My midlife crisis seats seven and has a power rear lift-gate.

When Nina died, one of the things she left me was the ownership of two vehicles. The first, my primary car when she was alive, was a Mazda 3, a small sedan with a six speed manual transmission. It's both fuel efficient and fun to drive. The second was a Mazda CX-9, a crossover with a third row for hauling kids but which did not, as Nina put it uncharacteristically non-metaphorical but accurate language, make her feel like a minivan owner.

We once owned a Toyota Sienna. Or I should say the minivan owned Nina. It was after Benny was born and Nina was struggling with the ineluctable truth of parenting multiple kids: it’s a huge pain in the ass to get them in and out of conventional sedans and wagons. She advocated for us to buy a new minivan. After the kids got bigger and every conceivable do-dad on the minivan broke (the automatic sliding doors went about five months after we bought the car, Benny stuck a nickel in the cd player, the sun roof flew off the car and nearly killed someone behind Nina on the highway, and the interior lights malfunctioned), Nina decided she’d had enough of minivan living and went out and bought the CX-9, which she loved.

Until recently, I hadn’t thought much about getting rid of the extra car -- not out of sentimental attachment to Nina’s SUV, but due to the fact they served very different purposes. The CX-9 was for longer trips because of space and also the kids get carsick in my backseat if we travel more than a few miles. But the sedan got almost 40 mpg on the highway and fit nicely into my downtown parking deck so, since I drive all over North Carolina for work, it didn’t seem to make sense to drive a larger vehicle for work.

I'm going to miss the standard six speed sportiness of my Mazda 3, and Benny's going to miss the troublingly non-literal Mazda logo, but the new ride we found has generous compensations in other areas. 

But the past couple of years making two car payments, paying taxes for two vehicles, and doing maintenance and repairs for both cars, convinced me it was time to consolidate. My first thought was a hybrid crossover – same space, but more mpg was my working theory -- but the hybrid crossovers all had less space than our current one. Then I found a novel solution: Chrysler had just introduced a hybrid minivan – the first of its kind. I was not a fan of the minivan – is anyone? – but I went for a test drive because the hybrid concept seemed so right for my circumstances.

What I didn’t realize before driving the car is that Chrysler’s new hybrid minivan only comes in the high-level trim packages, meaning it’s not only got an advanced hybrid power system, but ALL the bells and whistles: entertainment system with touchscreens, seats that fold down with the touch of a button, more USB outlets than the Apple Store, self-parking ability and blind spot monitoring, a tricked out sound system, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, vented seats (the air comes THROUGH your seat and cools your back so it doesn’t stick to the seat. Brilliant!!), and even sliding side doors that open hands-free with a mere gesture of your foot under the car.

Like I said, I’ve never been a massive proponent of the minivan. But this was a sweet ride. It could haul seven people and a ton of stuff and it got fuel efficiency ratings that rivalled my little Mazda. The sales guy at the Chrysler dealer had me on the line. Until I saw the sticker price. HOW MUCH for a minivan?! Wow. Ok, it’s a lot of technology and a big car for being so economical, but he was talking about payments that were close to my mortgage (they also low-balled me on the trade value of my two cars) than any car payment I ever made.

I left feeling the disappointment you can only feel when you know you can’t get something that until very recently you had no idea you even wanted. There must be a compound German word for this?

I also felt stuck in my car search. Chrysler made the only hybrid minivan and they’d only been making it for two model years, so there was almost no used stock to defray the big sticker price. But something the salesman at the Chrysler place said as I was leaving stuck in my head. He asked if I wanted to see some of the regular, non-hybrid Chrysler minivans. “They’ve got all the same bells and whistles but at a much lower starting price because of the hybrid thing,” he told me, “and we get used ones pretty often, though they go fast” he added because: car salesman.

A few days later I went online and searched for the less fuel-efficient version of the Chrysler minivan, which was rebranded as the Pacifica after a total minivan overhaul by Detroit in 2017. I found a 2017 Pacifica on CarMax with the same trim my hybrid test drive car had, but at a considerably lower price and with only 4,500 miles on it. I was psyched. Wait. I was psyched? Was I actually excited about minivan shopping? What was happening here? The car wasn’t at the Greensboro store, so I had to request a transfer – the transfer window only building my newfound minivan anticipation (don't judge me!).

I told the kids we’d be test driving it on Saturday. I knew this would get a reaction because Benny’s latest mania is for cars. Or, more accurately, it’s for car brands. When Benny gets into something, it's epiphenomenal: he doesn’t really do the whole “thing in itself” aspect. When he loved baseball, it wasn’t so much the sport itself (he hated watching actual games) as the team names, mascots, and locations of all the clubs and their minor league affiliates – he had at one point nearly memorized the entire A through AAA minor league system for each MLB franchise. So his car fixation is more about brand and model names and their multifarous (and ever-evolving, as he’s learning) logos. I told the boys that this car had a touch screen entertainment system built in at their seats and a bunch of other cool stuff, and that they’d get to scope out other cars at the dealership. Sold.

Well, sorta. Being at the dealership reminded me of the other times we had purchased cars with kids in tow. It usually involved Nina and I tag-teaming so that one of us could entertain the increasingly impatient children long enough for the other to glean information or make progress on a deal with the salespeople. This time my tag team partner was Pete. But I didn’t drag him along because I needed childcare (I don’t have that kind of Machiavellian forethought, sadly). The reason I asked Pete to come is that I trust his judgment entirely on car buying. He is completely indifferent to the sex appeal of a car. Not that he doesn’t appreciate a good ride, but he can spot value and reliability and, above all, functionality, through the haze of car trappings better than anyone I’ve ever known. We used to tease him for buying a purple Nissan Quest whose shade of paint would have better suited underthings at Victoria’s Secret than a family automobile. But darned if that car wasn’t extremely reliable and exactly what Pete needed.

Pete is both famous for his acumen in car buying and infamous his total indifference to color. 

The Chrysler was as advertised: loaded with high-end gadgetry. The automatic seats, the blind spot alert system, motion sensing automated doors, an emissions reduction system that shuts the engine off at idle and restarts it automatically when you release the brake. We went for a test drive. I’m not going to try to tell you it was as fun as driving my sporty little Mazda. It’s a minivan. But the Pacifica had more than enough get up and go to feel good on highway merges. The ride was smooth and the kids were smitten with the screens in front of them (the system comes with Sudoku, a version of license plate bingo, and a few other built-in apps that are on the vegetable side of the video game spectrum).

By the end the ride I was fairly convinced. The remaining questions: 1. Was there a better value at a lower price point; and 2. How much were they going to offer in trade for my car and Nina’s SUV? When we got back to the lot Pete and I perused the other minivan offerings. There were a couple that seemed to be good values amongst the Hondas and Toyotas, but they were all older, all had higher mileage, and fewer features. The salesman came and broke down the trade offer and financing for me, both of which worked out to be in my range. The total payment was higher than any I’d ever made on a car before, but not more than my two existing car payments. I ran a quick check on GEICO’s website and reckoned I’d also be paying $400 less in insurance per year. The purchase was Pete-approved, who's to gainsay?

Nothing says bad-ass quite like a jet black minivan, amirite? 

