We All Need Someone to Lean On
My friend's sister lost her husband this year to cancer. The sister writes a beautiful blog, Homemade Time, that started before he got sick, recounting their lives together with their three kids, but she kept blogging after the cancer arrived, and continued through his death this spring. She's a gifted writer, and her posts were always deep and thoughtful. As things turned, she didn't pull any punches, and her gut-wrenching, harrowing prose will rip your heart out, yet still the beauty of her words shines through.
Here's a few quotes from the last couple of posts:
Suddenly Beatrice pulled her head back and looked at me, hard.
Mama. You're going to start crying.
I guess I am. How did you know?
You started breathing like this - and she demonstrated a pattern of inhales and breath holding.
The girl knows before I do.I guess you're right, Bea. I was about to cry. I'm just thinking about your Papa.
I know.
--homemade time: things we're all too young to know
But how extraordinary, that I keep on learning about us, in this time of sorrow and weight. I like to hear about us from the outside in. It affirms all the yearnings of my heart. Let it be truer and truer still.
I persist in tree mode with Mike. Each significant moment - Frances's choir concert, the arrival of our two new kittens, a terrible conflict with one of the kids - is an opportunity to miss him afresh. To feel the strangeness of his absence, and to anticipate his response to the situation. And the thing is, a good sandwich is a significant moment. So is a beautiful flowering tree, or learning last night that our old Annapolis contractor is caring for his wife who has a rare brain cancer, or going to the New School art show and watching various kids we know perform, or finding ants in the kitchen. Again. Oh Mike, can you believe these stupid ants?
If you pay attention, what moment in your day isn't significant? And so he is with me, and not with me, all the time. It's sadder than I can properly say.
--homemade time: outside in it
Then I couldn't bear another page, and had to leave the basement for awhile.
--homemade time: my life in books
Maybe it was a general warning from one person to another, both of whom knew that the other knew just how good it can feel to settle your forehead on a cool smooth surface, especially when life is getting you down. It's a comfort, but the world doesn't always look kindly on that kind of thing. So in the end I tucked my legs up tight like a chilly bird on a branch in the snow (how many times did Mike's doctor at Penn comment on how I looked like I was about to take flight, perched on the edge of the extra exam room chair during those long visits?) and wrapped my arms around my knees and somehow made it through. Now they will send us benefits for the children. I'm grateful.
In writing this, I realize that more than anything I am longing for the very best place to touch down, which is Mike's body. Yes, there is comfort in landing my flail-prone limbs and heavy head somewhere steady when I am so full of hurt and sadness that I'm afraid the doors will all fall off their hinges with a crash. I find containment for this sorrow in a hug, a wall, an open car door. The hinges are, miraculously, functional. But I think when my third eye is seeking contact, I am really seeking Mike. His warm shoulder, his elegant jaw, refuges for me in the hardest of times, even when he could barely tolerate my touch because he was in pain and the sight of him had to suffice. I held his hand often during the days and hours leading up to his death; he was holding mine too.
My beloved. It has been a month. How terrible it is to be without him.
Just going back through the blog to cull those posts made me start to tear up. But I'd be doing her an injustice to make you think that it's all sad. It's beautiful, and she definitely is deserving of your time and attention. I love it when a new Homemade Time shows up in my RSS reader's inbox, even though I know it will probably make me cry. There's something so beautifully human about her voice, and even though our two situations are different, somehow I find something to relate to, something that she says that relates to something that I'm going through at that moment.
I used to be really into social media, because I thought that instead of websites serving us up canned content, we'd finally get the avenues to tell our own stories. I've really given up on that for the big social media services, but when I find a blog like this, that has something to share, I really appreciate what it brings into my life, and feel like this is something that should be shared. I wish that more things like this would pop up in my inbox.
Just keep the box of tissues close by.