Rain, Rain, Go Away

Actually, I like rain. It offers new color schemes to the day - all the variations of gray. Henry Beston wrote of the sea and the sky as "pewter gray" in his book The Outermost House. I've always loved that description of gray.

But in November the gray is so complete, so stark with the leaves off the trees and those bare branches clacking together. Todays rain doesn't fall but rather flies sideways in thick sheets with a howling wind. Dressed in my yellow slicker I use to walk down to the beach on days like this. I was a wild child loving the energy of a storm, head bowed to it's fury I'd walk to the ocean to witness the waves crash on the rocks and feel the raw power in my solar plexus.

That wild child chased adventure, she didn't need anyone else, she was strong on her own and capable of walking directly into the northeast gale. Lately I find myself looking for this girl in my woman's being. Too often I feel lost and unable to do this alone. This morning this wind and rain has me feeling caged and trapped, unable to adventure out on my own.

Today I wish for someone to come look for me, who holds me most dear in his heart and notices when I've headed out into the storm. I miss this feeling of being special to someone and knowing they need and want me by their side. But it takes a certain person to allow this wild child her freedom, to honor her adventurous spirit. There were few who were able to keep stride with her in the howling wind and to share a love for it as well.

Today, I'm missing that kindred spirit that I found in Jim Daniels.

Loving you all back,
Mary

Web of Life

This morning I got back from an early run in the woods with my dog, Ella. My crows were screaming at me as it was late for their feeding. I took the food out to the lawn by walking across the deck and to one side of my big oak tree. On my way back to the house I went to the other side of the oak and almost walked into a HUGE spider and her web. She's tried a new location. For the past few days she's been on the wood shed door and I've wrecked her web too frequently I guess. So now she has constructed her trap from the oak tree, that grows up through my deck, and the wood shed, directly in my normal path of passage from kitchen to yard.

I stopped just in time so as not to get entangled and therefore did not end up doing the flapping dance of swatting, jumping around and squeeling knowing how big this mama is! Instead I looked real closely at her construction - it's gorgeous. She's actually quite stunning too. There are two very long strands that run from the oak tree and then branch out making a perfect V, one going to the top of the web and the other to the bottom of the web. Nice architecture. The web sits closer to the wood shed wall, not hanging too far out and thus safe from the wind .... but not me if I forget she's there again!

I spent a few minutes talking to this large, bulbous-abdomen lady and did a few gentle twangings of her support strings. She didn't like that so much so I stopped, but I was intrigued by the strength and beauty of her design.

As I walked back into the house I found myself thinking "I'll show her to Jim when he gets up" ... and then stopped in my tracks. I couldn't believe I actually just thought that! But I did, it was real and it was painful. Some of my friends laugh at me because I notice things like spiders ... and enjoy it. But Jim never laughed at me. He loved having me point my observations out to him and he would take the time to stand in awe with me over a spider and her web.

I miss that.

Loving you all back,
Mary

Wired

It's been four months, which doesn't sound like a long time but feels like an eternity. I'm surprised at how hard this is to accept. How sometimes it feels like this can't be me? This really can't be what has happened to Jim Daniels .... of all people!? I must be caught in someone else's bad dream. It's not possible that this is mine.

A good friend emailed me recently who understands this kind of loss. He said that he read somewhere that the brain actually becomes "wired" to another human being when we are with them for a long period of time .... like 31 years of marriage. And that when we lose that person then the brain has to actually go through a whole new re-wiring to remove this person from our brains programming.

Grief is a biological process.

This makes a lot of sense to me. This explains why Jim could frequently speak the very thoughts I might be having more often then not. And that I could channel what Jim needed to say when he had lost his ability to talk ... amazing him sometimes. We were totally wired to each other. Totally in sync. Totally in love. And I'm totally lost now.

