a rambling collection of snippets

It's been a while since I posted anything, and lots has happened... But I don't feel like recounting it all. I seem to be doing about as well as I can hope to. I am very busy at work with letters of recommendation and a dozen or so graduate students with each of whom I have about a year's worth of work to catch up on. This can keep me distracted at times but my thoughts inevitably come back to Angela. I have been attending a bereavement group and one thing that is clear is that the process of grieving has its own schedule that is not up to me.

This will just be a ramble -- there is too much running through my head.

First off, here are just a couple of snippets from today. This afternoon, I was walking home from the University when I heard a voice behind me: "Hey, I know you!" I turned around to see a woman who was vaguely familiar, and the first thing she asked me was "How's your wife?" I couldn't figure out exactly who she was and I couldn't think of anything else to say but "My wife is dead." She was, of course, very apologetic, and then she explained to me that she was one of the nurses who had taken care of Angela in the ICU -- she had seen us in the Au Bon Pain in the hospital the Friday after Angela had been released from the hospital -- we were back for her regular blood tests and transfusion -- and she had no idea that Angela had died just four days later. She was a wonderful nurse, actually, and she clearly had the greatest affection for Angela, and was really sorry to hear about her death. I gave her one of the cards from Angela's funeral (I seem to carry a few of these around with me at all times for occasions such as this). But it was eerie explaining Angela's death to her.

Then, this evening, I moderated a debate put on by the undergraduate philosophy club on the topic "Can there be a reason to be moral without God?" (or something like that). I moderated the question-and-answer period after the formal debate. I was pretty interested in the debate as it took place, even though I found the topic somewhat irritating -- and I thought I did a good balanced job as moderator -- though I did make the mistake of calling on one audience member whom I should of guessed was off his rocker (he began his discourse by announcing "maybe I should have the last word" and then explaining that he had arrived at insights no one in the room could match -- I asked him to put a question to the panel and he eventually asked them what they thought of just adopting the morality of Mr. Spock, that everyone should live long and prosper...). But as the debate ended and we left the room, I immediately began to think about how I would tell Angela about how it went (she would definitely have wanted to know). Of course, I quickly realized I would not be telling Angela about the debate. So, I'm writing this blog post instead.

I have managed to do some good things -- I have started to go to the gym semi-regularly and I am getting a bit more efficient at work. But I need to make sure I leave time in my days for grieving and contemplation. I am struggling with the question of how I want to store all the cards and other gifts and mementos I accumulated after Angela's death -- these have all been displayed along with some pictures of her, my memory book about her, etc, on the dining room buffet, and I want to clear that off over the next month so we can put up the creche there at Advent -- but I don't just want to put all that away in a box. This may be something to work on over the next weeks.

This weekend I am going to South Bend for the 30th anniversary reunion of the Notre Dame Folk Choir, which I sang in from 1986-1991. There are a lot of good memories of Angela tied up with that choir -- members sang at our wedding, and she and Lucia went along for a choir tour (Detroit, Toronto, Pittsburgh) in my last year. Angela actually went into labor with Lucia at a St. Patrick's Day party at the choir director's house. I hope the reunion is fun and musically rewarding and not too difficult emotionally, and provides me with a good break from my routine here.

So, life goes on. That is how it is, for better or worse. There are many more things I could recount. This is one of Angela's favorite times of year -- the weather has been beautiful. Angela would always listen to the Bach Cello Suites in the fall, they seemed to her to suit the season -- and as I think her intuition was spectacularly right there, I have been doing the same. It is still astounding to me to think that this time last year she was so very much alive -- filming the kids and friends dressed up as characters from the Matrix for Hallowe'en and posting that to her facebook account for example... this year Rosie and her friends are dressing up as the Spice Girls (a bit of nostalgia for them -- Rosie's dyed her hair red and ordered a Union Jack mini-dress) -- but Angela won't be here to take pictures, so I'll do it for her. Every day I pray for her, and dedicate my day to her memory, and ask her help. And I believe that I am getting it.

