I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
My husband always knew he would be the first to go. Far better that way, he used to say, because it meant that he wouldn’t have to miss me. A private man, he also insisted that death was a private business. When the time came, he wanted to die alone, just to sleep on. There was to be no fuss, no funeral, no flurry of condolences, not even a goodbye if he could help it. Maybe he was afraid I wouldn’t know what to do or say; maybe he thought it would be easier if he just disappeared into nothingness without ceremony. He would have been wrong.
Like a catechism, I know what to do and say. It is part of the culture that formed me, and I am bound to it. Friends from back home agree that it is sewn tidily in our DNA – we know to mark the time of death, to stop the clocks and cover the mirrors, to draw down the blinds and close the curtains; we know what to say and do when led silently into a bedroom where the deceased has been “laid out”; we know how to pay our respects in private and in public, how to offer condolences over china cups of tea balanced on saucers bearing digestive biscuits; we know when to shake hands, when to whisper and weep or when to throw our heads back in laughter over a bit of craic about a life lived in full.
Without these tiny rituals in the days following Ken’s death, I raged internally and selfishly. Only because he expected me to accept and respect his wishes – and because I had promised – I complied. Against my will, I privatized my mourning and got lost in the ever-widening distance between the desert southwest of these United States and a blacksmith’s forge on the side of the road in rural South Derry. I wanted what I couldn’t have. I wanted to visit a grave and bring flowers, perhaps freesias because he loved their scent. I wanted the bits and pieces of a public goodbye. I wanted to fill the air with his favorite music. I knew he wanted none of it. No ceremony. No punctuation mark. Just an empty space.
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. And today, on the second anniversary of our poet’s death, my recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that as a final resting place, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it.
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
I don’t know what Seamus would have made of it but I think he might be pleased enough.
I think so too.
So when I returned to Bellaghy this summer, I visited the grave again. This time, a simple wooden cross stood in the dirt. This time, I was a widow, changed and contemplative, convinced that cosmic strings keep us connected. This time, I wondered about the spiritual space in which both men might move. Where are they? Are they afraid?
In Stepping Stones,Heaney tells Dennis O’Driscoll that he did not fear death the way he had done as a boy.
It’s more grief than fear, grief at having to leave ‘what thou lovest well’ and whom thou lovest well.
So when people tell me my husband is in a better place now, I can’t help but rail against them. What place could be better than here with his daughter, the girl he loved so much and so well? What place could be better than in our dining room to light eighteen candles on her birthday cake or at the Motor Vehicle Department when she nailed the parallel parking and got her license, or in the audience to cheer her on and whistle as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma, or when she earned her first paycheck? How could any place be better than a ring-side seat at the milestones yet to come? Is there a more desolate space than his empty seat at the table?
It has been one year, nine months, and fourteen days since Ken died, and my growing preoccupation is with wanting to know where he is. Where is he? Some days, it feels as though he just went missing. Where is he? It is a confounding, gnawing question. It is unrelenting, different from the madness that accompanied the early urgent grip of grief, the all-consuming quest to fix the unfixable, stop time, close distance, find the right word, and do the right thing. Doing the right thing – as Ken had requested – felt wrong.
He did not want to be buried in the ground. He wanted to be cremated, and he wanted his ashes – all of them – strewn on a piece of ground in the desert, at the base of Black Mountain, where his childhood home had once stood. It represented his beginning. It was his first place.
We obliged. My parents, far from their Castledawson home, our daughter, and a close friend did as Ken asked, each of us taking turns to empty the bag that contained the cremated remains of this man who had loved me? That bag probably weighed no more than five pounds. I recall fixating on this detail and wondering about Ken’s soul and the weight of it and its whereabouts. Where was it? Where was Ken? Where is Ken?
About a month ago, my daughter and I returned to the spot where we had spread his ashes, assuming it would be unchanged, frozen in time. Instead, “his” tree had been cut down and the area around it chained off for commercial development. An empty space – for now. Heartsick, I wept for him, for my naturalist, even though the rational part of me knew and knows that not for one moment would he have expected his desert space to remain unspoiled. He had grown resigned to the price of urban progress. Still, I was resentful again, angry that there was no grave for us to visit, no headstone to adorn with fresh flowers on his birthday, or on the anniversaries of the day we met or the day we married, the day our girl was born, or the day of his death.
Another blow.
Then with the right words at the right time – again – came Heaney and the epitaph from The Gravel Walks inscribed on the new headstone in place for today, the second anniversary of his death. The girl with her head in the clouds should never have doubted the man who kept her feet on the ground too. Not for a second.
Ken, you are neither here nor there. You are everywhere, and that is reason enough for “keeping going.”
