Is this thing on?

Me, today, post-opthamologist visit

(tap, tap)

Hello?

(deep amplified echo rising up from the empty amphitheater)

I don't even know where to begin after a full year of silence.

(throat clearing... more awkward silence)

I have heard that the personal blog is dead. That no one reads these things anymore, that it's now ALL about facebook and twitter and social media modes that trip off my son's tongue, but I can't even...

(closes eyes... opens them)

I just want to tell some stories again.

<whispers> Can I do that?

(listening... no one says "no")

Ok, then...

It's not like I haven't written in a year.

I just haven't finished anything. Bits and fragments of posts sit in the "notes" section of my iPad, sandwiched between "to do" lists and homework schedules, insurance information and Bar Mitzvah plans.

My well is not run dry, but, rather, my bucket full of holes.

The winter has been bleak and March, that asshole month, did not fail to deliver its requisite punches (my late parents' anniversary, father's birthday, father's death date). Spring's blossoming flowers always invoke my mother, mixing the bitter with the sweet, and always now with the missing.

And, once again, the school-year's end looms. How did this year pass?

(With a crawl and a shamble and a speedy blur.  With two boys growing through three shoe sizes and nearly my height. With homework done and screen-minutes counted. With small victories and midnight pints of Ben & Jerrys.)

I think I may be back.

I'll let you know tomorrow.

(drops mike, goes to run Jacob's bath)


Also? Linking to Just Write because I love and have missed Heather.

Wordless Wednesday: Men in Trees

It's a Man. In a Tree.

I know it's been a wee bit heavy around here lately -- what with March being the anniversary month of so much utter crap for me, most of all of my father's death two years ago, yesterday.

So I thought, today being Wordless Wednesday and all, I would take this golden opportunity to lighten up and put up a post about something you don't see here every day. No autism. No death. No elderly mother. No aging body. No homework wars.

Just... springtime.

And men in trees on Riverside Drive, doing a bit of spring pruning: keeping things safe, so dead branches don't come crashing down onto loved ones while they frolic beneath.

So, walking Ethan and a couple of his school friends home on Tuesday along Riverside Drive...

what did we see, but men... in trees...

We were amazed at how they got up there, dangling in the air from a rope until high in the branches.

And doesn't Ethan look all teenagery and movie-star-ish in this picture?

OK, folks, that's all.

Men in trees. And a cute picture of one of my boys. That's enough, right?


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Two Years

Dad & Me, Riverside Park, 1998

Two years ago today, my father died.

It was not the least bit unexpected.

He was nearly 93 (less than 2 weeks shy of his birthday).

He was gaunt, frail, a shell of his former self.

He had been actively dying for three months.

But still, there was a shockwave.

Suddenly a crack in the atmosphere of the world.

A sharp dividing line, a before and after:

The world with my father in it on one side.

On the other, the world without.

Diminished.

There was a howling Nor' Easter that day.

So unlike the near seventy degree early spring this March has brought us.

March 2010 was cold and snowy. A bitter thing.

Gray outside to match my inner grisaille.

He died as he lived.

On his own terms.

Surrounded by people he loved.

With great drama just beforehand.

And then, very quietly, neatly done.

He just... stopped.

Moments either before or after midnight.

March 13th, 2010

I write this now at the juncture. The end of year two, the beginning of year three without a father.

I know it gets easier with time. It already has.

But today is still tough.

And full of to-dos, no time to mourn.

So I will make do with little momentary pauses; a sliver of grieving, slipped into the cracks of life.

I will carry his photo with me today.

To remember.

To keep him present (though he ever is).

I was lucky to have had him for nearly fifty years.

Now two years gone.

Two years.

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March is the Cruelest Month

I am so very, very happy to be incredibly busy this month. So busy in fact, that I don't have time to ponder and wallow.

Because March, the last two years running?

Has nearly done me in.

This time last year, even though my body was officially "healed" from my first ever surgery (goodbye, gall bladder!) my spirit was still struggling. I was not yet nearly "myself" again.

And suffusing that whole winter, laying over it entirely, were ghostly tendrils of the previous winter when my father had been busy dying, and I had been completely consumed by caring for him and supporting my now widowed mother.

So last March was the final crushing end of Year One Without a Father. That year of sad first anniversaries, of remembering and reliving so much awful.

As I was grinding through it, trying to keep my head above water, everyone told me I would be astonished at how much better it gets, with time; that year two would be nothing like year one.

And they were right. Thank all the powers that be, they were right.

Two years ago, today, was four days out from Dad's passing. I was witness to his emaciated, worn out body, fiercely clinging to the last shredded remnants of life.

His incredible strength that I had admired throughout his life now a liability, he was really ready to go, longing for release. But his stubborn, fighting, never-say-die spirit won out. Over and over.

Until it didn't.

March to me is my parents' anniversary on the 1st. My father's death on the 13th. And my father's birthday on the 25th.

Two years ago, he nearly made it to 93. This year, it would have been my parents 53rd anniversary. He would have been 95.

And yet thoughts of him, of my Annus Horribilis, bubble up momentarily to the surface, then sink back below.

I am busy.

Busy with life.

Rising with my children. The thousand tasks involved in their care and feeding and shepherding throughout the day.

Laughing at their jokes. Supervising 4th grade homework. Cheering at their basketball games.

