Archive for 2013

If the Fates Allow

Monday, December 23, 2013



The kids and I brought home our Christmas tree last night: a big, spindly, beautifully-smelling ten-footer. We drove out to the tree lot and cut it ourselves, my son and I taking turns lying on the ground with the bow saw, pushing and pulling against the grip of the wood on the blade, snow filling our boots, the ground a mix of slush and mud as the temperature climbed above freezing. The two of us dragged the tree from the back-forty up to the barn while my daughter, newly-turned 16, drove the car back to meet us.

So much of this scene is different from past Christmases that it incites reflection on what can only be called a time of transition for all of us. If I stop and consider, as one is wont to do this time of year, I realize how many steps forward I’ve taken. Each of those steps feels hard-won, and each carries with it the weight of leaving behind a past life that was perfectly fine until it wasn’t. That my son, who for years complained about our sojourns into the woods for a tree, now insists on maintaining this tradition, and my daughter is now old enough to drive the car to help, are both reminders that life goes on, even at those times when we wish it didn’t. Transitioning from one place in life to another always causes the ground to feel uncertain beneath your feet. When that transition wasn’t planned and in fact arrives as a shock, this is even more the case. Second-guessing and regret often accompany each step.


A ten-foot tree would never have fit in our old farmhouse, built as it was with low ceilings so as to conserve heat. The very fact that we have this tall tree is a result of forward movement as we celebrate Christmas this year in a house we don’t own. I miss Christmases in our old house, where I decorated so much, I believe I could have convinced visitors that Norman Rockwell had married Martha Stewart and settled into our home. Considerable effort was put into making everything perfect. I realize now (as I transition to purposely spending my time in other ways) that it usually resulted in a beautiful setting and a very cranky decorator. 

This year, we are in a rental home—a way station along this path. As mentioned in an earlier post, I sold our farmhouse this past summer, unable to deal with the constant work and expense of maintaining it. I live in the rental home while my daughter finishes high school. Once she’s away at college, I will move into a renovated loft in the Midtown area of Detroit. It’s an old Jeep factory, and I currently own a shell of space that will be built out over the next year. It is walking distance to many things that are important to me: Eastern Market, Comerica Park, Whole Foods, the Institute of Arts, the Detroit Symphony, a community garden, three galleries, a nationally-known bakery, multiple restaurants. I can’t contain my excitement when I think about it. My recent meeting with a newly-hired architect resulted in a change of plans whereby the room with fifteen large windows and tons of natural light will be my writing space. The kitchen now opens up into the living room so that I can cook and entertain. I cannot consider this space without smiling.

I also used to bake cookies this time of year—thirty dozen by one count. They were gifts for friends and service providers, they accompanied us to every party we attended. On the second Friday after Thanksgiving, I would begin at 7 a.m. and finish around midnight. Kevin would call and check-in from work a few times through the day, getting an updated grocery list of items that had run out, and later, collecting my dinner order for Chinese carry-out. Once home, he sampled each kind, a smile on his face like that of a child in his favorite bakery where everything is free.

I have cooked and baked very little over the past three years, and couldn’t even begin to think about recreating the annual “cookie baking day extravaganza.” There is no longer the time, and I just don’t have the heart for it. But I did bake this year for my cooking group cookie exchange. I am grateful for my cooking group. They will never realize what their friendship (over half of them being brand new friends that I had never met prior to our first gathering) has meant to me this year. Together we have made numerous trips to Eastern Market in Detroit where we discover new things to eat, and befriend vendors like the lady who, with her son, sells the best turkey and veggie burgers, or the completely engaging couple who run the Middle Eastern store—they treat us like their long-lost daughters each time we visit. Because of this, I've returned to cooking with renewed interest and purpose. For my month of hosting our group I prepared—as a tribute to my parents and grandparents—an authentic Southern meal complete with chicken and dumplings, collard greens, green beans, mashed potatoes and peach cobbler. 