I decided to pull the trigger. Sure, it was a big purchase, but it solved several issues I’d been mulling. And I was excited to drive the car off the lot, which may not be the best reason to buy a new car, but sure beats the feeling of deep satisfaction from finding a very useful but uninspiring vehicle? The kids started buzzing when I told them I was going to buy. What was really impressive was, an hour and a half of paperwork later, they retained their buzz on the drive home. There has never been a more proud Chrysler owner than Benny Duberstein (“I can’t believe we actually own a Chrysler! I can’t wait to tell my friends” is not really a phrase I associate with most car enthusiasts).

I also feel pretty certain that Nina would have been on board, despite her preexisting minivan aversion. I think she’d have liked the fanciness of this model and the kids’ excitement. She’d have appreciated my plan to consolidate the cars and supported me being excited about the purchase – a bit of glimmer and shine in a challenging, lonely universe of solo domesticity -- assuming that in this scenario she would be both able to appreciate the plan and also dead so that she doesn’t still need her car. These types of imagined reactions are complicated but startlingly common in my new life.

The excitement is the strangest part of the whole thing. I was genuinely jazzed to get in the car to go to Costco yesterday (tested the automated features on the doors, tried out different cargo configurations using the automated stow-n-go seating) and to drive Freddy to school this morning (we listened to some tunes on the sound system, used the climate controls, I even set the electronic parking brake just for kicks!). It all adds up to the feeling that my midlife crisis has taken the unlikely form of a Chrysler minivan. While I think she’d be slightly baffled at the strange turn, I’m pretty certain Nina would get a very big laugh out of that.

Grief, regret, guilt, and that sweet, sad Otis Blue (you can't miss your water til the well runs dry, so drink up while you can.)

Montaigne wrote that every life is complete when it ends. He wanted death to find him planting his cabbages, concerned neither with mortality or even less his unfinished garden (but apparently overmuch with digestive health—why no radishes, arugula, or Japanese mustard greens, eh Michel?). We are always in the mode of becoming who we are, but only until we die and then—in whatever state death catches us--we’re a fait accompli.

Montaigne’s completeness may be true for the dead, but it is dramatically not so for their survivors. The feeling of grief is quintessentially one of incompleteness. The mere fact of missing someone leaves us shouting internally into the void and hearing only our echo.

We are also left with the persistent feeling of a life unfinished, a project left undone -- the garden’s future tending may not have mattered to dead Montaigne, but perhaps it was a big deal to his wife to feel she let him down by allowing his precious cabbages to rot because she was overwhelmed tending to the vagaries of 16th Century French estate law!

There’s a point in everyone’s grief when guilt and regret encroach. I don’t mean everyone is wallowing in guilt. And one needn’t be pining for the past or engaging in “magical thinking” in some vain attempt to correct past missteps. Regret is simply an intrinsic element of loss. We feel the absence of a person we know and care about and the human manifestation, at least in my experience, is simply the ineffable feeling of bereavement -- wanting to have one more moment with the person, one more conversation, one more chance to do some part of we never did while they were alive, whatever that is. Guilt is simply the feeling that we could have done more to alleviate that regret.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the need of the human mind to seek or create feelings of guilt or regret when a person died--even in situations where there is no obvious need. I don’t feel many regrets about Nina apart from the mere fact of her dying. I regret she didn’t get to live longer, won’t get to see our kids grow up, never saw her book published, and can’t enjoy the ongoing evolution of the family project she helped author and design. But I have only a few actual regrets that I felt actual guilt for not resolving.

And yet I still have a sort of open-ended feeling of guilt and regret—like I squandered something precious and finite by losing Nina—let our cabbages go to rot and now can never rescue the crop.

This may be in part because I have never been a “live in the moment” kind of person. Nina used to say my bumper sticker would read “No, actually, it’s the destination, not the journey” reflecting both my unfortunate natural contrariness and tendency to want to get things over with (to be clear: I also hate bumper stickers and would never put one on my car, which was part of her needling joke).

But I think everyone, to one degree or another, suffers from an inability to be completely in the moment. When the moment, as well the person we spent our moments with, has passed away, we always at some level have the sense that we didn’t properly appreciate them while they were here.

Feeling bereft of missed opportunities or squandered chances is part of life as well as grief. In 1961 William Bell wrote a song for Stax Records, his first and only major hit, called You Don’t Miss Your Water. Most people know this track from Otis Redding’s 1965 album Otis Blue -- that’s certainly how it came to my ears. It’s the quintessential love song of regret: a man looking back at a relationship he philandered away -- failing to appreciate what he had until it was gone. The fact that the song was made famous by a soul legend who died young puts a finer point on my thesis that, like every breakup song, Bell’s tune is also a song about grief. Consider the last full stanza of the song in isolation from the stated theme of infidelity:

I sit here and wonder
How in the world this could be, my, oh my
I never thought, oh, I never thought you'd ever leave me
But now that you've left me
Good Lord, good Lord, how I cried out
You don't miss your water
You don't miss your water 'till your well run dry

You can read this word for word as being about grief without stretching the meaning. In some ways it’s even more appropriate that way: a cheater should have thought pretty hard about his partner leaving him, right? But in the fullness of life, our natural unconscious tendency (unless we’re Montaigne) is to assume things will continue apace, pretty much as they are, into the remote future—it’s hard to fathom that things will just abruptly end, the way they did for Otis Redding at age 26 or Nina at 39 (William Bell, defying all soul musician logic, is somehow still alive at age 79!).

If it were any other way, we probably wouldn’t function at all. But we seldom confront mortality until we must. This may also be for the very good reason that it’s hard to summon the feeling of losing someone until they’re gone. I’m not sure it’s even possible to feel loss before it occurs, no matter how evolved or mortality conscious you are. You can drink all you want, but to fully understand how water tastes you really have to be parched.

Of course, we could argue that William Bell’s narrator is a little different: he lost a relationship, not a person; he tells us that he cheated, he even says “I just wouldn’t be true,” placing not only blame but volition on his shoulders. So maybe this distinguishes his broken relationship from actual bereavement?

I think it’s closer than it appears at first blush. We’re all human (except the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who I suspect all wear meat suits made from their former interns, whose entrails are also served to the Senators when they’re supposedly “in the cloak room”) and if we have a relationship with another human, we make decisions and take actions in accordance with our will while they’re alive and so we feel some measure of regret and responsibility when that person dies. That doesn’t have to mean we wallow or self-lacerate (though these are time-honored techniques that I can advise you on if you’re interested). But I am pretty sure it means that no one escapes the thrall of grief’s cousins, regret and guilt, entirely.

I went to my actual, non-metaphorical cousin’s wedding this weekend. It was a pretty glorious event. The bride and groom are two people who seem very much in love, which suffused the already verdant Appalachian Mountain scenery they chose for the setting with a positive vibe.

My pastoral dudes enjoying the wedding.

There are some weddings where you know at least some segment of the crowd is gritting its teeth or cringing, despite the outward shows of affection and well-wishing. Maybe the couple had an on-again-off-again relationship, or there are not-quite-secret past infidelities. Perhaps no one can quite figure out what the couple are doing together. This wasn’t one of those weddings. The vows were organic to the couple: forthright, funny, and genuine. The music suited them. The dress was fantastic. It all worked.

