Route 1, Day One

At 7:29 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec 29, we leave Annie and Shawn at the curb of Terminal A at Logan Airport. US Route 1 crosses the Tobin Bridge just north of Boston proper and near the airport it is combined with I-93, which has come from northern New Hampshire. South of Boston I-93 ends, and shortly afterwards Route 1 peels off I-95. We pass the “Auto Mile” in Norwood, where car dealerships line the road, and see our first pre-Holiday Inn, mid-century motel: a long, low-slung building with parking in front of each of about ten to fifteen units’ doors. I expect to see many more as we travel.
With Jim napping (short night for us), I drive across a bridge into Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and face its Public Library, an imposing monument to learning.





I take a right at a fork in the road and drive many miles before I realize I've lost Route 1. Hoping to recover without disturbing Jim’s sleep, I carry on. I finally find I-295, which junctions with Route 1 but again guess the wrong direction. When I realize my mistake I have to backtrack all the way to Attleboro, Massachusetts. Jim wakes up and is surprised we aren’t farther along, so I admit I’ve driven in a huge circle for the past hour. When we arrive again at the fatal fork in the road for the second time, I go left and promptly lose Route 1 again. Jim navigates with the GPS, we wander around, and eventually find Route 1. I’m still not sure how I lost it, but trust me, Route 1 South in northeastern Rhode Island is hard to follow.
  The drive south of Providence is lovely. We drive through the charming town center of Westerly, founded in 1669. It reminds me of West Hartford, Connecticut: one and two story shops line the road. We drive near the Atlantic Ocean, though we never see it, just highway signs for various beaches.
Connecticut surprises me: two lane roads through woods and villages. There are areas of car dealerships and big box stores, but also small town centers. For mile after mile there are echoes of the old Boston Post Road: street signs, business names, even an apartment complex named “Boston Commons”.

We had foolishly thought we’d arrive at Peter’s and Xiomara’s around noon, taking 4 ½ or 5 hours to cover what is 3 ½ miles via interstate. Silly us! We arrived around 7 p.m: eleven and a half hours on the road, stopping only once for gas and once for take-out food to share from La Cuisine in Branford.
Before we get to the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, where Peter and Xiomara live, we drive on Boston Avenue; what’s that doing in the Bronx? It’s all part of the Boston Post Road, established back when the Bronx was forest. It looks very much like many other commercial districts in New York City: block after block of city street storefronts.

When we arrive at Peter’s and Xiomara’s around 7 p.m. I make an executive decision. Instead of backtracking east through many busy Bronx city streets to return to the exact block where we left Route 1, in order to drive on every yard of the highway, we head directly south on the Henry Hudson Parkway, rejoining Route 1 as it (and I-95) cross the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. It’s 9:40 p.m. and we still have two hours of driving to reach the Princeton Inn, where I had made reservations several hours earlier. Let’s just consider it ‘alternate’ Route 1.

The trip down Route 1 and 9 is very familiar. It parallels the New Jersey Turnpike, so I’ve seen this territory many times over the years, both as a youthful resident and on countless drives from New England to New Jersey and south. The most distinctive feature is the vistas: I see downtown Newark off in the distance, and can see miles of city lights. We arrive in Princeton around midnight, happy to fall into bed after a very long day.

Merry Christmas 2015

We had a quiet Christmas morning, drinking homemade egg nog and sharing gifts by the Christmas tree. The Hazen traditional lasagna was served at midday, then Matt and R’el left for Seattle, Vancouver, and Juneau.
Annie, Shawn, Jim, and I went to the cemetery: they hadn’t seen David’s grave marker. Many graves had wreaths or Christmas decorations. Someone had put an evergreen arrangement at David’s grave. Rows of white wooden poles now mark the rows and grave locations. I think it’s for winter burials so they can locate the gravesites in the snow. I’m grateful for a summer burial. It was comforting to watch the grass grow on the grave all through the fall.

