drove away through the mountains.

The place where I live now is a tiny, pre-furnished apartment in a southern marsh of a town that I can’t stand. You and I were always mountains people, so it would not be your favorite either. But I have friends here who insisted on having me nearby, so I went ahead with it. I think they were afraid that I’d make certain irreversible life decisions if they weren’t nearby to prevent it and, honestly, for the first couple of months that’s most of what I thought about, so their reasoning at least made sense. The space is ok, but the the bed is too big without you and I never know how much food to cook anymore, and our Roxy dog isn’t here because your family took her, too. I just feel horribly out of place here. That would probably be the case anywhere, I guess, because I just feel out of place without you. But sometimes I don’t know that I’m fully without you – like, I think you’re familiar with my apartment without me telling you about it. I mean, since I moved in 7 months ago, you’ve burnt out 9 of my lightbulbs, turned various TVs on and off at all hours, and left trails of pennies to my door. Either you know where I’m at and you’re visiting me, or I’m becoming an X-person… Some of your close friends live nearby here, too, so I’ve spent time with them also. I think we can add that to the list of things you know already, though, since on each occasion, no matter the location, our song starts playing through the loudspeakers. “And if there is no more time, this always remains…” and, in those moments, my eyes inevitably wander to the empty seat next to me, where you should be. Where you kind of still are.

And then there’s the park down the road, the subject of the photo…

I go to that park everyday because the desire to be outside in the world is a thing we always had in common. It’s close, and it’s quiet there, and I can talk to you there without seeming like a person who needs to be medicated. Squirrels rarely judge. But the best part about it is that, every morning, this massive heron – the big guy in this picture – shows up and stands next to me. Sometimes I look at him while he looks at me, but mostly we just stare at the water until the morning light starts to reflect in it. Then I turn to him and thank him for showing up – I thank you for showing up because I know you’re why he’s there, why he chooses to be right next to me – and then I get in my car and drive the 3 miles home. And everyday, without fail, that heron flies above my car all the way back like a great blue airborne escort who’s literally watching over me. Once he knows I’m safely home, he leaves. But you know that, too, don’t you?

16.

What have I learned 2 weeks into daily writing?

Somewhere in the volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time / Remembrance of Things Past, he says “when you’re ready to let go of something, you’ll write.” (I’d tell you exactly where, but I was 19 when I read it…) There’s a part of me that always took those words for gospel, and I think I twisted them in my head to read that I couldn’t write unless I wanted to purge something – like I had to have an agenda, and it had to be that specific agenda, I guess. So for the last 17 years, what I didn’t know is that I could write and just see what happens, which has made doing stream-of-consciousness now both terrifying and incredibly liberating, especially given the content.

And that content… I certainly didn’t know that writing would be a little like poking the grief bear midwinter, waking it up, pissing it off, making it snarl at me. I went to go get a massage a few days ago and this girl who’s been working on me the last several months told me my shoulders were worse than ever, primarily in this one little spot along the collarbone next to my heart. When she touched it, she literally said “wow” and told me she saw it “ripple away,” and simultaneously I started to cry – not from physical pain, but from something… else. “Emotional trauma,” she told me, “buries itself in our bodies. There are probably things that you’re realizing as you write, and it’s bringing those things up to the physical surface, where I can see them.” I’ve learned that my grief bear is not thrilled about the interrupted hibernation.

And yeah, let’s talk about the not thrilled. I’m usually the kind of person who catches and releases houseflies, who says please and thank you to everyone, who tempers her behavior and always errs on the side of nice and I… have not been nice since this exercise began. My writing would suggest that that is because I’m mad. Significantly more so than I thought. I imagine it comes out more here than anywhere because where else would it come out? I can’t call up Will’s mom and tell her how shitty it was to leave me with nothing more of the love of my life than his sweatshirt, his pillow, and a tiny locket filled with his ashes. I can’t explain to her that losing Will, and then our home, and then our dog left me with nothing, and how brutally unfair that was and is. I can’t say these things because she’s living loss and hurting, too, so I bottle them up, let that rage fester and ferment, until it apparently spills over here. And on my shoulders.

I feel sometimes that I over-spill, but it’s been educational, and remarkably helpful, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to read everyone else’s stories – that’s really the other “I didn’t know” for me. I didn’t know anyone in the world felt some of the same things as me, and it has been incredibly isolating. It’s just a relief to not feel so alone.

17.

What is the condition of my heart?

I didn’t want to think today, didn’t want to consider the mangled mess that is my heart. But here I am.

