Begun on the 5^th, finished on the 7^th.

Sitting on my back porch, in some stillness. In my sight lines are some less than perfect pots of flowers and herbs that I’ve planted and babied in the blistering heat, a brilliant hydrangea in our back garden that is in full bloom, and the garden behind ours, long neglected yet still punctuated with blooming perennials that are too stubborn to recognize that they are no longer tended.

Yesterday was rather idyllic.  A summertime community picnic in Concord.  Hot dogs, Wilbur’s first, and hamburgers, sweet tea and strawberry shortcake.  And apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Firefighters set up a flat house with flames coming through windows and doors, all on hinges, and gave children the chance to aim a “real” fire hose and shoot water at the flames until the flames were defeated.  The line was too long for Wilbur to wait, for any of us to wait, but he loved watching other kids with the hose.  There was a playground with a sand pit for the pleasure of the littlest ones including Wilbur and his aunty Julia. There was a four piece band of what I thought of as old codgers playing blue grass and old rock standards.  Those codgers may have been younger than I am.  Best of all, we took a train to the picnic!  Wilbur’s current high interest topic is trains of all sorts and sizes, and so we met three stops on the transit line from Concord and took two little train rides to and from the picnic.  It was well worth it as everything about the train, especially moving, was fascinating to the little boy.  

The picnic was all very much perfect, very New England, although I dare say an injection of corndogs or brats on the grill could have moved it 800 miles to the west. It could have been a movie set of a time before the hyper-patriotism of the right and the insistence that a micro-organizing deity favors this land over all others.  The picnic was set in a time when the only self-conscious red, white and blue decorations were on the trikes kids peddled and the wagons parents pulled in the tiny parade from one end of the park path to the other. 

In the evening, no fireworks.  When Julia woke up on the 5^th, she said “we didn’t go to fireworks,” as if . . . I don’t know, she missed fireworks?  She doesn’t like the noise of fireworks and it is usually my place to persuade, cajole and nudge her to go, sometimes with the bribe of some treat.  I am the one who likes them but this year the glory did not feel worth the energy of coercion. If one other person had been in favor of going . . . but it is hard to always be the one pushing from behind or pulling out in front. I didn’t need fireworks this year. Believe me, there have been Fourths that demanded that we take in the spectacle and the crowds. 

And the weekend has continued, quiet, full of small tasks, Indian dinner to celebrate Death Day on this 5th, a trip to Ikea for drinking glasses, movie and dinner yesterday with friends.  Some worries about Julia — that wormhole will be carefully stepped around for this moment.

I have, for the last 14 years, tried to record my feelings, where my heart and soul was sitting on the anniversary of David’s Death. So many times, I have recorded the muddle of mind and heart. I have needed to write myself into understanding, perhaps mine some gratitude hidden from immediate view. There are still times when some event or impression begs to be repeated to him who no longer can hear but those times are much diminished. Instead, I am aware of the moving on, the passage through and the finding of the other side. There is no standing still.  Ever. We are the sharks in time who must move to survive.

But the memory right now, at this second, is of the hospital room where they tried to save David’s failed new heart.  After they asked me wether they could stop the heroic efforts to restart it, after the crash carts and army of saviors had left the room. The room stood quiet with garden beds of emergency debris blooming on every surface and across the floor. And Cheshire and I stood with one other quiet person, nurse or social worker, I am not sure.  And she asked gently if we wanted to move to another room while they cleaned up the room and straighten the sheets that our beloved’s body laid on.  Straighten the room and then we could come back in.  She didn’t say for our good-bye but the idea floated in the air. And I remember standing there and knowing that to move from the cluttered, messy space, from the bed, from the cooling hand that I held, moving would be the first step into the time after David.  

How brave that step was.  How much I did not want to move, how much I wanted to hold time still. And yet, I did. Move. I did what living demands and learned to become she who sits here now remembering. She who had no idea then what would come next. What a now would look like.

And what springs to my heart is gratitude, well, pain and gratitude, but gratitude which is what seems most worthy to ponder and explore. I am grateful that time did not stand still, then or ever. I am grateful for so much gentle support, grateful for my beloved community then and now, grateful that Cheshire created an adult life that did not yet have a shape and brought Justin and then Wilbur into my life. That they continue to include me in their circle of caring is an almost undeserved gift. I am grateful that Julia is growing and changing and that the battles I’ve waged to get the best for her emerging adulthood has given me energy and comrades in persuasion. Grateful how living led me back to Boston and to discovering and rediscovering so many next steps and paths some new, some old and close to my heart. 

And that is most of what I have to say today and over the last few days of putting this together. Just one more gift of gratitude, writing this off and on and into today, that I cannot neglect.  Today marks two years of having a VNM (Very Nice Man) in my life.  He is part, not the whole but definitely a healthy dollop, of what shapes the joy of my life. The me, who took that first brave step away from so much of my life’s joy, could not and did not imagine that there would ever be another life of joy. So much joy for this unexpected life.