painting with needle and thread

the photos are shots of some of my latest squares i've worked on through the long Memorial weekend.  i still need to add the fabric to the sides to sew them together then add them to my quilt.

i'm having days.  not horrible.  not good.  sort of halfway between tragic and numb.  i'm sewing on the commissions and in talking to the ones who've trusted me with the clothes of their deceased spouses, i feel humble.  i start early and work until late.  my insomnia seems endless and i've heard, read, and been told that sleep becomes so rare as to be on the endangered list.  but the last few days, just over Memorial Day weekend, and now through this week, i've found that i'm exhausted along about 11 AM.  by then i've been up for 5 or 6 hours and i have to lie down.  and that's when i dream, the only time i dream.

my dreams are always of him.  i don't tell myself to dream of him, it isn't a "fragment of an underdone potato," it is my heart, i guess, trying to weave an ephemeral net of wishes and memories for me to find a moment's peace.  i find i don't want to wake up but, i have to face the rest of my day, the remainder of my life.

so i go back to sewing.  5 quilts ordered.  it's a good feeling that i deeply appreciate.  it means rent and food.  but at night when i knock off, i move into working on my own quilt.  i hold the piece of his clothing i want to work with next and i sketch lightly in white pencil what i want.  and then i paint it in with my needle, up and down, through the denim again and again, over and over carrying the colored floss to give life and depth to what's in my heart.  i work until my hands ache, until my fingers hurt and cramp.  by the time i set my own husband quilt aside, i've been sewing for 12 to 15 hours.

i can't stop this punishment of myself.  i look for more and more work.  tuesday i built a cactus garden for an elderly woman, weeded her garden areas, and started on a stone wall.  stone after stone set into place.  it was a back breaking day and she was not home.  she had left a couple of water bottles out for me.  it rained on me for about an hour and i felt like it was a mixed blessing.  i was so hot and it felt good, but it also felt so lonely working so hard alone.  i got it all done though, except for finishing the wall.  that is a work in progress.

at one point, i sat down on the walkway and cried.  i cried for my husband.  i cried should he ever find out how hard i was working.  i cried for the pittance i was being paid but she is an elderly widow on a fixed income, and i know how that is.  my own income is fixed on what i can scratch out of the dirt.  literally that day.  my husband's benefits haven't kicked in.  "it takes time."

if he were here, he'd rub my wrenched shoulders and my aching feet.  he'd brush my hair and tuck me into bed.  he'd crawl in beside me and hold me, whispering to me, and i'd fall asleep.  i'd be safe.  i'd be loved.  i wouldn't be a widow.

but that didn't happen.  i went home alone.  took my little dogs out.  they had missed me.  they panic a bit now whenever i'm gone for an extended period of time.  their master has been gone for a long time so i believe, foolishly probably, but in my exhaustion, i believe they worry about me.  i showered.  i made a grilled cheese sandwich.  and then i sewed into the night.  pushing the needle through the fabric, joining pieces of this shirt and those jeans, embroidering names and dates for other widows and widowers.

if i can't afford more oil paints, then i can comfort myself and others by painting with a needle and thread.  it's soft work.  something my husband used to like to watch me do.

i pretend he is at the other end of the sofa watching me in the soft light of the night.

for my husband on Memorial Day

http://www.history.com/video.do?name=militaryhistory&bcpid=1681730307&bclid=1830064993&bctid=22751690001

i hope you can follow this link to see the short video tribute the History Channel put together.  for my husband and for all veterans.

this is as good as it's going to get ~ grief-stricken questions of faith

My husband died.  Suddenly.  Horribly.  I will always be able to recall the image of his face at the moment when I knew there was nothing anyone could do.  I was losing him and there was nothing I, or anyone else, could do. 

So this is grief.  Intense.  Lonely.  Painful.  Horrible grief.  I’ve had time to think about this.  I’ve had no one to sit with me.  I’ve had no one to counter my wandering thoughts or give me feedback.  My poor children are 22 and 25 and they are trying to work and build lives in this frightening economy.  They are young and building relationships, looking for, waiting for their one true love.  And they are trying to help me through this. 

But what is there to get through?  Where am I trying to go?  Healing Hearts is the name of the widow(er)s group I go to and have formed an odd attachment to but we’ve already been told and admitted to ourselves that we will not heal all the way.  So what are we reaching for? 

Anwers?  There aren’t any.  The questions are even vague and fluctuate with our pain or frustration at our day-to-day lives. 

