Tag: Mary

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Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me

David Bowie has been playing on life’s jukebox since the Labyrinth’s Fire Gang gave my eight-year-old self nightmares.

By high school I was hanging out with the drama kids, singing “Magic Dance.” I was also in Poetry Club writing my own versions of Nine Inch Nails’ songs, so when Bowie toured with NIN in ’95, I was there. “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” had just hit MTV and it was intensely dark. I put on some sort of black t-shirt and made my way to a muddy hill in a Camden, NJ, amphitheater.

At 16, I had no appreciation for the moment or the performances. The hill had turned into a slip ‘n slide and I was goofing with the goths. Fortunately, I had my head in the right place for NIN and Bowie playing “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)” together. That, I will never forget (nor the dirt-covered goth girl who pinned me down for a kiss at the bottom of a wicked slide).

I went on to see him at the Roseland in NYC (a show just for BowieNet subscribers), Moby’s Area2 festival (there was a cosplay Jared, but still no Labyrinth tunes performed), and the Tower Theater in Philly (the closing lyric, “Ziggy played guitar…” still holds on to my auditory nerve center).

Bowie had virtually quit touring when I met Mary. We were at Lollapalooza in Chicago when The Raconteurs revived a lackluster set by playing “It Ain’t Easy.”

I was mostly hands-off when it came to wedding plans, but I had a couple requests. One, that her dress show off her “shoulders and boobs” (direct quote). Two, that “Rock ‘N’ Roll With Me” be our song.

—

“Oh, when you rock and roll with me

There’s no one else I’d rather be

Nobody here can do it for me

When you rock and roll with me

When you rock and roll, when you rock and roll with me

No one else I’d rather, I’d rather be

Nobody here can do it for me

I’m in tears, I’m in tears

When you rock and roll with me”

—

For a marriage that involved so few tears, yet lead to so many, this song has come to mean almost too much.

Today I reflect on “Nobody here can do it for me.” I’ve learned the truth that self-love is a connection with the internal divine. There is an infinite engine of Love. I call it God. You can glimpse it in others, feel the radiance of it, but direct access is found only inside one’s own soul. Only once you’ve done that can you really share in the warmth of another’s love.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Embrace Your Freedom

In the weeks after Mary’s death I wrote about how music had lost its power over me.

I was living a robotic existence. It was too too risky to feel anything at all. I had intuitions about the importance of love, but I wasn’t ready to experience it.

The road trip we embarked on started with a weekend of music that would break me out of the armor I had built.

As Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band tore through “Lay Your Burden Down,” I had my son on my shoulders, my feet in the mud, and tears framing the smile on my face. Mary and I had danced in front of them on a special date weekend. All the emotions I hadn’t let myself feel poured forth. I let myself be free to feel.

Music touches me even deeper now. Everything does. Freedom means being able to explore further, especially within.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Don’t Overdo

We don’t have a tree up, I haven’t acquired stocking stuffers, and I’m not sure where the stockings are.

These were all on my mind as I pulled this card from don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements deck.

Now I’m thinking of Halloween. Mary was Tippi Hedren from Hitchcock’s The Birds one year before we met. She took bloody pecks out of a stylish blazer, wired birds around her, and had more birds torturing her hair. It was brilliant.

We overdid it all. Costumes, hikes, meals, decorations…we never sat for more than an evening by the fire. Even that would be rife with problem solving and planning.I don’t know if that’s what left her depleted and unable to fight off the infection, or whether she knew in her soul that her time would not be long. Both could be true.

I’m finding my pace. I’m learning how to rest.

I’m going to do my nest today.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Still Present

Mary visited me again.

This inspirational card has floated around our lives for more than a decade. I don’t know where Mary found it and I never paid much attention to it on our dresser or her nightstand.

Having no clear connection to our life together, I was tempted to toss it in my efforts to make room in our lives. Physical health and wellbeing has been paramount in our family transformation and I didn’t think I needed a reminder. I checked myself on how easily bad habits form and old patterns return and placed the card between our kitchen and dining room.

A day or so earlier, I was at Lanikai Wellness Studio for a yoga class and purchased a deck of cards based on Don Miguel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. I have a long to-read list and thought this would be a good way to bring Ruiz’s wisdom into my life. I also hoped they would provide material for a new blog series.

I sat down this morning to flip through the cards for the first time. This same card was in the first ten I read. We didn’t own the book. We never discussed Ruiz. I didn’t discover him until after Mary passed and there’s no indication of his name or the book title on the cards.