I heard a story once about astronauts – about how, when they return to earth after being adrift in space for months (sometimes years) on end, NASA puts them into a special underground apartment to allow them to readjust to the electromagnetic field here. The person telling the story ended it by saying something like “they can’t just go to Target the next day; life is different for them here.”

When I think about my heart, I think about an astronaut. When it was with Will, it was able to experience weightlessness. It saw what the world looks like above the clouds. It saw vast stretches of beautiful, glittering worlds that so many people never get to see. It was a full and grateful heart up there. Then, in the span of just a few beats, it was jettisoned back to earth. Back to gravity. Back beneath a layer of clouds so thick the stars are invisible at night. Back underground, where it’s forced to adjust to its new reality.

It doesn’t want to be here. It doesn’t want to feel this weight. It just wants to be back out in space where it was free and happy, but it’s trapped and it just feels heavier everyday.

It curses the electromagnetic field. All the pulses are wrong. It wonders how anyone ever stops feeling burdened by gravity. It’s angry that it was forced to return here instead of staying up there with him. It wants every law of physics to bend and break so it can go back where it belongs.

But it’s here on earth where life is different, so it just keeps looking up, waiting.

18.

“Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever,” he said. “You might want to think about that.” “You forget some things, don’t you?” “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Well, he was there,” she assured me. I tried to recall something of him from that time; his face, his hands, his memorable flesh. But there was nothing. Trying to remember was like plowing snow, packing it into a bank. Dense whiteness. I could remember the pasture in front of the house and standing among rows of corn as tall as trees. I could remember the smell of the sun on my arms and squatting down to select pebbles from the driveway. I could remember how it felt to rise and rise and rise, higher than I’d ever gone before as my trembling legs continued to unfold and suddenly, I was standing and this astounded me and I burst out laughing from the pure joy of it. Just as I threatened to fall on my face, my leg swung forward and landed, and so fast it seemed to happen automatically, my other leg swung forward and I did it again — my first step! — before tumbling forward onto my outstretched hands. But I could remember nothing of my father. Until years later, and then I could not forget him no matter how hard I tried.” — Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table

I remember this story he told me once about hiking in the Appalachian trail in his 20s. He went on mini-adventures after reading Into the Wild, wanting to prove to himself that he could overcome great odds, that he could live a transcendental life, that he could see that which was most beautiful and rugged and allow it change him. And every time, he succeeded. He survived in situations that would have terrified me, like being exhausted without enough water, or having to scare away bears and mountain lions at night. He loved the feel of the wind and the smell of the pine trees and the glow of the stars at night.

I remember our first date. We had planned to go grab drinks at his house and then go to a restaurant in town, but we decided mid-drinks that it would be more fun to cook with each other. So we strolled down grocery store aisles building a recipe (crab filled salmon with zucchini and mushrooms), and made a disaster of his kitchen. At some point as we stood talking and joking while waiting on the salmon (which would end up burnt to a crisp), he reached over and started to hold my hand. There was something about the nervousness and awkwardness with which he did it that was immediately endearing. Looking back, though I never would have believed or admitted it at the time, I think that was the moment I knew he was it for me in the whole world.

I remember helping him into a tuxedo, and I remember helping him into a hospital gown. I remember him gently helping me remove bobby pins from my hair, and I remember him kissing the scar on my leg after I’d had a surgery there. I remember every touch, every smile, the sound of his laugh, the way he saw the world, the way he made me feel like I was his everything, the way he made me feel like I could be as strong as he had been hiking those mountains.

My memories are stacked on top of one another by the thousands, like pages in a beloved book. Most are dog eared and well-worn because they’re pages I visit often. I probably shouldn’t visit them as often as I do, shouldn’t spend so much time reminiscing. Or, if I do spend time there, one could argue that I should also be willing to visit the latter chapters – the “post-loss” section – but I have no interest in those pages.

19.

“The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.” — Roberto Bolano, 2666

I’ve talked quite a bit about something close to this subject with my therapist because when I see other people forgetting (or what I interpret as forgetting him – which is really just not talking about him), I rage against it. It is, in fact, the thing that triggers my anger quicker than anything, this forgetfulness. I see people taking things that were, albeit, just material things, but which were emblematic of his life, and hiding them away in closets and basements, and it infuriates me. “It hasn’t even been 9 months yet,” I think to myself, “he’s worth more than that.”

But this isn’t about other people forgetting him. I intentionally do everything in my power not to forget. I remind myself, replay the memories, leave his picture on my nightstand, reread old texts, curl up in his sweatshirt. It hurts like hell to remember, but the alternative is worse. Letting go would be worse. Losing him all over again in fragments would be worse. I can’t allow it to shift or “soften” or dissipate because his life was worth more than a passing thought.

