Partnering

I'm watching, it seems like most everyone is engaged in partnering, where most actions, decisions, plans are in the context of what works for the significant others, spouses, loves, children.
I'm learning to do that with me.
It's perhaps the biggest change since Gil's death; my job is to make decisions based on what will further the action of me and (who knows?) what I'm becoming.
It's very disorienting.  I've always had a partner who I've been tuned to.  I miss the ease that having someone else's needs to use to make decisions,  gives.  It's so much more work to have to stop and think, "so what do I really want?"  And it's liberating.  The background noise of my life is still there, but I am emerging, as if from a great sleep, so much more solid and strong than I was in college, the last time I was truely a single.   I'm tired and it's a lot of work setting boundaries with folks or saying "no", but I'm learning.  I have no fear of becoming selfish or a narcessist (anymore than we all are) and I don't seem to miss being in a partnership, at least so far.
I'm just surprised at how different the world looks to me seen straight on through the lens of just my own life.

I'm still here

The garden is in, the chicklets clucking, big goats about to be joined by some kidlets, and then there are the new pigs.   My sister is a force of nature. By her sheer persistence and the grace of cardboard and wood chips (why did I never do this before? Oh my God, what a difference it makes!) there are less weeds and more clear spaces than there have ever been here before, both in the garden as well as the flowers and walkways.  
And there's more clear space in me too.
There's plenty to do, but I'm clear none of it's life or death because the death has already happened, there is no need for anxiety, he's already gone; I can survive in one form or other, anything.
I'm not lonely, but I am ready to reengage with folks.

When I was traveling crosscountry on the train, I sat with a woman whose husband had died a year ago.  She asked me if I'd noticed folks pulling back from me.  She feared that they didn't want her around them as a single.  I'd noticed the pull back also, both from others to me but also from myself in response to death or great tragedy in friends.   I told her I thought it was from discomfort, what to say, how not to impose, an unconscious fear of being too close to that pain and having it rub off.  I've kept distant from folks and also felt the distance grow from them, but I don't take it personally.  It's an organic reaction and must have some evolutionary benefit.  When I reach out, friends have been wonderfully responsive.  And I like being alone.  I like it a lot.

I am surrounded with delicious empty spaces.  I notice certain birdcalls (have they always been here?), faint scents, a small shift in my inner emotional weather front.   Flooding hits, my driveway washes out, Adam and Kate's newly carpeted basement ruined, and I feel the pain, but somehow I don't feel panicked by it.   Just curious.        I'm still here.
In some ways, I'm more here than I may have ever been.

Planting

We planted a big sugar maple, atop Gil's ashes and Isaac's placenta, in a beautiful spot on the rock outcropping behind the house. Chris and Miya (and of course the delectable morsel Isaac) Gil's brother and best friend Bob and his wife and Adam and Kate et al, we all shared, held ash, let it go.  One more step into the future after Gil.

I've been thinking about loving.  I remember chewing over the Bible line "Love thy enemies" and wondering how the heck one could feel the way I thought love should feel about your enemies.  ??  And then it hit me, love wasn't about focusing on the characteristics of the moment, it was being open to, awash in, the best possibilities.  It might be a baby, or an idea, a project, or a lover.  Love was allowing yourself to see the best potential  and by seeing it, feed it's actualizing. It is able to be chosen.

When I met Gil, he didn't have many of the characteristics that my Yankee, academic family looked for in men, so I decided that instead of looking at the bottom line of all his qualities that perhaps I should fuzz my focus on them and instead look at me.  Did I like the me that being with him was bringing out?  Did he open up potential in me that without his touch wasn't possible?  Yes and yes.
So I married him and changed the trajectory of who I am and the life I'm leading.

Planting,  an act of hope, an openness to what will emerge, a day to day slog of work.  I allowed a different part of me to grow, by marrying Gil.  He continues to bring out  the potential me I sensed when I agreed to marry him.  His tree and I will continue to grow together.

Humbling

We had a prairie burn on Sunday.  Gil had always organized them in the past, lined up the people and waterpacks; I'd made the food and manned the "flapper" or fire rake.   Somehow I just didn't hear back from many folk, and the places he'd borrowed the packs from in the past didn't respond either.
Sunday seemed calm, we had barely enough folk and then 2 didn't show up, barely enough waterpacks and then a couple malfunctioned, our burn meister's plan was perhaps misguided
and then the wind came up and changed direction.
As the fire took off, I was so focused on saving my neighbor's woods that I sent everyone over to help contain that boundary.  I was alone, surrounded by fire with only a rake.
It's times like this when I realize how easy it is to be a fool, full of pride "we've had 15 successful burns in the past", impulsively responding to the immediate and losing the big picture.
I was very dehydrated which seems to be associated with my vertigo, surrounded by smoke, and I panicked.  "Call the fire department!!"  I crumpled, couldn't stand up any more.