You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And find the heart unlatched and blow it open.
So walk on air against your better judgement
Establishing yourself somewhere in between
Those solid batches mixed with grey cement
And a tune called The Gravel Walks that conjures green
Twelve days after Ken died, I wrote this post. I haven’t read it since, and I’m not going to read it tonight. Somewhere in the middle of the grief-stricken ramblings, I remember is a pure – and good – memory of this day twenty five years ago – January 13, 1990 – the day when Ken and I embarked on what we both knew was one hell of a love story.
So, I’ll raise a great big whiskey to you tonight, Ken, and tell you that I’d do it all again.
x
11/27/2013
A friend, one who knows, told me the other day that it will take at least a year before the sharp stone of grief will shift from the very center of my being. She told me not to make any big decisions until I make it through all the “firsts” – the first Thanksgiving without him, Sophie’s first birthday without her dad, Christmas and decorating the tree, New Year’s Eve and not-quite-legal fireworks at the end of our street, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, my birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and fireworks over Morro Bay, summer vacation (will I ever be able to face Morro Bay again?), his birthday, Halloween and pumpkin carving, our Wedding Anniversary, and finally, the first anniversary of his death. His death.
My. Husband. Is. Dead.
And then she said, well, she texted me, which is a good thing because if it’s written down, I’m less likely to forget it:
. . . after a while that pain will feel like a friend. And you will be afraid to lose it because that will mean you are better and over it and not missing Ken any more.
~ just one of the mind games that Grief plays.
This grieving business has brought out the best in people who care about me, beautiful expressions of sheer humanity. It has also brought out the worst – albeit unintentional – in people who don’t know me and don’t love me but who are paid to deal with me, to deal with death for a living, to know what to say to new widows, to know not to say stupid things. (Recent days have brought me back to when I first landed in cancer country, but if you’ve visited this blog before, you know I have beaten that horse to death).
From the people at the mortuary, those with years of experience in the funeral industry, who called me with the first-time-I’d-ever-heard-it-details of Kenneth H‘s last wishes as opposed to Kenneth M’s which I knew like the back of my hand, to the automated email telling me about the online obituary and memorial page even though my husband, a very private man, had been adamant about no obituary and no fuss; to the doctor whose office assistant left a voice-mail telling me that there was nothing else she could do for me because I take four medications already; and then, my husband’s primary care doctor who wanted me to place myself in his position, to take a minute and see where he was coming from, regarding the whole debacle over who should sign the death certificate – hisposition, if you don’t mind – and then my oncologist (whose assistant didn’t return my call for help until after it was too late to call my primary care physician) who wouldn’t prescribe anything for me because, you know, the physical pain of grief has nothing to do with cancer, now does it?
I wanted to scream that if we were still in South Derry, there would be a very nice doctor on the other end of the line, telling my mother he was sorry for my trouble and that he would sort us all out with enough Diazepam to help cope with the shock, the journey back to America, the jet lag, the grief, the pain, the immeasurable sadness. The same doctor didn’t know my mother or me; he was merely the doctor on call, a kind stranger, and he had a heart of gold.
In the twelve days since my husband died – my husband died – can you hear me now? – I have cried and cursed and ranted and raged. I have been irreverent and exhausted and delirious and despondent. I have even laughed about things that should make me cry. I went out today and bought lipstick. Honest to God. I actually got up, showered, put make-up on a haggard face and drove to a store the way I have done thousands of times before, and I bought a cheery lipstick called ninety-nine red balloons. Just like the song.
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
I also bought a too-expensive-even-though-I-should-be-watching-my-finances-now-that-I’m-a-widow autumnal centerpiece for a Thanksgiving table that will be missing a place-setting. At some point, I noticed I had already changed my Facebook status to “widowed.” I don’t like the ring of it one bit.
Some of these trifling things are great distractions – wondering who will show me how to back-flush the swimming pool or tell me what that even means, or set the timer on the sprinklers or develop that intuition my husband seemed to have about knowing when to change the oil, or rotate tires, or change air filters, or get gas (I always forget to get gas, usually I’m on “E” with the light on. I used to joke about how running on empty is my last stab at living dangerously). It may actually not be that funny.
In the past twelve days, I have learned how to comfort people whose husbands are still alive. I held in my arms the neighbor I don’t know but who brought cheery chrysanthemums to my door. She couldn’t stop crying about the tragedy that has befallen my daughter and me, and I had to get some Kleenex for her and nod that time will ease the pain. Hell, I even consoled the discomfited doctor after she realized that my situation was sort of “urgent” and that, yes, Xanax might help.
