The first post

I have decided to start this blog to continue the posts that I had been putting up on the carepages website for my wife Angela Gugliotta, who died on June 1, 2010, of metastatic breast cancer. After her death I continued to post on carepages as a means of recording my grief journey.  But now I think it is more appropriate to use some other venue to continue this form of expression. Hence this rather minimalist blog.  It may grow and develop over time.  I am new to this.


The title of my blog comes from something Angela wrote after her seizure a little more than a year ago. On her facebook page she wrote of waking up in the hospital:

"Hey everyone. I am so moved by the beauty of the efforts and gifts of all out friends. I woke up, and the first thing I saw was my my green blue gold and red painted finger nails,but over the next day or two much more inspiring reasons to wake up were the similarly varied and beautifully colored eyes of friends and family gathered around my beds -- and beyond these visions all the extraordinary support we've had."

She woke up with an immense sense of gratitude for still being alive. She felt the beauty of the world and experienced all her senses as heightened. Although she knew her time was limited she felt that she had some things to do in this world yet, and she had been given some time to do them still. One thing she wanted to do was to explore her spirituality and her beliefs about the value of creation and the idea of a new creation. She started a journal about this and the first thing she did in the journal was to write out a kind of semi-poetic meditation on the experience of waking up and her gratitude for it, and her sense of the presence and reality of God in the world. The first line of this meditation was "What is this that I am awake to?" which she repeated several times in the course of the meditation. I have taken this line as the title for this blog.

She worked carefully on this meditation, as is evident from the fact that there are two versions in her journal, one with edits and scratching out, the other written out in final form. I am not sure whether I should share more of this meditation on this blog. Perhaps at some later date I will write out the whole thing. But for the moment I will just stick to the first line:  "What is this that I am awake to?"

That is how she began her journal after her seizure, and her exploration of faith and life over her last months.  It has moved me a great deal. I think she accomplished much with the nine and a half months she was given, from August 18 when she awoke from her sedation to June 1 when she died -- almost exactly the normal time of human gestation, from conception to childbirth. Three times she had gone through the 40 weeks of pregnancy, giving birth to our three daughters. Three times she gave birth without anesthetic, experiencing the pains of childbirth. In the last 40 weeks of her life, she gave birth to a new sense of peace and co-operation in our household, to a greater love in our marital relationship, to many new thoughts in her own intellectual life and work, to a deeper understanding of her own spirituality and relationship to God. She did this while suffering pains she would describe as worse than those of childbirth -- even with the pain medication that helped some of the time. She lived out of love for the people in her life, her friends, her family, her mother, our children, and me.  She was fully alive to her world and its beauty, in spite of the pain.


But now she is no longer awake to this world. My faith assures me she is not merely dead and gone, and I hope she is now asking with a renewed and even deeper sense of wonder "What is this that I am awake to?"


But in the meantime, I still wake up every morning to this world that she loved, and although I miss her terribly I would like somehow to take up her gratitude for and wonder at the world, its beauty, the friends that surround me, the work that I still have to do. So I would like to take up her question, and the wonder and gratitude it expresses, as a kind of motto and guide: "What is this that I am awake to?" And so I have titled this blog. In it I will record my experiences for the next while -- experiences of grief and sorrow and where possible joy and learning.