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.