Of course Xanax helps. Just ask any of my family members back home, who have endured incredible pain and loss in recent years. At every wake, there’s always some kindly soul passing around the Diazepam the way we used to pass around a pack of cigarettes at the pub. No. I’m not saying that Xanax, Diazepam, or Ativan numbs the grief or takes it away or helps me avoid the reality of loss. It just dulls – briefly – the excruciating physical pain of the sharp stone of grief that’s stuck somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.
Here’s the thing. I was Ken’s wife for one day shy of twenty-two years. That’s a lifetime. When we met, we both knew something special was happening. I used to think we would have fit in rather handily on the cast of Cheers. Ken wasn’t Norm or Cliff, but he was a regular. When he came in to the bar where I was a bartender, I always had a beer ready for him. I would position myself behind the bar, right across from him and nonchalantly wrap silver-ware in paper napkins, exchanging quips and innuendoes with him without making eye-contact, because when I did, I blushed.
A bit of a cliché I was a twenty-something Irish immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and still had a broad Antrim accent. As such, I was the main source of entertainment for the men who had just come off the day-shift; they were easily enchanted by what they considered an Irish brogue, and the more alcohol I served up, the more they wanted to tell me all about their Irish roots. I often dismissed them as “Plastic Paddys,” which they considered a compliment. Now, this was before microbreweries were de rigueur, but I was still overwhelmed by the variety of beer in variously colored cans – yellow for Coors, the Silver Bullet Lite version, blue and white Miller Lite etc The regulars indulged me, “Hey Irish,” they’d beckon and to help me out, they ordered rounds of beer by color: “Gimme three silver bullets, one red and blue, two white and blue, and two yellow.” Ken said I always charged $11.50 a round, but none of them minded.
Ken wasn’t fictional Sam Malone, Cheers owner erstwhile recovering alcoholic and former Red Sox player with a little black book full of women’s names and numbers. Ken didn’t need a team of writers, and I never met a woman who didn’t love him; and, I wasn’t Diane Chambers (well, maybe just a little) but the chemistry between us was undeniable and made up for the lack of compatibility. For almost two years, we denied what was so obvious to everyone else. He loved that I loved music and that I could give as good as I got. I remember he was very impressed when I sneaked some of his favorite tunes on to the bar’s jukebox, a contraption that could be described as “country thunder.” When the bar-owner wasn’t paying attention, I added Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” LA Woman by The Doors and, well, anything by The Moody Blues. Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. Now, it was easy for me to hijack the jukebox, because I had the flat-out awesome job of going with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse, somewhere in Phoenix, that was loaded with row after row of 45-inch singles. It was my job – a job – every other week, to replace some of the records in the jukebox, to keep it somewhat “current.” To stay on the owner’s good side, I’d throw in some Hank Williams, and I never interfered with Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” – nobody in her right mind would get rid of “Crazy” – but every new record I added was for Ken. And he knew it. Bob Seger’s “Sunspot Baby” would start up, he’d wink at me and then complain to the owner about how the new Irish waitress was ruining the jukebox.
The banter and badinage flew like electrical sparks between us, and we made those around us laugh and wink knowingly. We were the entertainment, and everybody knew we belonged together. Even before we did. I imagine had Dr. Frasier Crane been a regular, he would have had this to say about our performance:
“I know, I know. Now you’re going to deny it. Even though it’s ludicrously obvious to everyone around you, you two will go on pretending it’s not true because you’re EMOTIONAL INFANTS. You’re in a living HELL. You love each other, and you hate each other, and you hate yourselves for loving each other. Well, my dear friends, I want no part of it. It’s time I just picked up where I left off. It’s time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So I’ll get out of here so you can just get on with your denial fest.”
And then one day, Ken folded. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which thereafter we considered our official anniversary. I ran outside to give him his change. After all, $11.50 for one beer was a bit much, even by my standards. When he had me outside and alone, he looked right at me, told me he was crazy about me, that he always knew I had been out there, and that he had almost given up waiting for me. Quite a pick-up line, but it worked. Then he asked me to plant a kiss on his lips, and I reverted to being coy and strategic. But that didn’t last.
Within a matter of months – one month – we had moved in together. He brought nothing from his previous life, just a lot of love for me, and I dragged the collected Shakespeare, my Seamus Heaney poetry books, my collection of Life and Rolling Stone magazines, and a whole lot of crazy love for him. Crazy love – like the kind Van Morrison sings about, especially with Ray Charles:
Yes it makes me feel righteous, makes me feel whole
Makes me feel mellow down into my soul
While I never convinced him that Van Morrison was, in fact, God, I managed to turn Ken on to tennis, and we watched Wimbledon and the US Open on a tiny black and white TV-radio-alarm clock combo in a tiny apartment that amounted to a shack in the back of an old ranch house in central Phoenix. Then one day when we were watching TV, I said, “Let’s go get married.” He said, “OK,” and put his boots on.
