Category — Life

Most of the time, grief is a hum in the background, a soft sorrow, almost (in a way that surprises me) comforting, like the thrum of rain at night. Sometimes it comes to me as a longing, even a sweet longing, like that ache you feel when you hear Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now.”

But occasionally it is a sharp pain.

Most of these arrows to the heart are predictable: the first Thanksgiving without, the first Christmas without, the first birthday without, the first book launch without. The six-month mark. I know these are coming, and I prepare myself. I note the day on the calendar. I give myself a talking to. Maybe I read a Mary Oliver poem. Maybe I power up Blanton Heights. I make sure I’ve got gin, vermouth and Campari in the cupboard. And I handle it.

It’s unexpected that gets me.

Yesterday, sitting on the floor with Henry, I listen to him recite the names of all the people in his life, the names he now knows, the people he loves and trusts. Until recently, he was a listener. Now he is a talker. And so he points at me and says “Wowo,” which is me, Lolo. His “Ls” are not quite there yet. And he says Dada and Mama. And then he says Gamma, which is his other grandmother, and Papa, which is his grandfather.

And then, bam, it hits me: He has no word for Tom. He has no name for his other grandfather. And some day, when people ask him about his family, he will say, “I never knew my father’s father. He died when I was just a baby.”

I wonder what Henry would have called Tom. But I don’t wonder what kind of a grandfather Tom would have been. I know. He would have delighted in this child as he delighted in our children. He would have loved him unconditionally as he did our children. He would have read to him–with funny accents and quirky voices—sang songs, played the piano, planted pumpkins for him in the garden, alerted him to the birds swooping around the backyard feeder, occasionally bored him with scientific facts (known in our household as the reading from The Hager Codex), watched him, with an open heart, as this child learned about the world, as this child became a boy, a man. Tom would have been an extraordinary grandfather.

And that’s the awful grinding pain of it. That he didn’t get to be one.

Big things die when someone dies, and that’s what you notice first. That’s what hits you. They aren’t THERE anymore: lying next to you in bed, standing beside you at the sink brushing teeth, sitting across the table eating dinner, in the car, driver or passenger. No steps in the hallway. No rattling of dishes being put away. No whistling. Yes, he was a whistler. And you get used to this faster than you think you will. The silence. The knowledge that whenever you walk into the house, you will be the only one there. One car in the two-car garage. A closet with only your clothes.

And then, a month or so later, after that barrage of mail to “the estate of” from doctors and lawyers and accountants and vultures who read the probate postings, after the bills that are still in his name, and the random notes and letters from strangers, from fans of his books, from people who do not yet know the addressee is, well, no longer at this address, after all that has ceased, you notice that all the mail in the mailbox is now addressed to you. And you get used to this faster than you think you will.

And then, day to day, week after week, you notice the things he used to do that you now have to do: hauling the garbage cans and recycling up the driveway and back, checking the level on the propane tank, filling the bird feeder.  And the bigger things: putting up the Christmas lights, pruning the orchard, income taxes. And you do all of it. Sad because this is yet another reminder that a practical-life partner is gone. Grumpy because you have all your own chores to do. Intimidated because, well, taxes. But, with each chore accomplished, you actually feel a sense of accomplishment, of stubborn pride, proof that you can do all this. And you get used to doing everything that needs to be done. And you get used to it faster than you think you will.

And then driving up the freeway to visit a friend, you pass by the sign to Brownsville and remember that long-long ago breakfast at the greasy spoon and the joke you made about it every time you passed the freeway sign. No one else knows that joke. No one else knows about “café con queso” and why that is funny and infuriating at the same time. No one else will roll their eyes and say “blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah” when they have heard enough—and know exactly where that comes from. Those countless sentences that begin, “remember when…” will no longer be uttered. Because now you are the sole repository of that memory. And that empty space is so much bigger than all the rest. And you will never get used to it.

We don’t tell everyone everything. Even ourselves.

I’ve been thinking about layers, how we are, each of us, thickly layered humans, each layer formed from the passage of time—like rings in a tree—the result of events and people, the sediment of experiences, relationships that nurture, relationships that wound, births, deaths, you know.

