Cruelty

One of your greatest fears was cremation.  You spoke of it so often and with true horror.  Then they went and burned your body up. They didn’t know how you’d have hated that, because they never asked me. I was the only person in the entire world who knew you and knew all about you and what you thought and felt, but they never asked me.

You said over and over, Tom, that you were deliberately drinking yourself to death. And you did just that. You went and did it, methodically and with intention. And when I called it suicide, they said I was disrespectful.

Tom, they held your funeral without telling me. Without telling me. They didn’t want me there.  They said so. They said, after the fact, that they didn’t want me there because they thought I would make a scene. Which, okay, made me laugh a little, thinking of the absolutely staggeringly grisly, unpleasant, unpalatable, unseemly, inconvenient, horrific, deliberate body horror that was your life and death.  Now that, that was a scene. Had I been allowed, I would have flown into England, put on a nice dress and flat shoes for the graveyard, stood quietly, and left when it was over.  No scene.  I’m not you, Tom, except in effigy.

I held you in my arms, Tom, I knew every inch of you as I knew my own body, and still they wouldn’t let me speak with the medical examiner, because, they said, they were satisfied with the findings.  They didn’t have imagination to think that I wasn’t going to argue with a coroner, I just needed to know for myself what exactly, not generically and second-hand to boot, happened in your lonely end.

Tom, they told me I was upsetting them for begging to have our rings returned to me.  They said the rings didn’t belong to me.  They said I was bothering them and they didn’t want to think about it.  They gave our rings to the old woman who made you sandwiches, and brought you the vitamins you refused to take, and she told me I had no right to the rings and that she was going to send them only if she felt like it sometime.  Our rings, Tom.  They made me beg for our rings.

The cruelty seems so strange to me.  Why would anyone be this cruel to your special person, while still claiming to love and miss you? Do they not realize that it’s cruelty? Surely there is no nuance to keeping me away from your funeral? Or making me beg for things?

But then again, they didn’t really know you, so of course they didn’t know me and barely knew of my existence or how long we were together or what I meant to you.  I have tried to wave them off my conscious mind.  But this pain won’t go away.  The shocking pain of the unfairness of it.  Very often, things aren’t fair though are they.  I wonder why anyone ever expects fairness. You know what though? Sometimes, Tom, I wish I’d never even met you. I didn’t even want to be at your stupid fucking funeral, anyway.

The Truth Is

I liked to put my nose in your mouth and nudge your last fragments of teeth apart so that I could better get at the clues in there, from the broken edges all the way down to your liquored insides, the facts and the signs and the omens of you: smell of cider, rum, and brandy, ether on a handkerchief, the sticks you chewed when you were hungry, instead of eating, or bored, instead of living; smell of deep wet moss and brine from the sea and from your hobby of pickling yourself, smell of kosher dill half-sours and the cockles nicked from the shop, the smell of creaking barrels in ships’ holds, of bonfire and trash fire, smell of lit incense you swallowed and then released in wisps from your throat, smell of candy and nuts, and old rugs before a beating

Then there was something else I recognized, the certainty of your end, that every kiss foretold on the rich savor of your alcoholic breath: dark rot and drip, the flyblown suicide behind a deadbolt

After the First Death, There Is the Second Death

 

Dear Tom,

Webster’s dictionary defines death as…I kid, I kid.  Your death especially holds a lot of symbolic and historical meaning for people, because you really didn’t let many get close or stay close.  You were practiced at doling out fleeting intimacy, at random times, and to random people, and, as all dire alcoholics, prone to the occasional very noisy soapbox paean to the figures of your past (delivered in slurred voice and teary eyes to God) (those paeans drove me batshit.  They were repetitive and dull, not to mention clearly disingenuous, and, once in awhile, about old lovers).

You gave me your key and let me use it, tried as hard as you knew how to make me welcome in your very tiny, well-defended, private world.  I knew all your habits and little ways, all of the thousands of moments that made up a day in the years of our cobbled-together transatlantic partnership.  To me you weren’t symbolic or historical or an imago (well, maybe you were an imago, but isn’t every love relationship built on that?).  You were daily hours of the good and the boring and the enraging and the prosaic, and illuminated moments of transcendent joy, and infuriating fights, then chili on the stove, ice cubes clinking in brandy, discussions of art music poetry the multiverse and Death, but also thank you for buying my favorite bubble bath, and thank you for drawing the baths without number, and for washing my hair.  And then what the fuck your snuff has fallen all over these fresh white sheets, what will they think of us in this, the nicest of all hotels, also wash your socks I’m not the first woman to remind you.  Never mind all that.  You know what I mean.  You know that I saw you in the here and now, and I loved you.