I remembering digging out a big fat phone book – the yellow pages – and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher there reminded me of a lovely blue-eyed old man in Field of Dreams, earnest and patient, as he told Kevin Costner’s, Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham and all the blue hats he never got around to giving his wife, Alicia.
We asked a stranger to officially witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health, till death us do part. Health is easy, but sickness is a bitch. Madly in love, we had no reason to suspect that breast cancer (mine) or aneurysms (his) would move in and turn things upside down more than once and make us resent our own bodies. Thus, we filled up that ordinary November morning with a time-honored succession of extraordinary promises. We couldn’t stop smiling. We didn’t even tell anyone. Young and wild, it was as though we had eloped to Gretna Green. I think we probably even went to work afterwards. Along with all the other rituals we performed every day, the getting married was just something we could have done any day, at any time. No fanfare. No hoopla. Completely ours. Private.
We loved being answerable to only one another, doing whatever we wanted to without having to worry too much about other people. I remember one night when I was homesick for the smell of the sea. I just wanted to stare out at the ocean which seemed another world away from the desert southwest. It was a Friday afternoon, and we had nothing else to do. Still years before Sophie was born, we got in the car and started driving. No map. No GPS. No specific destination. Just ocean. That night, we were in Los Angeles, and I was inhaling the sea air. The next evening, we were in Pismo Beach, strolling along the pier. As if to put America’s vastness to the test, I asked him to keep driving. Eventually, we stopped by a lighthouse where we balanced the camera on the car, set the self-timer, and took a picture of ourselves, windswept and clinging to each other, completely unaware that a decade later, we would stand again on that very same spot on the road to Monterey, smiling for a picture that would be taken by our little girl. Then, for a decade, San Luis Obispo County – Morro Bay – became our family’s vacation spot.
We created hundreds of lovely little rituals and routines over the years. My mother always said I could set my watch by Ken. True. I always knew where he was, what he was doing, how much he loved me, how proud he was of things I had done professionally. He was my greatest cheerleader and the person who once told the young me who used to get her feelings hurt easily and who cared too much about what other people thought, that she needed to grow some hard bark, because she would need it. Well, Ken, I need it now. I know you didn’t want me to harden; you wanted me to be tough. But, it is just so hard to be tough enough to fully absorb the blow of your death, to look up and expect you to walk in with another cup of coffee for me and ask what I’m blogging about and then wonder aloud – with a wry smile – if the woman I once was would be coming back any time soon. Each of us wrestled with the truth that cancer changed me, as a brush with mortality would. It wasn’t bad or good. It just was.
It was not a perfect marriage, but it was an honest marriage. We argued about little things but never about the big stuff. One of our first arguments was over what it was he was thinking about. We never argued about that again. It went something like this:
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
Are you sure?
Yup.
So what are you thinking about?
Nothing.
Well, it must be something. I can tell. Are you mad at me? Is it about me? (I mean, isn’t it always about me?) Well, can you at least tell me what it begins with?
No baby. Just private thoughts. Private thoughts, my honey.
Private thoughts. Well, you can imagine how well that went over with someone who has to know the inner details, the finer points, the “how are you really feeling” details about everything. But he never told me. And the strangest thing happened. I realized over the years that we all have private thoughts, secrets never to be told, things that stay deep within us – not bad, necessarily, just private thoughts. Most people just wouldn’t say that out loud. But Ken did.
Looking back on it, he said it the same way he once told the cashier at a Pep Boys, after he’d paid in cash for new windshield wipers, that she couldn’t have his address. Not that he was a conspiracy theorist; he just hated his name and address being placed on some list only for it to be sold to someone who would profit from it. Annoyed because he was just not cooperating the way most customers did, the young cashier’s jaw dropped when Ken looked at her, deadpan, and with a twinkle in his eye, said quietly, “I just can’t do it. I can’t tell you where I live. The cops are after me.” And I had to walk out of the store because I was laughing so hard.