I learned a lot. I have a visceral understanding of what needs to be prepared to be safe. I'm more willing to go ahead and be a bossy broad and say I don't feel comfortable with the plan.  But mostly, I feel humble.  In the face of big forces, of which FIRE and Gil's death are only 2 of so many, I am small, small, small.  Which is just fine. I am not responsible to make everything turn out right; I'm responsible to learn as fast or slowly as I can, to deal with the consequences, and to keep trying.  
And to drink enough water.
I'm missing the guy.

Held in place

For What Binds Us

by Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.



I seem to be held by these forces.  The scar tissue that stitched Gil's and my lives together ties me to old ways of caregiviing, managing, indulging. Habits, inertia,  I'm having a hard time changing these patterns, for good or for ill. The bond I feel with the farm, family, friends keeps me rooted and nourished , it sustains me.  And held to the way I've been.

I don't know what is next, but I feel more as though the decision has been made and no one has informed me.  I am listening for the urge for something more and to what the forces are, which hold me to this past, (I don't want to be dismissive; this "past" may well be the rest of my life).  If I can't sense and then name what  keeps me so rooted, how will I ever become aware of what new lives I may have yet in this lifetime, and be able to let go and step into them???

Numb and Crabby

So much for the anniversary of his death being an emotional Camile like weep fest.   For the last couple of days I've been feeling kind of numb, going for the naps and ice cream  and generally irritable at family, friends and foes.    I get off on missing him and crying but, you know, I've done a lot of that this year .  Time to move on to feeling other feelings, like anger.   I was surprised when I riffed on that in the last post.  There was a lot about the years from the brain tumor on that was really hard and he could be quite self centered and passive.  And I was never Saint Kathleen; I wasn't always fun to be around.   Grieving  doesn't change the reality of our basic messy humanness.  And crabby when it's upgraded to anger can be energizing.  Which I could use.  I'm sick of wallowing; time to clear brush and move chickens.  And I'm pissed he's not here to help.

Holy Week

A year ago, this was the week before Gil died.  Last week was our 25th wedding anniversary.  Oddly intense little mileage markers, they call out for some ritualistic processing (recovering Catholic that I am).   I went back to Samba on our anniversary, the Brazilian ode to meat restaurant that we went to last year, and I'm planning the ashes/tree planting we'll be doing with Chris and Miya and (ta da!) Isaac et al in a month.
And then there's   now.
Last year this was three days before he died.  I think it was finally starting to sink in that maybe he wasn't going to be able to snatch disaster from the maw of death as he'd done  soo many times before.  Hard to believe.  I think this was the day that I climbed into the hospital bed and spooned with him.  For some reason he needed to be on his side, it was such an invitation to snuggle!  I think I remember him responding, maybe even saying "good".  Mostly I was on the cot they'd made up for me right next to his bed, I could reach out and touch him.
I think this was the day when we could no longer get Gil to swallow his pills. These were ones which couldn't be given by IV but which could have fairly immediate negative impact on how he felt.     I suggested "pilling the cat",  mixing the ground pills in applesauce and squirting it into his cheek.  It worked in the morning and then in the evening he spit it into my face.  
I think he was angry because he felt belittled, and bossed.   I hadn't explained to him why these meds were necessary, I hadn't asked him to let us do it,  I didn't treat him as though he were still there.  Though he seemed mostly unconscious I think he could still hear us.
And I was angry. I was tired of being responsible for everything. Angry that he was fading these last years and I felt chose  TV and computer games, golf and billiards over me.  But mostly I was angry that I was in this position where looking out for his well being left me feeling like a bossy bully.
I wish I'd had the compassion to think of a more respectful way to help him, and
I was doing the best I knew to do; I feel no guilt.
There was a turning point when the magical thinking part of me started to realize,  he was too far gone even for a miracle like  in February, with the gurgling and finally getting the morphine as a steady drip loosing the pain and consciousness.  Those last two days I was in the numb space where it started to dawn on me, something momentous was about to happen and dramatically alter the rest of my life.  Gil was disappearing and I couldn't follow him.    How extremely odd.