On marriage

Today is the anniversary of my marriage to my husband. Some people call their spouses "the love of their life" and they are not wrong, but for me the words seem too much of the realm of fairy tale to ring true.
Marriage in its new stages is a promise to love through, and despite the storms, which may ravage the life of one or the lives of both partners. It is a promise to hold onto each other no matter what lies ahead.
Marriage which has weathered the years is a distilled love. One which may lack the full headiness of young love, but is more powerful. It is a knowing love. Shared trials, losses, worries, arguments are tempered with renewed promise, forgiveness, understanding, strength, and gentleness. There is a complexity to an old marriage which makes it all the sweeter for the entwining of two minds and hearts which have grown together like the trunks of two birches planted together: each supporting and leaning lending their parts to a greater whole.

So my husband, Matthew, is so much more than "the love of my life". I free him also from the shackles of that term.

He is the extension of my thoughts as I am his. His knowledge is mine and mine is his. His triumphs are better than my own, mine are partly his for he gives me what I need, as he is able. His failures shadow me as much as they do him; mine creep or roar into his light. Though we do not always get it right, together we shelter each other.

We each remain distinct, two beings in one marriage. Before we married his bachelor self viewed marriage as  "a slippery slope" into what he was not certain, but it was to be avoided if possible. He can no longer remember what ominous idea lurked at the bottom of this slope. The landscape of marriage has slopes and hills, plateaus, rivers, oceans, mountains, frozen ponds, bog, desert, and gardens lush. I would not trade a single one for a wealth of unbroken sky unending. If one looks up, the sky is always visible from any vista.

I have many loves in my life. I did not divest myself of parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends when I married him. They remain loves of my life, many of them from my earliest memories. Romantic love is deepest deep, but not for me exclusive tenant of my heart. When our two daughters were born, my heart and his grew to an unforeseen dimension, measureless, ever expanding. They are different loves for each us and certainly loves of our lives. Our new grandson, Remi, is a love of our lives as we are shown, again, the infinite capacity a heart has to love.

When we married, we each gained new family and friends whom we have come to love for and with each other. They are all loves of both of us. When we welcomed our son-in-law, Mikhail, into our family we gained another love of our lives.

The idea that one person, no matter how wonderful, talented and loving, can be everything to another person seems impossible to me. I  know I cannot be everything for my husband. He needs his friends, his family and his own pursuits to enrich him in ways I cannot. I would not so limit him.  So it is with him and I. Long marriage has cured me of expecting him to be what he cannot be for me. To wish it other diminishes the freedom and quality of love. To wish it other denies me the pleasure of the other loves of my life, and seeing him prosper in his.

The word "friend"  derives from Old English  freond meaning "the loving one".  He is my best friend in this sense, but even here I rankle at the ranking of love. The loves in my heart are circular, not vertically arranged. He is my husband, I his wife. What that means is beyond expressing, as every attempt to do show falls short of what it is.
 Happy anniversary to you Matthew. I am grateful for what we have shared. I am grateful we are together to look forward to the days ahead. I thank God for you and for giving us the courage, strength and joy to continue to work on our marriage.

Grief revealed

If we have lived long enough to live and to lose someone we have loved we are on intimate terms with grief. We say this and it is true, but "intimate terms" sounds almost too friendly as a way to describe it. It is too familiar for so many people and yet, even under old scars, the grief finds ways to be fresh. It keeps its strangeness, its power of shock, like a tidal wave coming in amongst the slapping waves which only hint at power and content themselves with the rubbing of stones in a hypnotic repetition of watery breaths. We know grief is always possible. We acknowledge its potential while putting it to one side in our thoughts, unless we have had too many shocks or have been born, like a shell-less  crab skittering in vulnerability, in which case the potential of grief is as palpable as an ever present shadow of looming rock.