Then I learned to cook. It was before Food TV Network, and I relied almost entirely on an eclectic group of chefs on PBS so there was lots of Cajun cooking going on in the early years. Our first Thanksgiving Dinner together was a foreign affair as far as I was concerned. Never mind the Food TV Network, this was before the Internet and Google, so I had to go out and buy a holiday cookbook from Williams and Sonoma to learn exactly what went into a Thanksgiving Dinner and what this quintessential American tradition was all about. I’m sure like most Northern Irish folk, I would have the natural tendency to ask, with just a touch of martyrdom “Sure what would we have to be thankful for?” And then there would be some hand-wringing and worst-case scenarios about what happened to your man whose wife took up with somebody else, or the state of unemployment or Maggie Thatcher and terrorists, or The Troubles in general, and the brain-drain with all our young people like me leaving for America, Australia, New Zealand – following the sun.
A quick study, I was soon fixing turkey and all the trimmings like a pro. I even made pumpkin pie and candied yams (nothing from a can), and amber colored side-dishes and butternut squash soup, fare that would never have shown up at a fork supper or tea after a Harvest Home service at a country church in Northern Ireland. As if there wasn’t enough food to feed a small country, I was compelled to assert my Irish-ness with Brussel sprouts which Ken hated and roast potatoes and, for good measure, a Pavlova or a sherry trifle for desert – I could only make sense of Thanksgiving Dinner if I considered it an early Christmas Dinner. As if I’m not confused enough about my cultural identity. And to make it truly my Thanksgiving, we would listen to the entire Last Waltz soundtrack.
For tomorrow, I have ordered a turkey breast dinner. Just the breast, because that means there will be nothing to carve and no carcass for soup. Ken always carved the turkey, and he loved my turkey-noodle soup. Oh, how could I possibly brine and roast a turkey without Ken here to do the basting and the carving and telling me not to put apples or anything sweet in the stuffing? I always put apples in the stuffing. Why not? And when he wasn’t looking, I basted the turkey with maple syrup. I always add marmalade to the yams too and slices of clementines or even the syrup from cans of mandarin oranges. If it’s not sweet, what’s the point?
My parents are here, and already I am dreading the day they tell me it’s time for them to go back home to Castledawson and for me to resume living again. I hope they will stay for Christmas. My lovely irreverent friend in Tempe who hails from Ballynahinch and who knows about grief (as she will tell you herself, she is hands-down the winner in “The Sad Contest”) is going to bring a Pavlova and maybe even some currant squares and custard. And my mother will put the kettle on for us and make tea with Barry’s teabags and bring out a plate of Hobnob biscuits. I will complain if she puts too much milk in it, because I like a good County Derry cup of tea the way my Granda did, so strong “you could dance on it.’ Our meal tomorrow might feel a bit like a Northern Ireland Christmas dinner from days gone by. I just hope I remember to eat.
We have lots of food in the fridge – baskets of sympathy from near and far from heartsome people who ache for us. I don’t know what to say to them, other than thank you. And, my gratitude is heart-felt and genuine. But if I’m honest, I hate that it is these strange new gestures I am thankful for this year. It would be so much easier to give thanks that the turkey’s not dry.
Oh, Ken. Why did you have to die? There was something I wanted to tell you. It was important.
It doesn’t matter. By now, I have to believe you have run into Lou Reed, that the two of you have scored some really good weed from J.J. Cale, and you are feeling no pain. And maybe Seamus Heaney will raise a glass to you.
Cleaning the leaves from the pool is now part of my Saturday morning routine. An exercise in futility, because as soon as I think I’m finished, a warm breeze rustles through the trees and Mexican honeysuckle petals and leaves cascade into the water like confetti. I “shock” the pool too, with a powder of chemicals, and for good measure, I add a capful of something blue. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure the pool isn’t shocked at all.
Sometimes I wish my husband had left behind a list of all the household chores he did, so I would know all the things that still need to be done after I do what used to be my share. I never bothered to take stock of his share which included pool maintenance and going to the grocery store to pick up those items I invariably forgot. He always took a list, from which he never strayed. I, on the other hand, just took my phone, knowing I would call and ask him to peek in the fridge and let me know if we needed more eggs or milk or tomatoes. Naturally, he’d always ask why I hadn’t brought a list with me, and I would remind him, “Because I have you!”
I know I need to back-flush the pool pump (whatever that means). I remember him doing so with some regularity, but I never took the time to find out why or how or when. I know I need to change the air-filters but I don’t know how often or where to buy them. Knowing my luck, it will necessitate an outing to Home Depot or the mom and pop hardware store up the street, places I avoid like the plague.
To familiar faces at the grocery store or the gas station, I look the same as I always did. They just don’t know that the rings sparkling on the fourth finger of my left hand no longer mean that I’m married. Nor do they signify that I’m a widow. Ostensibly, nothing’s changed. If you were to ask the people who know me as the woman who drops her daughter off at school every morning, everything is as it has always been. I leave the trashcan and the recycling bin out on a Monday night, so the man who drives the City of Phoenix garbage truck would have no reason to believe anything has changed in my house. I wonder if the mailman knows – surely he must – but still he delivers letters addressed to both my dead husband and me.