A Scattering

I have been reading a book of poems by the British poet, Christopher Reid, written after the death of his wife Lucinda from brain cancer, A Scattering. There is much that speaks to me in these poems. If you would like to understand me as I now am, read this, I would like to say. (Unfortunately it is not easy to buy in the US.)

Here are a couple from his "Widower's Dozen":

Conundrum

I’m the riddle to an answer:
I’m an unmarried spouse,
a flesh-and-blood revenant,
my own ghost, inhabitant
of an empty house.

A Reasonable Thing to Ask

Please explain tears.
They must have some purpose
that a Darwin or a Freud
would have understood.

Widowed, a man hears
music off the radio –
Handel – Cole Porter –
that sharply recalls her,
and they swamp up again.

A faculty that interferes
with seeing and speaking
and leaves him feeling weaker:
what does he gain by it?

What do we gain by it –
blind to the tiger’s leap,
voiceless under the avalanche?
Somebody must know.

Actually, I think we gain a great deal by tears. They are a great source of consolation. They are necessary. Augustine has a beautiful image for this when he writes that in setting free his tears for his mother's death, which he had repressed, he was he was "spreading them out as a pillow beneath my heart."

When I need her help

This past weekend, Angela's mom and I visited Benedictine College, where my oldest daughter Lucia is now studying. Of course, I wished Angela were there with me.

But then things took a turn -- on Saturday night, Lucia's boyfriend of four years, who is also a student there, and is a major part of the reason she transferred there, told her he thought their relationship wasn't going to work out. On top of Angela's death, this was a hard blow for Lucia. And I wished so much that Angela were there with us at that time. I felt Lucia really needed her mom more than anyone else then. Gloria and I offered her the comfort and advice we could. But Angela could have spoken to her from experience of a breakup with a college boyfriend, of the pain that caused, but that it was possible after that to establish a new and permanent union with someone else -- a union that produced the most wonderful gifts life can bring in Lucia and her sisters.

I find this role of being both mother and father to my daughters very hard to work out. I can't replace Angela in their lives, and there are times, like this weekend, when her absence is very painfully felt. Yet I feel that even in her physical absence she is present. I pray that she will be able to offer Lucia some guidance and comfort and help in this time.

I can't say this too many times: I miss you Angela, and I love you still. I so need your help and support and I believe that you can still give that to me, in some way.

waking up

I keep finding things in Angela's papers and other places that I didn't know about. Recently I came across a small piece of paper I think she must have picked up in the last year, used as a bookmark in one of her books. It was titled "Gratitude" and contained a number of thoughts about this topic. The first, longish, selection struck me, because it corresponded to so much of how she tried to live her life in the last year:

"Waking up is a continuous process. No one wakes up once and for all. There is no limit to wakefulness, just as there is no limit to aliveness. It is risky to be awake to live. It takes courage.

We have to choose between risk and risk. We run the risk of sleeping through life, of never waking up at all. Or else we wakefully rise to the challenge of life. facing the challenge of life, of love.

Waking up is a process....[it happens differently for folks] what counts is that we don't go back to bed again. What counts on your path to fulfillment is that we remember the great truth that moments of surprise want to teach us: everything is gratuitous, everything is gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is the measure of our gratefulness. And gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness. Are we not dead to whatever we take for granted? Surely to be numb is to be dead. For those who awaken to life through surprise, death lies behind, not ahead. To live life open for surprise, in spite of all the dying which living implies, makes us ever more alive.

David Steindl-Rast, OSB"

To whoever placed this in Angela's hands, or made it so that she would find it, thank you. She certainly awakened to life through surprise, and lived life in a spirit of gratitude -- before the seizure, but especially after it. And so death, though it lay in her temporal future, was already behind her. I really believe that and am grateful for it.