I am not wise enough to say anything meaningful about how one remembers or rediscovers or relearns what is at the core, underneath all those layers, how one unpeels oneself. Tom did this, I think, as he prepared to die. It is solitary work. I observed it from the outside: How he sat in the sun on the front porch, face tilted upward. How he sat on the back deck listening to the birds. How he fell asleep mid-afternoon with a worn copy of Lao Tzu opened across his lap.

What was happening inside I do not know. But I know that when he sat on the edge of the bed we had set up in the living room when going up stairs became too much, when he sat there in his jeans and the gray plaid wool shirt I bought him that was always one of my favorites, when he sat there and took the medication, he was a different man. He had come to a place of knowing. He was unpeeled.

Before that, in our lives together, in the layers he unpeeled for me and I for him over the years, there were, I now know—of course I knew then–oh-so-many unpeeled layers. I shielded him, and myself, from intermittent doubts about who we were, and I am sure he did the same. We hid parts of ourselves for all kinds of reasons, for no reasons, maybe when we didn’t even know we were doing it, maybe when we didn’t even know what those parts were. I don’t say this with regret. It is who we were.

And when it worked, it was glorious. And when it didn’t, we played it close to the chest. And kept on playing.

It started with a toaster.

Tom and I had been a couple barely five months when he left for Washington, D.C. to take a six-month science writing internship. We spoke every day, wrote the I’m-pining-for-you kind of letters people newly in love write to each other, neither of us doubting for an instant that when he returned we’d escalate to the “let’s make a life together” stage. (We were right.) After the internship, he caught a ride west with a crazed, pill-popping ride-board stranger, and together they barrelled cross-country for 43 (pharmacologically assisted) non-stop hours.

No, that’s not right. They did stop somewhere. I think Tom told me it was Ogallala, Nebraska. There they alighted ever so briefly at a second-hand store where Tom, brain buzzing, looked for a gift for his beloved. That would be me. He chose a toaster. It was, in fairness, a kind of cool, vintage-y toaster. But it was a toaster. Imagine my delight.

It very quickly became the gift to which all other subsequent gifts were compared, as in: At least it’s not a toaster. Or: That’s nice but can it toast a bagel? During the ensuing flawless, conflict-free 30-plus years of our marriage, I received other such amorous gifts: kitchen shears, garden trowels, a hand-held cordless vacuum cleaner, a set of Allen wrenches, a phone charger. But there was also the antique jade necklace, the beads a stunning and unusual sea green, and little pearl earrings I wear when I want to be ultra-fancy, and, in Mexico, a carnelian and silver bracelet that is one of the most beautiful things I own.

I loved these traditionally romantic gifts. Love them still. But, in truth, I’ve worn that jade necklace maybe four times in fifteen years, and I use the damned toaster every day. During the three years of the pandemic, I never wore the pearl earrings. I did, however, vacuum out the car several times a week. Those kitchen shears? I never knew I needed them until I had them, and now I can’t imagine culinary life without them. There is, was, a deep thoughtfulness to these gifts that transcended romance. It was about a life shared, the dailiness of that.

A week or so after Tom died, I got a package in the mail. In a pretty box that opened like a book was nestled a cruet of aged balsamic vinegar di Modena. It was a final present from Tom. I wondered when, during his last weeks, he ordered this. I wondered if he imagined me drizzling it on the Greek salad I made, which we both loved, or the roasted Brussels sprouts I made, which, well, one of us loved. I wondered if he considered that I might, right then, go into the kitchen and toast a piece of polenta bread and dot it with balsamic. I wondered if he was smiling.

Poor me.

Look at me.

Look at me, a woman alone, a widow.

Feel sorry for me because I feel sorry for myself.

Boo-hoo.

Wait. I am learning, I am coming to understand, that grief is not about me.

“I can’t imagine how terrible this is for you,” people say. (Which, by the way, is not only an actively unhelpful thing to say, it is an actively hurtful thing to say. And seriously, who the hell cares what YOU can imagine?)

“I can’t imagine how terrible this is for YOU.”

The one this is terrible for is HIM.