My friend, Hannah, has been telling me that the brain needs to heal from all this trauma and that this takes time and needs lots of rest to accomplish this task. Ah, the process of re-programming my life without Jim in it. Yes, it's going to take a little time and it may explain why I can just run out of steam so fast and only want to lie down and read or close my eyes. It also explains why I get hit with the tsunami of disbelief still. Perhaps these waves must happen to rattle my brain into creating new pathways of thinking. I certainly have to find new pathways of being.

On my birthday my dearest friends were offering to take me out to dinner. I kept telling them, "I'm not into my birthday this year". They didn't listen. They were all at my house when I got home from work; Todd had the grill going, Matthew was at the stove steaming up muscles, chilled white wine was popped and Alice poured me a glass. And we had a wonderful dinner party. They were right, it was nice to celebrate and I appreciated all that they did for me that night! But when they all left I sat at the kitchen table and opened all my cards that had been mailed and a few of the gifts sent and had a complete break down. I use to think my birthday was all about me. I now know it's not. It was about JIM being with me and how he would celebrate me and adored me so much and made me feel so special. No one else can do that like he could. Rewiring .... next year will be a new program.

I went away over the past weekend up to my sister's camp 3 hours away. She and her family gather with their best friends each summer. This summer I was invited and I had a blast. WIth 5 kids ranging from ages 8-14 and all of them so much fun to be with, so open and funny and able to communicate verses shy away from the adults like we have the plague. We swam, mountain biked, fished, played board games until late into the night and laughed a lot. They completely threw my schedule off as I told them "wow, you all have breakfast at lunch time, lunch at cocktail hour and dinner at bed time!" But it was good to throw me out of my routine. Of course, I would have thoughts of Jim and would miss him horribly, but I didn't get hit by any big wave and have to leave the group in order to go dissolve in a heap somewhere. At least not until the drive home when I felt lonely and wished Jim was driving and we could relive the weekend together. But I didn't need to pull over to the side of the road. Progress, I guess.

As I re-wire my thinking and being I can be a little ADD. If I have failed to respond to an invite, an email, or a phone call then send me another one! I meant to get back to you at some point but may have just spaced it out. My brain is rewiring .... and my heart is trying to mend.

Loving you all back,
Mary

Observations

I'm noticing some things these days that I want to share. First, if you read my Summer Storms blog then you read how all the boats in the harbor were a shocking white the night of the thunder storm. Today (well actually, yesterday, but let's stay present) I'm noticing that the same boats are still out there on their moorings but one sail cover is red, another one blue and not all the hulls are white .. one is even black! But the other night during that storm ALL the boats and ALL the sail covers were brilliantly white!! How does that happen?

I'm also noticing that my patience is very low these days ... I tend to snap at folks too quickly and too easily. It's quite annoying and I feel so horrible afterwards but can't seem to always stop myself. It's like having turrets syndrome! I hate doing this. Hate how it makes others feel ... how it makes me feel. Today I've been thinking about it and just wonder if it's because for 16 months I had to be incredibly patient with Jim; walking, communicating, bathing, entertaining him and on and on. I admit that I didn't always love doing all these things and there were many times over the course of a year and a half that I truly lost it and would go outside and slam sticks into rocks, or throw logs off the wood pile as far as I could heave them to blow off some rage. Jim and I always knew it was the cancer I was raging at, it was our situation that we both had been thrown into without giving permission to be there that I was raging at and Jim would do great at not enmeshing in my tantrums ... inside that broken body and compromised brain was the same wise and wonderful Jim.

But I'm honestly not sure this is a good enough reason to have this irritable nature now that just rises quickly and bursts out with no warning. It's not my true nature, it's not really who I am or how I usually operate in the world.

So, I just want to say to all my friends and family that I have an awareness of it. I know when I do it, and I hate myself for it. And if you have been in the line of fire when the shot goes across your bow I want you to know that I'm trying to get a handle on this and do better .... and I probably didn't really mean it but I understand this may not help to know when under fire.

Is this also part of grieving? There are so many alleyways to this process and no map!