Tonight, my children and I will decorate the tree. Ornaments are now kept in a storage unit instead of the dusty attic of our old house. I’ll look at each one (and we’ll need each one in order to cover this huge tree) and know of the memories it represents. There are ornaments from trips to family reunions, our first trip south for Kevin to meet my extended family, two trips to Europe. I have the ornament we purchased while on our honeymoon and the ornament I gave him on our 25th wedding anniversary. Some ornaments I made by hand and several were made by our children. 

This year, I’ll place three new ornaments on the tree—small, beautiful, hand-crafted bangles given to me by friends as we celebrated at a holiday dinner last week. The four of us are all single women who happened to live in the same neighborhood—two divorced and two widowed. We gather each month at one of our homes or at a local restaurant and share equal amounts of celebration and commiseration. They (and many others) were there for us during Kevin’s illness and then for me after his death. I cherish these friendships as well, and find myself hoarding away little incidents and big news as I go through the month, in order to share with this group who understands better than most what this new life entails.

There are other recent events that cause both smiles and contemplation: I reconnected with a wonderful friend last week that I hadn’t seen since my wedding day. Twenty-seven years evaporated like the steam from our coffee as we caught up on our lives and made plans to keep in better touch. It’s always good to be reminded that I can reclaim some of the fun of the past and bring it along with me.

My siblings and I have started a new tradition of meeting just before Christmas to lay a wreath at my parents’ grave and have lunch together--a new tradition that brings sadness and laughter colliding together. As part of my move, I found and watched several old videos of my family sharing Christmas Eve. Time moved in fast motion as I pulled one video out and popped the next one in, a year having passed in the moments in between. So much time and so little; so much change.

Old friends and new, just-born traditions and those well-worn, all bring comfort; they occupy in different ways the empty space that’s created when those so important are no longer here. I permit myself the time for sadness and hope that it settles into a place that also allows for the joy that springs up along the path when I’m not looking. 

Here’s wishing each of you a safe, joyous, peaceful, holiday season filled with both reflection and hope, and surrounded by those you love.

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Toward Happiness

Friday, November 22, 2013



Lately I’ve been thinking about happiness.  How do we live happy lives, or in some cases, return to a happy life after being sorrowful? What makes me happy? Am I happy right now? Is that ok?

Happiness in the midst of heavy grief is an elusive and, for me, fraught emotion. For weeks after Kevin’s death, even laughing at a joke felt wrong. As with everything in grieving, each person has their own timeline. In my case, it took nearly a year before I could even laugh with close friends. I distinctly remember an evening shortly after Kevin’s passing when friends came over to watch Project Runway. In an effort to cheer my daughter, we brought out popcorn, chips, and pop, and made it a girls’ night. As the critiques of the designers and their creations began, jokes were made and we were all supposed to laugh, but I couldn’t. I remember it as being close to an out-of-body or metaphysical experience. I was observing myself, sitting among friends who were there because they were concerned about leaving us alone. They were concerned because I was a widow and my daughter had just—at the age of twelve—lost her father. They were with us because my husband was not. There were the usual feelings of disbelief and impossibility, but there was also the overwhelming understanding that I would never again find even simple enjoyment, nor did I want to, or feel I deserved to.

Over the past three years, enjoyment has managed to creep back into my life—sometimes accidentally, sometimes because I’ve sought it out. Most of those times though, it is accompanied by considerable heartache and guilt. Milestone events, which should be happy and enjoyable, are now and will forever, be bittersweet. This term will always be attached to any occasion with my children: birthdays, performances, graduations, weddings, the births of grandchildren, as it should be. None of these life events will be the same without Kevin present. He should be here, experiencing them with us, and he’s not. The amount of unfairness in that realization is indescribable.

This understanding that Kevin isn’t here to enjoy these moments makes movement toward happiness a slow and troubled process. It is a complicated mixture of guilt and longing. I may always feel guilty for still being here, enjoying the achievements of our children, or participating in both the simplicity and awesomeness of life. In the quiet moments after a joyful experience I always come to the questions that can’t be answered: why is Kevin gone, why am I still here?