In perusing the (blissfully economical/brief) wedding program, I was struck that the longest section was dedicated to remembering loved ones on both sides of the bride and groom’s family who had died, including the groom’s father (my uncle), who died from a rare form of leukemia (and Nina, a touch of sweet, melancholic generosity).

As an avowed anti-sentimentalist, I have to say:
the vows were pretty great. 

After the ceremony my cousin Ben, the groom’s younger brother, gave a toast. After an appropriate amount of teasing his brother, he told the gathered crowd how the two brothers had grown much closer because of and not despite their father’s untimely death. This invocation was bold because it was the mummy at the feast—holding up the death mask in the midst of the party is always a risk. And it was appropriate for the same reason: death is not only always present, it is life’s only invariable element and, in this case, a seminal event in the lives of the groom’s family. My uncle wasn’t as young as Nina when he died, but he was a vibrant, active, energetic 61 and seemed much closer to the living than the dead right up until he got sick. He left behind four kids and a wife, stunned, in the “wait, what?” twilight zone of grief and loss.

Ben said, unapologetically and matter-of-factly, that it was both the worst and one of the best things that ever happened to his family -- their father’s death simultaneously tearing the family unit apart and bringing the surviving members closer together.

The groom's family all together save the groom,
who was dancing too hard to photograph. 

I can’t imagine a better invocation of grief: right in the pumping heart of one of the most life-affirming of ceremonies we know. As anyone who’s experienced any kind of loss (death, breakup, whatever) can tell you, weddings -- despite the affirmations and well-wishes -- are one of the biggest grief triggers. All our “if onlys” and “might have beens” stand out in sharper relief against the backdrop of sanctifying a loving commitment. Ben’s toast rang true not despite but because of the fact that my uncle couldn’t be there to share in the moment -- an obvious and painful source of regret, but also a reminder among many of why it was so important in that moment to reflect not only on the vast, unspent stores of love yet to be fully realized that stretched before the bride and groom, but on the lives already mortally complete, the dry wells.

See. Dancing. Party hard, Max & Suzie. 

There’s a sense in which weddings bring us closer to our elemental selves, ask us to cast a longer glance at what makes us human -- why we gather, unite, procreate, make lifelong commitments, etc. Foundationally, the answer to all of those questions is the same: because life is short and we all want it to be meaningful. Inevitably, until our time is up, part of our life will be spent wondering what might have been for our lost loves. So sometimes we don’t miss our water fully ‘til the well runs dry because we are always trying to enjoy the still-sloshing-full cistern we’ve filled at our cousin’s wedding. Which come to think of it tastes mysteriously strong for water…

Mansplaining to Judges is a thing and we are all in very deep trouble.

This was the only picture of female judges I could find on the Internet. OK, not quite, but pretty close, and most of the others were Judge Judy or RBG. (That's Sotomayor, Ginsburg, O'Connor, and Kagan, created by an enterprising woman who wanted to fill a void). 

I went to Richmond this week for an argument at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. My job affords the neat opportunity on occasion to argue cases to panels of 3 judges who ask smart, probing questions about whatever legal issues the parties have argued in the clients’ briefing.

There was an important en banc rehearing before my argument, so I went to watch. When the court sits en banc, the entire set of active judges for the Fourth Circuit hears the case instead of just a three-judge panel -- in this case FIFTEEN. It was a lot of black robes. The lawyers did a good job and I was genuinely interested in the argument as a spectator. But it wasn’t the legal acumen of the judges or the skill of the lawyers that stood out.

Instead, I noted that counsel for one of the parties had a very different manner of addressing the female members of the Court from the way he spoke to male judges. When he answered questions from men, his responses were deferent and congenial – even when the judges disagreed with his argument. When he responded to the women on the panel, he was borderline patronizing. At one point, one of the judges became so frustrated as the lawyer tried to explain a case to her that she herself had raised in asking the question that she cut him off and said “I understand the case, I’ve read it.” I can’t tell you how obtuse this seemed from the gallery. She was a Supreme Court clerk, went to Yale, worked at a major CD law firm and in the Obama administration. She's a straight badass and does not, I’m guessing, frequently need things explained, let alone her own questions. But even this didn’t deter him.

If you come at the king (with your condescending nonsense) you best not ... well just best not. 

The attorney in question was not an obvious clod or overt misandrist troglodyte. He was an effective advocate. He handled most of the legal questions ably and it was a long, tough argument. I have never met him nor seen him argue before. But based on my one observation, my guess is he probably has a great deal of ostensible, conscious respect for the women judges to whom this tone was directed. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he would be surprised if not shocked by my observations. I don’t think I’m being unfair in my characterization and I conferred with another attorney who watched the argument and had a similar takeaway.

Part of the reason it was so striking was the panel’s makeup: ten men and five women, so the female judges are a substantial minority presence on the court, but still greatly outnumbered and surrounded by male voices on the bench (curiously there are at least as many if not more women than men lawyers in the Fourth Circuit, but that’s another story altogether…).

The lawyers in this argument all happened to be men as well. The effect was to heighten the already gender-slanted environment of the legalworld and make the mere fact of a woman judge speaking notable among so many male voices. And the women on the bench were not shy. Four of the five women on the panel asked a substantial number of questions (by contrast there were at least a few male judges who said nothing).

But every time this particular lawyer responded to a man – whether that judge agreed with his position or not (and there were several male judges who did not and a few who did), the response was more typical of what you hear in a Supreme Court Argument – there is some intellectual jousting, but also a great deal of deference to the judge asking the question (though to be clear the SCOTUS is not free from boorish male behavior by a longshot). When a woman spoke, there was a lot more pushback and a lot more explaining by counsel – making the response less an answer to the question than an implicit assumption the female judge misunderstood the lawyer’s argument. More like what boys do to girls in classrooms than what lawyers do before judges (and unfortunate in any context).

Is this the reality of American men: the degree to which we are bred to condescend to women is so deep and ingrained that, even in a situation where the man has no inkling or overt inclination to be condescending and belittling to women and the women in question are owed not only the normal amount of respect due another person but also those of their high ranking office (appellate judges are revered to the point of being fetichized in the legal universe) and the longstanding traditions of the court, the effect of a man’s basic manner of address is still condescending and belittling? Those are some despondency-creating levels of dysfunction.

I argued my own case (to a woman I would dare not condescend to – at least I hope! -- and 2 men), then drove home to Greensboro feeling world weary about the prospect of raising two boys in our culture – one that not only creates this sub-rosa recapitulation of toxic male behavior, but tolerates its overt expression at the very highest levels. I can try to counteract this in my home but, to be honest, I’m still trying to figure out all the ways I am messed up about women. I grew up in this culture too, if anything in a slightly more retrograde era (I didn’t go to Georgetown Prep, but still). I also need to root all these behaviors out of my own makeup, because I’m not dense enough to think that just because I was in the gallery and not up at the podium in this instance, that someone else hasn’t eyeballed me talking to or about a woman in an equally problematic way. 

I am dense enough to try, though. I talked to the boys last night at dinner about it. It came up organically because despondency was apparently on everyone’s lips: the boys wanted to talk about “what’s going on with Donald Trump and that guy who’s having to go to court or something because someone says he raped them.” I divined that to mean Brett Kavanaugh, current member of another Court of Appeals (god help his female colleagues and clerks), going before the Senate.

How do you explain this mess to boy children? 