Loving you all back ... even when I'm not that good at acting like I do ...
Mary

Summer storms

We had an amazing thunderstorm in Portland, ME last night. Torrential rains, tornadoes in some towns and crashing and banging that shook the house. Provided everyone stays safe I am one who loves the energy and drama of a good summer storm. My mother use to sit in the middle of the living room with her sneakers on ... rubber for it's grounding properties ... during a thunderstorm, while my dad would take all us kids out to the front porch. He would sit and look at his watch, timing the the minutes or seconds between the flash of lightening and the boom of it's thunder. He would then yell "GO!" and the four of us would run out onto the lawn in the rain and dance in little bouncy steps or run around with our airplane arms out until he would yell "BACK!" when we would sprint back to the porch just before the next flash and crash would hit. During all this dancing and running my mother would be yelling from inside the house, "Jay, bring those kids back inside!".

Dangerous? Of course. But this was an era when you got a BB gun on your 10th birthday, rode on the tailgate of the pick up truck and all piled into the station wagon without seat belts on.

Last night, when the rains stopped and the black sky moved out towards the open ocean, the light became absolutely incredible. The boats in the harbor took on a surreal, bleached white color that was blinding in their contrast to the asphalt gray of the ocean and the pewter gray sky. As the storm moved out to sea the sky still flashed with lightening and there were periodic streaks of jagged bolts that would almost hover for that split second as though stopping time at that very moment before it all went black again.

Jim was a professional photographer. He taught me about light. He taught me to say "the light is so gorgeous right now". It was always about the light, about capturing that moment, about how quickly that light will change and it will be a different moment.

If Jim had been here last night he would have grabbed his cameras and gone to capture those shocking white boats on the black sea. He would have grabbed my hand and pulled me out to dance on the lawn in the rain. Jim had the unique qualities of seeing beauty in the light of the world through a mans eyes and the ability to live his life with a child's enthusiasm.

I miss him like hell.

Loving you all back,
Mary

Saturdays, sometimes

I spent almost the entire day, Saturday, on the couch. I blamed it on the steamy heat of the day that kept me from wanting to get out into the garden and be in the blaring sun to weed. I blamed it on the hard bike ride I did with a friend that morning (and to my cycling community - I rode up Mountain, Dutton and Long Hill with my brake pad rubbing, thus effectively riding all these hills with my brakes ON! My friend said with a laugh, "you're awesome!", I said "no, I'm a bonehead!"). But mostly I blamed it on my state of mind.

I knew if Jim were here he would never allow me to spend that time not grabbing life by it's tail ... even one day. He would be calling friends, he would be doing projects around the house, he would do the drive by and stop in on friends. So I, timidly, called a few friends, sent out tiny little white flags in emails, but everyone was busy or away ... I was on my own, and unable to get out of my own way. My state of being these days.

Kay Redfield Jamison in her memoir titled "Nothing Was the Same" is very eloquent in her description of her grief stating "my mind was not right, but it was not deranged. I was able to reason and to imagine that the future held better things. I did not lose my sense of how to navigate the basics of life ... "

And this is how I feel. I always thought that when Jim died I would be in the fetal position with the curtains pulled down, opened and half eaten bean cans littering the kitchen, mail and newspapers piling up on the doorstep and friends coming in to force me to shower, force me to move, force me to live. But this is not my grief. I believe I look and act pretty normal most days. My grief hits in tsunami waves. One minute I'm thinking of something unrelated and the next there is a memory of Jim and the reality of his absence is crippling. As Jamison states "I learned to live in expectation of assault".

I haven't really learned this yet ... but certainly understand what she means.

I have a little something planned today, Sunday, which I'm learning is important to get me out and doing. I'll go watch the annual Yarmouth Clam Festival cylcing race put on by our bike shop, Cyclemania. This year the club - whose owner, and many of the club riders, are good friends - is devoting the race to Jim. They are even giving away one of Jim's photographs to the winner of the "preem" .... the sprints set up in the race. Jim would be absolutely proud and so honored by this. I'm hoping I can keep my eyes dry through all this, but perhaps I need to learn this doesn't matter either.

Stoic is no longer a sign of strength.

Loving you all back,
Mary