He is the one who will never eat a plate of dry-cooked green beans again, who will never play cribbage with his sister again, never climb the butte again, never explore the back streets of Chania again, never again pick an apple from a tree he planted and pruned and fertilized, never again watch the bluejays dive-bomb the bird feeder, never record another dream in his leather-bound journal. Never write another book. Never see his grandchild become a boy, a man.

Me? I get to sleep between flannel sheets, to hike and run, to write and read and plant and weed. I get to dance in the kitchen to the Allman Brothers, to walk on the beach with Karuna, drink coffee with Julie, workout in the park with Celina, bake cookies, photograph clouds, hold my children tight, roll on the floor with Henry.

I get to live.

And every day—I mean every damned day—something astonishes me, takes my breath away, makes me deeply happy to be here.

I long for the future we won’t share, the one I took for granted. But my grief is for him, for the life unlived, not for myself.

“Grief makes friends into strangers and strangers into friends.”

Someone told me this a few days ago, and I momentarily dismissed it as just one of those clever turns-of-phrase. You know, bumpersticker wisdom. And then, boom. Oh yesyesyes. That’s what’s been happening these past four months.

A friend–well, not just “a” friend, but a person I had long considered the closest of confidants, a sister from another mother–vanished from my life. Another friend, someone who had long depended on me for emotional support, disappeared. A woman I reached out to who had been part of my life for more than twenty years, never returned my call. Tom’s best buddy, a person I knew well and had spent considerable time with over more than a decade, never reached out.

But at the same time, a casual friend, more an associate than friend, dropped what she was doing and drove an hour and half to sit and have coffee with me. Three times in two weeks. A woman I spent two days with six years ago found one of my photographs on Facebook, made a painting of it, and sent it to me. A woman with whom I had a deeply fractured friendship reappeared. A high school acquaintance whom I had seen once in a godzillion years five years ago, sent me the loveliest of books. One of Tom’s friends, a man I had met only once, has been calling me every week just to check in.

I related these experiences to the friends-into-strangers-strangers-into-friends woman. She is a hospice worker and has seen a lot of grief. Some people just know, she said. They know what to say or not say, what to do. They are not afraid to get close to grief. They just lean in because that’s who they are.

And some people don’t know what to do, she said, or what to say. Or it is just too scary or painful for them to reach out. They have their own issues. (Who doesn’t?) They don’t want to have a conversation about death because, well, we don’t know how to have conversations about death. Talking about it makes it too real. Talking about it slams us upside the head with our own mortality. When friends disappear, don’t take it personally, she told me. (Of course I do.)

In fact, listen up, friends and strangers and everyone in between: I don’t know what to do either. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what I need until it appears. I’m just making it up as I go along.

I had a dream last night. Of course I did. We dream every night. But I have not remembered a dream since October 15, the day Tom died. This morning I awoke with this dream image: My friend Jón Ágúst Guðjónsson, an Icelandic shaman, was operating a huge piece of earth-moving machinery, piling a mound of rich earth in the meadow in front of my house. Tom was perpetually amused at how literal and transparent my dreams were. Uh, yeah. So, Tom, out there, ANALYZE THIS! 

I wrote that (and posted it on Facebook) last week. I tagged Jón Ágúst, who immediately responded “I look forward to see if Tom sends clues about the meaning in the next few days.” That’s like, shaman talk, way above my pay grade. My view of dreams, which was nourished and enriched by many talks with Tom over the years—his being nourished and enriched by a Jungian dream group he was a part of for close to a decade—is that dreams are a way for one part of you to communicate to another part of you. To send messages, alerts, prompts, pings. Subconscious to conscious. The stuff buried, ignored, unexplored. Free from the external stimuli (not to mention ego) of daily waking life, the subconscious takes over when we sleep. Dreams are often an intriguing mixture of “real” images—people and places you know, snippets of movies, memories—and images or story lines that seem random (hardly ever!) or difficult to interpret (not for me).

So I spent time with that dream, which to me was about (literally) unearthing what needed to be unearthed, about Pachamama sending me a clear signal: Take this dirt, this earth and make something new. Grow something. Make a new landscape with it. Okay: Got it.

