Three months

Three months have passed since Angela died. It is very hard to believe that this is true. The summer has passed as in a haze, and I have found repeatedly that my memory is working strangely these days -- things that happened relatively recently -- especially just before Angela's seizure last August -- seem very distant in time, and things that happened a long time ago -- before her initial cancer diagnosis in Nov. of 2000 -- seem relatively close. My entire sense of time is distorted still.

I seem to be doing better in some ways, and am more functional when I am awake. But at night my sleep is disturbed and restless. I continue to have passing thoughts that she is simply out for a little while, or gone on a trip -- when something significant happens I tend to think "I should tell Angela about this" or "Angela will be happy to know about this," and find myself reaching for the phone, as if to call her. My missing her is less physical, less visceral, than it was earlier. C.S. Lewis wrote that no one told him that grief felt so much like fear. My grief feels less like fear now. But it is still pervasive. There is a line from Edna St Vincent Millay that is reproduced on many grief sites, but still has truth in my life. "The presence of that absence is everywhere." (She wrote this to friends after the death of her mother: "Darlings, I knew that you were sorry. But there's nothing to say. We had a grand time. But it's a changed world. The presence of that absence is everywhere." She also wrote the poem that is printed on the card we distributed at Angela's funeral, God's World, the first line of which will be inscribed on Angela's gravestone: "O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!" So finding this quotation about grief from her moved me to find out its provenance.)

Recently a former student whose mother died of breast cancer when she was 19 wrote to me that it was a kind of grace that her mother died at the beginning of the summer, allowing her, her father, and her siblings to work through the initial grief together without the disruption of the school year. And I thought to myself that there was truth in this in many ways -- that the onset of Angela's final illness, the course of it, and even the timing of her death, has a kind of providence to them. That she had her seizure on August 15 of last year, surrounded by friends, near available help, rather than the next day or two, when we would have been on a camping trip in Wisconsin, perhaps driving there, or perhaps sleeping in a tent, or canoeing, and rather than a month later, when Lucia would have been in college in Montreal. That Lucia was able to make the decision to stay home with us for the year and so to see her mother frequently during that last year of her life. (Angela even stayed up with her all night long one day in February, helping her to finish a quilt that she was making as a present for her boyfriend.) That she never suffered serious cognitive or neurological decline. That she suffered her final illness during the first full sabbatical year that I have ever had, so that I was able to spend far more time with her than would otherwise have been possible. That she was able to be released from the hospital, and not die in the hospital, but at home -- as she very much desired. That she was able to see her two older daughters settle their college choices. And indeed, that she died at the beginning of the summer, and not, for example, now -- which would have made the beginning of this school year especially difficult for Teresa and Lucia. That we were able, the girls and I, to take a couple of long driving trips during which we could have long conversations about Angela and our life with her, in the months after her death. All of this seems oddly providential, in a way -- given the reality of her illness. Of course, it goes without saying, I would rather have her back. Oh God, yes. But nonetheless, the manner of her illness and dying allowed us many things that might not have been possible for us. And through the last year we were drawn so much closer together, as a couple and as a family, that I cannot but think much good will come of it.