Too, I simply miss having my best friend to share in the wonderful and the mundane. Both of us traveled for business, and whenever one of us returned, we would talk about experiences we had on our trips, always ending the story with “I wish you had been there, you would have loved it.” So often I say that now, whether it’s seeing a bright flash of the Aurora Borealis from our deck, or feeling comfort in a gathering of old friends, or attending a particularly lovely poetry reading: I wish he could have been here, he would have loved it.

Despite the questions and the wishing, I also know that I tend toward happiness. I need it in my life and fear the alternative darkness. Knowing this has propelled me forward over the past three years. I recall a conversation with Kevin a few years into our marriage. He was writing a paper for a college class and as I proofread, I jokingly commented on how unfair it was that he was so smart; that math and science and even writing came easily for him, while I studied hard, read and then re-read a text, or worked to make a single sentence just right. He responded with the usual good-husband response: that I was smart, too--I think he stopped short of saying that I was equally smart :), and that I had qualities he didn’t have, like a sense of happiness, a lack of cynicism, a belief in the goodness of people, the ability to make friends with anyone, and the desire to live in a place of light. Those were things that he was struggling to learn that seemingly came easily to me. Over the years we taught and learned from each other. I believe he became a happy person who lived with me in that lightness.

I recently came across this story by Madonna Badger, who lost her parents and her three children in a house fire on Christmas morning, 2011. In it, she talks about how she has carried on. Those who haven’t experienced loss (and hers was certainly greater than most), struggle with understanding how those who grieve can carry on. There is much to admire about her, particularly her response to this question. She says, “…trying really hard to not feel sorry for myself makes me feel good. Being of service helps the pain to go away, if only for a little while, and giving and receiving love makes me feel good. Basically, I go to wherever the light is, because anything else is darkness, and it can be a deeply black darkness.”

I understand this, and I so admire her ability to so clearly articulate it.

This forward momentum (some may call it resilience but I’m not sure that’s accurate) isn’t for everyone. Some may also say that we all have a choice to be happy or sad, but for those in grief I don’t believe that’s always true, either. For me, I move toward an eventual happiness because that is just who I am, no less than having long fingers or red hair. It is a part of me that has been beaten up and nearly suffocated, but it was always there. 

And, with the slow steps of someone walking through an uncharted, muck-filled, foggy swamp, I will continue to walk toward it.

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A House, A Home

Monday, November 11, 2013



Earlier this year, I sold the house in which Kevin and I had lived for twenty years. It was a terribly difficult thing to do. I had hoped to stay in the house until our daughter graduated from high school in 2015, but keeping up an old farmhouse on two acres of land (mostly vegetable and flower gardens) was becoming increasingly impossible. It had occurred to me that it might take two years to sell the house, given Michigan’s slowly recovering economy. Instead, the house sold within six months of listing, and after nearly one-hundred showings (yes, 100). 

Any home would be difficult to leave, but leaving our home was particularly traumatic. Kevin and I purchased it shortly after we married. We had been visiting my brother one evening, and had a conversation with him about when we could buy our first house. We complained that it would take years to save for a down payment while paying off student loans, paying rent in Ann Arbor, and handling other expenses like car payments, insurance, etc. Dusk was just settling in as we headed
Moving day.
back to our apartment and passed an old, abandoned, farmhouse with knee-high grass and a wooden screen door flapping in the late autumn wind. I yelled at Kevin to turn into the drive and that was all it took. We returned a few days later with our trusty landlord/general contractor and made a bid on the house by the weekend. My parents helped with the down payment, which was all of $4000.

