Love is a Story we Never Tire of Telling…

I read those words on an early morning walk on the first day of March—a walk free of wind and full of intention, as I set off to bring myself back to the land and into my heart. The weather was decidedly spring-like, and I walked my usual neighborhood-to-open-space route, feeling the shift from the sad, sour mood of the night before as I hit the desert ground. As I look skyward, I’m thinking about all the planetary alignments taking place and how I’m invited to realign right alongside. It’s a good walk as I goalset and storyplot, knowing a new chapter of my life is unfolding.

Toward the end, I opened my email on my phone and found Pádraig Ó Tuama’s weekly missive—always an inspiration, his thoughts and a poem to boot—and as I skimmed (I am still walking after all), these words jumped off my little screen into my soul. A perfect reminder as I think about what is ahead this month: Love is a story we never tire of telling. Yes. Don’t you love a sentence that carries so much?

Love is a story we never tire of telling. Whether we know it or not, we are telling the story of love every day in so many ways—showing up for ourselves, our friends and family, and caring for colleagues, our community, and neighbors we know and don’t know. We tell the story of love in our actions and as we protest, pray, or participate; we tell it all the time.

But what really hit me reading those words was another meaning: the idea that Love is the story we never tire of telling. For me, March contains stories I’ve told so many times before—of disease, of awareness and action, of grief and acceptance, of life, and of death. March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, and also the month Brian died, nine years ago.

For years, I have come into this month with body memory first, usually around late January or early February. Why am I sad? Oh, yes, the beginning of the end was right about now. Then March begins, and the stories I tell have a container and a reason for being repeated. The stories of colorectal cancer increasing in young people, of Brian’s late-stage diagnosis, of the impossible thought of what might have happened had he had a colonoscopy (he was 48 when he was diagnosed, not yet screening age). Again and again, I’ll share the stories and encourage colonoscopies. Love is a story we never tire of telling.

I’ll never tire of telling the story of Brian facing his diagnosis and death with so much strength and maybe a tad too much stoicism, but inspiring nonetheless, and heartbreaking. Because his life was a story of love: the way he loved every moment and laughed at most of them; the way he showed up for his family, his many jobs, his wonderful friends, for me, and for the three amazing humans he helped bring into the world and loved beyond reason. And he deserved more. But he lived a life full of love, culminating with an enormous final act—on the heels of being told he had liver failure, he shared how grateful he was for the time he was given; he wouldn’t have changed a thing. I don’t know how he did it. I tell this story a lot, but I tell it to myself more than anyone else. It’s been a driving force of my own journey of acceptance. I am blessed with the life I’ve lived so far, and I’m grateful for all that comes my way, good or bad, because how could I not be? Brian was a great teacher.

But this year, the stories are taking a different shape. I felt it earlier—the familiar triggers, yes, but with a glow after the grief, anticipating new beginnings. This month, a new story joined the fray: a wonderful continuation of Brian made an appearance with the birth of our first grandchild. To be sure, Elijah is the continuation of many stories, many lives, many loves—my daughter Sarah and her husband Sam, of course, and just think of all the individuals stretching as far back as we can imagine who had to find each other for this baby to be. And that Elijah (historically a prophet and a miracle worker) chose March to arrive, and not his February due date, emphasizes his story in my life as a luminous lineage of Brian’s.

I couldn’t be more grateful, more happy, or more excited about all the new stories that will unfold thanks to little Elijah, and I know Brian shares in all of them.

It is two weeks since I started to write this post, knowing what March would bring—familiar stories of gratitude and grief and new stories of babies and beginnings, all stories of so much love—and you can bet I’ll never tire of telling any of them.

Baby Elijah and Grammie GG

*This line comes from a bittersweet poem, “Dukka” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, a poem of all the ways we love while enduring war. Please find her work featured in a beautiful episode of Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound on On Being.

You Won’t Dig My Grave

I am no weeping willow

I am no fragile flower

To be taken by the frost or by the lateness of the hour.

I have lived in consternation of the road ahead for me

And despite that I can’t see that far, there are things that I can see . . .

A new song by acclaimed singer-songwriter Josh Ritter was released just a week ago, aligning synchronistically with a heartbreaker of a breakup and offering up what I know to be true at just the right moment of strength-defining clarity. That moment I’ve known before, when you pull out of the sadness and despair and face your life, sigh a deep sigh, and realize you are here to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, learn from the experience, and begin again.

You won’t dig my grave, you won’t dig my grave, I have lived among the angels, you never were that brave. You won’t dig my grave, you won’t dig my grave, I have been up to the mountain, there are things you can’t take.