Hope?  It’s for us to define and decide on how to get attain it.  And if we’ve arrived found it or ever will.  And isn’t the idea of hope in and of itself hope?  But what do I hope for?  That he will come back?  He can’t.  It would also be an insult to God and God is the last person, entity, Supreme Being, sigh, I don’t want to insult God.  He holds my husband. 

I have wicked thoughts, nightmarish thoughts and though I tried once at the widow(er)s group to express them, I was cut off and the questions squelched quickly.  They are not for the faint of heart. 

Which brings me to my crisis of faith.  Does He have my husband’s soul?  I pray every morning and every night to the God I was raised with.  I pray to the God I saw perform one miracle in an oncology ward when I was twenty.  It wasn’t a miracle for me but I witnessed it and that was enough.  But now that my husband has died and I have sat with his still body, touched his lifeless hand and talked to deaf ears, I am stumbling in the dark.  Is he in Heaven, awake and alive, no longer hurting, no longer tired?  Does he remember me or is he protected from those memories?  Does he still love me? Does he know I still love him?  Will I, indeed, see him again?  Grief asks.  

I’m terrified that death is like going to sleep.  We know nothing.  We are in a sense gone.  Do we wait until the end of the world as some interpret scripture and then we’ll all be standing before God for judgment?  Do I have to line up and wait to see if my bad thoughts, any lies I’ve told will keep me from Heaven?  Will keep me from my husband?  What?  What happens?  How do I keep faith that everything will be okay when the only person who helped it be okay here has been taken?  How can I not when the opposite of that belief means that he has died and is nothing and I will die and will be nothing and we will never see each other again?  That would be Hell. 

Am I mad at God?  No, not really.  My husband’s body hurt from all his years as a soldier.  The medications he took for pain and for arthritis would drop a horse.  His mind was at peace because I told him over and over and over how proud and honored I was to be with him, how much I love him, and that he was most certainly a hero.  He no longer hurts.  But where is he? 

So there’s some of the questions that have been unasked out loud since the moment the nurse walked me into the room where they had put him, quiet, a sterile white sheet up across his shoulders, his face so still, and his eyes forever closed. 

I was told at the widows group that I am standing in one place, not moving forward.  Where do I move?  Where am I supposed to go?  Does it really, seriously, really get better than this right now? 

I’ve laughed since my husband’s death and I don’t feel the heavy burden of guilt for it.  If it strikes me funny, I laugh.  I cry every day.  Not always for him.  Sometimes I’ve cried because the money is so tight and I’ve been hungry.  I cry because I’m scared.  I cry because I physically hurt.  I have a broken hand that was refused medical care because I have no insurance and it has healed wrong.  I have possible bone chips floating in one knee, just south of the patella.  And I have a heel that was hit by an iron U-boat that was carrying over 125 pounds of boxes.  I am sometimes in agonizing pain.  If I had money I would go to a doctor and a dentist. 

If I had money I would buy me a small place with a fenced back yard for my two Scotties and I would paint, write, sew, take photographs, design and build my stained glass windows, and carve wood.  I would create all the visions I have in my head in all the mediums I think would bear them out the best.  My daughter calls me a renaissance artist.  I just see things alive in different ways.   Glass is fragile and geometric.  It can only be cut a certain way so the design has to be considered with this in mind.  Sewing.  It’s tactile and soft and can become alive with color.  I’ve also discovered, or rather other people have discovered my abilities with a needle and my emotions.  I make memory quilts and try to capture a life that once was for the solace of the receiver of the quilt.  Paintings?  Oils or gauche and watercolors.  I paint what I see and then I insert my altered perception of what I see.  They are considered realism but it is my realism that I give to people and they never know it.  And I write.  I have four books almost finished, a thriller, a ghost story, a politically incorrect social satire, and one horror. 

So you see?  I have interests.  I have things to do.  I’m not stagnating in a world of depression or wallowing in tears.  But I do hurt, badly.  I miss him more than I have words and on this site, I’ve written a lot of words about grief and him. 

So what do the grieving expect out of life?  I see widows in the group who talk like pros but don’t seem to be really any further along though everyone tells me they are.  It’s in their eyes.  It’s in their statements, and their questions, and in their assurances that things are “okay.”  I can hear it.  I can see it.  Body language doesn’t lie.  They all have that certain loneliness that can only be defined as the realization that the person they were committed to spending their life with has died.  Whether six years or forty-five years of marriage, the depth of the bond was the same.  Total and complete love for this person and now they are in some mysterious place that we cannot go yet.  And maybe will be just as forever gone from us as we will be to our children and family when we die and realize, there might not be any place to go. 