Oof. The allegations against Judge Kavanaugh make the lawyer’s tone with women judges I witnessed pale in comparison. Kavanaugh's conduct, awful as it may be, may be less egregious than that of the commander-in-chief, in the historical aggregate. How can a culture that would tolerate Donald Trump as president and make Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination a close question be expected to inculcate boys with anything other than toxic levels of baseline misogyny in their makeup?

I actually expressed my despair about this to the kids. I told them I worried that, no matter what was true in our house, they weren’t just learning from me, but from friends, teachers, TV, music, etc. And, for that matter, I wasn’t a perfect role model. As an upper middle class white dude, I’m uncomfortably close to the center of the Venn diagram of American toxic masculinity (I worded this slightly differently to the boys). So I’m not sure I’ve got the right end of the misogyny stick myself (there should totally be a misogyny stick, BTW. If misogyny arises, break glass).

The boys’ responses were as follows: 1. Freddy said “We don’t treat girls/women like that at my school (thank god I opted for the Quaker school in 2018 of all years!) so I’m not only getting bad influences; and you’re not an idiot, like those guys.”; 2. Benny: “I am NEVER raping anyone. Ever. No raping. Raping is bad. People should never rape. What are all the different kinds of rape?” The upshot of my intervention for Benny seems to be he feels empowered to use a new word her previously thought prohibited and will now be mentally and verbally cataloging violent sex crimes. So there’s that. [pats self on back]. 

At the end of the day, what hit me hardest in some ways was how very badly we are missing Nina. In all the ways, but very keenly in this one. Having a strong female role model is important for the boys. Also having the chance to witness a man and woman interacting in what would hopefully be positive, non-misogyny laden ways. I can still work on myself, but it’s in a vacuum and, as with the lawyer today in court, it’s only when the issues come into real world contact with women that it becomes manifest. I have to not only hope I can teach them the right ways to behave – or at least the right principles – without screwing up myself. Also I hope the boys get enough contact and experience with women that they can develop the right kind of habits themselves. Because most of the rubber hitting the road (sorry, unfortunate metaphor, but I can’t afford an editor) isn’t going to be under my tutelage. It’s going to be in Brett Kavanaugh’s dorm mixer or in whichever awful den of male toxicity one of the boys finds himself lodged were he’ll have to decide what’s right and act accordingly.

So, yet another reason why having your wife die of cancer is dumb and another little jot of despair in case you were running short of either this week. You're welcome!

Ruins

Grouper - Ruins

Years ago I had to be on steroids for an extended time. I didn’t sleep much and one of my coping mechanisms was reading about music. I found Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide and, impelled by the prednisone, read his massive, alphabetical catalog of reviews in order. (It was slightly crazy, even given the prednisone. I can see that now.) I also read reviews on Pitchfork, trolled Metacritic for new releases, and was generally obsessed with finding and listening to new music. I needed a fix to counteract the "I wanna peel off my skin" feeling of the steroids. On the upside, my mania introduced me to a lot of good music.

One of the albums I found was Ruins, by a band called Grouper. The “band” is actually Liz Harris, a musician who lives in Oregon, and her album is as spare sonically as the band's lineup. A lot of the lyrics are more breathed than sung, often accompanied only by Harris singing over her piano and sometimes ambient noises such as crickets and frogs croaking.

It’s not exactly accessible, but it's beautiful and I found it immediately arresting. Ruins served the double purpose of being good music and a kind of balm in itself. Though her style is different, the sonic effect felt a lot like Gregorian chants, or Enya, but without the gnomic bourgeois weirdness that music always evokes for me. It felt fresh and restorative. Despite the album’s name, it held no darkness, no decay. Just a steady thrum of subtle, but strangely catchy musical phrases. I listened to it more than one sleepless, prednisone-fueled night to bring myself down from the anxious edge.

When Nina got cancer -- not long after my bout with steroids -- it had a strange effect on her anxiety issues -- which were chronic-generalized not situational-steroidal. One the one hand, as she wrote in The Bright Hour, the “terrible thing” she’d been dreading anxiously for years had finally happened. This meant, by and large, that she was no longer in the thrall of her prior fear of the unknown, lurking, deadly thing that could never be totally ruled out.

By contrast, when she had actual doom bearing down on her, Nina handled mortality as well as I can imagine. But there were times when the weight of the whole thing shook her to the core. I still can’t fathom what she was going through, with her life all around her still going on – our boys growing out of their shoes, me going to work, days on the calendar passing, all while she contemplated how precious little now connected her to all of it.

There were a (surprisingly) few nights when it really got the better of her. She was experiencing what I guess is true, organic, existential dread. There was nothing for it. We tried what we'd learned in dealing with her previous anxiety. But some of the tools from the generalized anxiety toolbox no longer suited: you can’t decatastrophize metastatic cancer. It’s a textbook catastrophe. An actual matter of life and death.

One night we were trying the standard litany – mindful breathing, relaxation, opening the windows surrounding our bed to let the night air in, lighting candles – to no avail. I asked her if she’d let me play some relaxing music. She was skeptical (our musical tastes had a lot of overlap, but didn’t always align, and sometimes she felt I had a poor sense of “the room” when I’d put on weirder or edgier stuff – I still say The Coup livened up our parties and I will die on the small, humble hill of Shakira's breasts!) but I reassured her this would be soothing. I played Ruins by Grouper and it had an immediate effect, which I didn’t notice at first because the effect was that Nina was quiet and calm. She didn’t fall asleep, but she felt less anxious almost right away.

We listened to the whole album, and then when she did get drowsy, she asked me to play Ruins again so she could fall asleep to it. Up in our bedroom, we didn’t have a speaker, so I was just playing the album on my phone. The sound wasn’t as good, but we were playing even that soft, subtle album at a low volume anyhow. And there was something incredibly intimate about the whole experience – a tiny source of comforting sound for us, who felt so tiny tucked in our bed, surrounded by the ruins of a life together we had expected to last for a whole lot longer.

From that night until she died, Ruins was our go-to music for soothing calm: in the car on the way to Duke Cancer Center, in the chemo bay during treatment, before a new set of scans, whenever we came to rest in an anxious, fretful place, that was the soundtrack.

When Nina died, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the album for a while. It was probably a few months until I played it. When I did, it evoked all the things I expected – her illness, the sterile smell of hospital walls, her trembling voice in our bed as she fought to control the uncontrollable feeling of her world shrinking to nothing. But it also brought a whole other set of new associations: actual ruins.

I was in New York City visiting my sister on Roosevelt Island after Nina died and strolled down to the end of the island. The island’s southern tip has been spiffed up in recent years, with a new park and memorial to FDR. Another prominent feature is the Smallpox Hospital – a 19th century gothic building designed by James Renwick, Jr., the same guy who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Smithsonian Institution Building, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. I remembered the hospital from earlier visits with Nina – we had walked around it when it was still fallen into complete ruin, crumbling and surrounded by tall grasses and overgrown trees, and wondered if we were even allowed to be there, so strong was the sense of abandon.

The Smallpox Hospital was allowed to fall into total ruin, nearly being taken over by Roosevelt Island vegetation, with portions crumbling to the ground. 