Grief and the ocean seem to be immense, powerful,and relentless. They differ in that grief sends its intimate waves of loss and longing on our personal shores in unexpected chills to dull a sunny day more often. The ocean is a great smiter of life, but it can rock in its lullaby of hiss and seaweed a long time before it is stirred to turn its wave fingers into fists. Grief is a regular contributor to our loom of emotions. Sometimes you see it coming and sometimes it swamps you and sends you sputtering : an earthquake of cold fire coursing, almost drowning the soul. 

There is much imagery of grief and the ocean. In 5th grade we studied a poem by Shakespeare extracted from The Tempest. I have never forgotten the haunted way the poem made me feel. 

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

                                             Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

In the same play Prospero eschewing his magic, in a gesture symbolizing Shakespeare's closing of his talent,says he will drown his book after burying his staff  "certain fathoms in the earth,. And deeper than did ever plummet sound." This is the quieter grief of aging and losing power and  remembering more than is yet to come.Even Macbeth waist deep in blood waxes poetical about the ocean saying, "Will all the water in the ocean wash this blood from my hands? No, instead my hands will stain the seas scarlet, turning the green waters red." There is a grieving for lost innocence simultaneous with his awareness that there is no undoing what he has done. Even the ocean in its immensity is unable to quench his guilt. Only those who are strong in the flush of youth, as Romeo and Juliet in whom blood runs quickly like rivers of red, are able to say “My bounty is as boundless as the sea, /My love as deep; the more I give to thee,/The more I have, for both are infinite.” For those who are not yet marked by grief's intimacy,  the infinite nature of the ocean's power is a kindred spirit in passion. Only those who are unbowed by the buffets of persevering grief like and confident in their power can say like Julius Caesar "There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures." Ironically, the grief of  betrayal, then death,  at the hands of a friend is soon to encompass him. 

Grief is strict, but it is an able teacher, a skilled pursuer. If we like Odysseus sometimes stop our ears to its sad dirge and haunting longing,  we can learn much from it. We can learn about love, about courage, about strength, about patience, about hope, about the power of despair and about resilience. We can learn about gratitude and kindness and choosing wisely how we spend spend time and how we treat others and ourselves. 

This past weekend I attended a beautiful celebration of love at a wedding of a young woman who grew up with my daughters. When they were all small her grandfather said they were like garden fairies by the pond and tall grasses and trees. Now he has rejoined the universe and his ancestors and we come again to loss and grief like dappled shade amongst the fairy beams of light. 

As I was walking back to the hotel having gone to buy diapers for my little grandson, I passed a funeral home where the hearses and somber cars were preparing for a final journey for someone. In just 15 steps I came to a road under repair with its cones like summer wasps warning of striations in pavement and of being stung by the front loader's  shovel mandible. I thought of new life, new marriage, busyness, change and the requiem of funerals and thought about how the whole of life's experiences can pass in a mundane minute like a drop of water reflecting the greater world. 

For every happiness, there is a grief in store. For every grief there are infinite layers of feeling packed like Matryoshka dolls. For each grief there is also hope and memory and love. While we live, we breathe the air of warmth and frost. We breathe. We live and, if we live, we are granted love or we else we are shells of air only. For the gifts of love, of shared experience and hope I am thankful, for I know loss, pain and despair cannot eclipse them.

 Simon and Garfunkel sang "Hello darkness my old friend" and The Proclaimers sang " I can't believe I ever doubted you: my old friend the blues." J.R.R. Tolkien wrote : “I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.” There is a loving in grief and a grieving in love just as there is a night for day and a spring in the winter and a winter in the spring. I look for the light in the darkness even if the illumination is feeble. It is always there in its subtle, gentle hope. 