But what Jon Agust was talking about was the dream world as a conduit between the living-on-earth (me) and the no-longer-living-on-earth (Tom). That was a little too séance-y for me, thank you very much.

And then, boom. The very next night, I had this dream: I was dancing ecstatically in the meadow (yes, same meadow) with Henry, the one-and-a-half-year-old newest member of our family. As I flung my arms around, I felt that my wedding ring flew off my finger. I panicked. But when I looked down at my hands, I saw that my wedding ring was still there. It was Tom’s wedding band, which I have been wearing on the middle finger of my right hand, was gone. I scoured the meadow. Saw nothing. Hunted desperately. Then, giving up, I walked back to where Henry and I had been dancing. I sat down on the grass. I turned my head, and there, right next to me was his ring.

Yeah. So Tom sent that message.

We had talked about whether we would be able to communicate after he died. The whole idea seemed so 1990 Ghost-y, so weird. But everything was so weird already that the conversation seemed rational. I wanted that dream to mean that Tom had found a way to reach out to me, and that I was receptive. But I had my doubts.

And then, the next night, this dream: I am driving my car and realize I don’t know how to get to my destination. My nav system doesn’t work. Fine, I love maps. I stop the car, open the glove box and look for a map. There is no map. For a moment, I think: Shit. I’m screwed. And then, just as suddenly, I am filled with…some combination of curiosity and energy and joy. I get to make this up. I get to find my way.

Thanks, T.

(photo credit: ME)

When my husband died, I made soup.

Oh, I did other things, too:

I cried.

I wore his gray flannel shirt for five days (and nights).

I read the tabbed pages of the last book he read.

I showered using that Icelandic moss soap he smelled of every morning.

I stood in front of the door to his writing room staring at the Nazar Boncugu that hung from the lintel. It is a bright blue and white glass disk we bought in Istanbul, a Turkish good luck symbol thought to protect us from illness. I shook my fist at it and cursed.

I went to a restaurant we liked where I sat outside at a little table and ordered a Negroni, our favorite drink, and felt very very sorry for myself.

I found the cat and took him outside to see the full moon because I had to share it with someone.

But also, I made soup.

It’s not true that you can fix everything with Duct tape or WD-40. Some things require soup. And then of course, there are some things that cannot ever be “fixed.” Like when, in the middle of October, on a brilliantly sunny day with the oaks blazing orange, he dies, this person with whom you’ve spent the last thirty years, the father of your three children, co-adventurer, co-conspirator, the one who still thought you were funny, the one who got excited about compost, the one who bicycled with you on the shores of the Baltic even though he hated bicycling, the one who played the monster in many a Z-grade middle school movie shot in the woods behind the house, the one who calmed the waters. He who saw the vulnerability you so effectively hid from all others. And never outed you. That one.

But there is solace in soup, truly there is.

There is the Zen chopping of vegetables. There is the all-day simmering of broth, the rich chickeny, garlicky aroma filling a house that is no longer filled with his whistling or his piano-playing. There is the domestic routine, the calming familiarity of it all in a world, in a house suddenly made unfamiliar. There is the grace of knowing what you’re doing when really, you don’t know what you’re doing, the way, for a minute, skimming the broth or roasting the vegetables, or pulling meat from bone, you forget. And all is good.

The truth is, the world opens up once you have a good broth, and it is hard, at that moment, to feel anything but optimism. The (soup) future is wide open. Mulligatawny or spinach tortellini? Butternut squash apple or wild rice chicken? Lentil apricot? Black bean? Or just roast all the roastable vegetables in the bin: the last of the cauliflower from the late fall garden, those gnarly carrots, that Walla Walla sweet you were saving for something, those golden beets that were waiting for just the right moment that never came.  That there is an easily imaginable future, that this future includes only good choices. This is the solace of soup.

And then, of course, there is the spooning of it, the sipping of it, the slurping of it. A slow, repetitive action, hypnotic, even. Some would say soup is calming because it triggers childhood memories, the mother’s cure-all on those wintry days when you were sick in bed, sniffling, coughing, those days when a cold was just a cold. My mother was an inventive and superb cook, but she never made soup. She heated soup. From a can. If soup is a soul-saver it is because of memories I have made through the years.