It was still dilapidated. But now it had a new wrought iron fence around it, a manicured lawn, and scaffolding to support the crumbling structure itself. Surrounded by the new park and well-lit, I had no trouble imagining it as an attraction – the building itself is beautiful, even in disrepair. But as I read the signage about a proposed restoration, I felt a pang of disappointment. I didn’t want the Smallpox Hospital to stop being a beautiful ruin. Not only did it feel more beautiful and enchanting to me that way, it felt organic to my situation – the building was bereft but still standing.

The Smallpox Hospital ruin now stands in a beautiful park, adjacent to a fancy new memorial to FDR (which includes a giant disembodied statute of his head -- lest you think the island is no longer weird and haunting). 

On a trip to Martinique Nina and I took back in 2003, we stayed on the Presque-isle La Caravelle. It’s a little peninsula on the east side of the island that juts out into the Atlantic. Our hotel was a good way out on the peninsula, and one day we decided to see what was out towards end. It turned out there was a ruined plantation called the Chateau Dubuc.

NER on the beautiful, eerie grounds of the Dubuc plantation in Martinique, and a couple shots we took of the ruins during our meanderings around the grounds. 

It was beautiful and haunting – the view of the plantation grounds framed by the Caribbean through the ruined walls of the castle both breathtaking and a reminder of the slave labor that cultivated the sugar, tobacco, and coffee cultivated by the Dubuc family. There is now a museum at the Chateau, but it was either closed or not extant during our visit. We just strolled the grounds, the only visitors, while I deciphered the French signage – our favorite was the one that warned of the beautiful but dangerously toxic manchineel trees (mancenillier, in French, AKA in English as beach apples and colloquially in Spanish as manzanillas de la muerte, or "little apples of death") and cautioned visitors to maintain a safe perimeter from the foliage and the trees fruit, which looks like small apples but contain a highly toxic and corrosive substance.

"Take care! This tree is very dangerous" was probably Nina's all time favorite signage in any language. 

Our trip to Martinique was only a few years after we got married, before we had kids, while Nina was still getting her MFA in poetry. At the other end of our life together, shortly before Nina died, we took another Caribbean vacation – our last hurrah – this time to Turks & Caicos. Nina had only one criterion for this trip: it should be warm and beautiful – and T&C did not disappoint. On the drive from the airport and later on when we circumnavigated the island on a Vespa, we kept seeing houses that were only a foundation, or perhaps a single wall stood, but clearly uninhabitable.

Astonishingly, Nina died just over two weeks after being astride a Vespa with the beautiful Chalk Sound behind her. 

It was so striking and pervasive, we asked a taxi driver if these were lingering damage from a hurricane or abandoned remnants of the housing crisis. He laughed and said that they were neither destroyed nor abandoned. In T&C, he explained, many local people did not have a lot of money, but plenty of time and patience. Land is relatively cheap, he said, but to buy building materials on an island that doesn’t produce them, is very expensive. So many people of modest means stake out a cheap plot of land, then slowly, over years, or even decades, construct the house – starting with the many foundations we saw in evidence. He told us sometimes the homesites get passed from one generation to the next before they’re finished.

I find this memory soothing – the idea that the people of T&C don’t need their houses to spring full born from the ground, as we are accustomed in the U.S., but cultivate a ruin into a home with eons of care and labor.

When Nina was dying, all I could think about was holding on to her. My work was mainly to support her in any way I could. But I also spent a lot of time and energy trying to keep from staring too long into the abysmal future. I knew I needed to think about the future and we discussed it frequently -- never shying away from saying the hard things out loud was Nina’s way. But I focused on the here and now as much as I could because what came after could be dealt with afterwards, but Nina would be gone, and right then she was still present.

I thought of Nina’s perspective as the opposite, in some ways. She had to wrestle with the concept of a rapidly shrinking life in all dimensions: she could was less and less able to navigate the world physically, her lifespan was measured in weeks, then days, and her thoughts of the future were about absence, not survivorship. She would not be there to survey the ruins with me, the first journey we would not be making together in almost 20 years.

The truth is, I have no idea what Nina was thinking or feeling beyond what she told me. I am unable to put myself in her shoes, even having gone through it with her. What do the dying feel? What does the world look like when you know that soon you’ll no longer be in it? Does it all seem like a crumbling ruin, haunting and filled with ghosts, like the end of the world you spent your life building? Or is the half-finished work of a dedicated tinkerer being passed on to her survivors because time just ran out?

I recently learned that Liz Harris recorded Ruins in Portugal. I like to think this explains some of the redolence Nina found in her Grouper work. Back in 2001, when we moved to Paris, Nina’s parents took a “gap year” and lived with her then-teenage brother in Cascais, Portugal. Nina struggled with Paris – the language, the pace of life, all the Parisians – and we struggled too. We had only been married a year when we went, and so we felt a lot of our marital growing pains that year, plus the added stress of living abroad. Paris was as close to ruination as our relationship ever came. We were frayed and taut – having already gained the stressors of married life, but only begun to develop the skills to cope with them.

At Christmas we visited Nina's family in Cascais. I returned to Paris after the New Year for classes, but Nina stayed behind. The slow pace of Portugal and its ruined beauty – parts of the oldest neighborhood in Lisbon are still propped up from to the massive 1755 earthquake -- which destroyed nearly the entire remainder of the city. One of the things she raved about was Sintra, the town and palace situated not far from where her parents lived. Sintra is a beautiful castle that dates from the 15th century. It is situated up in the hills in beautiful parkland and surrounded by the ruins of previous structures, including the Castle of the Moors that preceded it. A castle built on ruined castles. Nina loved the grounds, the castle, the winding mountain paths, all the Romantic allure of the place. She even loved the fact that it was a palace for kings of what became a second-tier monarchy, whose members outlived their dynasty's glory.

Part of the Castle of the Moors, now a ruin near the grounds of the Sintra Palace in Portugal. 

The Portuguese, maybe because that 1755 earthquake really did ruin a good portion of the country and its fortunes with it, or perhaps because they’re a nation of long-distance mariners, are known for what they call saudade. The word doesn’t translate, but it means a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. It also carries a repressed sense or knowledge that the object of longing may never return. It’s sad, but also not exactly a negative emotion. It sounds like it has a lot in common with grief, or with the indescribable feeling of huddling together in a bed around a tinny iPhone speaker, listening to the only sounds in the whole world that can bring you peace and calm.

Gravity's aging, slightly embarrassing rainbow.

This is how I see myself when I run. 

This is how people under 20 see me. 

Aging is weird. I had 20/20 vision every year until I hit 41, now I have an astigmatism. I weigh considerably more than I did five, ten, and twenty years ago. I mend less quickly when I’m sick. I fall asleep during even a short time in a moderately comfy chair. And when I do, I snore. I worry about getting enough fiber.

In recent years, I have also fallen while jogging. Twice. I never fell while running as a young person. I mean, I’m sure I fell as a child while playing, but once I hit puberty, I recall having a pretty stable relationship with gravity and momentum. The first fall was in 2013. I went running on a very cold and icy day over Nina’s advice. We were cooped up with the weather, I was stir crazy, and I needed exercise. I think I said something to Nina about how runners go out in all conditions, and a little snow ought not to stop me from exercising (it turns out those are experienced all-weather runners, not me going out for my first ever ice jog. Who knew? It was a different time. ). I made it about 20 feet down our hill before falling slipping on the ice, falling hard on the sidewalk, and coming home bleeding from at least four places.

