What a Dog Knows

    It is the 100th anniversary of TS Eliot's poem The Waste Land. I was intrigued because I had never read it, and of course I share a name with the author. I though about Dylan, who shares a name with the poet Dylan Thomas, and how I hope she reads him someday. So I read the poem (well, listened on Audible, probably better than reading it myself). And it is about death, and what comes after, on earth. And it ends with the chant "Shantih shantih shantih," the traditional ending to an Upanishad. 

To whom it is not known, to him it is known. To whom it is known, he knows it not. It is not understood by those who understand, it is understood by those who do not understand. 

- -   Upanishads, Teacher, 3 

    Last night I sat outisde with Teddy. I wondered if he misses Nicole. I tried to explain to him, but he doesn't understand. Maybe if I had shown him Nicole's body, shown her getting buried, but he would have thought it only looks like Nicole being buried, he would never have believed it was her. So he must go on with the question, when will she be coming back. I wish I could tell him, so he would know and so he would be able to understand my hug.

    I started to think, maybne that is how g-d looks at us. G-d wants to tell us where our loved ones go, wants to comfort us with the shared understanding, and yet cannot make us understand. We do not speak the same language. All he can do is show us, in seeingly unconnected and mysterious ways, and it is up to us to see the possible meaning, and try to understand. The best we can do is try. The best we can do is guess. 

Being a Widower

What becomes more and more obvious to me with each passing day is that being a widow or widower is a unique experience, a unique pain and psychological condition. That is why is has a name, a name that once attained can never be shaken. Not like "divorcee" which can be erased with a new marriage. Or "single" or even "married" which can be adjusted relatively easily. Widower is a title that never leaves, only it could be hidden. 

Not all people marry, so that is the initial right of passage. And not all stay married. To choose to marry, and to choose to stay married, is a choice, maybe one made daily, or weekly, or yearly. It is a choice to remain in an embrace of an eternal wrestling match for truth. For no two people are completely compatible without the constant discussion of the compatability. So to be married is to engage in this discussion with someone who you accept is also engaged in the same discussion, and with reaffirmations and push and pull throughout. 

So when this constant embrace is broken, one side of the conversation stops, but the other side does not stop. I cannot just instantly stop thinking about whether my decisions and choices reflect that of the ideal, because I know they do not.  All of a sudden I only have my own point of view to combat with. It is earily familiar, of being young, of the desire to feel that my own experience is all that should be needed to guide me. But on the contrary to my thoughts when I was young, I learned through time that my distinct point of view was slanted, incomplete, distrorted even. And that realization came not from my own analysis of my life and situation, but from the realization that there was someone whose opinion I valued as much if not more than my own, And the frightening realization that her opinion conflicted, sometimes often, with my own ideas and preferences. This contradiction, a congnitive dissonance in a way, attracted me to this other, and the leap of faith that marriage required was to realize that neither of us could fully change or retain the other, that we were both metamorphisizing throughout the marriage, maybe coming closer to the exact realization of reality we were looking for. 

So a widow/er, or at least myself as a widower, is to accept that the other's voice is stuck in my memory now, and that of others, and sadly with each passing day gets slightly more abstract, more vague in target. We are ones who did try to fly close to the sun, who realized that being with another person and searching for truth was maybe a way to actually get there. Maybe it actually was the path to happiness, and peace. Bobby. Being alive. Like you could fly not on your own, but only through the give and take, the constant acceptance of the back and forth, up and down, moving the air, causing the rising through the air, not peacefully rising but aggresively moving the air, together. And then it is gone.

So you are left to see the world, with those who have tried and failed, those who won't try, those who are succeeding, and you feel like you are out of the game. Like you already won. And you know the game will not go on forever for anyone. Not one person will be able to play the game forever. Not two people. It will end for each and every person, alone, together, apart, just like your game has ended. So it feels a bit like an afterlife. Like I won the game, but now I need to sit around while others continue to play, get the chance to keep playing, maybe getting closer to the sun than we did. And I can sit in pleasure thinking of my daughter, how she may get the chance to learn what I cannot teach her from someone else. And I hope she gets to play for as long as possible as well.

If this is depressing, I am sorry, comes with the territory I am afraid. But I am not depressed. I am thankful, and sad. I can cry at the drop of a feather, but also smile with the same speed. And maybe through time I will be open to learning again. But for now, I want nothing to dare take up any space that she took up, I want no chance that any learning will push out something I learned from her, I want to stretch each synapse as long and as far as they will go and nothing will make me take the chance to replace one that was growing. Because they are still growing, through everything I read and think about and learn they are reacting with what exists, and I can still hear her thoughts and reflect them on everything I hear, read, and think about. It is only the contradictions will cause the growth to stop. Embracing anything that we wouldn't have embraced. So my goal is to continue to embrace what we would have, as long as I know how. I can make this last, maybe a lot longer than I think. And it is not the same, in no way is it anywhere close to the same, but it is as close as I can get right now, as close as I can get. It is because I believe it was true, I believe it was real, and I believe it made me better, she made me better. But I will never know what I don't know, what would have come next. But I can always imagine, and maybe my imagination is the best able to imagine for her than anyone's anywhere, almost making her continue to exist. Almost. It is better than nothing, so much better than nothing.

