Day 151

Once I was at a restaurant near our old condo (by then, mine alone) eating lunch and talking to M. about her various beaus. And as we talked and laughed, a woman sitting at the only other occupied table on the patio burst loudly into tears.

It was so startling. I didn’t go to her. I didn’t say anything to her. Neither did M., who is so empathetic. We didn’t know what to do. We were scared of intruding on her privacy.

Of course that woman was in grief, I realize that now, because I am similarly overtaken in innocuous situations - not long ago I burst into loud tears near the avocados at Trader Joe’s. Another time I started crying when the crosswalk signal came on, remembering we used to call that little symbol “walkyman”.

If I could have that day on the patio over again I would walk to that back corner of the garden and sit next to her and take her in my arms while she cried. It’s going to be okay, I’d tell her. You won’t feel like this forever.

That’s what I tell myself when I am lying on the couch at four in the morning, tears trickling as I watch, again, the moon set in the west through the big living room windows. The word “waves” is used a lot, people talk about waves of grief. It’s apt, it’s literal, there are literal waves of grief. Sometimes I surf them, shooting down a tunnel with the pain all around me and me knowing I’m going to get wet but I’m not going to get killed this time. Other times, most times, I get killed, the wave slamming me to the bottom and pinning me there in a washing machine of emotion.

I flipped through all of my pictures of you, something I don’t allow myself to do often. I linger on the ones from Spain, with you and R. looking really happy. Seeing your face happy makes me so happy, but also is a spear right to the heart, knowing your pain to leave it all was in equal measure.

Your death is like a boulder dropped into the middle of my house, and life just resumes around it, the new normal, but now there is this huge knowledge, this intractability of knowledge. The cold hard fact I can touch, lean on, wet with my tears. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. The meaning of my life is what I give it. I’d have given you a year of my life for a year more to be added to yours without a second thought (and I wouldn’t even first hedge, asking to know how much time I had left) but no one offered me that bargain, much less you.

Father N. says that the best way to expend this excess of leftover love I have for you is in being the best person I can possibly be.

Now, when I write, I remember that moment in the living room on B___ Street, when I read you the day’s output and felt like it was pretty good, and was excited for the way the narrative was coming together. The way you were smiling at me, your eyes shining and when I asked why you said, because you are happy. At the time, I assumed what you were happy to see was my productivity, my finally getting going with the writing thing in a serious way. And you were happy about that, happy to see forward motion and my absorption and motivation which to that point had always been directed so lucratively at other things, like my corporate career. But you were also just happy for me, happy in that moment to be with me, drinking red wine in the living room of a city we had just relocated to and the sound of the traffic trickling through the door cracks as we talked and made our plans.

The striped chair you were sitting in then now sits in my family room, where my husband sits in it working, if he’s taking a break from the desk in his office. If I go to him he will glance up to see if I want to talk, his face open and pleasant. We are recovering from something like a fight; fighting is something we do very rarely but always dangerously. Why do you have to be so sensitive, he asked me once, a question that was sincere and pleading and not at all blamey and that still makes me bark startled laughter. Might as well ask why I’m still here and you’re not. Of course I know that the ties that bind us are too many and too thick to sever with a single word, day, event. One can decide to try, of course, but it doesn’t work - I know this from personal experience, as do you. I was tied to you more profoundly than I knew, says Ingmar Berman’s Johan to Marianne, his wife, in Scenes From a Marriage when he finally realizes that walking away easily is not at all the same as forgetting easily.

I’ve been thinking about this film a lot, actually. In part, because of what R. wrote. After I read your email he asked to be alone for a long time, and I know he was thinking of his time with you, she emailed me. (Such graciousness, to tell me. Such love for you.) I hope good memories predominated.

Something Roger Ebert wrote about the film and the marriage in it (which like ours after 20 years ends in a divorce that leads to a lasting friendship) resonates for me in the here and now. He calls the film a heartbreaking masterpiece but for me the mastery is in his, Ebert’s understanding of what Bergman was trying to say about marriage, what my grief is maybe trying to tell me about ours.

Beyond love, beyond marriage, beyond the selfishness that destroys love, beyond the centrifugal force that sends egos whirling away from each other and prevents enduring relationships - beyond all of these things there still remains what we know of each other, that we care about each other, that in twenty years these people have touched and known so deeply that they still remember, and still need.

I didn’t know I still needed you, though even as I write that I think maybe something inside me did know, maybe that knowing is where the cry was wrenched from when you paused before telling me your diagnosis, a pause with a single indrawn breath in which I heard the rare sound of your suppressed tears. In that pause I knew everything and I cried out as if shot.

But the most beautiful thing Ebert says is about that haunting quote from Johan, when he says that to his ex-wife, about being more profoundly connected than he knew, something Ebert said even better, more explicitly: In some fundamental way they have touched, really touched. And the memory of touching like that will be something to hold on to all of our days.