Friends came out and looked at the house prior to our move-in, dubbing it “Sullivan Acres” after the 1970’s television show “Green Acres.” Another friend called the basement a Turkish prison, and several were certain it was haunted. Regardless of these “concerns” we moved in just before Christmas and began work, pulling plaster and lathe off the walls, scraping up carpet, re-wiring, re-plumbing, and then putting it all back together. Over the course of this time, we lived on the first floor, then only in the kitchen, then we moved out altogether and lived first in a sublet in Ann Arbor, and then with my parents in Detroit. Finally, just six months before our first child was born, we moved back. The original plan was to gut, rebuild, and sell, making enough money to have a down payment on a nice house in Ann Arbor. But then life happened and soon our kids were settled into the schools, we made friends, and the idea of selling became distant. The few times we considered selling we needed only to attend a few open houses where we would list all the shortcomings of the property and decide instead to stay put.

The house became a huge part of our identity. “We live in the yellow farm house across from the party store,” was pretty much all we ever had to say to anyone in Dexter and they would know the one. The home’s original family still lived in town, and our work had made many curious over the years. We frequently entertained, welcoming friends and neighbors as often as we could find an occasion. Our children held many sleepovers and birthday parties, and roamed the two acres finding snakes, frogs, and bunny rabbits.

After. July, 2012
My feelings about the house are now, for the most part, ambivalent. It is my great regret (given my now perfect hindsight), that we stayed in the house for so long. How many trips could we have taken, how many memories could we have created with the time and money used on our house? It breaks my heart to think about this.

On the other hand, how great it was to have such a place to call our home.  And what a true accomplishment it was for us both. Many times (well, more than once, anyway) I encountered someone who, upon hearing of this project, would tell me that they had undertaken a similar project with their former spouse. A marriage that can survive such a major home renovation is a rare thing. I also know that Kevin and I learned so much from that renovation; there was nothing that could go wrong that one of us (mostly Kevin) couldn’t fix.

Shortly after Kevin received his Stage IV diagnosis, we talked about our accomplishments. It was a dreadful conversation to have. I reminded Kevin that he had realized so much—a Michigan MBA, a position of importance with an international corporation that respected him and held his opinion in high regard, many close friends, children that loved him and wanted to spend time with him, an extended family who loved him. He had traveled the world, run a marathon, and completely renovated an old house that was now a beautiful, memory-filled home. His response was that he wasn’t done yet, which I completely understood and agreed with. But it was important to me that he know how very much he had achieved; that his was not a life that, by anyone’s estimation, would come up short.

Containing our marriage, indeed our lives, into moving boxes was a physically and emotionally challenging chore. There were times, I must admit, when there was a certain lightness and liberation to it as well—an uncluttering. For the most part though, it felt like a stripping away or reduction of so much that defined me and us. Our marriage would never be defined by things, but it certainly was defined, in part, by that house. And now, I’m attempting to create new definitions for myself that don’t necessarily involve the home in which I live.

Now, the house is occupied by two plant biologists who both teach at the University of Michigan. They have two children, a boy and girl, who are the same age difference as ours. They love the gardens, the antiquity, the creaking of the wood floors, and the inviting porch. They understand the memories that reside within the house and hope to make their own. There is a certain miraculous symmetry to their purchase of our home. I wish them well.