To be clear, I am not speaking (via Josh) to my very sweet ex-lover, but rather to the situation, to the relentless tests of my strength and thorns to my heart. Realizing, though, that I’ve experienced incredible highs and the lowest of the lows in my now 55 years, a little piercing ain’t going to do too much.

I listened to the song on repeat as I walked the worn path around my neighborhood to the open space, finding the little desert blooms thirsty only for the sun, and reminding myself of all the little blessings and the abundance of love that surrounds, regardless of anything I do to invite or deserve it, and that yes, this won’t do me in, I’m all good with this slight step back to move forward.

I’ve not kept up writing as I intended when I started this blog last year. Aforementioned romance took up a lot of time, and miles to get to and fro, so moving the thoughts into my hands and onto a screen went by the wayside. However, the thoughts were a thinking while on the road, and ultimately helped me accept the things I don’t know and trust the things I do. Like, “good enough” love just won’t cut it for a heart that knows no bounds. Step in fully with me, or don’t step in at all.

In a week or so, I’ll be back home for a whole three years. In all honesty, it hasn’t been the fairy tale you and I imagined. I feel like I am just starting to gather again after a great unraveling that uprooted me from Michigan and all my loves to my great New Mexico land that I approached with such faith, believing the ground and sky would quickly heal my broken ways. What it offered was more real and ongoing than a happy-ever-after. My heart home has given me an open, comforting, trusting container to do the work, dissolve a bit more, wonder what it is I’m so desperately longing for, and find the ways to balance the searching with the living.

You’ve never been loved the way I have; you wouldn’t understand.

By Brian, yes, the universe, you people and this land even more. Sidestepping the shallow grave, I begin again.

I forgive you. For growing a capacity to love that is great, but matched only, perhaps, by your loneliness.

Of all the comforting words directed my way as a young widow, the well-meaning “you had true love, some don’t experience that at all” never helped me. What I heard, I’m sure not intended, was that I was selfish to want deep love again, that what Brian and I had was profound, and experiencing that kind of love even once is plenty for a lifetime. Yes, we had a great love, we were soul mates. What we experienced together wasn’t just a trusting love that sustained us through better and worse, sickness and health, but a shared and exponential ability to feel new depths and versions of love. A love that evolved through the mundanity and intensity of our life with kids, pets, and across three different states. Why wouldn’t I want that again?

The capacity to love didn’t die along with Brian nor is it reserved just for him. I have a big heart that, from time to time when I am consumed by grief, snugly holds Brian’s memory as it swells to every edge. The sadness I feel is the experience of love that no longer has a place to go. Then miraculously my heart keeps its shape when the grief subsides. His memory settles in a comfortable corner (not too far away) and my heart fills with the lightness of love. Sometimes romantic love, more often an agapic love activated by me, my friends, nature, family, humanity, and a warm, universal energy that connects us all. This kind of love lifts and carries me through. Until the pangs of loneliness show up and seek center stage, momentarily obscuring all else, reminiscent of grief, but characterized by a desire for love that also has no place to go. 

“Phase One,” beautifully written by Dilruba Ahmed, and the third poem in Poetry Unbound, offers a litany of faults and a generous refrain of forgiveness. Reading it reminded me of how hard I am on my heart. I urge it to lighten up and not expect too much, blame it for falling too fast, grieving too long, and feeling too much. The title of this post is a stanza in the poem, toward the end, as the list of faults grows and the real culprits are finally named: love and loneliness. When I first read it, I focused on the loneliness, attention-hog that it is, glossing over the embedded compliment. I read it once more and reflect on the positive quality of capacity. And I realize that my capacity to feel the strength, nuance, range, distinctness, and intertangling of emotions, all rooted and related to love, is enormous. I can feel the mass of these emotions, the weight of grief, the gravitational pull of loneliness, and the lightness of love. What a gift. I don’t forgive my capacity—on the contrary—I embrace it, love it, and hope it continues to grow as long as I’m alive.

Let me be ok.

How often did I utter this simple plea after I moved back home to New Mexico? Please, let me be okay. It would start desperate, while sobbing, feeling incredibly alone, and not at all sure that I could do the big things, like move across the country with a U-haul full of stuff to a home I hadn’t seen before, to a place I hadn’t lived, without a job and not much of a plan. It felt too hard, too much, too scary, and to top it off I brought an innocent bystander, my youngest child (and her cat) with me, who does that? (People. people do.)