I do miss David today. He was so thoughtful in his gift-giving. I often use the digital scale he gave me and just last night I rolled out some vegan biscuits for supper on a silicone pastry mat from him. They turned out well; I used soy milk. (No, I’m not vegan; Matt is.) It’s strange to only need five of each of the themed gifts Jim and I gave this year. (The theme was Julia Child and included Julia's My Life in France, and DVDs of the original PBS TV show The French Chef and The Way to Cook. Jim had met Russ and Marian Morash in Nantucket some months ago. Russ produced and directed  The French Chef and The Way to Cook and they both knew Julia well. They graciously invited us into their home in Lexington and Russ signed DVD cases for each of us.)

I keep thinking about the family photo shoot Ellen did for us a year ago. David looks so chipper, so alive, so happy, a great contrast to December 19th when he had been admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pain. He returned home December 23rd, in time for Christmas, though he wasn’t eating solid food. Christmas 2014: everyone was together at home for 27 hours.

                                                        Merry Christmas!

                                            David and Santa, Christmas 2009

"Light out for the Territory"

A few years ago Jim read a travel memoir, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, by Neil Peart, drummer of the Canadian rock band Rush. After losing his daughter and then his wife to death, Neil takes off on a motorcycle through North America.

So when Jim suggested driving all of US Route 1 as soon as possible, I was ecstatic. Jim mused, “So if I want you to react with immediate enthusiasm all I need to do is suggest something you’ve wanted to do for years?” Duh!

After my epic Cross Country trip (15,900 miles pulling a pop-up tent trailer with six kids, ages 4 to 14, through 48 states, Mexico, and 3 Canadian provinces), I dreamt of another road trip: drive all of US Route 1. I grew up near Route 1 in New Jersey. Actually, we lived near 1 and 9: they share a roadbed in northeast Jersey.
Route 1 has a weird kind of romance: cheap motels and commercial strips. But it’s got Americana potential that interstates lack.
                                                                 

Why do I want to do it? I love the idea of doing all of something. I’ve daydreamed about hiking the Appalachian Trail, but reading Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods opened my eyes to the massive undertaking it is. The Trail is specifically laid out to go over as many peaks as possible, and my ability to handle elevation changes, never extraordinary, is now sub-par. Also, I once got very lost and disoriented in the Lower Vine Brook conservation land right here in Lexington. How hard can it be to keep track of yourself in 110 acres of town woods, surrounded by paved streets?


But driving, driving I can do. On the Cross Country trip I learned something about myself: I don’t mind long drives. If I had a cubicle job, I might spend 8 hours sitting in front of a computer. Sitting in a driver’s seat, the windshield is very much like a computer screen. Driving rains and darkness are a challenge, but the dry daylight hours are easy.
Jim wants an unplanned trip: just get in the car and go. If it weren’t for Advent and Christmas, we’d be on the road already.
So, on December 29th we’ll drop Annie and Shawn off at Logan airport pick up Route 1 South and “light out for the Territory” like Huck Finn.

Misery in the Cafeteria

I felt like I would be able to avoid experiencing the cliché that ‘the first year of grief is the most intense’. When the letter from Good Shepherd Hospice said the third month is often difficult, I thought that meant it would start getting better with the fourth month. It hasn’t.

I went to the annual wreath-making party at church. I had originally told Linda I couldn’t sing in the women’s chorus, but then decided to try it. Happily the songs were lighthearted this year. I started to cry with the closing hymn, “Silent Night”, but didn’t break down sobbing. When I went down to the gym to make a wreath I was relieved to find Cami and her neighbor at a nearly empty table, so I had familiar company while making the wreath.

