Telling People

It’s a mistake to think that just because you’ve been gone so long, everyone knows. Yesterday Beth wrote me - she’d read a reference in my blog about listening to ColdPlay and grieving my ex. Did C. pass away, she asked? I wrote and told her about the incurable cancer, discovered so late, and the wife and young children you left behind. I was writing to her as a washing machine was being delivered, I’m sure the delivery men wondered what in the world was wrong with me. They spoke no English and it was up to me to do all the talking in my rudimentary Portuguese, my husband was not home. I was cheerful and laughing at my grammar mistakes as I directed them to the delivery spot; then while they carried the washer down the steps I got Beth’s message, which had the inquiry about you buried near the end, or I would have known better than to read it in front of others. I thought I’d be able to handle telling her, but started crying as I typed, squinting to see the screen through the blur. I forgot all about the delivery guys until I pressed send and looked up to find them quietly standing there with a paper on a clipboard for me to sign, watching me cry.

My friend has died, I told them in halting Portuguese - I had to learn the word “died” when daddy passed - and they both put their hand to their hearts at the same time. I didn’t have the language to say, it happened nearly three years ago and I’m sharing the news with a mutual friend who is learning for the first time now. I felt guilty as if I were taking their sympathy under false pretenses. They were so kind, my voice kept breaking as I tried to finish our business. My husband came home just as the delivery men were leaving and saw my watery eyes. It’s Beth, I explained. She didn’t know about C., I had to tell her. Saying your name always brings the waterworks. He put his arm around me.

Karen said how good it was of my h to be so understanding about the persistence of my grief but it is no surprise to me. I cried about our divorce too, and it was my h who comforted me. You still love him, of course you do, he’d say, hugging me. Maybe only other divorced people can understand.

I’ve been listening to a song by the leader of the Pogues, Shane MacGowan who died. I remember how you listened to them a lot, and the Sex Pistol’s Johnny Rotten, his new band, I forget the name but I remember going to see them and you dancing to “Is Everybody Happy?” So few people in your life ever saw you dance, it was always such a joy to see. Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor wrote a song for the movie Sid and Nancy, about Sid Vicious and the girlfriend he killed. All four of them - Sid and Nancy, Shane and Sinead, have all died, all of them younger than me. I used to feel such empathy for people who kill themselves as Shane and Sinead both did, and I still do, but now it’s tinged with anger. Mostly at myself, I have always had that flirtation with depression and often had suicide ideation but after you passed, after hearing you telling me how you were hoping to eke out another five years of watching your kids grow up, after hearing the wistfulness in your voice…I won’t say the ideation hasn’t come knocking at the door but now I refuse to give even the thoughts oxygen by writing about them. It is such a betrayal of you, to entertain the thought of not wanting to live anymore. Like stealing from the future you were denied. I rarely have those thoughts anymore; when I do, I think of how I must guard what time I have left (I’m 60, can you believe it!) like the fleeting gift that I now understand it to be. Now, when depression comes knocking I feel like Thor, opening the door, my armour and weapons in place to confront it, only to find not some stinking dark monster but only a shivering child, starved and in ragged clothes, just wanting to come in from the cold. I don’t know where I’m going with this metaphor, except that maybe I’m realizing that depression is a part of me, nothing to turn away from. Maybe trying to ignore it, turn away from it made it stronger and more persistent. Maybe it deserves my empathy instead of all this rage and shame and fear and denial. Maybe I can let it in to warm itself by the fire of my love and compassion, and it will finally go away when it is ready.

There is a soundtrack to my sadness with only a little overlap to the soundtrack of our marriage. For the longest time while working I listened to Fix You on repeat. The line “I promise you I will learn from my mistakes” always brings tears. When walking all those nights in San Francisco I’d listen to Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’ duet, If This Is Goodbye. I’m so glad I told you that I told you I loved you that last call. I still smile at your surprised response - it was so you, and just like the first time I told you I loved you all those years ago in that little apartment on 7th Street in Charleston - you gave the exact same surprised response. Both times I didn’t mind, I wasn’t looking for your to say it back, I just felt it so strongly it seemed essential to tell you, to not give in to the usual fears and keep silent.

Another song I like to listen to is Shawn Colvin’s I Don’t Know Why. Hearing it I always remember us driving down Route 15 or some similar two lane country road. We were in your dad’s truck, and you pulled into a cutout for some reason - we were between two fields tall with corn, both belonging to Phil (how he misses you, crying with our foreheads together, watching our tears patter down onto the wooden floor of the reception room was maybe the holiest moment of my life). While you were off looking for what you were looking for I lay back on the bed of the truck and listened to this song and felt complete happiness, a happiness I was aware of, a happiness I thought about. Will life always be this good, is what I thought, hearing your footsteps approach, the driver’s side door open, the volume of the song louder, and the weight of you suddenly beside me, the sun burning red circles into the blackness of the inside of my eyelids.

Now the song I’ve been listening to for the past months is Haunted, the song by Shane and Sinead. (Remember that one summer when we listened to Sinead’s album on repeat, I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got?) Each time I listen I feel a kind of awe that they are both gone to wherever you have gone, leaving the rest of us here, haunted by the ghost of your precious love.