This is my first real holiday season alone. A friend buoyed me through my first Christmas as a widower, but that friendship has been lost. As much as I trust where I am and the good things that are to come, the loneliness is weighing on me.

This week I came home from a brutal two hours of soccer. I was hammered in goal and on the field, nothing seemed to work in the back-to-back games. I was wiped out emotionally and physically. I was useless to my sons as they warmed up leftovers and served themselves dinner. I wondered what I was doing wrong, how I got to this place.

I had a dream that night that Mary had been in the stands watching our boys and watching me play. I ran over to the edge of the field to ask for help with something small. It startled me and I woke angry. I envisioned the stands again and I took her away. It wasn’t like a dream. I can see the empty spot at the end of the metal bench now. I could have told her how much I loved her, how blessed I am to have had her, how important she was, and is, to me, or I could have just smiled and enjoyed a moment seeing her again. But I erased her. I was angry at myself for a foolish fantasy.

So she’s back this morning telling me to take care of my body. She always protected soccer for me. She would come home from a long day of work, start making dinner, and send me out the door, no matter if the boys were being disagreeable or impatient, or if coats were still on the floor from our afternoon adventures. She was always there later to hear about my frustrations and successes on the field. I can hear her drowsy, mumbled, “I’m listening,” as she fought off sleep after a late game. She was listening, she was always present. She was so good at being present that she still manages it from time to time.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Single AF

Romantic. Fool for Love. Intense. Romeo.

My friends (and myself) have taken me to task for how I love. Sage advice, patient nurturing, and loving mockery have been at my doorstep since I chose to end an intense and public love affair.

I’ve experienced romantic love twice in the nearly two years since I lost my wife. It seems I have two modes of dating: one and done, or falling in love.

I live with all my heart. Parenting, soccer, yoga, even blogging isn’t fulfilling until it pushes me to tears. That’s where I like to get, that place of danger, the place where possibility blooms like a sunrise out of a winter morning.

Widowhood didn’t create this, as my high school sweetheart recently reminded me, it moved the bar. The love that Mary left me is greater than any I have ever known, the pain nearly equal. Living in these extremes has stripped away much of the middle. So comes the high-wire act. The joy and jeopardy of dancing between the fringes of existence. Worse than tripping back into the pain is floating off the wire into space, drifting without course.

My heart doesn’t break. It grows to the size of its pot. Then it continues to grow. The beauty is obvious as leaves and blooms spill out over the sides. The pain comes as the roots push silently against the hardened clay, struggling for room. The pot breaks and the pain is exposed and ugly. Relief is there too. I am reminded that love is infinite. I am reminded of God’s love that Mary opened a window to on the day she left this realm. I am reminded that there is always a bigger pot, that I can mold one on my own, and that it’s okay to crave a partner in that process.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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A Marriage Complete

There is a criticism of marriage that essentially states that the only marriage deemed successful by our society is one that ends with the death of one or both partners. Longevity trumps health in our most valued relationships.

I have the questionable honor of having had a successful marriage.

Beyond having made it to the natural dissolution of our union, I believe that Mary and I achieved all we were meant to together on this Earth. We set out with few goals and accomplished all of them, and much more, in almost 11 years of marriage.

We wanted two children and to have a stay-at-home parent. That goal expanded into a home education lifestyle and a focus on family wellbeing that we had not imagined. It created a framework for us to survive and thrive through a difficult loss.

We had rules to keep decisions, disagreements, and conflicts between the two of us, to always turn to those rifts and work to heal them. Through those rules we built an indomitable team. We counted on each other’s checks to improve ourselves and our marriage. I hold this model close to my heart and apply the direct mastering of conflict as often as I am able.

There must be things left undone or unsaid, correct? A widow friend of mine commented that we seem drawn to those ideas that were sown but never harvested. Maybe our dreams weren’t grand enough, but I can’t think of a thing we wanted to do, yet did not “get around to.” A live recording of a Nine Inch Nails song came on yesterday and ambushed me with happy and sad tears. We saw them in a technologically and theatrically stunning show in Chicago. I thought about all the concerts, the theater, the modest traveling. I cannot think of any significant opportunity for ourselves as a couple or as a family that we passed on for another time. There was something in us that knew we only had so long together.

When we had no reason to believe it was our last few months together we got baptized as a family and shared special hikes and personal moments alone.

The end was the end. It was Mary’s story completed and the chapter of our marriage closed.

