Just another full moon
(a note to any readers of this blog. I’m sorry you followed it reading a comment or something and thinking maybe you’ll read some good writing and it’s just a woman grieving inexplicably hard for her ex. I started this blog because grief is not only hard, it’s boring; people get tired of hearing how sad you are and I promise if, reading this, you realize this and unsubscribe that it’s totally okay.)
It’s foggy today. We moved here in the middle of fog season more than two decades ago and I was unprepared, uninformed, and unreasonably PO’d about it. Now I can’t imagine loving any weather more.
It’s going to be a full moon tonight, the last one of this first complete year of your absence. Facebook showed me a post I wrote two years ago under the then-full moon. Back when you were still alive, and still hopeful. Now nothing is the same, even the moon looks less full. The fact of your death is like a faint filter over the world. It’s still a beautiful world but now sepia with sadness. I still think of you every day. I guess I always will.
When you told me you were dying, part of me started dying too. Our last conversation set a timer in my heart, and I was aware of it ticking every single second until I got the word you were gone. The night of your death was one of many in which I lay awake, knowing you were approaching the transition (how I hate these fucking euphemisms). I wanted to talk to you with all of my might. I wanted to be next to you. I didn’t want to do anything but hold your hand and send the message every way that I could: what a good man you were. How happy you made me. How lucky I was. How generous you were. What a gift your intellect was, to everyone who knew you. Your kindness. The many hours we spent together, with almost no fighting, no conflict - we were happily compatible and did many things for the first time, together - snow skiing, wakeboarding, running marathons, traveling internationally, learning languages, starting businesses. You were the best man I knew, and divorce never changed that. I always admired you; I will always strive to be like you. I can hear your voice in my head, so clearly - I hope that never fades. I talk about you constantly to my husband who does not mind; he is very much like you and that’s not an accident.
It was always funny to me, that you called me by a nickname that no one I worked with ever used. That seemed as it should be. I never expected, though, that you would be the last person in my life, outside my immediate family, to call me by that nickname. And so the sound of your voice, saying my name, is a rare and beautiful remembered thing. That I’ll never hear it again is a symphony of sadness.
How wonderful you were. How I wish I could have touched you one more time. I know now, I should have just driven through the night, toward you. I should have sent you a message - I’m near, and will stay near. You could have called me to your side, then, if you wanted - or not. It wouldn’t have mattered, I would have been okay sleeping in the backseat of my rental in the parking lot of the nearest Casey’s.
But I couldn’t. Who was I, to take those precious moments from your family. I feared to put such a decision on you, whether to see me one last time. To presume that it would mean anything to you to know that everything I do that is good is because of you. That you have lived on inside of me, will always live on inside of me.
Grieving as an ex-wife is different than grieving as a wife. We were amicable, but became more and more distant as we piled up new life experiences that had no sharing point, as the sharing points reduced - the death of your dad, your grandma, all the graduations and marriages and births. Your own re-marriage, then mine, the children we ended up having so different than what we expected, when we married at 23.
So what have I come to understand is that I can love you any way that I want, in my heart and in my words. Father Neff said that I must never stop myself from expressing this love, to see my remembrances as holy artifacts of it. I told mom and she was just quiet, unable to process the peace I, an atheist, get from talking to the priest that married us.’ She thinks Father Neff doesn’t know about my atheism. I don’t disabuse her, it would confuse her more.
I want you to know that I’ve forgiven myself, as you wished, as you granted, as you requested, as you insisted. I decided that if you wanted it, then I should trust you. You chose your messages very carefully at the end, in your sorrow and pain, your hope and exhaustion. The best way I can honor you, our life together, is to let go of punishing myself, and embrace the beauty of life in all of its human fragility.
When I went to see Grandma that last time, I knew it would be the last time - she was 100 years old, and in assisted living, and it was strange but welcoming to see some of our furniture in her snazzy apartment - someone picked out the best things, I was pleased to note. The Chinese lacquer chest, the purple wool rug. I forgot what you looked like! she told me. At your funeral Aunt J. said that when she cleaned grandma’s room for the last time, there was a poem in a frame, handwritten by me, to her.
Just the other day I thought of you and felt no urge to cry. Called dad on his 86th birthday and we had a gentle laugh about your formal apology to me for not believing the Miata would be the last car I ever bought. I didn’t believe you! you said in disbelief about yourself, and in admiration of me. One thing about you, you never felt offended when, after years of knowing each other, I suddenly displayed an interest or a preference or a trait that was unfamiliar to you. People get weird about stuff like that but you never did - you had room for not just your multitudes, but mine. How lucky for me that our paths crossed when they did. I’d change nothing, except skip the wedding ceremony and instead let mom and dad come around in their own time.
When I last talked to R., we broke into tears at the mention of you, both of us kind of laughing and gasping. What difficulties she has been through, since the loss of her husband, guide and protector in a strange land. I hope you did not die with too much anxiety in your heart for her and the kids. Their lives will always be shadowed by the loss of you, but they are thriving. Unsurprisingly to anyone who sussed your true genius, V. started college as a pre-teen. Your mom is bursting with pride, she sees you in V. We all do.
Since you died I spend a lot of time walking alone, mostly at night. Never the places we walked. I listen to music - not music we shared, but new music. I think of you with every step, some days, and others I just walk along in a blur of tears, the music stitch by stitch closing the big gaping hole in my heart.
I went to another country for awhile, thinking I’d think of you less in the unfamiliarity of it all, but I still broke into tears both times I mentioned you. Does the fact that I cry just saying your name mean that I accept you are gone, or am resisting it? I don’t know, I only know I miss you, will always miss knowing you are somewhere out there in the world.