No Title

Not untitled. Specifically No Title. If I had kept this blog going during the past few years, oh what it would say. Nothing is the same. I feel launched from a canon. Through the looking glass. Before and after, and now it is after. I cannot begin now because I don't know where I am, yet. I am in a place that looks familiar, with similar tastes and smells, and yet the way I understand them has completely changed, turned in a fourth dimension. Simply asking does something taste good, feel good, seem good is a question that is peeled like a forever onion now, dripping with rawness, unforgiving and unrecognizable. 

I start work again tomorrow. I suppose my subconscious is up and eager, like a boxer before a boxing match I feel my insides trying to grab on to old familiars. But unlike before, when a familiar song or book or taste would be a reinforcement of reality without any need for reflection, each familiar item now sends me on roads of reclassification and reassociation. A blog even. Am I the same person who has been writing this blog all along, since Dylan was born? Even if I am, I am not in the same world anymore. There is before, and there is after, and now it is after. 

Begin the Beguine. And now when I hear people curse the chance that was wasted, I know all to well what they mean. I didn't waste my chance as much as spend it, use it completely, never realizing it could be gone. I want to spread it out, do better, try again, stop struggling, land, drift, stay. I thought we had a life time to take chances, to lurch around until we fell into place, now all I want is to be dropped back where we were, and to stay, only there, forever. I will never have that chance. 

And now, now I am ready to stop, only after my flights of fancy flew us too close to the sun, and I was not the one to get burned. I am forever frozen in fright now, learning as a beginner in a world of experts. I thought I knew so much, and yet what I thought I knew was all wrong. I feel so personally responsible, and so completely aware of my own lack of control. Responsible for what, for not knowing? How could I know? There is no logical reason why this happened to us, to her, and yet my mind wants the previous world to be zipped up, tied in a nice bow on a large bag, with the pop sound as it collapsed into the inevitable. This makes me feel so clearly like I am on the other side. 

But maybe I will see the world more for as it is now. A field of popping lilies. Covered until they pop, slowly all to pop and fizz into the air. Those close to you, those far, all will pop and fizz one day, until the air is full of fizz as far as you can see, while behind you, a new field has grown, some not even aware of the fizz. 

Was my crime not being aware enough? Being to cavalier? Feeling more than invincible much later in life that many others I know? Or did I think I could out run it? Or did I just time it all wrong, have a very clear and confident sense in how much time we had, and never considering that I could be oh so wrong?

Time, something so dear to me, and so antagonistic to Nicole. Nothing she hated more than a deadline. A drop-off time. Only pick-up times did she get right, and always. Always right on time to bring back home, and then always reluctant again to leave. She saw time in a different dimension than I, and we often fought about it vehemently. She'd make a decision in five minutes (it would take me hours, weeks, months to make), but then she would not finish as the goal came into view and then slid past and then receded further from view (as my anxiety would force to finally choose and rush through to lock it). I was always concerned with finished, damn be the meaning. She always grabbed the meaning and let it wash away with time. But it became part of the fabric when that happened, and I realized it, but couldn't take it and turn it into something tangible, something we could live off of. So I kept locking and creating, and she kept meaning and generating meaning, and we were like an organ grinder moving from place to place. Maybe I was the monkey, trying to create while she ground away creating meaning. Dylan, friends, capturing moments, perfecting the livingroom, making health choices, all were her. Me, leaning into whatever I had decided, be damned how it felt I was going to make it work. And rarely stopping and waiting with her. 

All this tied up in a nice clear bag now, with a clear top with the twist tie, almost like a big balloon, but one that will not pop, will never pop. Before in the bag. After, now, what?

I do feel like I lost a game I didn't know I was playing, and by losing I lost the most precious thing, the greatest loss. Noone told me I could lose. I though I could get hurt, sure, I though I could win maybe, but I never thought losing was on the table. This wasn't a possible outcome. I remember talking to a therapist before our wedding, as I was needing to talk through some nerves about how I would be as a second-time husband, when the first didn't go so well. The therapist said plainly, "what's the worse that could happen? It doesn't work out and you get divorced again, no big harm." He seemed to be so right, and it made me so happy to think about that as the worst possible. 

But no, how about "So you have 12 years of happiness and then it all ends in a blink (wink?) of an eye, that's ok then right?". I don't know. Where did this option even come from? Even through her final six months, when we knew it was bad, I still never understood it would feel like this. 12 years is all we got? I'm going to enjoy every minute then! Can't be worrying about stupid things that might affect us 30-40 years down the road. But no, even to the end I was thinking about 401k, where to live, what the best way home from the hospital was. I couldn't see it. And there was a sadness, not just about the coming loss, but about our inability to see the same even at the end. All we ever wanted was to be floating in the ocean, holding each other, like we did, when nothing else mattered but the two of us, the air, the smiles, and the pure joy at being together in a moment. Or to hug the family four (Teddy included) and appreciate our softness together. We had those moments, many of them, but so many more moments were consumed by getting to airports, when was bedtime, how do we eat, who shops, where is the money, who really are our friends, who makes us better, who makes us worse, why are we like we are, where are we going? I suppose she is always floating now, always in the ocean looking at the sky and smiling, and I am on dry land, and though I will never again have the chance to hold her, I realize that when I am calm, and peaceful, and appreciating being alive, I can feel her holding me, and I want that feeling, as I now know all to well what it means to be without it.