Hanging In

This is my challenge for the future: To construct a meaningful life without Steve. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Like having to carry a large and heavy stone everywhere I go, every minute of the day. It weighs on my stomach as soon I wake up. I get out of bed with it in my arms. I feel it on my back and shoulders as I go through the day. I take it to bed with me at night. I only put it down when at last I fall to sleep. I don’t think it will ever go away. I’ll just get stronger, I hope.

Summer Storm

It’s late afternoon—almost time for a glass of wine—and we are having one of those sudden summer storms that occur frequently in Maine. Just five minutes ago, it was a bright sunny day and then--pouf!--the sky turned dark, the lake was whipped by wind and the dock was pummeled with rain. By the time I finish writing this I know for sure that the light will be a golden green, the lake will be peaceful, and the air have a fresh clean smell of wet leaves. Maybe there will even be a rainbow.

My moods are as changeable as the weather in Maine. I woke early this morning and went out for a run along my usual route—up to the turn to Casco and back, about five and half miles total. I always love the view after the turn. There’s old grey farmhouse on the right and in the distance to the left I can see on a clear day all the way to Mt. Washington and the Presidential range. I felt strong and happy to be there, enjoying the view, enjoying the day.

Then I came home and the house was empty.

Yeadon

Yesterday I went back to Yeadon, the town where I grew up. And it wasn’t in my dreams. I took Elizabeth to see my house, 850 Church Lane. I showed her the entrance to my father’s office, the windows of my bedroom, my parents’ room and my brother’s room, the alley behind our house. The big linden tree at the front of the house was gone but the metal post that once held my dad’s sign, Morton S. Beck, MD, was still there. The house looked lived in but tired. I was almost tempted to ring the bell and ask to go inside but didn’t. I knew it would just make me sad. I don’t need that right now.

My parents and my childhood seem very far away to me today. Being a widow--whatever the hell that word means--seems light years away from being a daughter and a sister, when I lived in a present that was protected and secured and the future seemed a bright silver road that could only bring more happiness and pleasure.

Morning

I wake up early ever morning in Maine. Steve and I never put the blinds down at night. We wanted to be able to look at the stars and the moon and the outline of the trees when we went to bed. We wanted our eyes to open to the new day on the lake when we woke up. I always got up before him. I’d peer over the curve of his back as the light moved from grey to pink to gold and green. I liked feeling him warm beside me, sleeping peacefully.

I’m sleeping on his side now. There is no mountain on my horizon. I can stare straight ahead at the lake. I imagine that I am seeing it all just as he did, the joy and beauty of a new day gladdened with the blessing of health.

Today

I left my husband today on a hillside overlooking the lake. He was sleeping peacefully in a plain pine box. He was dressed in a saffron colored robe and had his favorite fedora on his head. I told him I loved him as I shoveled dirt on the box. I went back to the house without him. He was looking at the lake and didn’t want to be disturbed.

There was a beautiful sunset tonight. I sat on the dock and watched the sun disappear into the lake. The sky turned red and purple and gold. The lake was quiet and the mosquitoes hummed. I looked in the water but I couldn’t see Steve. I guess he’s still on the hill sleeping peacefully. I hope he wakes up soon.

August 8, 2010

My husband died yesterday morning on a beautiful Maine day.

Every day he went for a morning dip in the lake and then sat on the deck looking up at the trees. He’d always say, “I can’t believe they let me do this.” Well yesterday, permission was denied.

I went for a run this morning and all I could see was through Steve’s eyes. The sun was shining, thin white clouds skittered across a blue sky. The oaks and the maples were full of green. I thought of him up there somewhere in the breeze, in the trees, in the clean Maine air all around me. A peaceful soul.

Past Life

Like indelible ink, your parents leave a permanent impression on your being. You grow up, get married, have a career, even have children yourself but the impression they made on you never really washes out, still visible on your skin like a faint laundry mark on a favorite old shirt.

I came up with this image as I was walking home from the gym in Casco on a spectacularly beautiful Maine day and because I had just finished reading John Updike’s last collection of short stories, “My Father’s Tears.” Most of them written when Updike was in his 70’s and set in the present day, they are full of references to and reminisces of his childhood, his parents, even the topography of his growing up. They are elegiac in tone—an old man looking back—but consciously detailed even sensuous in their description of his past world and the way it weaves in and out of his present.

The power of the past to affect me even now in my 60’s, a grown woman married over 40 years, mother of two adult children, amazes me. In my dream life, I often revisit Yeadon, the town I grew up in; I walk all through my house, look out the windows of my bedroom and if I’m lucky, every once in while (oh, how I wish this happened more often), I see my parents—still youthful and powerful and beautiful, before aging and death left me without them.

Blessings

The Sunday NYTimes doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to read in it this summer. But maybe it’s the summer and I’m just not into reading the paper with the same intensity of interest. Too many distractions, most especially an amazing run of beautiful sunny days that call for getting up and moving around, not sitting and reading.

But…this past Sunday I did read the article about actress Laura Linney since she is one my favorite actresses and “Lean on Me” one of my favorite movies. (Maybe because it’s about a brother and sister which is why I remember sobbing at the end of “The Mill on the Floss” by George Eliot which has its emotional center another brother/sister relationship.)

Linney will be starring in a new TV show, “The Big C” on Showtime which sounds incredible even though the odds of my watching it are pretty slim. (Given a choice between TV and a good book, the good book almost always wins. The one exception in recent memory besides watching President Barack Obama, of course, was "The Sopranos.”)

Something she said in the interview really struck me and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. She noted how she has come to realize that “growing old is the greatest of blessings.” That was a blessing my brother and, to some degree, my mother were both denied. My mother got a little crotchety but then who isn’t past 60 and then all of a sudden she was sick and then she was dead. She never really looked or acted old as in wrinkled, decrepit, tremulous, senile old. And, Max, well what can you say about someone who dies at the ridiculous age of 51.

Which is why when I sit on the deck and look out the acres of diamonds dancing on the lake I feel incredibly grateful to have this blessing of growing old. Okay, it takes me longer to do the Saturday crossword puzzle in the NYTimes; I run a lot slower but I’m still out on the road three times a week; and this summer, I did a headstand in yoga, a major achievement for me. (Against the wall for sure but my goal is to be able to do a headstand in the middle of the room by the time I go back to Philly.)

Maybe this is a transitional moment for me—the end of obsessing about getting old, losing the fear and instead embracing the blessing. As my mother said, always be open to new things.