One more thing about soup and sadness before you get to the good part (i.e. the recipes): It prevents what the Germans call Kummerspeck., literally “grief bacon.” This is the weight you put on after a bout of emotional eating. Note that the constructed word is not Kummersuppe because it is almost impossible to overeat soup. You can’t chug soup. You can’t gobble soup from a bag wedged between your legs while driving. You can’t stand in front of the freezer and gorge on soup. You make it. You simmer it. You ladle it. You sip it. And in that slowness of time, you can breathe into the sadness. And exhale it too.

My broth:

Add the bones and/ or carcasses from past roast chickens (you have saved and frozen them for just this purpose)* to a large stockpot filled with water. I fill the pot with carcasses and add enough water to cover. Add a carrot or two (chunked), an onion (quartered), a few ribs of celery, three or four whole cloves of garlic, a bay leaf, kosher salt, several good grindings of pepper, and (if you are so inclined, and I am) a quarter cup of so of dry sherry. Bring to a boil, then cover and simmer. Hours if you got ‘em. Cool slightly and pour through a strainer into a container you can put in the refrigerator. Overnight the fat will congeal in a layer you can just skim off with a spoon. If your chicken pieces had skin, there will be s good amount of fat to skim. (You can correct seasonings when you make the soup. Don’t worry about salting or peppering the broth anymore.) Assuming a normal-sized stockpot, you should get 10-12 cups of broth.

* Those of us who are backyard chicken farmers know that, after a while, we are operating an old-age home for non-layers. Perhaps, they can now be stockpot chickens?

The easiest most impressive soup:

This recipe serves 4.

Basically, except for sauteing garlic, you just dump in these store-bought (or garden-grown) ingredients:
a package of fresh or frozen cheese tortellinis (12 oz)
a 28-oz. can of diced tomatoes (with its juice)
several cups of fresh spinach

10-12 basil leaves

Also: buy a small wedge of very good parmesan

Melt 3 tablespoons of butter in a soup pot. Add 8-10 (yes, you read that right) cloves of chopped garlic and sauté until fragrant. Add 8 cups of your amazing broth and bring to a boil. Toss in the tortellini and cook until half-done (maybe 5 minutes if you use frozen as I do). Now add the canned tomatoes and their juice. Cook until pasta is tender. Toss in spinach—lots!) and basil leaves. Stir until wilted (a minute). Serve sprinkled with grated parm. It’s beautiful soup.

But tonight, because I was zombie-ing from room to room imagining this headline–Grief-stricken Recent Widow Found Drowned in her own Tears in Empty House—I made potato leek soup. The hard part is cleaning the leeks. The satisfying part is peeling the potatoes. It is a simple soup that never fails. Make A LOT. It freezes beautifully.

Clean (Google this if you don’t know how. Dirt and silt cleverly hide in leeks.) and chop 4 nice-sized leeks. You want mostly the whitish part, but I like some green too. It makes the soup prettier. Sauté the leeks in butter until softened and fragrant. Because I believe everything is better with garlic, I mince several cloves and add to the sauté. Peel and chop the potatoes. Smaller chunks (obviously) cook faster. The more potatoes you use, the thicker the soup. Russets and yellow fin are the best. Stay away from the little red ones or the purple beauties. Now just add the sautéed leeks and potato chunks to the broth, bring to a boil, and simmer until the potatoes are fully cooked. You can enjoy this way, or you can put in a blender to make a silky, smooth soup. I suggest homemade croutons on top.

This was my husband’s favorite soup. He liked it so much that, years ago, he dubbed it “World’s Best Soup,” and that’s what the kids always called it. I don’t think they know, to this day, that it is just potato leek soup. I set the table with a cloth napkin, ladle out the soup into one of the good bowls, sit at the kitchen table, and eat, waiting for the soup to perform its magic. I am not disappointed.

Surrender with grace. That’s what the yoga teacher said as we were settling into a difficult posture. This not something I do very well, this surrendering thing. And rarely with grace. But it is what Tom did, was brave and strong and wise enough to do. Was allowed to do because we live in Oregon.