And that is what is tormenting me, because I want to find another miracle.  I want my faith back to where it was when my mother and then my baby died.  I want some kind of assurance that this isn’t it.  That this painful life with that one brief period of peace and happiness that I had with my husband wasn’t all I got after all the years of being beaten. 

I want to know that I will get to hold his hand and touch his crinkles beside his eyes, and feel his arms go around me and hear him whisper, “I’ll always be here for you.”

so far, not so good

just a very bad day.  i'm so depressed.  i miss him so much i hurt all over.  it's a beautiful sunny day and i notice it only in so far as a statement to the weather.  i watered my plants.  i re-potted my lavender because it's thriving whereas i'm not.

i keep fantasizing about him.  he was so handsome.  he had great legs and such a smile.  his eyes would light up.  i miss his hands.  they had so many scars on them, little white ones and one big one where he'd gotten cut defending himself during the war.  he was so strong.  he'd survived so much.  why did he have to go?  i need him.  i want him so much.

i finished the quilt top for the woman from the group and it's in the frame.  i am going to start quilting it but i think i'm going to have to take a break and do some work on my own husband quilt.  i need to feel his clothes in my hands, embroidery the words he said to me on his jeans.

100 days.  i'm not doing very well today because i want him back.

the gift

today is one hundred days that i've been without him.  it's cold without him.  i didn't want to wake up but my two dogs wanted me to.  they cling to me.  we sleep in a pile on my bed.  they've stopped looking for him though i did find Scootie Wootums taking a nap inside the closet with his nose on top of his hiking boots.

Carmen Sophia has always been my girl but Scootie adored my husband.  two guys not afraid of anything.  one hundred days without him.

but i got a gift yesterday afternoon late.  one of the women from the group called me to ask if i might make a quilt for her.  and she has a bicycle i can use so i don't have to walk everywhere.  it was a Godsend.  a gift from someone who understands the pain and the struggle to live day-to-day.  today it will be minute-to-minute.  one hundred days.  it sounds like a long time and it is, but then sixty minutes without him was long.  i don't know how i've made it this long and i don't want to think about, or face, another day let alone the reminder of my life without him.

i've finished both sides of the first quilt i've been commissioned to do.  i'll put it in the frame today to start quilting.  i'm going to Netflix my brains out and quilt.  and try like hell to get through today.

maybe i'll take a break later and walk up to Loew's to see if they have any daisies.  

100 Days of Grief

“Parting is all we know of Heaven and all we need of Hell.”  ~ Emily Dickinson 

I attend a widow(er)’s group that is facilitated by a nun who has lead these groups for years.  Sister, as well as the other widows and widowers in the group, say that keeping a journal of private thoughts will allow me to look back and see for myself the progress I am making.  I was told that this progress is all about moving forward, not staying locked in one place.   I was told that grief is not something we get over but something we live with and that it will become familiar.  I listen to the other’s speak to their busy lives with their children, or their friends whom they call to rally around them for support.  I listen to them speak about work and co-workers.  I listen to the tone of their voices tell me if they believe their words or if they only want to.  I listen for that telltale sound of pain, to gauge how far along they are with moving forward. 

Sister asks us how we’re doing, what we’re doing with our time, and what certain times of the year or things make us feel like.  Have we removed our wedding rings?  What have we done with our deceased spouses things, or plan to do?  I listen to everyone discuss their lives and fears and small victories and I only feel cold inside.   Everyone has busier lives than I do, more and better connections to others that I simply don’t have nor, at this late date, will ever attain.  I am adrift without familiar land to spy and my oars are now broken.  On Wednesday, May 20^th, they will have been broken for 100 days.

There is one woman whose husband died suddenly over two years ago.  She has come very close to befriending me, as much as she can with two very young children, and has told me to call her anytime.  I find I cannot even though I have had such panic that I have so desperately wanted to.  My hand does not move close to the phone.  I feel like an interloper.  She has a very close network of family and friends, a very busy life.  I feel horrible because she has been nothing but nice and compassionate to me.  It’s just me.  I can’t reach out.  I don’t feel good.  I don’t feel like I can.  I am so sensitive and fragile.  I cry too easily and I don’t know what to say other than “I miss him so much I can’t stand it.”