Love,

Leah

Questions

Alex, we have so much to discuss.  A lot has happened since you left me.  There are the things I need to catch you up on: Haverford was the choice! How funny is that! And Itsy’s death, her final meal of a Starbucks breakfast sandwich, I let her eat the whole thing and still she yowled and shouted for more.

And I want to know about you: did Itsy come and meet you? And were you glad to see her, and did you laugh when you spotted her lumpy little body trundling your way? Are there pee pads there, or is incontinence an inconvenience of our Earthly Life only?

Did you meet your dad? Did you celebrate your birthday? Do you wear your body, or are you something else now?

Can you see me from where you are? Are you still mad at me, or are you proud at all of the way I’ve handled the hard things?

Did you think the wake and funeral were okay? Were you embarrassed by the open casket, and how everyone looked at you, or looked away?

Do you know how much you are on my mind?

Also, Alex, what the hell is your iPhone passcode.  Tell me! Or do I, perhaps, not want it? You can tell me that, too.  And tell me more about all these people I’ve met for the first time, who were such a big part of your life.  Did you like him? He checks in on me, I think he assigned himself that role.  Is he the right person for the job? Did you think that other guy, I bet you know immediately who I mean, was a creepy freak the way I do, or is there some back story to him, that you could fill me in on? I’ve speculated a lot, and I have my suspicions, could you corroborate?


Oh and most important: are you really dead, or was it an elaborate fake, are you working under deep cover somewhere, and will a black SUV with tinted windows pull up beside me on an evening in early spring a year or two from now, will you jump out and give me an awkward half wave, smile sheepishly, apologize a hundred times for all the pain, hug me and tell me you’re alright, just working and they needed you more than I did, and it was the right time.  Because I think that might be a possibility, too.

But if I do ask, and you tell me you’re dead, I’ll believe you.

Imprint of the Barrel

It’s getting better in some ways, and much worse in others.  I have weeks of light, of hope and happiness, and then a week of relentless frightening grief, so strong I’m sobbing every day, alone and for hours until I’m dehydrated and sick.  I live with his books on the shelf; his army jacket in the closet; the stacks of 1/72 scale Thunderbolts, Corsairs, Hellcats, and Spitfires that he never got a chance to put together and paint, in his exacting way.  I don’t even see those things anymore.  But occasionally I’ll stumble on something that pulls me down fast into the bog of grief.  Today it was his leather holster, the one he’d used for 20 years to keep his personal handgun on his belt.  He was never without that gun.  They came and took the gun away, the night he died (I’m not licensed and also they move lightning-fast so the widow won’t have an easy way to commit suicide, in her confusion and despair, is what I believe), but they left me with this.  The deep imprint of the barrel, the memory of a gun so clear it’s hardly a memory at all but a feeling as real and immediate as bullets.  I loved him so much, his guns and books and models and Marlboros and how he knew everything about me from the first night we spent together, almost like he was a supernatural creature, a witch, a demon, or a god.  I was so scared of him.

Always

At the end of miles and miles of winding country roads, past farms both sprawling and humble, tall corn and bulky cows rumbling and ruminating in their fields, past the plenties of rich red sumac and sunny goldenrod, past the darkest wines and palest pinks of hydrangea, through brief breezestorms and eddies of the first falling leaves, that catch light as they swirl and scatter in front of me, past all this is Alex in his last place, in the lovely business of his new season: rest, and calm, solace and reward, a return to earth and all its light, color, movement overflowing.

His small grave stands in a military row, at ease between two very old servicemen, Frank and Winston, who died around the time he did, and I like to think that maybe he had a chance to meet them on his way; he always did like to talk with old soldiers.

He’s gone from what we call life.  But no one told me that if you lean your cheek lightly against the face of a gravestone that’s been sunning itself in a field on a clear afternoon in late summer, the marble is warm as living flesh.  And if you lean in and touch cheek to grave, and close your eyes and breathe quietly, it’s exactly the sensation of leaning on the smooth bare sun-warmed shoulder of a man you loved.