It’s possibly a strange comparison but, my parents divorced the year I turned 18 and when each of them eventually sought out new relationships in the years that followed, I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It wasn’t the idea that they’d each want a new partner to share their lives with that confused me, but rather the idea that they could move on at all – that it was possible to detach from love. If love can end, I thought, then what good is it?

Maybe I’ve confused changing with ending, like confusing a glass door with a brick wall. But both are a kind of separation, and the problem is that any separation is unbearable.

20.

“At the end of my suffering there was a door. Hear me out: that which you call death, I remember. Overhead, noises, branches of pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface. It is terrible to survive consciousness buried in the dark earth. Then it was over: that which you fear, being a soul and unable to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth bending a little. And what I took to be birds darting in low shrubs. You who do not remember passage from the other world I tell you I could speak again: whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice: From the center of my life came a great fountain, deep blue shadows on azure seawater.” — Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris

“No matter what you believe or don’t believe, the truth is: love exists. The love you built together, the love you still carry – nothing will destroy that.” — Megan Devine

I couldn’t make myself write today. I’ve been legitimately overwhelmed with other life stuff the past few days, so I used that as an excuse, but carving out time to dedicate to it was totally possible. I just couldn’t. In fact, the moment I read these quotes, I broke down crying and I’m still pretty touchy about it.

See, I lost Will (I still can’t say the D word – can’t call a spade a spade and say how I lost him) at 8am on a Friday, and sometime around 3am on Saturday, I heard his voice. He woke me up and told me to start writing, and I did, and then I promptly drifted back to sleep. When I woke up for real a few hours later, I thought I’d had a weird dream. But then I saw the notes scribbled and realized what had happened.

When I think about it now, I have a hard time rationalizing it – I’m all about science and reason and to say that supernatural things fall outside my world view would be an understatement. But there was the paper with my handwriting and words I’d never say. Some part of me thinks I was hallucinating and some part of me knows I wasn’t. And… what’s that line of Hamlet’s? “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”?

So, rather than writing what I think he’d say, I’ll write one of the less personal things (sorry, number 23) I believe he had me write that morning after I lost him:

“I’m in all things and all things are in me. I’m ok and safe and I love you.”

21.

“Silence / It has a sound, a fullness./ It’s heavy with sigh of tree, and space between breaths./ It’s ripe with pause between birdsong and crash of surf./ It’s golden they say./ But no one tells us it’s addictive.” — Angela Long

A moment of grace.

I come from a family that celebrates every single holiday and every single birthday with a big gathering. Anywhere from 10-100 people come together, do potluck meals, exchange gifts, watch movies, and play games. It’s the kind of thing that probably looks like a lot of fun to people who aren’t living it – or at least to people who aren’t, as I am, deeply introverted. For me, it’s sheer torture. I’ve been known to drink an entire bottle of wine by myself in 1 afternoon, or to pop anxiety meds, just to get through an event. The sound is overwhelming to me, and I always have to look a certain way and behave a certain way in order to avoid judgement. Inevitably someone will make a rude remark, or family members will argue amongst themselves about nonsense, and things will devolve into frustration and either yelling or silence. Every gathering is exhausting, but they continue nevertheless. And attendance? No matter where people live – sometimes many states away – everyone is expected to attend. It’s a rule that, while technically unwritten, has been ingrained in all of us since the time we were born: you show up.

I didn’t show up once last year. For the first time in my life, I rejected the whole system. I didn’t see my family on my birthday, or at Thanksgiving or Christmas. It’s a choice that put me on the receiving end of countless guilt-trip phone calls and messages demanding that I show up – insisting it was time for me to “move on” and “get over it” and telling me that my refusal to cooperate was a sign of depression and that maybe I should “see someone” (as though I don’t already). And every time, I pushed back and reinforced the boundary and did my best to explain the nuanced difference between depression and grief. I think Will would have been proud of my stubbornness.

As a result of the boundary enforcement, on Christmas morning, I woke up alone at a B&B in the woods. I made myself some coffee and went to sit on the porch. As I made my way outside, the orange tabby house cat walked over to greet me and, as I looked up into the trees, I realized that I was surrounded by mistletoe. In the next moment, an 8-point buck walked directly in front of me and stopped to watch me. I froze and just stood listening to the sound of his breathing. Something about it transported me back to the year before – to waking up before Will and listening to the sound of his breathing, to the soft exhalations I’ll never hear again but which I used to live for. As that deer began to walk away, I snapped back into time and felt nothing but gratitude and peace.