Sister told me that I am so new to my grief, still so raw, and I was thanked for being so open about it.  Then she went on to address the group by saying that we need to stay in touch with each other; that only those who have experienced grief can understand it.

I like going to the widow’s group because it is the only contact I have with another person beyond my daughter and my son.

I don’t like going to the group because I listen to myself and I hear what I’m saying, and I sound stupid.  I hear the words come out of my mouth and they aren’t what I want to say.  I can’t intelligently express myself there.  I try too hard.  Or I cry and cannot make sense.  Or I babble in my loneliness and desperation to be heard.

They are patient and they do address what I speak to, but remember, I said it wrong.  It’s not what I want to say.  It’s just something I desperately pull out of thin air to try and join.  Something to try and be a part of something I feel on the perimeter of.  These people cannot adequately speak to me if they do not know the grief I cannot speak to.  After I get the advice and counsel, they move on to other topics, other concerns, and I feel heat in my face.  I feel a humiliation that I am still not able to tell them what I’m feeling.

I’ll continue to go because it will mean that once a month, I will have someone else to talk to.  There will be people there who acknowledge that I am still here after a fashion.  I think I will work on not saying as much.  I’ll just listen and take a pass.  I think I’d rather reveal the truth of my depression by not speaking to it rather than trying to tell them and failing.  I’m not moving forward.  I’m not stagnant but I don’t feel any forward progress.  I’m depressed and as each day goes by I’m still the same depressed person.  I’m not more and more deeply depressed, just sitting in this one spot. 

I almost laughed at the last meeting.  It wouldn’t have been appropriate.  It would have been a caustic, humorless laugh of one who knows something that is a deep, dark secret.  Someone thought I looked better.  I felt like hell.  I hurt all over and I was straining myself not to start crying.  I felt horrible that night with no way to express it without sounding like I wanted it to be about me.  I don’t talk anymore unless it’s to my children when they call, and then I get there and I think I talk too much.  I am lonely and I guess I want people to know I’m there before the meeting ends and I’m shoved back offshore to drift alone in my little lifeboat.

The more I attend these meetings the more I realize that every grief is individualized and that no advice can cater to us all.  The details of a person’s life, what they came from, what they had with their spouse, what they lived through, how much support they have available to them, and what kind of death was brought to their door will keep us all apart even in our symmetry of being widows and widowers.  I wish I had a way of connecting to someone but I haven’t found it yet.  They are all so different.  They are all grieving and at various stages in that journey while I am indescribable.  My life has been so different from any of these people.  I lived in fear and intentionally diverted so much pain to myself to protect my children.  Few people will assist someone like me.  No one would want to sit and listen to my story of how it was, how it became for me after finding my beloved, and how it is for me now that he has died.

“Death leaves a heartache no one can heal.  Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”  ~ epitaph on a grave in Ireland. 

I am new.  I am raw from this pain. The loss of him is more than I can bear and I cannot find comfort in anything and from anyone yet.  I heard myself say the word, “Making the quilts, and having her friendship, has helped me.”  And it has.  I would give almost anything to be so busy with quilts lined up one after the other that I had a waiting list.  Then I wouldn’t cry so and stress so about things like rent and food. 

But it will also keep me in this solitary life.  I wonder if I had more orders for quilts or the embellished jeans I make, if I could buy better food and could eat better, if I would sleep better?  Just having the necessary staples of life might make grieving, not easier, but I could actually address it without falling to my knees and putting my head in my hands and sobbing for the security I had with him.

I am without my beloved husband and there is no way out.  I love him so much and I can’t imagine anything that will heal me, even though the group calls itself “healing hearts.”

“She is no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.”  ~ George Eliot 

I do not want to grow old without him.  There.  I’ve said it.  He kept me alive instead of existing.  He showed me things I would have missed.  He gave me love that I had been conditioned into believing I didn’t deserve.  I miss him and I want him back.  I want him to take me in his arms and let my cry and tell him how awful it’s been without him.  I want him to rub my neck and my back and croon to me the soft words he had for me, the ones he’s whisper to make me smile and sigh.

“There’s no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.”  ~ Edith Wharton

I found this quote from Henri Nouwen:  

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.  The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

The only person in my life, my entire life, who was that kind of friend, was my husband.  He gave to me.  He shared with me.  He got in front of me and fought for me.  He made the bogeyman shrink and go away.  He stayed with me when everything went wrong.  He never left me until he died and left me forever.  I miss him and there are no words beyond that.  If I say I want him back, does that defy God?