I suppose people would be surprised at how sensitive to being left out I am. We are such famous hosts. Before David got sick we would hold a dinner for twenty people nearly weekly; even last year, when he was sick, we had Advent suppers for each of the four Sundays before Christmas. (He was well enough to be able to enjoy the evenings and the attention of the five-year-old girls.) We seem to be so plugged in, but each year as I contemplate attending the wreath-making I am anxious about finding a group to fit into.
Takes me right back to the start of junior high school. Either I didn’t get the same lunch schedule as my friends from elementary school, or, more likely, all their tables filled up and I was odd man out. So I was assigned to a table with five ninth grade girls. I was awkward and shy; they were not pleased with my presence so they were catty and mean. I suffered in silence; they called me ‘Gertrude’, the ugliest, most old-lady name they could think of. Lunch time was torture. I rushed through my meal to get out of the cafeteria and onto the schoolyard.
I don’t remember how it resolved. Did I have a whole school year of misery? I certainly had friends in the other years of junior high. It’s just an orphan memory of pain and displacement.

My Army Guy

My reaction to David’s death has progressed as the months have passed. At first I found myself in the 'oh, he’s just at Fort Hood, doing the Army things any 27 year old Army guy would do' mode. After the burial, September 12, it became obvious that he wasn’t at Fort Hood, and that his body was in one specific place, Westview Cemetery, Lexington. November 12 brought the grave marker installation, with the carved granite rock declaring his death in no uncertain terms.
And now, as the holiday season warms up, I realize that in my experience, Army guys tend to get leave at Christmas time and unmarried Army guys tend to visit home. So it’s really hard not to notice that my Army guy hasn’t made any plans.
I’ve gotten over the gut-wrenching reaction to naming my children and falling into the emotional ravine between Matt’s and Annie’s names. Now I am very careful when people ask what my kids are doing for Christmas. I keep firmly in mind that the order is Matt, then Annie. I pause just slightly.
And do I want people to talk about David? I don’t know, I really don’t know. I don’t want him forgotten, but I also don’t want to melt into a puddle every time I talk to someone. How is this grieving thing done?

Evening of Remembrance

On November 12th, Good Shepherd Hospice held its annual “Evening of Remembrance” for all the hospice patients who had died in the past twelve months, from September 2014 through August 2015.

Jim planned to drive straight from the ferry on Cape Cod, having spent the day on business in Nantucket, so I invited my friend Amy to drive with me to the service in Newton, about a half hour from our house.

We meet in a small auditorium set up with chairs; two long tables flanked a small podium in front. Thirteen white pillar candles and thirteen heart-sized smooth grey stones rested on the tablecloths. A staff member walked to the first candle and lit it as Jaye, the grief counselor, held the first stone in her hands. As Jaye gently turned the stone in her hands, a social worker read the death dates and names of all the hospice patients who had died in September, 2014. There were about thirty names. This ritual was repeated for October, then November, and each month in turn: well over 360 names. It was overwhelming. All those sorrows, and this at just one hospice memorial.
The thirteenth candle was for anyone else we wanted to remember. At my suggestion Amy had submitted the name of her late husband, Kerry. It hadn’t occurred to me to put in my parents’ names; I was so focused on David that evening, but I honored them in my heart as the last candle burned.

I thought October would be hardest and then life would start returning to normal. But November hit me hard and December is starting slow, yet another day I struggle to get out of bed, look helplessly as my email inbox count rises above 300.

Last night a friend of mine called: her son-in-law had just been killed in a freak work-related accident. Suddenly I was on the other side of shock and grief, struggling unsuccessfully to find words to express the support I wanted to give. It’s a strange experience, grief. How do we give comfort, keep the sorrow from separating us from each other? I’m reminded of the writer, Anne Lamott, and her blog post after Robin Williams died:

Gravity yanks us down, even a man as stunning in every way as Robin. We need a lot of help getting back up. And even with our battered banged up tool boxes and aching backs, we can help others get up, even when for them to do so seems impossible or at least beyond imagining. Or if it can't be done, we can sit with them on the ground, in the abyss, in solidarity.

Dear readers, I want you to know that you do support me in my grief. I hope I can pass it on.

Veterans Day 2015

Jim and I have an annual date to attend the Lexington Town Veterans Day celebration. Since 1995, when R’el joined the Lexington High School band, we have attended regularly and now, with our children long-since graduated, we continue to take the morning off to watch the parade and attend the program.