I have to hand it to the Victorians with their explicit rules and regulations for mourning so that everyone knew, based on outward appearances, the extent of one’s grief over the loss of a loved one. Were I one of the ladies of Downton Abbey, the Dowager Countess might give me permission to go “into half mourning next month and back to colours by September.” Except doing so would confuse even more all those people who already struggle over what to say to me.
At the grocery store last Sunday, I managed to annoy the woman behind me in the checkout lane. There I was, in all my glory, in the 15 items-only lane with an overflowing grocery cart. I was oblivious to my mistake, perhaps because I had been so distracted by the realization that I would no longer need to buy men’s deodorant or razor blades or V8 vegetable juice. Of the three of us, only Ken had liked V8.
Unloading the more than fifteen items from my grocery cart, I was interrupted by a loud sigh from the inconvenienced woman behind me. “You do realize, don’t you, that this is the fifteen items only lane?” Well, no, actually. Had I realized the error of my ways, I would have been in a different lane. I apologized profusely for delaying her check-out, even as my mind raced with thoughts of all the things they don’t tell you about becoming a widow.
They don’t tell you how guilty you’ll feel when you tell the bank to go ahead and erase his name from the checking account or when you strike certain items of the grocery list because only he needed them. I wanted to scream at her that my husband was dead, that he was much better at doing the grocery shopping because he didn’t stray from the list like I do, that if he had been with me, we would have been in the appropriate check-out lane, that she was lucky to have her husband with her and less than 15 items in her grocery cart. I could have been petty and asked her if the six-pack of beer counted as one item or six, but I didn’t. They were in the right lane. I was not. But had we been going about our business in the Victorian era, with me in “full mourning attire,” I bet she would have given me a break. She would have somehow known that my heart was breaking over the fact that I had almost put the V8 juice in the cart but then realized I wouldn’t be needing it. Ever again.
There is no manual for this. There is no way of predicting when the grief will take your breath away and send you scurrying behind dark glasses or to the bathroom at work so nobody sees you crying. There are no rules about when or if you should stop wearing your wedding ring. My husband and I didn’t have a wedding with the exchanging of rings. We just got up one November morning in 1991 and decided to get married. We didn’t even tell anyone. It was just something we wanted to do for us. On a Christmas morning, twelve years later, my husband gave me wedding and engagement rings that I have worn every day since. I wear only a little jewelry, so I cannot imagine looking down at my left hand and not seeing those rings sparkle. Since there don’t appear to be any rules – although I’m sure someone has an opinion on this – I think I’ll just keep wearing them.
The ring question, however, is the least of my worries. I’m more concerned about what happens next. Obviously, there will be no resumption of normal activity because whatever normal was, it isn’t that anymore. There was the way I was before my husband died. I was on solid ground. One day stretched into the next with predictable routines and rituals that appeal to a creature of habit like me. Now there is an uncertainty, a kind of dread, about tomorrow and the next day.
Until I had to do them myself, I underestimated the number of mundane yet essential tasks my husband performed just to keep the house functioning. For someone with a lousy memory, he still remembered to take the garbage cans out; to open the gate for the lads who take care of the yard and to lock it again; to water the flowers that bloom madly in mild winters; and, when to shock the damn pool. He knew when to change the air-filters and the oil and when to renew the registration of our vehicles. He always fed the hummingbirds and checked the mail and did the laundry, and reminded himself to do so on post-it notes that accumulated in the basket where he kept his keys. He picked our daughter up from school every single day, and he was obsessive about being on time. He never wanted her to come out of school and not see him waiting for her.
Unlike me, he was punctual and practical and always put things back where they belong. He had a good sense of direction and, not to belabor the point, but he was always on time. My mother always said you could set your watch by him. Before you think he was a saint, he wasn’t. There were things he didn’t do and wouldn’t do and things he wasn’t good at, but that’s where I came in. Between us and for us, we made it all work. I can’t make it work the way it used to, because “it” is finished. A new and different stage of life – without him here – has begun. I have no idea where it will take me. If he were here, he would tell me not to worry, that I will do what’s best for me personally and professionally. He loved me and believed in me and even when I made mistakes – and I have made many – he remained in my corner. He had a way of turning my tribulations upside down to expose the humor in them, and he was quick to point out when I was making a shit-storm out of nothing. If he can see me now, he might be laughing at some of my recent exploits.
