Prologue
You write your wills before your first trip away from your young son. You revise them when you have more assets and a second son. They are more complicated. But they won’t be relevant until a time in the distant future.
You rewrite your wills after your husband is diagnosed with a disease that gives him a 5% chance of living 5 years, the disease fiction writers unimaginatively use to kill off a character. You do not understand the minute details of living trusts and irrevocable trusts. But you have more immediate worries, concerns, fears about how to get through each day.
You go together to a cemetery to select the plot you will visit in the future.
That future arrives sooner than you think, as his body comes apart like the fraying quilt on your bed. You lose sleep, weight. Your wobbly hold onto the life you’ve known, falling away.
In a millisecond, you are a member of a club no one wants to join.
The Next Chapter
Dinner invitations pour in at first, from friends, from mere acquaintances. You feel grateful, resentful, exhausted. Soon those invitations disappear. You think of the condolence notes you wrote with “let me know what I can do to help” offers that never materialized.
A colleague tells you co-workers don’t know what to say to you.
You become a third, fifth, seventh wheel when invited out by couples, wondering if you mention your husband’s name too often or not often enough. Turning away rather than watching those couples walk holding hands, tuning out talk about their travel plans, their anniversary celebrations.
Your number of anniversaries are trapped in amber.
There are days when you don’t see or speak to anyone other than a barista, a pharmacist, or a wrong number. Or, maybe, to anyone. You talk to yourself.
You feel incompetent struggling to open jars, clasping necklaces. You are overwhelmed by a first-ever sewer backup in the basement, fetid water from the past. A metaphor, you wonder.
Haircuts, pedicures, and massages are the menu of intimate touches. Unless you have grandchildren, whose impossibly soft skin and sweat baby sweat replenish you. Joy tinged with an ache for the absence that no balm can soothe.
Collections of vinyl albums, stamps and postcards fill the basement closet shelves and spill out of the basement, haunting you. You curse the computer. The inoperative passwords. Your husband’s incomprehensible financial records. Your husband.
Your house is a minefield of memories. The graceful tall glass vase shaped like a volcano, the colors of lava, from Hawaii, a surprise gift; the painting that dominates the dining room of ripe persimmons, which everyone thinks are tomatoes, by an artist in a tiny town in Nova Scotia, whose garden filled with wildflowers enticed you into her studio.
Everywhere are reminders of your lifetime of decisions, arguments when you felt so angry you wanted to leave, days when you felt lonely. Wasted emotions you regret.
You eat soup every night for dinner, sometimes with chunks of squash, carrots, mushrooms in rich seasoned broth from the farmer’s market, sometimes the salty brew from the familiar red and white can of your childhood. You spoon coffee gelato, the flavor only you liked, directly out of the pint plastic container, unable to stop yourself from having just one more spoonful, until the spoon is empty.
Some in your situation find new companions through random meetings, others on dating apps, which you’ve eschewed as phony, frightening, and foolish. Leaving you, secretly envious, to wonder what is wrong with you. You imagine a meeting on an airplane, in an art class, a wedding, a memorial service. Thoughts that tantalize and terrify.
You do not return to your previous “usual” side of the bed, the side closer to the bathroom, which you relinquished to make it easier. You sleep on a third of the bed, narrowing yourself as if in a coffin. You treat the rest of the bed with reverence and the spot for your new leap-of-faith puppy.
Epilogue
You feel less incompetent with each necklace clasped.
In the morning, you smooth wrinkles from the blankets and tug your new quilt tight, just the way you like it. So you can slip under them at night. Alone.
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