Another painful anniversary

Wanted to not keep writing about this but the fact is it's breaking my heart.  Today - well yesterday now - was what would have been my mother and my stepfather Tom's 29th wedding anniversary.  Last year I was in Maine with them both and we ordered in Chinese food to celebrate.  It was a fun and light time and not one anyone thought would be the last.  We had had Thanksgiving a couple days earlier - same there.

While my mother has been dealing with the grinding day to day loss of Tom for months now, I don't have nearly as much in person presence to mourn except intermittently and I realized today quite painfully that this is one of them.  The next one will be Christmas, which was the last time I saw him alive.  My mother will be here for that.

I have been so concerned for my mother's well-being, I have not paid enough attention to my own loss but today pushed me over the edge.  Because my mother made it clear she was OK with me staying home in NYC over Thanksgiving rather than coming up to Maine because I was so fucking exhausted, I have done so and was given what I now as a gift of a cold to slow me down long enough to know how excruciating this loss is.

My good friend Julie suggested I come up with some phrase that was more adequate than stepfather to describe my relationship to Tom and I am stumped, not because I don't get what she means - stepfather sounds so distant and he was anything but.  This suggestion is what started my crying today and  feeling my own pain - to paraphrase John Lennon.

I'm having a hard time typing because I'm crying while I'm writing.  I know this is a good thing because it means I finally feel safe enough to feel this, that I'm letting go of the sense of shock and emergency that I entered when he died because of concerns over my mother and also probably just because it sucks to feel this much pain.

I may have written this here already and if I have apologies but Tom really got me, he understood me in a whole and real and unsentimental way that only someone who really loves you can understand you.  For me to receive this kind of loving attention from a male person (not in a creepy way - I hasten to add in case that's not crystal clear) was a first.  I'm not sure if I've found its like in the world, the only person that comes to mind was my drama teacher in high-school Terry Ortwein, also deceased prematurely, from Parkinson's.  So it is a profound loss of someone who is quite literally irreplaceable in my life.

I know many of you who read this will have experienced this kind of loss in your life and if there is a gift here, it is that: to know another's suffering, to be able to sympathize as well as empathize with another's loss.

My friend Julie passed on this Rilke quotation she heard on the radio show On Being.  I read it at Tom's internment:

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deeper connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

I believe this is true.  But it does wound us first.  The gift only comes after that.

Yes, but today - after crying Round 1 this afternoon, I sat and watched the twilight turn into the gloaming over the inlet at the tip of Inwood.  I saw gulls and geese and loons and herons turn colors from white to grey to silhouette - and the train and the moon and the radio of the young couple who sat on a bench near me, sipping coffee from the cafe.  Taking it all in.  One of the last blog posts Tom commented on involved me staring out at this beautiful little bit of the world, sun gleaming then, wind brushing the light into whirlpools of diamonds.  I noticed this at the same time as bemoaning the racism across the bridge that had killed a young man who was friends with a student of mine.  It's all here.  It's all real.  This is it.  This is us. It is all of it.  Cherry picking or gloom mongering is distortion.  My shadow side these days is the light.  I am just now beginning to see glimmers of my shadow.