Busy preparing for Jacob's annual IEP meeting, for which "the letter" came in the mail yesterday. Always giving the shortest notice legally allowed, it's in two weeks. Scramble. Scramble.

Busy producing the New York City Listen to Your Mother Show. an amazing endeavor that is heating up white hot in my life, now that we are cast and less than two months out from showtime. (May 6th - mark your calendars!)

Busy doing everything that needs to be done for my nearly 90 year-old mother.

It's good to be busy. I am grateful. I complain (it's my nature). But I'm not REALLY complaining, you know?

Two years ago, I was in the thick of death. There is such a surreal quality when I look back to that time, the awful and beautiful of it, all wrapped up together.

And while "beautiful" seems a strange word to be found here, describing death; now, two years out, I can see that part, too.

It was a gift to be able to be there with my father, and for my mother. To lie beside him and gently, so gently, stroke his back so he could continue to sleep, comforted by the last simple human connection of touch.

At the end, at the very, very, very end, there is no future. The past is a distantly receding dream. There is only the bright white light of NOW. And then it goes dark.

Sitting in my father's light, at the end of the end, was a gift, with its own beauty. And now, two years out, I am beginning to see that, beginning to treasure it.

And so I run about these busy March days, grateful for the life that flows through them. 

Starting year three.

And waiting for April, and true spring to come.

I'm linking up to Maxabella's I'm grateful for... because I so am.

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W is for Wallowing

W is for Wallowing.

It's March.

I am not fond of March, anymore. Probably forever.

This is my month for wallowing. Sorry.

It's not pretty.

I am fairly useless.

I have missed appointments, important appointments. Flaked out on friends. This is not like me, not my usual m.o. At all.

I have not failed to meet Jacob's school bus or appear on time to pick Ethan up from school. Yet.

We're only halfway through the month, so not counting my hatchlings. Yet.

They might not even be chickens, anyway. Maybe dragons. Ethan is certainly reading enough books about them these days.

Anyway, I might have also said that W is for Wandering, as that's what I feel like I am doing here, right now. Purposeless meandering, shaggy ambling through this post, through my life.

I know that for some people, a death focuses them like a laser beam. Not for me.

For me it has the opposite effect. I get unmoored, lost, drift into gray space that is neither here nor there nor... where?

I have written of how waiting for someone to die is like limbo, but there is yet another limbo space, too: the time after. Clear at first, mourning enters into an ill-defined phase when the river of grief carries you to its shores and you find yourself wading back from unknown lands.

There's a reason nearly every culture codifies its period of mourning. There are specific rites and rituals, I think, to help contain what can so easily become an out of control morass. Societies need grief to not swallow up their members, yet death must be dealt with or it all goes underground, bubbling up as depression, paralysis, an ebbing away of the life within those left behind.

So there are rules to be followed, rituals to be observed. I am no student of the fine art of mourning but a few come to mind: the Jewish tradition of shiva, Mediterranean widows' black, the catharsis of an Irish wake.

I am also now very much aware of how much the Jewish tradition of waiting a year to place a permanent marker upon a grave feels so right. This particular point, that I have just arrived at, carries with it a certain gravitas, the end of the first dreadful year of dreadful firsts.

Year one now becomes just another number, a part of the larger passage of time. Much in the way that a baby's first year is so scrutinized, celebrated, counted in days, then weeks, then months, so too a fresh death is counted so slowly at first.

The first days immediately afterward are barely separated into a night and day, such a blur they are. There are periods of light and darkness, yet holding little relation to sleep and waking.

There are many things that must be done, and with immediacy, for wailing babies and rotting corpses are on their own immutable timetables, wait for no one.

Then time speeds up. Days become weeks, then months and finally a year is upon us. I can't count the months any more, it seems silly. So it goes.

My father is merely gone. For how long? Long enough that I must sit for a moment, concentrate to conjure him.

For my mother it is, of course, infinitely worse. I have my children, my husband, my friends and my whole life to keep me more than occupied.

He was, by the end, her whole life. Now gone.

She is without purpose, her too same days bleeding into each other, one just like the next. She used to take care of someone, she used to have a companion. My Dad gave her life shape & purpose.  Gone now.

The social worker at her residence thinks she's depressed, wants to adjust her medications. Um, hell yes, she's depressed. With good cause. She's also just plain sad. She's in mourning. They had fifty one years together, and only one apart. Give her time.

I took Mom to a doctor's appointment today, to have her hearing aid adjusted. Sitting next to her in the cab, in the doctor's waiting room, across from her in the restaurant we lunched in afterward, we fell often into silence.

It's not that we have nothing to say to each other, but rather we are so full of my father's absence, it makes it hard to talk. We don't want to wallow, to obsess, to go on and on about him and the missing of him. But there he is: the invisible elephant in any room we are in, too big to ignore, but really, can't we talk of something else? Apparently not, today.

So we sit in companionable silence. An elderly mother, her middle aged daughter (who is, improbably, still a parent of young children herself at an age when others become grandparents). We cup our warm drinks in out hands. We smile wanly at each other. We sigh.

It is good that we have each other.

To wallow together on a day like today when the missing is strong.

To laugh together on a day like tomorrow, when, surrounded by my sons, her grandsons, we are propelled towards the future, fond memories of her husband, my father, the warm wind at our backs.

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme. And "W"? It's really a double "V" isn't it, not a double "U." So what's up with that name? Really, English, get it together.


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