      November 11, 2015 was rainy and windy. The parade was cancelled and the program was held at Cary Hall in Lexington Center. The high school band sat on the stage, and the William Diamond Junior Fife and Drum Corps, of which Sam and Annie were founding members (Sam on the drum, Annie on fife), marched in while playing a jaunty Colonial tune. While the high school band played a medley of the Armed Forces hymns, the vets from each branch stood as their respective hymns were played; I cried. David was honorably discharged from the Army in June, but wasn’t there to stand at attention for the Caissons rolling.

      In the afternoon we visited David’s grave. The monument company had told me the grave marker was carved and would be delivered Tuesday; the week before I had seen the neat rectangular hole for the marker. It was now a tiny bit eroded, with a few dead leaves at the bottom, but still empty.

      Then we drove up to Wells, Maine, for the wake of the father of one of Jim’s clients. After speaking with Brad and his family, we sat quietly near the body and spoke to each other of funerals: Jim’s Dad’s, each of my parents’, David’s. It’s still a tender subject, that there was no wake for David. I’m proud of him for donating his body to UMass Medical School, and pleased that useful research was moved forward by his donation. And part of me is pleased that there was no embalming, no make-up. But it bothers me, for some reason, not to know what David looked like when he was placed in the coffin. In fact, I tend to picture him curled up in a ball. That’s not how I last saw him; he was lying on his back, his beautiful long arms at his sides, at rest in his hospital bed in our dining room.


      The day after Veterans Day I returned to David’s cemetery. The grave marker was in place and I was relieved to see his name spelled correctly and the dates accurate. “Set in stone”.

"Fine"

       When I was a young schoolgirl I woke up sick one morning and my mom let me stay home from school. The back room off the kitchen in our house in Northumberland, PA, had a red speckled linoleum floor, the washer and dryer, and a white upright piano. I was in this room when a washer repairman visited. He smiled at me and said, “Hi, how are you doing?” I promptly replied, “Fine.” “Fine?” said my mom, “then why are you home today?”

Early in the first decade of this century (the aughts? the naughts?), I went through a long period of moderate depression. My standard answer to “How are you?” was “Okay.” One day I revealed to a friend that I used different tones to indicate more precisely how I felt. If someone were close to me, they would recognize the differences, for the casual questioner the face value of “Okay” would suffice.
This sweet friend wanted to get to know me better and as time went on she would quiz me, “What kind of ‘okay’ are you?" I really appreciated her concern while also feeling vulnerable for revealing myself.

I’m back to answering ‘fine’but with just one tone. And when asked, I do feel just fine. It’s when I’m alone that sorrow overtakes me, and not often even then.

Around October 10th I started feeling poorly. My body felt achy, like the flu, but it wasn’t the flu. For Columbus Day, October 12th, I took a walk with my teacher friend, Amy, since she had the beautiful autumn day off from school. I told her I’d been feeling low for a few days, like the flu but not the flu. A widow for over 20 years, Amy said simply, “The body knows.” Yes, even though I hadn’t consciously remembered that October 12th was the second ‘monthiversary’ of David’s death, my body knew.

As the third monthiversary of David’s death approaches, I find a heaviness in myself. Last Friday Jim and I drove to the Newton office of Good Shepherd Hospice, which served David in the last two weeks of his life, for a grief support group. Turns out the website had incorrect dates, so there was no support group. However, a social worker, Jaye, generously spent an hour with us, talking about David and our experiences. It was very healing to talk to someone with 20 years of experience in grief counselling. She listened intently and added insight.

My new heaviness is no coincidence: the compassion and understanding Jaye offered us opened something up inside me. Or perhaps it allowed me to dip my toe into “The Well of Grief”. David Whyte says it’s a place where we cannot breath. Can I let my spirit go to that place while my body continues to breath? I’ll try? As the wise Jedi says, “Do or do not. There is no try.” I’ll do.