Beginnings, endings and in between

The biggest beginning I am part of is in welcoming my grandson Remi to our lives. Though he is still just two weeks old he has already worked his way into our hearts. When I see him or hold him the feeling of love, pride and protection I have is indescribable. I have felt it twice before in this intensity with the birth of each of my daughters. My mother said upon holding her first grandchild, my daughter Samantha, that it was the same as holding your own baby. My grandbaby is a child of my heart and in his veins through my daughter flows the blood of all my ancestors, my husband's ancestors and Remi's father's ancestors. I am grateful to be so blessed with the beginning of my life as a grandmother. I look forward to the wonder of being part of his infancy and childhood and to seeing the person he will become and celebrating his successes and his wonder. He is, like all babies, a beautiful mystery to be revealed little by little. So I must thank my daughter, Samantha, and my son-in-law, Mikhail, for bringing him into this world.

Where will these feet bring him in life? 

In his mother's arms so loved.

   This, too, is the beginning of my summer holidays. I am so tired and so grateful to be on a break. There are many students I have said good-bye to-some for the summer-some maybe forever. Beginnings and endings.

As I grow older and I know more and much less. I see that there is much more of the in between in life. Beginnings and endings are not as clear cut as they once seemed. Love can be never-ending. That is when it lifts us, and holds us, maddens us, incites us, strengthens us, excites us, inspires us and ever grows and changes with the core holding us firmly anchored one to the other beyond distance earthly, in time or dimension. Love can almost end when givers grow unkind with a pain like losing limbs. At the time you do not know if you will withstand it, but you do. It leaves a scar like a knot that was once a branch of a tree. There is strength in a knothole and a beauty in its poignant ghost of a limb. At 53 I am still discovering who I am, still learning and ,hopefully, still seeing, listening, tasting, touching and feeling with the same wonder of a child. When I get overwhelmed by the suffering, the violence, the poverty, the intolerance, the injustice in the world I look for the beauty wherever it is. That takes renewed practice each day. That takes a lot of effort and determination some days. I will be old the day I stop looking and seeing and learning.   I never want to get old in the heart and mind.

Family: we're in this together whatever comes our way.

Hamlet says of his uncle Claudius, who is also his step-father: "a little more than kin, but less than kind". Family is always kin and there is always love, no matter its manifestation exuberant or shadowed, but the kind part is dependent on so many things.
Lets start with the good, the immutable.

• Love. It's not all happy ever after, not for parents and children, nor for spouses, nor aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews nor cousins, whether full or removed once, twice or wished-for removed. In-law love may take root, or not, but at the very least it seasons the other loves in our lives. Love is pervasive. Its roots go deep into our souls. The droughts, fires, freezing, earthquakes, floods of life may alter them, but they persist on deeply, seeking sustenance, nourishing us with green plenitude or spindly sourness, but nourish it does just the same. It cannot be beaten by any force. Not even death, the ultimate divider, can hold it off bleed us as death will. Love is forever. 
  

• We are never alone. We may have family members whose pain and suffering isolate them from others or we may do this ourselves in an attempt to scar over the pain of loss, grief, guilt, shame, disappointment or deep-worry; we can never isolate ourselves from the roots of love, both earthly and divine. Our family runs in our veins, warm sap passed on generation to generation by our ancestors whose unseen presence and unheard prayers whisper comfort, strength, tears and hope to us, unobserved, but powerful. No dam lasts forever because water, like love, will erode any barrier over time. So it is with the love of family. 

• We have a shared history. There is joy and comfort in knowing the stories, the jokes, the trials, the triumphs, the challenges, the losses, the people without having to explain everything. When you are away and come back you just pick up where you left off with them. In the meantime every phone call, every card, every letter, every picture means more. 

• We have each some of our loved ones in us. We share the memories. Where one person forgets, another remembers, so as much as possible is preserved and so we collectively make a mosaic picture as a family. We get know those who have gone before us who we have never met. We get to hold onto more of those we have lost. We get to see them in a glance, a laugh, a tip of the head, a saunter in a walk, a nervous tick, a singing voice, a speaking voice, a way of moving and many little things we never notice until they resurface ephemerally in a family member like soap bubbles on the wind. 