There was the night last week when my daughter wanted a tuna sandwich. Simple, right? It would have been except the can opener broke. Naturally, I immediately told her to Google “what-to-do-when-the-can-opener-breaks,” which led her to ask if by any chance we had a Swiss army knife. No. We don’t. Then she found a Youtube video on how to open a can without a can opener and, somehow, between us, with an ice-pick and a bread knife, we opened that can and scraped out every morsel of tuna. The good news is that I had the wherewithal to add “can opener” to the grocery list and for good measure threw in a new corkscrew as well.
Then, there was the evening when I decided to water the plants in the back yard before having dinner on the patio with my daughter. I had bought a new five pattern spray nozzle for the garden hose and was doing a fabulous job soaking and spraying and misting, until I needed to turn it off. Simple. Except the nozzle would not cooperate. When I tried to turn the faucet off, the hose began to leak, sending water shooting into the sky, soaking me and everything else on the patio. My daughter came out to save me from myself, and tried to help, only to get soaked and somehow to make the water come out even more furiously. In the middle of this mini-fiasco, each of us drenched, she asked – and I am not making this up – if we should call an electrician. An electrician?? I would love to have been on the other end of that phone-call. Now, I realize this is one of those stories that loses a great deal in the telling, but suffice to say, we eventually turned off the water and had dinner, without the intervention of a plumber – or an electrician.
It’s not all slapstick. In exchange for pasta and wine, my friend Rhonda came over and taught me how to use an electric drill. I’m always hanging things on the wall and destroying the plaster, but hanging things on the external brick walls requires more than a hammer and nail; it requires a drill and a masonry bit (which I had referred to as a masonry bite giving everyone in the hardware store a good laugh). My first project was to hang funky junky letters that spell p-a-t-i-o – on the patio. I know. I didn’t need them – I know where the patio is – but I like them. And that would be my stock answer to the question Ken always asked about why I keep bringing junk home.
In all, I am just very busy. I’m preoccupied too, with thoughts of how I can mother my daughter in ways that make her feel as though has more than one parent. How can I be more dad-like when she misses fatherly advice not to mention his unique brand of humor. I can’t. I can only re-tell all the stories that prove how much he loved her and hope that something therein will lift her up.
If it’s hard for me to know what to say to my daughter, I can only imagine how tough it is for other people. They don’t know what to say, worried that whatever it is will be the wrong thing. I never knew about Being. A. Widow. until it happened to me. I don’t even know what to say to myself about it. It is the subject some people do not bring up; the massive elephant in the room. I want to tell them that saying the wrong thing is better than saying nothing at all, that ignoring the chapter of my life that just ended makes me feel a bit like the way I felt when the bank removed his name from the checking account. I just wish they would say his name every once in a while and ask me if I miss him. Do you miss Ken? What do you miss most? How long has it been now? It would be easy and less sad for me if I could just talk about him without making people feel awkward. Asking me about him would allow me to tell a story about him, something funny perhaps, like the time he drove to work with no pants on, because the dryer was broken and all his jeans were still in the washer. It was before 5AM on a hot Phoenix morning, still dark outside, so he drove down the freeway with his Levis hanging out the car window to dry. Yes he did. Thinking about it makes me laugh, and laughter is great medicine; it’s a gift.
One of the first gifts my husband ever gave me was a silver pocket compass. Having noted very early in our relationship my stellar capacity for getting lost – and notwithstanding the fact that I was then a novice driving on the American side of the road – my man intervened as he knew best. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that I was never one for “orienteering” or map-reading; I was more of a free-spirited “let’s-just-see-where-the-road-takes-us” kind of gal, a far cry from those students back home who earned Duke of Edinburgh Awards. WIth that kind of attitude, I got lost all the time. Devil-may-care on the open road frequently gave way to panic. I would fret over whether to turn left or right, then commit to turning right only to look over my shoulder and realize I should have turned left. And then I would call to report that I was lost. Again. Invariably, he would ask me if the sun was behind me or in front of me, somehow believing that if he helped me establish North, I would be just fine. Naturally, that never worked, and he always had to stay on the phone with me until I found a recognizable landmark. So for our first Christmas together, he gave me the lovely compass which is still in the blue velvet lined box it came in. I always thought it was too much like a piece of jewelry to be practical and, anyway, I didn’t really need it to help me find my way home. I relied on himfor that.
With factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly “an App for that,” I am much better at finding my way around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area these days. It should be noted that if I have been somewhere at least eight times, I can get there without assistance. But until such times, I must count on either Google maps,Siri, my daughter reading directions from the phone that is smarter than us or those friends and colleagues who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination, where they are already waiting.