Then my request would be softer, while meditating, after the cathartic sob, looking at my surroundings, thinking of the luck I’ve had, and feeling an ounce of optimism creep in. But the tiny verb in my prayer was worth consideration. Let. Finding this one permission-seeking word in Kei Miller’s* inquiring poem Book of Genesis (itself being the preeminent story of Let) spurred on all this thought of my wordplay creating reality, eventually shifting my perspective from a prayerful “let me be okay” to a calmer “I am okay” despite whatever drug me down. At times I would recall the more practical phrase 'suck it up, buttercup' that Brian was quite fond of. He often directed it at our kids (poor souls), but it helped further shift my perspective. I could hear his sharp advice and knew to be okay, one had to accept the current situation and actually BE.

But was it him I was asking to begin with? Who do we turn to when we are at our lowest? When we are feeling doubt, uncertainty, or fear. I’ve never had a direct communion with God, rather I feel a connection to a spiritual Universe—to the collective energy of all living things** and all who have died, the stars above us, the ground below, all of it of us. But when I need more than stardust, I can recognize a singular consciousness—in the form of a nameless, loving energy, or yes, Brian’s personality and voice, or even, occasionally, my dad, now 26 years gone. At these times of utter aloneness, what mattered wasn’t who as much as what. I need to be reassured by a spiritual other moving me from “let me” to “I am,” someone to confidently say, “You are okay.”

So I would hear those words, from someone come and gone, a Higher Power, or my highest self. You are ok. Really. You are. Like the singular flowers that go it alone, so many of them I’d see on my walks, coming through sidewalks, or in a patch of grass. With a little more strength, I could move to the next day, the next moment, the next experience—which I would simply let. be.

——

*This was the second poem in Poetry Unbound. Simple and profound. Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet who teaches Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and often explores themes of identity, language, and place. Were all these poets hand-selected for me? I think so.

**I am not alone, roughly 3 in 4 people believe in a higher power, be it a God, gods, or some other divine source or universal energy. You can learn more in this 2023 Fetzer Institute-funded spirituality research study and report I co-authored, with a particular focus on how beliefs and practices changed during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

A woman. By a river. Indestructible.

I haven’t been by the river in well over a year, the Chama River, where my late husband's ashes flow and where we spent so much time as a young couple. But I think of it often. I like to think Brian’s ashes are still there, flowing and clinging, though it has been over seven years since the kids and I threw most of his ashes into this wild river. The water itself isn’t much to look at, muddy from erosion, surpassed in beauty by the curves of its container and the multi-colored cliffs and mountains that rise and hold the land in northern New Mexico, just a mile west of Ghost Ranch, aka Georgia O-Keefe territory. Yet, it is remarkable water.

The last time I went to the Chama, on what would have been Brian’s 58th birthday, I lay as close as possible to the edge, finding a flat outcropping of rocks to stretch out on my back. I closed my eyes to focus on the sound of the water, made louder by its volume and urgency. Opening my eyes, I rolled over and watched the water closest to me, where it pooled up, resting in little protective spaces along the edge, then into the current once again. It reminded me of new skaters on the edge of a roller rink, holding on to the edge for dear life (Life), then, taking a deep breath, letting go, stumbling a bit but moving on, just like the water catches a stick or two, some stacked rocks, a little mud, then flows on to join the current.

As I read the first poem in Poetry Unbound*—Wonder Woman by Ada Limón—I parse this line: A woman. By a river. Indestructible. While the author** describes surviving life with chronic pain, I think of resilience borne of grief and fast-moving currents that take us without consent. Sometimes we let go willingly, not knowing how we will get through, but trusting we will. I think of myself, in my memory, so many times, by a river. I think of figurative currents in my life that carried me back to New Mexico. So I could witness the real rivers that keep moving, the mountains that give perspective, and the sky that is always huge, always hopeful. And heal. 

I’ve come to know that healing never ends, it ebbs and flows, shape-shifts, changing what we need and what we see along the way. Often, we are unaware of the forces that propel us forward, just that we’ve somehow moved through. At other times, we know exactly what we need or what is helping us along. Coming home to New Mexico would do wonders for my hurting soul, I knew that. And lying by the river in meditation would remind me of my resilience. A woman. By a river. Indestructible. My transforming in place has taken many turns and is often opaque, just like my beloved Rio Chama, but it keeps happening as I keep going, resting when needed, forever connected to the river’s flow.

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*I have one or two copies of Poetry Unbound I’d love to gift. I was so taken by it and how it helped me that I rushed and bought a dozen copies, doling them out like Bibles whenever someone expressed a slight interest. Send me a comment and let me know if you would like a copy.

**Ada Limón is the current U.S. Poet Laureate, the first Latina to hold the position, and the first to be renewed for a second term. I also discovered that her goal is “to use poetry to draw attention to the natural world, and to promote the idea that poetry can help people connect with their emotions and heal.” 🤍