Black Armband

On Monday, my daughter Annie called. We talked of many things, including David’s death and our reaction to it. Tuesday evening we had our monthly family book group conference call. The book, Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel By Changing the Way You Think by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky, is a basic CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) manual that Annie nominated. Through my therapist I first learned of CBT around 2003, after my second hospitalization for psychotic mania, and have studied the technique in David Burn’s book Feeling Good.
But this week I’m not ‘feeling good’. Are the aches and pains of this morning from walking briskly to the cemetery and back (5 miles) and the next day pushing a baby stroller 3 miles with my 59-year-old body, or are they the flu-like somatic symptoms of grief? Both, I guess.

The first week after David’s death was full of activity: preparing our house to welcome visitors, planning the funeral, having the funeral, spending our family week in the Catskills.
Since David’s body was donated to the University of Massachusetts Medical School we had no need for a funeral home’s services immediately, so instead of a traditional wake, we held visiting hours at our home. In the 1960s our house was the McCarthy Funeral Home. Catholic families used it, with the funeral Masses held at St. Brigid’s a few blocks away. When we were house-hunting back in 1993, and learned of this history, I was thrilled. Raising our six children in it fulfilled a girlish dream of mine. In many towns in the Northeast, grand Victorian houses are converted to funeral homes. I wanted to reverse the process and turn a funeral home back into a home with children. The McCarthy Funeral home closed in 1983, so by the time we bought the house in 1993 it had few hints of its past, mostly a large sink in the back cellar. (We call it the crypt; I’m certain it was the embalming room.)
In the second month after David’s death, my life seemed to go back to normal, but in this third month grief is not letting me off so easily. I don’t sit around and mope, but neither have I the energy to embark on new projects, or even continue with old ones. I find myself a day late with this blogpost.

A friend of Jim’s told him that in 19th century England, people wore a black armband for a year following the death of a close family member. Expectations were lower for social participation, work, and keeping commitments. I need to honor that need in myself and my family.

Palisades, Devils Tower, Tower Park

I’m sitting on the soft brown couch in Riverdale (the Bronx), listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, little Victoria kicking her legs and waving her arms. Andrew is munching on Lucky Charms in between kissing his baby sister.

    Victoria was born 40 minutes after David died. She’s now two months old. It will always be easy to remember the date. Will I remember it more for the death or the life? The life I think. Every year Victoria will change; she’ll have her first birthday, her fifth, her sixteenth. David’s date will be static, slowly fading into the past, but never forgotten.

    Xiomara and I stroll with the grandkids to Wave Hill, a public garden in Riverdale west of Van Cortlandt Park with greenhouses, lawns, two historic homes and spectacular views of the Hudson and the New Jersey Palisades.


The sheer brown cliffs of the Palisades, with their strong vertical lines, remind me of Devils Tower (click on the first image for a slideshow) in Wyoming (featured in Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

• 

    It’s been a beautiful long autumn. The reds and fiery oranges have fallen on my favorite stretch of Mass. Ave, where Route 2A splits off from Routes 4 and 225, across from Tower Park. In Walgreens’ parking lot, young trees, spectacular in the bright sunshine, seem like flaming torches in between the parked cars.

"The Well of Grief"

            At our church women’s book group the other night, my friend, Carri proposed a night of poetry. She handed round some books to peruse. I picked up Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation by Roger Housden and opened where a tiny sliver of colored paper marked the page. What I read took my breath away. At home I searched for it online.

My favorite YouTube version of "The Well of Grief" by David Whyte is a still picture of a brick-lined well, flush to the ground, the words in a white font scrolling up the photo and a short excerpt from Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. How can I describe this piece of music? Set aside eleven minutes to watch Leonard Slatkin conducting the BBC Orchestra in the Adagio on September 15, 2001, in honor of those who died four days earlier. Barber expresses the depth of human emotion far better than any words I know how to use. Listen with an open heart and experience its haunting beauty for yourself.

Years ago I played in the viola section of the New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra. While we were rehearsing Barber’s Adagio, my stand partner told me that it had played on television during the reporting of John F. Kennedy’s funeral. And now I listen to it and feel the grief for my son.

What music speaks to your soul?