No Safe Distance:

One thing I had not anticipated was how many connections I would be making, even months later, with people who had been in Michael's life and had moved away over the years. I know this could be true of all of us...you get a whim to check up on someone from your past, Google them, and next thing you know you are reading an obituary and dropping your coffee cup in shock. And, not surprisingly, in Michael Schwass' case, the Googling often leads people to me.

Now that we are a few months away from his passing, info is getting a little harder to find and a few links are now archived, like the awesome tribute obituary Stan Mikita did. (I'll see if I can find that somewhere else for you, but the Sun Times requires you pay to view it now.) In the meantime, I know there are several people who regret not having been able to be at the funeral. For those who wish to view them, there are still funeral photos up at the Pioneer Local Press.

I have such a strong desire to start a new blog right now. It's that feeling you journallers know well...the ones who always need a new journal with a new pen to match every time a fresh beginning seems to be presenting itself.

But I'm resisting that urge.

This IS a beginning, of sorts, but this beginning stems from what or more exactly from who came before...

Whew...feeling a little blast there. Oh sometimes I just miss that boy.

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I don't even know what I want to say but I feel like typing so I'm typing.

And that's part of what is happening, these urges to get back to familiar activities...urges that feel like a return to something. I've been having this weird feeling...like somehow I've been deposited back into my life, my before-Michael life, or before Michael-become-My Guru life, but in a post guru-ized state of consciousness. I'm getting new urges to do old things...feelings of deja vu all over again...

I don't know if that makes sense or not, but that's the best way I can describe it. A little like Dorothy waking up.

Ah, yes, that's it.

I had the most wonderful time in Oz (Michael and I found a place very much like that actually, but that is a story for another day, in book form). It was also terrifying. The path we were travelling had every imaginable horror but sometimes there was singing (quadriplegia was not his worst disability...Michael couldn't carry a tune in a bucket) and dancing (we did a very nice wheelchair/office chair waltz) and root beer floats and marvelous wonders but the horrors were so real.

There we were, rolling along that seemingly endless yellow brick road when Michael took a detour and ducked through a door marked Hockey Pucks Only. Suddenly I was standing by myself before a huge curtain with this giant head wavering over it, a head with a slightly crooked nose. This floating Wizard head looked like Michael but was so austere, so much larger than life to me and I felt so small in comparison. I just wanted the old Michael back. The one I had a crush on and who just made me giggle at every turn. The one who always beat all the odds against him and who told me so often that I inspired him to live when he was so ill in 1997 and who seemed happy to have made it through.

But this Wizard said that changes were coming and if I really wanted to walk the rest of the road with Michael I had some work to do first. It was my choice. I could go home the way I came if I wanted to but the road ahead was going to test me. I trembled and I shook but I stood my ground. "I'm not leaving this path. I am not leaving Michael's side if there are dangers ahead. I'm not leaving him on this road alone. Do what you will."

The Wizard head was so demanding and unreasonable in the tasks he made me do...like finding courage...and overriding my incessantly chattering brain...and learning how to love someone beyond my human capabilities to do so. It was beastly hard. Hardest thing I have ever done.

But then it started to get easier.

And when he saw how determined I was never to give up no matter how afraid I was the Wizard became so kind to me. And then he came out from behind that big curtain and was Michael again. But an older Michael. A weary Michael. A beautiful and glowing and tender Michael but weary nonetheless. When we were the same size again he told me he loved me more than I knew and that he wished he had known me when we were children and that, if he had, he would have followed me everywhere, 'absolutely everywhere, and we would have been together our whole lives'.

And then he died.

And I woke up back home.

And at first my head hurt a lot...and my heart...and sometimes I get a powerful twinge now and again.

Like now.

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I looked out my window last night hoping the clouds would clear for the lunar eclipse (they didn't) and watched the deer meander across this little acre and it felt like so many full moon nights that would find me awake...

...and I found myself singing to REM and baking carrot cake from a recipe that I was making back when Green first came out (if not much earlier)

...and I heard myself saying to Scott that we should take a class together in something fun at the local community college (like we did every quarter for the first few years of our marriage) and it actually felt like fun to think about, didn't just seem like it would be.

...and we ran into a friend we hadn't seen in 10 years at Whole Foods. It was as though we had seen her only the day before but so much had happened to each of us. It looked like life had aged us all a good ten years, we agreed. But we knew the truth was we really hadn't aged a day.

...and I sent that carrot cake in the mail to the man who found my father's body because I knew he loved my carrot cake and it made me really happy that I WANTED to do it AND had the energy to.

I'm finding myself feeling peaceful inside in a way I don't think I have EVER felt. Like it's me, the old me, who used to just bite into life and want to sample every single bit of it but also a new me who doesn't feel like she's failing if she just stops and savors one small nibble for a good long while.

...like the old me who loves feeding people things made with love and singing but a new me who doesn't feel like now she needs to bake twenty more cakes for everyone else who might like one too, and volunteer at the local animal shelter, and make sure her house is spotless and send handwritten letters on homemade cards to all her friends.

...like the old me who never wanted to waste a minute of life but a new me who now understands there will never be enough time and that this all goes by so fast so it is best to slow down and just live it.

I had been living for the past few years among the dying and now they have deposited me back among the living.

I didn't think I could make it back. Wasn't too sure I'd even want to try.

But I did make it back. And I found what I never expected to find:

It's beautiful here.