Day of the Dead

Last week I went back to one of the places we lived, to see some of the close friends that we made together twenty long years ago, people we have traveled with, ate dinner with, camped with, spent endless nights on porches drinking beers in the soft summer dark. Friends we both kept being friends with even after we were no longer together.

We reminisced, toasted you, cried over you. I told T. about your last hours, the story your mom told. I told them about your last picture - they couldn’t bring themselves to see you so close to the end. They asked about R., the kids and I wonder, will any of us see any of them again? You were the glue that held us together, if R. takes them back to her home country, would your mom see her grandkids again? It’s not my business, but your mom is my connection to you and your kids, and I’ve left your kids some mementos of you - your cool black high school letter jacket with your last name (still mine) emblazoned on the back, and the opal ring we chose for the engagement ring, a round stone with three tiny diamonds like wings on each side. Maybe V. won’t like it but it is something you chose with your own eyes, and touched and held. You were a young man, just 23, a man you maybe didn’t get much of a chance to tell V. about, she being just 11 when you died.

Whenever I think of you, you are always smiling. Your blue eyes always warmed up when you smiled. I clowned around a lot to make you laugh. M. kept reminding us of your unique laugh, I was so glad that he remembered it too - the way you turned your head to the side and had that high pitched giggle, so unexpected for the big, stern looking guy you could sometimes be. It was a laugh that had kindness inherent in it.

People talk about ‘accepting’ your death. I don’t know what that means. I mean, of course I ‘accept’ it, it’s a fact, you are burnt up and I would probably taste the ashes if I could which is maybe macabre maybe not but you have to admit it is *accepting* in the strictest sense. I know for a fact you are not coming back except maybe in my dreams (so far not though) or in the form of whatever your energy has taken now, which will most assuredly not be the tall, muscled, good natured blue-eyed guy I was married to for twenty years, twenty long years ago. The tragic face of your young widow and your children with their still, careful faces are as much testament to that as my own cracked heart, my own second family surrounding me with love as I grieve for you.

Maybe all they mean by “accepting” it is, please don’t be so sad, please try to love the life you have. Don’t forget the ones who love you right here and now. And I do try not to be sad - I distract myself with forward motion, the little actions that, day after day, constitute a life. At some point it will feel normal again, time will, not all stretched out where I can feel the crack in my heart widening from one minute to the next.

I suppose at some point I will be accustomed to the thought that you are not here, that the thought itself will not bring tears to my eyes. I will get used to you being not just gone to another country gone, gone with another family gone, but gone gone. But I will never not be sad you aren’t here. I really loved you, I never stopped, that wasn’t the problem between us. Our marriage didn’t end because we stopped loving each other - even I knew that, even T. knew that, she said this past visit. I know you knew that, even *my husband* knows that, he is the one after all who took me in his arms when I wept over the true end of our marriage, saying with infinite understanding, “of course it’s hard, you’ve loved each other a long time.”

It was a good thing, a necessary thing, to sit with people who knew you and loved you as part of a couple that I was half of. I went straight to B.’s workshop from the airport. I walked up on him welding something, a metal helmet on his head, sparks flying. I had to call his name twice, had time to observe the changes that cancer had wrought on him in the past four years (not too many as it turns out -he is robust looking as ever, if still changed in four years, like all of us). Then he pushed the visor back and I was standing in front of him and he said something elliptical about the loss of you, being oh so careful of my feelings, and fixed those unsettling light eyes of his on me, so kind and understanding that the tears welled up and my face screwed up like a little kid and we cried for a few minutes in each other’s arms, the sadness of you gone morphing into the gladness of being here, now, together, a feeling much more urgent for poor strength-tested B. who is no stranger to grief these days with all these years as caretaker under his belt and now his mom gone too. We talked about grief, about A. (so so fragile now), about his cancer (now in remission), about yours.

Back at A. and B.’s place there are reminders of you everywhere, though they moved to this place long after you last saw them. They still have the ceramic dishes just like ours, when we bought them all in Santa Fe that time B. flew us there in his little four seater plane. We went to dinner with T. and S. and we toasted you, all of us remembering that night the six of us got together at S. and T.s, everyone was amazed I still remembered the menu ( pork loin and pomegranate margaritas). Like then, they still have a little herd of rescued d-dogs, a 200% turnover since you were last here, so everything in that department is the same but also totally different. Death has a way of doing that I guess.

Before heading to M and T’s, S. took me on a tour of the park where you and I used to run with K., training. Remember that year we were trying to qualify for Boston and K’s husband tried to stop her and we would drive up to her house in the pre-dawn hours, lights off, and she would sneak out of the house and not slam the car door until we’d turned the corner? I stood at the stone water fountains, still unchanged. You and K. are both gone now, so much sooner than any of us then could have ever imagined. Both of you diagnosed in Stage IV. She got to Boston years before me. Had someone said to us the last time we stood at that fountain “Two of the three of you will die before the age of 55” I would have been certain one of them was me. Now here I am in a park so transformed but this part, the part you and I knew so well, still preserved.

So then it was over to M. and T.s place. They wondered if I wanted to go anywhere that reminded me of you but their place *is* that place for me, they are those people for me, and I for them. I could have driven by our old place when I had the rental but I did not choose to do that, found I couldn’t quite bear to look at that sidewalk leading to that front door (is it still merlot-colored I wonder). Just imagining driving over there, the pattern of turning the corners in that neighborhood makes my heart feel strange.