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.” ~ William Shakespeare

I have words.  I have a lot of words.  But I have no outlet except to write them and put them online.  There is no one to come sit with me as the sun sets and hold my hand as I cry.  There is no one that will come listen to me talk about him for any length of time.  There is no face like his, no comfort like what I got from him, no love like what he gave me.  There is no bond like what I had with him.  I am alone now and always will be.

There is no comfort now.  There isn’t anyone to try.

“The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.  Every other wound we seek to heal – every other affliction to forget: but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open – this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.”  ~ Washington Irving. 

It will be 100 days.  I don’t know who to get through it other than to bow my head and get through it.  At least I have some commissions for quilts to keep my occupied.  I know he would be so proud of me.  I have to hang on to that thought.  For a long time.

accumulated silence

i can't get around the fact that he's gone forever.  i keep hoping he'll call.  i don't know if it helps or hurts that i'm in a place where he never was.  we have no history here together.  nothing is familiar.  i think i'm evolving into a hermit.

i feel out of step with the passing of time.  i can't find his memory here and i'm out of place.  not only is he not here with me, but i know he's never coming to join me.  i've surrounded myself with my things, my little shrines in different places around this small place, so that whatever little area i'm working in, i see pictures of him, of my children, of the places i used to walk through with him.

i can't make sense of him leaving like that so i'm trying to make sense of what he left behind.  the tangible things are here.  his clothes, his shoes, his medals, some of his military stuff.  i sleep with his Marine Corps sleeping bag, called a bivy bag.  it doesn't really smell like him anymore, but it bears the marks of his having been in it.  it has some blood stains on it and a bullet hole.  a close call, he said and though he smiled, it was rueful and didn't touch his eyes.  knowing the story, i can only hold that bag closer and be thankful i got him for the time i did.

i am left with his stories.  his life was filled with wild and incredible adventures.  such calculated risks he had to take with no idea how it would actually play out, how he would get home, only knowing that he would serve his country with honor, and no one would ever know.  but me.  he told me.  and i'll keep his secrets.  but i have them.  and that means i have a part of him that no one else ever did.  i took his guilt, his anguish, and his horror of war and helped him find a place of reconciliation within himself.  he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that i was in awe of him, what he endured, and that i truly believe he is a hero.  he'd never come close to thinking anyone would see him as such.  

i do have the knowledge of that.  that and the fact that i could embarrass him.  i adored his face, his body, the way he walked, his smile, his hands.  to me he was such a beautiful man.  i loved his scars, his muscles, and his laugh.  he has the most wonderful laugh.  but he would blush and look at me with patient frustration.  he never saw himself as handsome.  but he knew i thought of him that way.  he knew i adored him.  he'd try to sleep and i'd be looking at him, watching him in the darkness of the room, and he'd know.  he'd purse his lips and say he had no idea what i saw, but that he was glad i had found something in him good.  then i would kiss his face, his eyes, and stroke his beard, his hair, soothing him, lulling him to a sleep without nightmares.

and he would be there for me, for when my nightmares would come.

but he's not going to come back.  i'm alone with these sleepless nightmares.  everything is so screwed up.  i can't sleep and i am so tired during the day.  naps.  that's what i do.  i take short naps.  30 minutes here.  an hour and a half there.  one night i'll get maybe three hours at a stretch and then the next, maybe 45 minutes.

so i hold his sleeping bag close and play with the ties.  i read or get up and sew.

i asked a woman from the widow's group how long before she stopped crying every day.  and was i losing it because i still cry every single day.  she told me i was normal, that i was going through hell right now.  she told me i was too alone here.  she told me i was a bit of a worry because of my unique aloneness.  but it's odd that in the weeks right after i moved here, i wanted to find a friend.  the passing of the last six or seven days, through mother's day weekend, has found me not so worried about it.  i'm not sure why.

i just feel myself withdrawing deeper and deeper into a hermetic life.  i have my sewing commissions.  i want to get more.  i'm trying to stay hopeful that others will see the work i'm doing for this woman and hire me.  i'm falling into a routine of not speaking unless my daughter or son calls.  i talk in my head to my husband, but not out loud anymore.  i talk to my dogs so i'm not completely silent.  but if i need food or fresh library books, i can do it all without speaking to anyone.  all of it without saying a word.

the real truth has finally dawned on me in all this accumulated silence.  "it's not for us to know."