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Looking for Sanctuary

Sunday, October 13, 2013



Purple wildflowers, bushy tigerlillies and a few untamed roses fill the memorial garden of our church. Kevin’s ashes are buried there in a beautiful paper packet that will, over time, become earth. The building, grounds and people of our church were all important to Kevin. He loved attending services, participating in the men’s group, organizing the annual Men’s Retreat, and working with church youth as a religious ed teacher and advisor. We only began attending church about three years before his illness was diagnosed. We had struggled to find where we fit in, but felt strongly that we wanted a place for our children to learn about values from people other than us.
First Unitarian Universalist of Ann Arbor is a welcoming, active community of liberal thinkers like us. Kevin felt more at home there than anywhere else other than, well, home. We made deep and rich friendships. The congregation went into action when Kevin’s diagnosis became public—cooking meals, caring for our kids, driving Kevin to treatment, sending notes of encouragement. Our ministers took wonderful care of our family. Our Associate Minister, the late Nancy Shaffer, had barely unpacked the boxes in her new home, having just moved to Ann Arbor from Illinois, before she was at our house inquiring about Kevin’s first surgery and impending treatment plan. Subsequently, she was at multiple chemo treatments, came to our house to talk about diagnoses, and sat with our family during every surgery, both planned and emergency. The Pastoral Care committee went into action with meals, cards and other thoughtful efforts.
After Kevin passed away, we had only a few days to plan his memorial service. He made notes on his laptop, but never discussed with me what I should do if he didn’t make it. I went through pages of writing and found that he wished to be cremated, have his remains spread at his dad’s grave, my dad’s grave, my Uncle GW’s grave, and at his favorite running place. The remainder would be buried in the UU memorial garden.  What I remember of his service was as good as it could be. It was full of music, reminiscences and tears, and over 200 people that loved Kevin.
But that experience also marked that church and that sanctuary forever as the last place I ever was with Kevin, unable to see him or touch him.
I took a few weeks off from attending services. But I knew that I would eventually need to return. Our daughter loved her religious education classes, we both have many friends there, and there is rarely a sermon that doesn’t speak to me in a meaningful way.
But the first time I walked into the sanctuary, I felt my knees buckle and the breath leave my lungs. I found a seat closest to the door and glued myself to it. I kept my eyes on my shoes. Of course, I was greeted by many, including our Senior Minister Gail Geisenhainer, who also greatly impacted our lives during Kevin’s illness. She understood what it meant for me to be there and thanked me for my bravery. At the time I shrugged it off, saying I was fine, because I didn’t realize myself how hard it was going to be to walk through those doors.
I had never anticipated having this reaction. We have spoken about it in my widow’s group and it is a painful thing. Quite often one’s church is the place for solace and good memories of baptisms and weddings. It is the place we turn to in an effort to be closer to answers. It is a place to solidify our faith and beliefs.
But that all goes away after having a loved one’s funeral in that building. At least it did for several of us. I was surprised by how many in our group had been lectured by their ministers over having any negative feelings about attending church. It would be better, I think, if these ministers understood that much about grieving can’t be understood, planned or willed away. We don’t ask for any of the feelings that overcome us, and seemingly have no control over when and where they happen. Patience is far more helpful than any lecture. Losing our connection to a congregation or the peace of being in a sanctuary is yet another unfair loss for us. 

I remember shortly before Kevin’s last surgery—his back was in such pain that we had to take a cloth folding chair to church so he could sit through the service. In front of us was a woman who had lost her husband to cancer just 2-3 years before. As we stood and began singing a rousing gospel hymn, I noticed her swaying, clapping and smiling. I wondered just then, if Kevin didn’t make it, how long it would be before I could be anywhere, but especially back in this place, acting that happy. I put that thought, like any that had to do with the possibility of death, out of my mind.
I didn’t realize at that time, how difficult it would be to find happiness in that place, even when small bits of happy began creeping back into my life. It is now also the place where I last saw Reverend Nancy before she returned to her hometown of Davis, California, to surround herself with family as she succumbed to brain cancer. I also attended the memorial service for my friend Brenda. I understand that death and memorializing are important functions of a church’s purpose, but on some days it seems to be the only thing. I now attend church nearly every week, though most Sundays it’s still not easy.


There have been other peculiarities of grieving as well, things that those who've not experienced it might find strange. We find our lives are different in the way we think or act and realize it's just another way in which we've lost more than just our loved one.  I could do an entire post on irrational ways I’ve thought, or the strange out-of-body experiences I’ve had. For some unknown reason (that I’ve hypothesized but not solved) it was very difficult for me to tolerate the touch of another person—I bristled at hugs, hand squeezes or even accidental bumps in crowded rooms, in the months just after Kevin's death. The idiosyncrasies of grief—the odd ways in which it manifests itself in each individual, are not understood by scientists, much less those who experience them.  All we can do is get through the emotional and physiological changes that grief brings and hope that our families, friends and ministers are waiting when we do.
 

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