The other time was a year or so later. I’d been running regularly, increasing both my speed and distance, and I wanted to add a further challenge to my runs to make them more interesting. I started by running up onto the park benches I passed along the greenway. Then I got more daring and started to run across the stationary exercise equipment stations that are affixed along the route – balance beams, platforms for crunches or push-ups, stretches, and the like. Various configurations of metal pipe that afforded a kind of agility drill to break up my routine.  One day I tried to leap onto the parallel bars – about two or three feet off the ground -- (in my defense I want to point out I’d done it before successfully!) just as a very attractive, athletic, non-falling, woman was passing the other way. I slipped as I alit and came down with one of the bars between my legs, only centimeters from a life changing experience.

If you go jogging, you may encounter an apparatus like this one along your route. I know the temptation to leap atop them and run from bar to bar the whole way across will be strong. But be wary; let my example guide you.  

In a way, then, I was prepared for today. I went jogging after work. The weather was all post-hurricane sunlight and, though the route was littered with branches and debris from the storm, it was very pleasant. About halfway through my run, I saw group of high school kids (I think? I’ve reached the unfortunate stage of life when all people from the ages of 13 – 20 look more or less alike to me) up ahead running. The kids divided into two groups as they entered the greenway: the boys turned left, the direction I was heading, while the girls started toward me. I could hear the girls chatting and laughing as they approached.

You probably won’t believe it if you know me, because I am so effortlessly cool most of the time, but I felt a rush of self-consciousness. Like I was suddenly the awkward one at an hipper, cooler party than I had any right to attend. I’m not normally consumed with self-consciousness, I didn’t know who the kids were, and I certainly didn’t see myself as part of their peer group, so it struck me as odd. Maybe – and I hate to even invoke a negative and potentially unfair stereotype -- but maybe there is just an inherent self-consciousness inducing power to a pack of HS girls? I don’t know, I just felt momentarily rattled, not quite myself as they approached, though the likelihood that they even perceived me as I huffed and puffed to keep my forty two year-old body in steady forward motion, is slight.

For some reason, in this addled, self-conscious state, I decided it was my duty to clear fallen pine cones from the path. After all, our children were using it! Plus it seemed super cool to casually kick them from the path as I ran. I am a man who not only jogs, but nonchalantly betters the world as he goes. I don’t know exactly what I was thinking. Maybe my whole mess of impending mini-disaster was just a brew of being out in the nice weather, invigorated by exercise, but hobbled by the world – maybe I needed to impress someone, or be seen as less pathetic than I sometimes feel, and this was just my tiny, sad version of that? Regardless, I’m pretty sure the runners were impressed. Then, just as I jogged past them, I caught sight of my loose left shoelace. But I was distracted by all the pine cones, feelings of generalized overcompensation for indeterminate inadequacy, and jogging girls, so I kept my stride for several more yards.

Just then, I came upon a huge pine cone in the middle of the path — I lined it up for the society-bettering, ankle-saving kick it deserved, but as I was getting my aim on the cone, I saw my shoelace again, visibly untied. Now my brain was simultaneously telling me to do two things: kick the pine cone – an instruction already received and in mid-execution – and "stop and tie your shoelace before you trip" -- a new instruction yet to be integrated into either my cerebral cortex or my straining body.

How I saw myself, nimbly clearing debris as I jogged. 

Apparently, this type of neuro-physical overload is the third rail of forty two year-old widowed brains. I neither made contact with the pine cone nor tended to my errant lace. Instead of the clean, Killian Mbappe style strikes I laid on the previous pine cones, making the greenway safe for jogging and enshrining myself in the “older hero type” teenage mental hall of fame (which I’m pretty sure totally exists), I struck the ground awkwardly about six inches behind my stride, stepping on my untied lace with the other foot, and crumpling to the ground, in a heap almost exactly in the mid-point between the pack of girls and the boys ahead of me. I skinned my left knee pretty good and got both my hands for good measure when I broke my fall.

How I appeared to others witnesses my feats of agility. 

I’m pretty sure the kids didn’t see anything. The girls were headed the opposite direction and I wasn’t anywhere near catching the boys. And I’m over thirty, so basically invisible?

Plus, like I said, this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’d not only fallen before, I had fallen only about twenty yards from the exact spot where I went down this time. It had been a while. But it’s good to know that my athletic ability is still an apt metaphor for my personality.

Anyhow, I knew what to do: I took a moment to assess the damage, but not wanting to seem overly concerned about the ungainly half-gainer I – a middle aged, beet red man, sweating profusely from every pore in his body – had just performed for a crowd of indifferent teens, I quickly tied my shoe, and took off at a trot for home.

I can see clearly now (but also progressively less well).

*Quick Post-Hurricane Post-Postmortem Update: We had heavy rains for a couple days and nothing more. I know our friends and family down east got clobbered, so it's not an indication of what Florence did on the front lines, but Greensboro was largely spared.


The other day I went to the ophthalmologist’s office for my annual diabetic retinopathy checkup (if you’re thinking my life sounds like a nonstop rave-up, well … ). A trip to the eye doctor isn’t exactly the end of the world and so far (knocks on wood) my eyes have held up well to 22 years of diabetes vagaries. But I hate the ophthalmologist. It’s not the wall chart tests or setting my chin in the contraption with the doctor only inches from my face – a strangely intimate setup for the examination of the very organ that allows us to see faraway things. It’s the pupil dilation. I hate the feeling of having my eyes dilated. It’s not the photosensitivity, though that’s annoying. It’s the inability to focus, the way the dilation robs me suddenly of my acuity. It feels like more than vision. When my eyes go all fuzzy, I feel like my whole brain has lost its ability to concentrate.

When Nina was alive, she used to tease me about my sensitivity to pupil dilation (as well as loud noises, sudden movements, direct sunlight, sand, water, heat, cold, etc.). After all, she’d once had a condition where the only cure was a direct injection of medication INTO HER EYEBALL, wherein the syringe had to be inserted, injected, and withdrawn slowly, maximizing her “discomfort” (I don’t think it helped that the nurse told her beforehand “it takes a really long time, I wouldn’t want it done to me”!!!). The fact that after every eye exam I feel like I need to lie down in a dark, quiet room to recuperate until my vision returns to normal was the subject of some much-deserved ridicule.

I was musing about this during my most recent visit, and it got me thinking how teasing – a seemingly innocuous, everyday element of discourse – is part of the whole connecting thread of shared experience in grief – the one tying me to Nina by our long mutual knowledge of each other’s idiosyncrasies and routines. It’s obvious at one level: when your person dies, the thread gets cut, and your everyday routine becomes a series of reminders of their absence: Nina’s place at the dinner table, her side of the bed, her stocking at Christmas are all empty spaces now.

But losing the everyday presence of your favorite human is a deep wound. It goes beyond missing that Nina, leaving a crater that, without even trying, I tend to try to fill. If Nina were alive I would surely have been texting her from the eye doctor, probably trying to joke about my “discomfort” and teasing myself (she used to say that I had a gift for ostentatious self-deprecation that was second to none) about the fact that I’m such a wimp.

My texts to Nina were most often silly, neurotic, everyday things. But, especially in the aggregate, they mattered. They were indirect ways of saying “I love you,” “I need you,” or maybe just “I’m uncomfortable, I’m happy, I’m anxious, I’m right chuffed with myself at the moment, thank you very much (because sometimes in my texts I’m British), etc.”