We had no aspirations beyond marriage. I’m still trying to find my purpose, my story.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Listen to the Impossible Story

Pull that crystal handle back on your time machine and go all the way back to 12 January, 2018. Go and tell me I’d lose my wife within a month and that before the end of spring I’d be in her parent’s RV guiding my sons on a journey I’d never imagined.

My reaction? Impossible. Mary’s healthier than I am and, God forbid, if I lose her I will be lost. I had considered my own death. I had considered the loss of a son, or two. I had imagined how treacherous the lives of those left behind would be, but I leaned on Mary so hard that I never had the courage to imagine life without her. She was my miracle, she brought me to Christ just by walking like him. She didn’t know a darn thing about soccer and made me a better player, turned me into a coach. She humbled me. She showed me what love could do.

Impossible. All of it. You could go back 13 years and tell me all of this. I would not have listened.

I’m glad you didn’t warn me. I’m blessed our tragedy came down the tracks over six days. I didn’t think about impossible: I prayed for a miracle while planning for the likely. Everything was possible in that moment Mary went to Heaven. I was a super hero. She gave me that magic space ring, that radioactive spider bite, that tragedy that turned Frank Castle into The Punisher. Okay, bad example…kinda. I am more keenly aware of my mortality than ever. This present is the only present I have to make the world better, or worse.

So, let’s make it better I say to myself. The first way to make the world better is by making yourself better (I often ignore this primary fact). The second way is to make your family and friends better (hard to do if #1 isn’t in order). The third way is to help those in your community, physically close to you, but strangers nonetheless.

I had internalized the hero’s journey. From comics to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to the Star Wars trilogy, I bought into it so much that I committed to taking my sons on a road trip adventure before Mary had taken her final breath. It was that thing that happens to us. Not internal, but received. The type of inspiration that told me there was something out there, that my work and my thinking and my mind were not enough on their own, that the work that must be done is opening oneself up to receive the message. That takes more effort and patience than you may think. Your desires and fears will cloud the message and pretend to be the message. Again and again I have found that praying to hear clearly is to ask for the greatest blessing. The more I listen to people; not their declarations, but their stories, the more I love people.

Impossible. We put this barrier before understanding at inconvenient junctures. But how many impossible stories have you heard? Or lived? Impossible isn’t a dream, it’s a mystery we haven’t explored.

God bless,

Jason

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If It Hurts To Go Anywhere, Go Everywhere

There’s no place we go that doesn’t maintain a connection with Mary. The four of us travelled up and down Delaware and tried on every type of event. She’s in the parks, gardens, concert halls, and campgrounds. In places that she had never been, we talk about what her reactions would have been or how she wouldn’t have forgotten the hummus for the carrot sticks.

It doesn’t always hurt, most of the time we’re smiling and remembering how she heightened every experience with her warmth, her smile, and her ability to be present. Sometimes it hurts like hell, especially when there’s something she would particularly enjoy.

Today didn’t hurt. We had fun with family and friends from Lewes to Hockessin and we’re going to bed fully spent.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Not Alone

I got to introduce a new friend to a place that is covered in Mary’s memory today. We met at Delaware Art Museum and I learned that he had never seen the Labyrinth. We chatted and I got to share my favorite place to gather my worries and release them. Besides Mary, he’s the only person I’ve walked the Labyrinth with as a pair. We remained uninterrupted for a full hour, a rarity on a beautiful summer day.

The acoustics kept turning our conversation back to the present and I discovered how much the space resembled a temple in my heart. Sounds are made so crisply clear that I can more easily turn my mind to God and perceive what He wants me to hear. Even through our chatting and the crunching of the gravel under our feet, I could hear that I was in the right place at the right time.

All is well in my world.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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An Unlikely, Art-Filled Life

These pictures were taken three years apart and neither one by me.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016. Reprinted for the DE Creative Kids Passport, 2019.
Peninsula Gallery, 2019

Unschooling has been the most rewarding journey of my life. I still don’t like the word “unschool” and didn’t know it when I started exposing my sons to art before the youngest could walk. I had no history or education with art, I was sent by my wife as she knew there was no way I would be a “stay-at-home” dad. Story times and family-friendly tours and activities got us into museums on a regular basis and I quickly saw the magic that was happening in my sons’ lives.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016
Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2012
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Meeting the Twin Poets at Delaware Contemporary, 2018
Shakespeare at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2013
Terrific Tuesday at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2014

An intentional learning lifestyle has taken us back again and again to our favorite galleries, where there is always something new to discover.

As we return to all these places in 2019 to complete our DE Creative Kids Passport, I will try not to be overwhelmed by the memories that we have made.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason