The unbearable loneliness of being

I have a husband and a family. I have lived a happy life. I HAVE a life, I am alive. But the news of your death is like having the rug pulled out when you didn’t even know you were standing on a rug.

The other day I cried and cried and S. said “Aw” but went about her business. Everyone’s tired of it, including me. I console myself reading the blogs of people in grief. Looking right into the mystery - there’s comfort there.

My eyes hurt from crying so much, though pretty much all I allow myself to do is leak. No wailing as it upsets the dog too much. My eyes are permanently puffy which has the weird effect of making me look both younger and uglier which is annoying. I don’t care, but I’m supposed to act like I do, so sometimes I do and put a little concealer on. But most times I don’t.

I wish you were here for me to tell you how right you were about what a waste of money it is to spend on clothes, furniture and “nice things”. Of course you didn’t need me to tell you, you were always confident of your values, the thing that people are admiring about you without being able to name it. I had a long talk with D. about it - you were a revelation to him, someone who didn’t care what other people thought, when *no one* cares as much as D. Or, cared, I should say. We’re both different now. We talked for hours about how you changed his life, and cried and cried. I’ll go see him when his country lifts restrictions. You’d heartily approve of the frugal Frodos we’ve become. I tell your mom, the queen of frugality, and we laugh remembering when she brought us frozen corn in tupperware in her purse, on the plane, because she didn’t want to waste it. Here’s me, crying again over welcome corn.

I find myself thinking a lot about our twenties, how we were always the youngest everywhere we went, whether your work functions or mine, and whatever softball league we played in. The annual trips with D. and M. The first thing they brought up when they saw me, was the scooters, the four of us on the beach, beers at the reggae bar. Sometimes I remember that and it’s like remembering a movie I saw, and not my own life.

All those races we did together, getting up early. In this our habits were reversed - normally you’d hit the snooze and consider it time well spent, while I was up and out of bed when the alarm went off. But when it came to race day, getting up at five or even earlier - I hated that part and grumbled and lagged while you shepherded us along. By the time we arrived I was over it and we’d walk around to stay warm, always vowing to invent some kind of re-usable/recyclable throwaway jacket all runners would be happy to buy, discard, then have it re-created then re-sold to them at another race like a circle.

The Bay to Breakers every year - the first year I was obsessed, for some reason, with counting the naked runners but soon got bored. After that though we took it deadly serious and ran it fast and well every year, once even getting an invitation to the front of the starting line, where the crowd hurled and twirled thousands of tortillas into the air before the starter gun sounded. The year it rained, we had to run all the way back home, drenched and freezing. We stopped midway at a coffee shop, pooling our change to get a small coffee and huddling over that for an hour pretending not to notice the people who wanted our table.

Now when I walk the dog that you’ve never met, I sometimes retrace our old running routes, including passing that same coffee shop every so often - it’s still there, though much around it has changed, and the street itself is transformed. Further down is a bar we liked to go to on Sundays for half priced beer and pizza after our weekly long run - it’s still there too, the sign sun-faded and unchanged from our last visit. But fewer and fewer of the old landmarks remain, even some of the music venues, like Slim’s are gone now. And while I’d probably not return to a place we haunted, it haunts me the choice has been taken from me, has been taken from you, time marching on.

Last night was a full moon, the harvest moon, just like the song. Sleepless, I took the dog for a ramble in the balmy air and played the song by Neil Young, remembering the night we went to see him perform right after the release of the album Harvest Moon. It was a small venue, and though we were now on our third house and no longer kids, we were again among the youngest people there, as Neil’s fans were generally children of the 60s, not Gen Xers. I remember sitting there with my eyes closed as Neil sang come a little bit closer, hear what I have to say, you squeezing my hand. Now I am listening to the song Harvest Moon while the harvest moon is full overhead, shining down on me out here in California where we moved together, and shining down on your gravestone back home among the cornfields too, and when I cry on Day 123 it is for all the days of ordinary magic you are missing.