I can simulate these communications outside of an intimate, long-term, love relationship – if you polled my friends and family they’d all affirm that I have been overcompensating (or over-texting) for the loss -- but it’s never in the same way, or with the same degree of intimacy.

It’s this type of intimacy, maybe even more than physical intimacy or any sort of direct intimate expression, that's been the most beguiling in many ways since Nina died. There is no direct way to fill the void. It’s an intangible benefit or side-effect of being in a long-term relationship – knowing banter, teasing, and the like – you can’t start mid-stream with someone else where you left off rapporting when your partner dies.

The need for this is important and potentially troublesome for starting a new relationship after loss. This communication is endemic to who I am – I could not form a lasting bond with someone without it. So naturally, I’m going to text silly things from the ophthalmologist to anyone with whom I become intimate, eventually. 

But, as with nearly everything after a loss, there are traps in that seemingly obvious behavior. There’s the recapitulation of my relationship with Nina, something I want to avoid. Every relationship is unique, and shouldn’t be form fit into an existing mold – but how much can I avoid doing the things I do in a relationship? How much should I even be trying to monitor and tamp down my instinct for such behavior?

Communication is a particularly fraught part of bridging the gap from a lost relationship to a new one, because we say so much indirectly. Nonverbal or indirect verbal communications – inside jokes, puns, shared symbols, etc. – are a kind of glue for any relationship, whether a marriage or friendship. And communication is so key in relationship building. We can do plenty of it directly, but we still need those moments of flirtation, chit-chat, or silliness.

Much of the behavior I’m describing are appropriate in a new relationship context, but that doesn’t mean they don’t also implicate and reference the prior relationship – after all, this kind of communication is indirect, sometimes non-verbal (facial expressions, gestures, etc.). This gets confusing. The ultimate question for anyone looking to connect again after a loss may be: how do I know when I need this (new) person and when I just need -- and the answer can be both at the same time, which is especially confounding.

This type of relationship intangible is maybe the best illustration I’ve found of why it’s hard to enter into a new relationship soon after a loss (or a breakup, for that matter). The intangibles show how pervasive and powerful the loss is in our makeup. It’s also really hard to detect -- the behaviors fly below our emotional radar most of the time.

The problem for me has been I can’t see clearly enough to distinguish this kind of thing until after the fact. It’s not until I get home, lie down in the dark room I’ve been sharing with no one, and let the powerful effects of the emotional transubstantiation wear off that I can disentangle the threads. And even then, I’m not sure I have it all clear. Of course, as my ophthalmologist pointed out, I do have a nascent astigmatism. She prescribed me reading glasses and said I should be prepared for bifocals at some point. So maybe it’s not going to get much clearer from here on out.

Do I have to be all the Johns at once?

It’s entirely possible I’ve been spending too much time indoors. We are dealing with the fringes of Hurricane Florence and, though the storm hasn’t had nearly the impact we feared, it’s been raining steady for over a day now and schools have been closed since Thursday. Despite my best efforts to orchestrate activities for the kids, we’ve been homebound a fair amount of the hurricane-lengthened weekend.

So, with that cabin fever caveat, I’ve been thinking about the emergent nature of life (my life, our lives…right now I’d just like to emerge from my house). I’m savoring the last twenty pages or so of Edgar Morin’s The Method, Vol. 1: the nature of nature, where the author concludes by summarizing his development of the concept of “complexity” and complex systems – from stars to human societies. Rather than trying to wrench an abstract, objective truth from scientific study, Morin wants to incorporate both the observed phenomenon and the observer into our understanding of the complex system as a whole into which “science” or “knowledge” emerges. We can’t just pay attention to the signal, we have to look at the noise, too. We can’t focus solely on the organized parts of the universe, because they arose from – or more accurately emerged out of – the diffuse, chaotic, disorganized bits interacting.

It’s not just original building blocks of the universe, physical or societal, that “emerge” from chaos to form a timeless order. Our world is continuously engulfed in and permeated by chaos, even in the relatively organized structures of our societies and social lives, and we are constantly emerging as relatively stable, well-ordered beings. But we’re not timeless.

Humans have established some pretty well-defined emergences – being born, reaching physical maturity, finishing school, having a family, retirement, death, etc. But these are really just abstractions from a continuous cycle of being and becoming -- big moments plucked from a constantly shifting, contingent, fact and circumstance dependent set of conditions. We are not the same from one milestone to the next, or even in-between, despite the strong human narrative we generally follow – the neat path from cradle to grave.

We only have to look at the end point of our narrative -- death and dying -- for analytical grist. Montaigne wrote that whatever life we enjoy it is stolen, lived at ife’s expense. Morin’s more scientific view is that we are alive for whatever time we live in defiance of the very laws of thermodynamics our highly developed human brains have deduced. Living beings are machines that emerged from a once-chaotic universe and, at a relatively highly advanced stage of bio-development, somehow gained the ability to reflect on the conditions of their own emergence -- thank you, cerebral cortex; this, somewhat ironically, allows us the ability to discern that our very existence violates the laws of thermodynamics: we do not dissipate, in fact we self-generate and regenerate – that is until this very self-generation uses up our scarce resources and we die.

Alive, we are never static. We never simply are. There may be no better description of living things than Heraclitus’ ancient, well-worn “you can never step into the save river twice.” Whatever we are, we are always becoming it. There is no part of our lives in which we are not engaged in the battle against our ultimate dissolution, and this means constant regeneration and renewal – it’s what our bodies are designed to do. They become until they cannot.

Grief and loss are one of the big events in the human narrative – we tend to think of them as the conclusion, in fact. Grief and loss themselves are often divided into specific stages thanks to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the mid-century mania for neat abstract analytical categories. There’s some utility in a framework for things so endemic to human experience – the reason the stages work is that everyone recognizes something in them. But the stages also mask the emergence of grief, make it appear neater and more orderly than it is. But, if we are constantly hewing out our bodies’ delicate homeostasis until we can’t anymore, why would grief – the aftermath of that process’ final stage -- be any more fixed or neatly discernable?

It isn’t. Grief is the noise and the signal, the message and the static. In the minutes and hours after Nina died, I had some important decisions to make. I made them with what now seems like remarkable clarity, or at least decisiveness. First, I had to tell the kids. In order to do that I had to get to the kids, who were staying with friends while I was with Nina in the hospice facility. Then I had to decide whether to take them to see her body. She died early in the morning, so they were still eating breakfast when I arrived. Nina and I had discussed whether they should view her body briefly before she died and we’d agreed it wasn’t necessary, but we never finally decided, she said to use my best judgment at the time.

When I got to the kids that morning, I still put the matter to them. Freddy demurred, Benny immediately refused, but it wasn’t really a fair question. Somehow I’d already decided they shouldn’t see her and any of their normal doubts were probably enhanced by whatever subtle or obvious cues I was giving.

As I look back, it’s still not clear. Should I have taken them to see Nina’s body? Would the object permanence of that have been more valuable than the potential trauma of seeing their mom’s dead body? They saw their grandma’s dead body lying in state for a couple of days in her bed, so it’s not like death was a totally foreign concept, even at their ages. How was I so certain? Was it just the overwhelming circumstances that allowed me to decide? Sheer necessity? I don’t know, but I concluded not to quickly and decisively.

