I’m not sure of anything

I do know that I love many believers and I pulse with gratitude that wants a locus and I wonder about the wonders I see around me and feel inside me. But I’m not sure of anything.

-Kelly Corrigan, Tell Me More

Unrecognizable

I was thinking recently of the ways that my life – our lives – look different than they did a year ago.  When I look at this list, the fact that I feel vaguely dizzy makes more sense to me.

Last year, two children played hockey and I was at the rink in Cambridge approximately eight hours a week.
This year, both children play squash.

Last year, two children lived at home.
This year, one child goes to boarding school.

Last year, we had four parents between us and our children had four grandparents.
This year, we have each lost our fathers, and our children have two grandmothers.

Last year, the children were at the same school they’d been at since they were both 4 years old.
This year, they’re both at new schools (see above for Grace boarding)

Last year, Matt and I were both in jobs we’d been in for a while.
This year, we are both in new jobs, his since January 2017 and mine at a company I helped found in April 2017.

Last year, and every year before that, time flew by.
This year, everything is moving at a glacial pace (and yet feels like a blur at the same time).

I’ve written before about the James Taylor line about change: “Once again a time of change … oh the change makes music.”  Last spring, I couldn’t stop hearing those words, and the change I focused on was Grace’s imminent departure for school.  That was a big transition at the time, though of course I was unaware of the enormous earthquakes that lay ahead.  On Thanksgiving I posted a photo and talked about how much was different, without knowing how much more different life would get only three days later. And then my father died, and we careened into the holidays.  Life went dark and blurry, Mum got her hip replaced, it was Christmas, and then New Year’s, and now we are into February.

It is clear that last fall represented an enormous, irrevocable rupture in the fabric of our lives.  We will never recover from the losses of our fathers, and the fact that they happened so closely together still feels surreal.  But it’s also interesting for me to remember that even before September it had already been a year of huge transition.

Being gentle with myself is not a strength, but when I list these changes I am reminded that I have to learn how to do that.  This is a moment of massive upheaval, and while many of the changes that have happened are good, they can be difficult nonetheless.

So, here I am, still trying to hear the music that the change makes.

Time

I have bemoaned time’s swift passage my whole life.  I’m a broken record, actually: I write, I talk, and I think endlessly about this.  Tempus fugit was almost the name of this blog.

And, suddenly, in the last couple of months, that has changed radically.  Now time’s crawling.  It’s been two months since my father died, but it feels like two years.  Thanksgiving, when he stood at the head of one of two tables and carved one of two turkeys, feels like even more years ago.

It’s a strange, contradictory thing: the actual days, as they pass, aren’t really any slower.  Nor are they jammed full of anything special.  Oh, yes, that first week after Dad died is a total blur, and I’m simultaneously aware that it was one of the most sacred and also the most strange weeks of my life.  And a lot has happened, since last fall – Grace went away to boarding school, my father-in-law died, my father died, my mother had her hip replaced, other dear friends and family members died.  We had special visits with our cousins on both sides, experiences inflected with both sorrow and celebration.

But everything feels so slow right now.  Full and blurry at the same time.  I’m sure this is a manifestation of grief (along with my irritability I hope).  But it’s remarkably different from how I normally experience life, which is both vivid and at high speed.

Sometimes, though, time slips in a dramatic, disorienting way.  On Saturday, Mum and I went to a family funeral (her beloved cousin, who was really her father’s younger first cousin, and to whom she’s always been closer than that familial tie would suggest; he also spent a lot of time in Marion, so was a part of my parents’ and our lives).  She stood up and read Crossing the Bar, the Tennyson poem that was read at my father’s funeral.  In that moment, as I watched her read, I felt dizzy, overcome with memory.  I felt like I was back in the church where we celebrated my father’s life, and, maybe even more, I was on the back porch with him as he quoted the poem from memory in post-dinner candlelight. In that moment, as I watched Mum read (beautifully, though I could tell she was emotional) time flew again, ad I thought of this post, and wondered if it was true.

It is, though.  Mostly, everything feels like it is moving incredibly slowly.  I’m struck by how far away life last fall feels.  I suppose it’s that, more than slowness, actually, that I’m keenly aware of.  And maybe that makes sense; the dual deaths of Matt’s father and my father cleaved our lives into a before and after.

The only way I know forward is to do just that: to move forward.  To let myself marvel at the tricks time plays on me, at how long ago it feels that Dad was here while he simultaneously sometimes feels so vividly present.  I think, several times a day, of the email my father sent to Grace after her other grandfather died, in which he asserted that “the only thing to do is to face forward and grab the future with both hands, even if it hurts.”  Indeed. I’m trying.

I do have moments of noticing – often captured these days on Instagram. Life is no less beautiful; what’s different is the lens through which the world.  I trust that things will return to normal, but I also know it will take a while.  Until then, I’m going to let myself move ploddingly through my days, observe what startling joys I can see (alongside the numerous, and inevitable, moments of stunning sorrow). Dad believed in the value of new experiences, of that I’m certain.  I don’t know that he’d thought through this last, and most definitive new experience he would offer me, a literal change in how I move through the world. But it’s undeniable, this impact, and I’m trying to get used to it.