Day 102
The dog gets upset when I cry. Even if he’s on the other side of the house, he knows and comes in and lays at my feet and won’t leave ‘til I stop. Eventually I do.
So far I haven’t cried today but it’s early.
I walk and walk, like we used to that first year only I don’t try to walk around the hills as you would, I just go straight up them. I walked past K’s place. Both of you being gone so soon is nothing any of us expected. Once you, me, her guide dog and our little guy had a picnic at the park between our places, remember? And I’m the only one alive now, definitely the worst of the bunch - I’m too honest not to acknowledge that. I’ve changed - there’s that.
Still haven’t opened the box, other than to read some of the letters from college but I had to stop after two. Did you save and re-read the letters I wrote to you, I wonder? I doubt it, my letters were always so long and chatty about nothing. Yours were easier to read - one page, always, and straight to the point.
It’s so fucking outrageous you are gone. People ask how you died. Stage IV cancer, caught too late. Maybe universal health care would have enabled you to catch it much earlier. You are that stoic type, you went to the doctor when something was wrong. That’s the midwestern way. I was there at your first screening, us still in Texas, divorce something that happened to other people, California not even a dream, and both of us a clean bill of health except your cholesterol was high, mostly because you ate steak en croute at the hotel restaurant the night before, something you wouldn’t order if you were paying for but gleefully did when the company was covering it. I can picture you now, digging in with a happy eye on the clock because we were supposed to be fasting no later than 6p. The nurse told you she’d never seen such back muscle development - meaning mine - and I was proud.
On the news, violence is threatened and executed. Suicide bombers in another country, in this one insurrectionists angry that the officer who shot one of their own - a man whose haunted eyes tell the only story worth listening to - has been held faultless. Your death is like a bass line playing under it all, the only thing I can pay attention to. The desperation of sadness keeps trying to burst out of me like the creature on Alien, birthed from the unwary guts of a guy who wasn’t careful enough with where he put his mug, not unlike the overconfident insurrectionist. They both got what in retrospect should not have been unexpected but certainly not deserved. If there is one thing grief teaches you it is that blame is as useless as karma is not real. Because if anyone would get to stay it would be you. There is no karma just the lightning bolt of loss leaving everyone stunned and blinking.