My daughter had never seen the compass. It was safe in a box with old birthday cards and Valentines from my husband. For her 16th birthday, I wondered what I could possibly give her to mark the occasion. What do you give to a teenager whose father died just three weeks earlier? For her birthday, there was not one thing I could go out and buy that would make her day any brighter or better. I don’t know why I thought of the compass, but it seemed perfect. In a rush – last minute, as usual – I had a local jeweler engrave the front of its case with her beautiful name, Sophie, and on the back, a perfect sentiment from W. H. Auden:
“He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest.”
He was my daddy for 5,809 days.
“Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat.” Patti Smith
Grafton Street, Dublin. November 2013
How do I begin to put the stuff of the past twelve months in a box and tie it up in a big red bow? Just begin. Pluck out a memory and wrap it up. Move on to the next. Handle with care. It’s the perfect day for it, New Year‘s Eve, a day designated for wrapping things up, for reminiscing and resolving; for Auld Lang Syne and kissing strangers; for holding on and letting go. For loose ends. For fireworks.
There was more to 2013 than its last forty-six days; there was a time when we were three instead of two. Like lightning bugs, the memories flash. Ken tapping his feet at a Fleetwood Mac concert this May, marveling at the genius of Lindsey Buckingham, wondering what Lindsey must be on and if he could get his hands on some of it. My fiftieth birthday and the wood floors I’d wanted for two decades in this little house finally installed. Expense be damned, I wanted it to feel like a California beach-house underfoot. Art supplies for Sophie’s summer college class.Binge-watching Breaking Bad in late summer. The three of us watching on my computer screen, an animated film in which a frail yet fervent 83-year old Maurice Sendak gives his final interview, each of us in tears when Sendak tells the interviewer,
Almost certainly I’ll go before you go, so I won’t have to miss you . . . Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.
Ken squeezed my hand at that part. I can almost feel it. I wonder did he feel that Mr. Sendak was speaking for him too? Now tears. But wait. Another memory and a smile. He with a wink, “Are you ready for Tony and the boys?” every night at 8PM when HBO re-aired the entire series of The Sopranos.
And then, unthinkably, big, invincible James Gandolfini was gone. And then Seamus Heaney. And then Lou Reed. Lou Reed. Ken didn’t want to talk about Lou Reed dying. But, Ken darling, did you forget we cannot have the magic without the loss? Two weeks later, you would be gone too, and if I could have just one more conversation I would tell you it is all going to be alright, because the loss of you, and all the pain of it, will never trump the magic. Never.
Yes. 2013 has been what a friend describes as”a full year.” A year lived fully. A cliche, maybe, but it has been a roller-coaster.
~ Photo by Adam Shaw
Remembering my first time on The Big Dipper roller-coaster at Barry’s in Portrush, I must close my eyes to better see myself again hurtling through the North Atlantic air. Curls wild in the wind, mouth agape, eyes squeezed to block out light and noise and fear, and me half-hoping to stay aloft forever, because ”coming down is the hardest thing.’’
At the top, breath suspended, I wait for the world to fall out beneath me. A sudden plunge at shocking speed has me convinced I am plummeting to my own death. But not yet. More unpredictable twists and turns await, above and below. White-knuckled, I am clinging to the bar, only half-believing there is enough life in the clickety-clacking, old machinery to set me down again on solid ground.
When it’s all over, I am free to return to the midway, albeit a little green around the gills, unsteady on my feet. As he helps me out of the car, I hope no one but the weather-beaten carnie can tell I am not as confident as once I was.
This New Year’s Eve feels tenuous, and I am settling in somewhere between Tom Petty’s”Learning to Fly” and Robert Frost’s lovely “Birches.”
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
Neither do I. Nowhere would it go better than a place where I can find myself held up, daily, by the kindness of people who have walked in my shoes, who feel my pain. People who know a thing or two; people I may never meet but who hold me in their thoughts and prayers, who light candles for me in faraway places, who say something even when they know not what to say. For reading, for remarking, for taking a step or two on the hard road with me. Thank you. We are forever bound in a human chain.
In November 2013, a few days before he died, I visited the graveyard in Bellaghy where Seamus Heaney is buried. And today, on the second anniversary of our poet’s death, my recollection of that visit is fresh – the mound of Derry soil not yet settled under a sycamore tree, no marker other than a makeshift sign at the entrance to the car park, two plants, a bouquet, and a handwritten thank you note. The sycamore leaves scattered on the dirt and wet from the rain, the clouds hanging heavy and low, I remember thinking that as a final resting place, a naturalist like my husband would maybe consider it.
Unsure what Heaney would think of it, local grave-digger, P.J. Rea, honored to tend to the job and moved by the number of people who visit to pay their respects, considers the unasked question:
