When we made the 3 hour drive between my folks and yours, the miles of corn unspooling on either side of the road would get really monotonous so I’d sing in the car. Not along with the radio either - I’d sing your requests, like a concert. You admitted to selecting the most difficult songs to sing a capella, just to see if I could.
I didn’t think of it even then as love at first sight but the first time I saw your face as you were you walking past me at the factory we both had summer jobs at I knew with 100% certainty we’d be together. I’ve never really analyzed why. It just felt like something that was meant. Like I recognized you. Our wedding song started out The first time ever I saw your face, a really old-fashioned choice but I liked it for its literality. There was also the coincidental fact it was written for a man that had the same name as you, another little bit of synchronicity that felt meant.
Sometimes in the middle of the night I wake up and walk around the dark house (and I’ve tried saying your name three times at the mirror in the dark because we saw Candyman and Beetlejuice but still no sign) and I look out my window at the streetlit dark and I think it’s a good thing they cremated you because I might be too tempted to dig you up and look at you. This is not something one can say or write out loud thus this blog. People would think I am kidding and I am not. It’s not the kind of thought I can share with just anyone but I told my husband and he said yes, in the theoretical world where you’ve been buried intact, he would help me dig you up so you can see why I love him1. That’s what they did in the movie Captain Fantastic - the dad leads his kids on a ‘mission’ to dig up their dead mother and they have a ceremony and then they tie her to a raft and light it on fire and push her out to sea. I didn’t even cry during this scene - I held my breath. Because I really dug the idea of being able to dig you up and I was actually in that moment watching the film full of regret that I would not have that chance. I know how gross it sounds but if you can’t be honest with your anonymous fucking grief journal who can you be honest with.
I am not looking to burn you up in some ritual or something (anyway you were already burned up - and was there a ritual? this I would like to know). There’s no setting you afloat with the tide, you’d hate that anyway, you respected and feared the ocean and would not want to be floating on it at night alone, this I am sure. I would just hold your hand, and kiss your cheek and lay with you for awhile. Maybe sing a song or two which is where this all stemmed from, as so many memories of you do, hearing snatches of songs I used to sing to you (like the line this is just a dream). Maybe leave a keepsake in your pocket. If I remember to bring a scissors2 maybe I’d cut a piece of your shirt from where it was touching you, and then I guess I’d just bury you again.
It’s very hard to see you so wasted by pain in those final pictures, but I’m glad your mom sent them to me. Obviously something in me needs to see them, K. says it is giving me closure. I enlarge them on my big monitor and examine you minutely, how changed you were from just a few months before. Your prominent collar bone. The wasted shape of your legs taking up hardly any space in your pants. The way the hats you had to always wear at the end emphasized the blueness of your eyes. The way your eyes stopped being an integrated part of your smile in those last months - your lips stretched, the wrinkles formed at the creases of your eyes, but your eyes, themselves are, for want of a better word, still. I know how it feels to have your smiling eyes meet mine and in these last pictures your eyes are not meeting anyone’s. I live in another dimension now, was how you put it when I asked you about your pain, in the last conversation we had on earth. That’s what your eyes are looking into - that dimension. How pervasive your pain must have been for you, the patches you wore just dampening it but never relieving it, the cancer advancing too fast. The picture of your brother in the warm yellow lamplight applying the patch to your chest - he is so tender. Your neck that I used to shave weekly for you fragile like a stem. I think of your mom taking that picture and my heart can hardly stand it.
The photo I look at most often is from the obituary - in it you are tanned and happy looking. To me it seems there is a ghost of pain lurking around your forehead but that might be my imagination. I don’t know who took the picture, or where - you are the only familiar thing about it the way a dream can be (though I have never dreamt of you, not even once). From the clues I would say you were already diagnosed, in treatment, living in that caesura of hope when you had outlived their prediction and the disease did not advance. You are smiling, just slightly but it is your real and true smile, I know because it is so familiar that when I see it I always smile back even if I have been crying. We weren’t really familiar to each other anymore at the time this picture was taken, not on a regular basis - we were both remarried and had been living our separate lives for more than a decade. So the familiarity in the photo is just an illusion, but it’s a good one, it’s good to see you looking so much like the you that I remember so well, like seeing a picture of a dream.
He would not only help but bring the right tools and probably talk people out of arresting me if I got caught because he’s good like that.
I wouldn’t but my husband surely would have his all-purpose knife