It wasn’t true clarity. I recall being very certain about a lot of things that morning and in the ensuing days and months that seem arbitrary or ambiguous 19 months later. Should I have stayed with Nina’s body longer after she died? Might that have been better for my own sense of permanence? As soon as they took her away to be cleaned up, I hurried myself (and poor Charlie and Pete) into breaking camp in the hospice room, which was full of our things that people had brought from home to make it more familiar during our stay -- a surprising amount of things accumulated in that short time. Maybe I should have spent more time among them, transitioning from the room with Nina in it, to the same space with only her corpse? Was it a bad idea for me to be organizing the memorial service, given how overwhelmed I was and did this perhaps lead to a painfully long memorial sermon that I submitted to no one for editing but subjected many to? Yet I was very clear for no readily apparent reason on all these decisions at the time.

I don’t know, and I’m not overly wrapped up in whether or not I made the right decisions (except maybe the final forty five minutes of the funeral oration – if you outdistance Pericles, you’ve gone too far). Nina died and I’m pretty sure I did my best under the circumstances. I’m just trying to reckon with the sheer contingency of it all and contrasting that with the fixity I felt for my convictions at the time.

In the midst of what felt like sharp a break with prior experience – the world with no Nina – I was emerging and becoming with what felt like an urgent, desperate rapidity. Every moment, every decision, every greeting card unanswered and each casserole consumed felt like a palpable flake of the chrysalis. I had a keen sense that Nina’s emergence had ended, her still-unfolding wings frozen, dessicated in the hospital style bed in the facility where I kissed her still-perspiring forehead for the last time, then quickly emerged into the pale, drizzling daylight of the first moments without her, launching into memorial services, book events, childcare searches, school lunches, weirdly without hesitation.

Although I thought about the aftermath of Nina’s death in advance, planned for it, discussed it with her, I was a grief pinball -- all oblique angles and crazy carroms. One moment I wanted to hold Nina’s hand until the last possible moment before cremation, the next I couldn’t wait to leave the hospice building behind. I wanted to shelter the kids from pain and I wanted to scream whenever one of them needed anything from me. I gave what were probably impossibly conflicting and unmanageable directions to the aggrieved people around me. I confused powerful impulses for strong principles. I was a study in the throes of grief. Still life with flailing man (though in this instance the French “nature morte” rather than still life might be more appropriate?).

There’s still no fixed, objective view. I’m unable to disentangle all that was happening around Nina’s death. I know the kids never saw her dead body, but I’m not aware what that they did experience that day, or most of the other days. I’m sure not all of it was bad. They played video games, ate dinners and desserts, got showered with attention. I know from talking to the boys that they remember that morning too and see it as a break. But what emerged for them when Nina died? And what’s happened since? Those dudes are constantly emerging too! You can’t step into the same stream of Benny’s consciousness twice. Or rather, he may mention the fennec fox every single time, but each time it’s a new fennec fox, a fox imagined and articulated as Benny’s small defiance of the laws of thermodynamics – never mind normal human discourse.

Benny's only experience to date with a real fennec fox. 

The other day in the lobby of my psychologist’s office I saw an unfamiliar couple in their fifties or sixties. The man looked care-worn, the woman was emaciated and had a portable oxygen concentrator – the exact model Nina and I rented for a trip to Turks & Caicos, our last trip before Nina died. I looked at the oxygen unit (the Inogen G3, which rode under the seat of our Vespa in T&C, I guess I recommend it?), and listened to the familiar hiss and catch rhythm of its pulse dosing.

Nina wouldn't be photographed with the damn oxygen concentrator on, but it's under that seat. 

I tried to gauge my reaction in real time, which is always dicey, but realized I wasn’t immediately triggered, or plunged into PTSD. I felt a more keen and immediate recall of Nina using the machine and the time surrounding time period. I remembered her being almost entirely wheelchair-bound, so that she was never even able to go on the beach at our fancy beachfront hotel, and that the wheelchair and oxygen made her feel too self-conscious to approach Katie Couric – who by happenstance was on our flight to T&C and had tweeted only a couple months before a lovely message that brought added attention to Nina’s NYT article, and who was gamely chatting up dozens of our fellow passengers, each of whom seemed to already feel they had a personal connection to her (the only upside of this missed opportunity for Nina and Katie to meet was the fantastic people watching!). Instead Nina direct messaged her while catching her breath in our hotel room after we arrived. She only went downstairs for dinner once during out stay, in fact, though she was flush with the experience afterwards – or was that the oxygen deprivation?

The flood of associative/dissociative memory was par for the course. But what I felt more than anything watching the woman’s gestures festooned with that familiar tubing, the digital controls, and also the helplessness worn like a second skin on the man in the waiting room attending to her, was being confronted with an old version of myself – one I emerged from at some point (or many) since Nina died. Maybe it’s just another way of describing the same familiar phases and stages of grief. But I don’t see anything distinct or caesuric about the past couple years. It’s all overlapping, a parting that seems unreal but absolute, a becoming in which I can’t remember the beginning and haven’t reached the end.

There are so many versions of us that get written and rewritten over the period of our lives. We are the ultimate palimpsest, except there’s no eraser and the lines are being rewritten before the last layer of ink is even dry.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and, before I even realized it, was seized by a fit of sobbing so violent I had to force myself to stop because I was having trouble breathing (how is our well-designed body included with a feature that blocks your swelling nose with snot while your mouth is breathing so hard?!). Part of me immediately thought “this is nothing compared to what Nina went through for weeks and weeks, let alone when she actually died,” (on behalf of my Tribe, I’m adding a new Guilt Stage to the Kubler-Ross model) another part of me felt searing anguish and regret for all the million ways I am fucking my kids up by not being careful enough, thoughtful enough, good enough, or soft enough around the edges, to even come close to what Nina would be doing, let alone to begin to make up for what they’ve lost (Regret: Sub-stage of Jew Guilt! Gelt?).

I ached for the guy in the psychologists’ office (though good on them for seeking therapy during what looked like end-stage cancer – growth mindset! (no cancer pun intended!)), and all the nights like the one I was having he had in front of him, and all the hospital visits and decisions, and hands held or not held, that he’d already experienced. I wondered if even then he was emerging from a bedroom, hospital room, hospice suite, out into the first morning of a world without his person in it. Bereft not only of her, but of his purposeful support and attendant duty to her, which shaped and gave meaning to his days as the reality of her condition emerged and unfolded. And of course I thought about Nina and the absence of Nina and the Nina sized hole in the sail that was supposed to head us all safely away through this mess.

What gets me confused isn’t that all this is happening all the time or that our delicate battle with thermodynamic laws will be lost someday despite our ingenious brains and bodily systems (not only in each of our individual cases, but for the universe as well – so don’t feel badly!). It’s what to do with the actual unfolding of the events in all this emerging we’re doing. Montaigne said that he studied himself, that his own mortal coil was both his physics and metaphysics. Sorry, I don’t have any answers better than that one. No real conclusions. I’m just trying to get the unfolding down the best I can in the hope that recording it gives it some semblance of order. My own little defiance of the laws of thermodynamics and the Kubler-Ross model -- analytically muddy, indistinct, and unpredictable -- or as I like to say, complex.