• We belong. We may be the life of the party, the funny one, the musical one, the storyteller, the great baker, the misfit, the black sheep, the embarrassing one, the peace-maker, the hard-worker, the quiet one, the chatter box, the hunter, the sewer, the keeper of the pictures, the keeper of knowledge, the confidante, the walker of hills, the gardener, the hewer of wood, the builder, the traveler, the teacher, the elder, the youthful, the wise one, the giving one, the needy one,  the joyful, the depressed, the hurting, the innocent, the faithful, the lost or the found but we all belong . We have membership by birth and it cannot be revoked, though we can choose to never revisit it in person it lives in our dreams. 

  
  

  We are dancers, and dreamers, tad pole explorers and hand holders
  

  
  

  There is, too,  the not so good. It comes as a package deal. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you want and what part you want to eschew. 

  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Our genes are ours at the moment of conception. Learning problems, clumsiness, mental illness, a time bomb of cancer, of Alzheimers, of Parkinson's disease, of M. S., of heart disease, of diabetes  and many more, a propensity to obesity, to addictions, a mutated gene, a congenital defect any of these may be destined to be ours in the lottery of family genes along with all the desirable ones. There's no betting on it, no bargaining, no cheating, no trading. 

  
  

  
  

•  We parent the way we were parented for the most part. We may be lucky to have been passed a chain of careful nurturing and kind instruction from parent to child to parent to child. Many of us are passed a chain of abuse, poverty, neglect, uncertainty, doubt like wind and storm that may twist our limbs, snap them off or even destroy us. Many of us are passed some of each. The love showing like sunshine, mildness and warmth  and mental illness, addictions, hopelessness, abuse so many storm clouds bringing hurricane winds, ice pellets, driving snow like teeth, rain torrents like vertical drowning. Whether you grow straight, you grow crooked, or you are stunted depends on family. 

We may carry burdens together, hold hands, struggle to catch up, tame bears, or carry someone on our backs, but together we thrive.

• Familiarity may breed jealousy where the clear glass of our child hearts has been smudged, cracked, chipped or even broken. Where positive attention has been lacking, where potential has been neglected, where confidence has been eroded, where self-doubt has taken root in the arid, stony soil of neglect and violence, there jealousy and resentment and a sourness of view may thrive where there should be joy in the accomplishments of our blood loves, our loved ones. 

There is, however, always love. The universal truth is love and hope and belief and education are the gates that can lead us there to an unshadowed love. 

“You did not invent these family habits. Your family is like mine, for thousands and thousands of years our families have embraced a dysfunctional lifestyle, passing these habits as gospel on to subsequent generations. This was not done out of malice, spite, or hate, but what they knew best. As ineffective as these habits are, you never stopped to consider another way of loving.” 
― David W. Earle

One in five people in Canada suffers from mental illness. Explore this further if you wish. That means so many families are affected by this. I have always lived with this in my family. It has made me who I am and I would not trade away any of the challenges I have known, because I would not be so strong as I am, nor so able to appreciate life so much, nor so able to see how much light there is amid the darkness, to feel empathy so deeply, nor hope so strongly. That seems to me I got the best amidst some sad, painful experiences because love will find a way through as it did in my family. I have to agree with Rumi: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  

So we see that the good and the not so good about families is part of the same whole. We're in it together. Together we can triumph, grow stronger and every generation better our children's lives more, nurture more, celebrate all of life more. We must tell our family stories, the dark  as well as the light, so that we learn to lift our children above the past to new heights, without ever forgetting it or letting them forget. To forget is to weaken the appreciation of the gifts we have, to forget the love and the sacrifices of those who have gone before and to forget to be thankful and humble and aware and realize that we stand in the love of our families and on the shoulders of those who have gone before be they bent or strong. If we forget to remember how empty the gifts we have and will pass on. 

You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.-Frederick Buechner