Living Things

The ivy is growing back, on the wall across from Alex’s spot, the kitchen window where he sat often and for hours, playing guitar or reading Terry Pratchett, or just watching the birds at their birdy business in the soft green.  In 2007, the building owner put hired men to work cutting that ivy away, we never knew quite why.  We watched as it came down in huge veils, to land in, and then smother, our little yard.  I cried and cried from the loss; there was nothing left but a terrible bare city wall.  Alex promised me that one day it would come back, because ivy on stone always does.  It grows again, climbing slowly and steadily over the years, until one day it’s as if it had always been there.

Yesterday I brought my girl to college.  I helped her pack her beautiful clothes, carefully, in boxes.  I made sure she has an electric kettle for hot chocolate on cold rainy days, when I’m not there to make it for her (“you make the best hot chocolate, mama!” even though it always came from packets).  We loaded the car without a fight, no tears or recriminations, no stubbed toes, no hassles, it all fit perfectly.  We drove two hours, we didn’t get lost.  We joked, we laughed.  It was time.

I can usually find the words to tell a story.  I can usually find its center, and its movement and meaning.  The metaphor and the narrative.  Today, it’s just these facts: He’s gone.  She’s gone.  The ivy grew back.  Here I am.

Here's How It Could Have Gone: Sudden Death Edition.

Rewind three and a half months.  6:30 pm, February 3rd.

"Hey, Leah, I feel really bad, weird.  Anxious and sweaty and nauseous.  Oh and my shoulders hurt and my face is numb.  I think I'm having an anxiety attack."

"You are, sweetheart.  Because those are all the symptoms of an anxiety attack.  Anxiety attacks are the name of the game for our family.  It's only ever an anxiety attack.  I mean I know that's really my wheelhouse, and you don't really get anxiety attacks, but of course that's what it is.  Lie down and I'll rub your back and don't worry, I'll stay with you."

*has anxiety attack that's really a massive heart attack for 20 minutes while I soothe him and rub his back.  Stands up for a glass of water.  Falls down, unable to speak.  Reaches out wordlessly and sightlessly.  His nose bleeds. I call 911 screaming and can hardly even remember the address for what feels like ages.  He dies on the floor before the EMTs can get to him.  They try anyway.  But it doesn't help.  Dead is dead. The End.

"Those are all the classic symptoms of a heart attack darling [as anyone would realize], so lie down very still and we'll get help quick--"

"911, what is your emergency?"

"My husband is NYPD, he's having a heart attack and we need help very quickly.  Thank you.  Here's the exact address, the door will be propped open for you.  I'm calmly helping him in all the right ways.  But please do hurry."

Ambulance arrives just before he would have collapsed.  They do magical twinkly things and then he has an emergency quadruple bypass and survives.  The End.

Two Beds

Midnight, I'm lying in the soft bed, the dog curled into my side.  She's already asleep, comfy and unworried.  I'm lying in the soft bed, in the dark, barefoot and thinking of you in the dark in the cold graveyard, you in your coffin deep underground under the earth, in your suit and shoes.  Spring comes late to the Adirondacks where you are now.  Midnights in the graveyard are cold.

In all my imaginings of the way things might turn out for us, never did I ever think there would come a midnight in spring like this, I in the bed alone and you alone in the grave.

Last Touch

I'm not scared of a dead body.  I know now that no harm can come to me from sitting with a beloved corpse, or holding its hand, or kissing its lips and forehead or stroking its hair.  No harm from a last teasing tweak of familiar dead toes with hobbit hair and funny familiar toenails carelessly trimmed.  No harm in laying a warm hand on a still-warm furry cozy bare tummy that won't ever again be pressed to my bare tummy.

You grew cold, fast.  Then colder still and stiffer and then there was the autopsy and the death mask makeup and soon there was no truly human landmark on your body, by which to find my way, and still no harm came to me in the last moments with you, the last moments I would ever experience in the presence of corporeal you.  I stood with the funeral director at the very end of the longest week I've ever known to date, it was finally quiet, just the three of us, and he told me he would put the ring on your finger, before he closed the casket.  I told him I wanted to do it myself, I wasn't scared, and he said "okay."  I carefully unbent your dead ring finger and carefully worked the sterling ring, the one I made just for dead you, over the dead knuckle and then I placed your dead hand nicely back where it had been, and ran my fingers through your hair to mess it up a little, to make sure you looked a little more like you, in preparation for the journey you'll make alone, the return journey of your body to the earth.  The last touch was only ours and ours alone, because touching the living you who touched me back and the dead you who couldn't, that was all part of our story.