Grace doesn’t come around often, but it did that day.

22.

“There are days when you wake up happy; Again inside the fullness of life, Until the moment breaks… And you are thrown back Onto the black tide of loss. Days when you have your heart back, You are able to function well Until in the middle of work or encounter, Suddenly with no warning, You are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that Sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way And will find the right time To pull and pull the rope of grief Until that coiled hill of tears Has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance With the invisible form of your departed; And when the work of grief is done, The wound of loss will heal And you will have learned To wean your eyes From that gap in the air And be able to enter the hearth In your soul where your loved one Has awaited your return All the time.” — John O’Donohue

Don’t think just write.

I don’t want to wean my eyes from that gap in the air.

My therapist asked me recently if I actually want to “get better.” It’s a loaded question in a few ways because it first suggests that I’m unwell in the same way as someone who has the flu, and secondly suggests that there’s a cure, and finally suggests that grieving is a choice – that I can just choose to stop.

It’s the final one of those 3 that bothers me the most because I don’t know that emotional pain can be overcome through willpower. Like, I’m not going to wake up one morning and say to myself “today’s the day! no more grief, no more missing him!” Nor do I want to because of what he meant to me. I don’t want to stop thinking about him. If people are allowed to quote historical figures and read biographies and carve statues in mountainsides and build the goddamn Taj Mahal to honor people who they loved or who made a difference in their lives, then why should I have to wean my eyes from the empty space left by his departure? Why should I want the wound to heal?

What if love and loss necessarily rips you open? What if it should? What if that’s its real purpose? What if healing is the wrong thing? What if remaining raw is the right thing? What if I don’t ever want to “get better”?

23.

Because you love me…

Because you love me, I live without fear. That was never the case before. I had paralyzing anxiety from the time that I was a child, and used to pace through the house in the middle of the night in my nightgown and bunny slippers, convinced that if I just stayed awake long enough, the monsters wouldn’t find me. I read books and sought counseling and took pills and did everything I could think of to make those monsters leave, but nothing ever stuck. Until you.

You always hated the fact that you took up so much space in the world because you were so tall and you always wanted to lose weight, but you never understood how perfect you were to me and how safe I felt beside you. You never knew that our bed was the only place I’d ever slept through the night. Because of you, the world gets to know a version of me who has experienced peace.

You always felt like your constant motion made you too much or overwhelming, but you weren’t… You never knew how watching you live your life with unceasing joy and silliness and passion inspired me and was enough to make me question why I was always running from something instead of towards something. You made me a leaf, a vining thing growing toward the light. Because of you, the world gets to see more than a seed.

You always thought you talked too much, but I never tired of hearing your voice, and you never knew that the thousands of hours that we spent talking about everything and nothing and the tenderness of our dialogues made me feel like I was heard – maybe for the first time in my life. You made me a lioness, and gifted me with a roar that could scare off any monster. Because of you, my love, I have a voice.

You never knew those things (maybe you did?), but they will. And whether here by my side or on the other side of this invisible veil that separates us, doll, you will always be my rock – in every sense of the word for a man who was a geologist.

24.

How can you possibly write about all of this?

Anyone who has ever learned another language knows how difficult it is to conjugate verbs into the right tense. In varying degrees of quality, I’ve learned 6 languages and the infinitive that’s by far the coolest in all of them is “to be.” Am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been. “To be or not to be – that is the question” (clearly I’ve had Shakespeare on the brain for the past few days). “To be” is the simplest of all verbs, yet it’s the one I haven’t been able to use correctly in any language for the past 9 months.

It’s hard to get the tense right because, as Megan said, “the words aren’t just any words, they are words that come from the deepest wound.” How do you reflect on something (past tense) that’s still a daily reality (present tense)? How does language itself not crumble under the weight of grief? But then is it a failure of language, or is it just evidence of me crumbling? Do I say he WAS the love of my life? No, because he IS – I still wear my ring everyday, still think about him probably 30 times a day. Do I say that I AM alone now? Technically true, but I still talk to him as if he IS still here, as if his very BE-ing IS still in question, as if the hands I once held and lips I once kissed ARE not now ash.

The entire experience is so jarring – such a departure from logic, from familiarity, from stability – that it’s a damn wonder that anyone on the receiving end of the emotional gut-punch has any words at all.

Maybe that’s why, in the midst of the struggle with “to be,” the tense I keep having the hardest time with is the future. It’s too hard to think of what or who I WILL BE without Will.