I am referring to his decision to make use of Oregon’s Death with Dignity. We talked about it back when it was first enacted twenty-four years ago, two vibrantly healthy people with a houseful of small children and busy, active lives. We supported it, embraced it, were proud of our state for enacting such a deeply thoughtful, empathetic approach to end of life. Years later, when California voters had an opportunity to vote on similar legislation, I wrote a long piece for the LA Times that chronicled the deaths of two men, an Oregonian with the choice to make a dignified exit and a California man forced to contemplate illegally stockpiling pills or putting a pistol in his mouth.

Our discussions were theoretical, political, medical. But not really personal. Or they were personal only in the sense that we both said, yes, this is how we would want to go. But we didn’t think we would actually, you know, go. We didn’t actively contemplate our own demise. Why should we? In the words of Tom Petty, the future was wide open.

Until it wasn’t.

He didn’t surrender immediately. Of course he didn’t. He did the research. He was beyond qualified to do the research, to deep-read, parse and understand the studies. He chose his doctor wisely. He had surgery, radiation, powerful (need I add debilitating) rounds of chemotherapy. There were good days, good weeks. There were carefully planned trips, not as adventurous as we were used to, but still adventures. And then there was more research, and an attempt at another treatment. And then, suddenly—it seemed suddenly although it was a year in coming—there was nothing left to do except to sit on the back deck facing the weakening autumn sun and surrender.

Him, not me. He read Lao-tzu and watched the leaves turn orange on the sugar maple. He listened to the jays that circled the bird feeder. He napped and dreamed and talked about his dreams. Me? I worked my way through prodigious to-do lists. I made soup. I finished a writing project for him. I bought high-quality linen for the awful hospital bed that was now center stage in our living room. I searched online for slippers to fit his swollen feet. I kept doing because to stop doing meant I was giving up. Notice I use “giving up” instead of “surrendering.”

His exit that Friday evening in mid-October, with me and the children encircling the bed, was not about giving up. It was powerful. It was intentional. It was graceful. It was ceremonial. It was, in a way that only those who witness such moments can understand, magical. I will learn from this.

(The image is a double-selfie I took in the backyard the day before Tom chose to leave.)

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

That’s what people post on your FB page when you announce that your animal companion of five or fifteen years has died. It is a sad event. I do not mean to trivialize it.

But it is also what people will post when they discover your brother has died, or your father, or the person with whom you’ve spent the last thirty years, father of your children, co-adventurer, co-conspirator, the one who still thought you were funny, the one who (literally) whistled while he worked, the one who got excited about compost, the one who made the best tofu in hot meat sauce, the one who bicycled with you on the shores of the Baltic even though he hated bicycling, the one who loved that chicken chop place in Chania even more than you did, he who played the monster in many a Z-grade middle school movie shot in the woods behind the house, he who calmed the waters, he who saw the vulnerability you effectively hid from all others. And never outed you.

Not your “best friend.” Something else: Your one and only.

I don’t have words to express the sorrow I feel now that he is gone, the longing I feel for this shared future that seemed to stretch out forever and now will never be. I don’t have the words that will comfort, and neither do you.

This is not a criticism.

We don’t know how to express or extend solace to others. That’s the truth of it. We don’t talk about death until it’s at our doorstep, until it knocks. And we don’t want to hear the knock, and we don’t want to open the door. And when we do, we are speechless.

What I’d like to suggest is skipping what I have come to see as “performative condolence,” the so sorry for your loss response. As a person who has made her life in words, I would like to suggest forgetting words.

The true solace I have gotten this past rollercoaster of a month has some from the friend who didn’t ask what I needed but rather drove an hour and a half to sit with me over a cup of coffee; the friend who didn’t ask what she could do but rather sent chicken soup and snickerdoodles across the continent; the neighbor who took a walk in the woods with me; the man who has known more hardship than I can imagine who embraced me in one of those full-body hugs that fills you with warmth and deep, deep kindness.

I am a student of solace now. What I am learning I will pay forward. What I will try to practice—and by “practice,” I mean do— for others will honor Tom, will use the energy he released into the world. It is what he wanted. It consoles me.