I stayed in their back guest room, the one with the white bedspread. There is a good chance you’ve slept in this room, and I know we have each slept in the green room down the hall. T. says your energy is everywhere in the house. As usual I could not sleep much and woke each night to the moon filtering through the trees and making shadow shapes on the wall opposite the bed, wondering if you ever looked at those same shapes in the middle of the night. Certainly the tree outside the window is the same from even ten years ago. I whispered your name but there was nothing, just the sounds of a night-quiet house.

I was set to go home on Saturday and then my flight got cancelled until the following day and in a nation of thousands of similarly stranded travelers maybe I alone was happy, falling back into the embrace of our friends. It was a perfect day in a city that we once moved to with all of the optimism in the world and lived a life surrounded by love and beauty and family and friends. Now three of us were sitting together again, in a place where you, too, had once sat, rounding out the three, perhaps my own absence like a presence as yours has always been.

M. put on some music. I had told them about the song you once said reminded you of me. I paired with M.’s speaker and played it and found that I could not stand there with anyone looking at me, I felt so naked with grief. I danced around wildly with my eyes closed on the far end of the patio, watched by the big heritage trees. M. perhaps sensing my emotional turmoil wandered over to lay in the sun, far enough for privacy but near enough to talk if I needed. I spun around with my arms and hair flying out and my eyes closed, faster and faster. The concrete felt cool under my bare feet. I remembered how the song had come on the radio which was emanating from the speakers of the blue boombox (the one that you’d given me in my 20s and I had taken to the office all through my 30s, and somehow had found its way to the top of our refrigerator in this new place we lived in, the fourth city in twenty years we called home), the one that goes and I wonder if anything could ever feel this real forever/ if anything could ever be this good again filling that narrow, dark kitchen on B____ Street, and you saying this right here, this line, it always makes me think of you.

I wonder if there were other songs that made you think of me, the way that song from the film Dancer in the Dark will always and only evoke you, from yet another moment in that same cramped kitchen on B_____ street. Me prepping for dinner and bawling because the song on the CD from the film was the one they played as she went calmly to her death, singing. You coming into the kitchen, and taking it in all in one glance and giving me a hug and pouring me some wine.

Thank you for coming, T. said, holding me as I was leaving. I needed to grieve him, we needed to grieve him.

The first night I was there, early in the morning M. came out and sees me sitting there on the couch watching the sunrise, my laptop nearby. Later he says, that’s the same spot you always sat in on your visits. Strange to think how often we’d been there together and separate.

T. said, I know that someday you will close your eyes and open them up and C___ will be there waiting and I don’t remember the rest of what she said because I was crying. For me heaven/afterlife is always pictured the same way, a great big lawn party with happy people in clusters that form and reform as people walk around and it’s like the best party ever because you know everyone in some way or another and you are mutually happy to see each other because of course it’s heaven. There would be a long line of trestle tables, as dad used to call them, the kind always covered in red checkered plastic tablecloths that you put your casserole dish or plate of brownies on, and some ladies would take off the plastic wrap or the lids and add serving spoons and just sort of generally hover asking everyone if they got enough cole slaw or jello salad. There would be talk of fireworks later (but likely we’d just watch lightning bugs morse code in the dark) and plan how tomorrow we’d all float down the river with our canned beers in coozies to keep them chilly, someone floating a cooler behind their raft. There would be a band setting up, singing the country standards that remained a core part of you throughout your life. You were a man of the world, families in two different cultures and countries, open to new experiences like no one I had ever met before, and only once or twice since. But you didn’t outgrow the friends of your childhood, or any friends you made along the way. You collected them and took them along with you.

I’m so sorry, I told you, my eyes swollen with weeping when we confirmed our separation would be permanent. And you told me, Don’t cry, baby (you always called me baby, and the habit had not died yet even after a year of living apart). We both made mistakes, you told me. It’s not your fault, no one’s at fault. I cried harder at your loving generosity, me sitting on that little stool in the office-guest room, you sitting on my desk chair. The blue foldout couch in that room went to M. and M. upstairs - they live in Costa Rica now and mourned the news of your death, M. reaching out to me to remember when you helped their son get set up in Korea (so many people with stories like that). The desk and chair were part of the sale of my last business. The stool I still have, stashed under a bookcase, just as I have the red leather chair in my bedroom.

I have so much of C’s music, M. confirmed. The amazing breadth of it had still not quite tipped them off to the emotional role it played in your life, and they loved all the live music stories I told them, memories I have had no reason to share with anyone. Remember sitting in your Camaro in a farmer’s driveway somewhere in the middle of central Illinois. The farmhouse had been long since deserted, just like the one in the Aimee Mann song (and for which I have a different memory of you). The sky out there was tall and fluffy white clouds sailed it like a cerulean sea and there was nothing to see but cornfields for miles around. You got out of the car, I no longer remember why, and I sat there in the car with both doors open, creating a nice cool wind tunnel. Sean Colvin was on the CD player singing I don’t know why the sky is so blue / if there were no music / Then I would not get through and it was one of those perfect moments you don’t even think about while you are living it, you just think it’s another day in your life and things will always be like that. I remember though, that day, the way the wind sounded in the big oak trees in the farmer’s front yard, the way the tassels on the corn bent and waved. The way you looked walking towards me, smiling, you with your blue eyes and me with my legs dangling and singing I don’t know why I know these things but I do.