When I ordered my grief books the week or so after A passed away, I also ordered The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. Didion is someone I read in school, although I cannot remember which piece, and I recognized her name. A blogger recommended the book, calling it “useful,” if not necessarily helpful. The book is a memoir of Didion’s first year after the sudden death of her husband, writer John Dunne, from heart disease, specifically, a condition her husband’s cardiologist had described as “the widowmaker.” His heart condition was known; he had a pacemaker and a good cardiologist, and they thought they had it under control. Dunne, according to Didion, was convinced it would be what killed him, in time; Didion told him he couldn’t know any such thing. And yet one evening during dinner he was talking to her, and then he was not. And that was it. I learned from this book that in 50% of cases of advanced heart disease, cardiac arrest is the first symptom, as it was, as far as I knew, for A. If there were others, he never told me, and I think he would have, although he was stoic when it came to his health, like most men. He had fallen some months back, tripped over some cables, landed on his guitar, and bruised his ribs pretty badly. The guitar was fine; that was his major concern. I only found out about it 6 weeks after the fact.
The book has sat on my side table for some time, awaiting the time when I would feel strong enough to read it. I reread my grief book a second time first. Then I picked up Daughters of Copper Woman, which I’d received from E last Christmas at my request but hadn’t gotten around to. I found a strange, unarticulable sort of comfort in it, particularly because the book starts with “Song for the Dead,” which seemed to me, rather than a slap, a sign that the time was right for me to read it. The Didion sat there with 2 books on musicians’ injuries and how to avoid them. A had known I’d ordered the latter 2 books. He was the reason for ordering the former. All around me are small snatches of the story of our shared life, like books he knew I was reading, that will never see resolution. I gather the threads, trying to weave them into some cohesive narrative that will protect me against the cold, and find all of them too short to fill in the empty spaces.
Why didn’t I want to read it yet? Because I feared that reading the account of a woman who had lost her beloved would just be salt in my open wound, too close to home. And yet, I decided last night to open it, and if it got to be too much I’d close it. I ensconced myself on the front room couch about 7 o’clock, within view and shouting distance of E who was trying to relax in the living room, and started to read.
I read all 227 pages in a single sitting.
I found I was dry-eyed the entire time I read it, because I understood so perfectly; it was like reading my own story, even though it wasn’t my story, it was hers. The only time I cried at all was when E asked what I was reading, and I told him, and started talking about A, comparing it to what I was reading. The book didn’t make me cry; my life did.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
In a heartbeat.
Or the absence of one.
I have written those very words myself. Didion speaks of how catastrophe happens on the most ordinary of days, always, days of sunny blue skies that make the horror absolutely unbelievable. Horror is supposed to happen on a dark and stormy night, not a summer Saturday morning. But how could it be otherwise? Every day is ordinary unless there is a catastrophe. And then it becomes the reference point for all days after, as we count the days on a new, personal, calendar forged by grief. As a nation, even, we count time from 9/11/01. I myself now count time from 7/15/06. I wonder to myself when, if ever, I will stop counting time in reference to his death. I can tell you that it is 7 weeks, 3 days, exactly from the day he died, and in 2 days I will feel the weight of the awareness that it’ll be 7 weeks, 5 days since I found out. Since I was instrumental in finding out. Sometimes I think about that, about how I had to call the police to find my dead sweetheart, and I find it the most bizarre thought I think I’ve ever had. I know I did it. I remember the whole series of events that got me to that point. And yet the idea of having to do so is so foreign, so wrong, that it seems like it happened to someone else, and I wonder how I had the strength to make that phone call to the police and describe A to them, matter-of-factly, when inside I was hysterical with apprehension and imagining the worst. It’s crazy to me.
The book was indeed useful to me, because it chronicles in perfect detail the bewilderment, the bizarre numbness that allows you to go on in the face of a situation beyond understanding when you don’t even understand how you’re doing it, and the very rational-feeling insanity that you engage in every day and don’t dare to bare to the world, as a result of grief. The fact that her husband died of heart disease, and that the history of their life together took place largely in California only made it that much more poignant. I’ve seen a great deal of California in the last 2 years, all at A’s side. And we had more trips planned, to the Healdsburg Guitar Festival next year; to the Hearst Mansion; to camp again next January, if the arrival of the new grandbaby didn’t force a change of plans.
It is the insanity that made me feel guilty after I took all of the concert dates A had planned off my calendar, and then wished I had written them down so I could put them back. I vowed to not be so foolish as to be o’erhasty in removing any other reminders, or even moving them.
It is the same insanity that results in nearly year-old horseradish and mayonnaise still abiding in my fridge, condiments I bought specifically for A’s visit last October because he liked them, and we’re a Miracle Whip household. E had cleaned out the fridge, and then had thought to ask me if it was okay if he threw stuff out. I looked at him, and said “Why would I care if you threw stuff away from the fridge?” And then he mentioned the horseradish and the mayo, which I’d forgotten about, but he had not, sweetly offering to rescue them from the trash bin, and I started crying. "No, go ahead, throw them away," I said, "they’re just condiments." And then I immediately changed my mind and asked him to dig them out and put them back. And so they stay.
It is the insanity that makes me confused sometimes, to the point where a confusion of timeline had me in a full-on panic attack that my e-mail about his not being on chat Saturday night was the last thing on his mind as he died, or, worse, that his concern about it precipitated the cardiac arrest. Then I realized I was thinking that I’d sent it Friday night, when in fact I’d sent it Saturday night, and he’d never read it. But for 3 horrifying minutes, I thought I might have killed him myself. On the less horrifying end of the scale, it makes me get lost while driving to places I’ve been dozens of times, evidence that I’m not quite all there, since I normally don’t get lost at all.
It’s the insanity that, every time I put on my shopping list to look for some kind of keepsake box for the things he gave me that I want to save safely in one spot, I start crying and take it off, preferring for now to leave those things integrated in my life and my space just as they always were. That may be less insane than I think; love cannot, and should not, be boxed up.
It is the insanity that ensures I do not leave my house without my hanky with the grasshopper pin he gave me and my journal in my purse, which started as a practical emergency measure in case I was overcome with grief and needed something immediately to help me deal, but has now become a security blanket of sorts. In 7+ weeks I have done no spontaneous journaling at work or anywhere else, and yet I still carry the journal with me. It has the numbers of his family in it. It has his picture in it. It has his obituary in it. It has a load of pain in it.
It is the insanity that tells me not to remove the Google Earth blog from my daily reads list, a link A, a GE junkie, gave to me when the Tour de France started, and which I barely glanced at during my daily rounds when he was alive, and at which I can hardly bear to glance now. But I cannot bring myself to take it off the list. I’m in no hurry to remove evidence of him from my life. He loved Google Earth, and we would send placemarks back and forth to each other when we chatted, sometimes spending an entire evening Google Earthing. He also loved the Tour, and didn’t get to see how it turned out. He would’ve been so disappointed with Floyd’s doping scandal.
Oh yes, I am holding on. For dear life. Dearer than I knew.
It is the insanity that makes me angry at a friend who is irritated that her mother won’t get rid of her grandmother’s clothes after just 7 months since she passed. I want to scream “Who are you to decide when it’s time for her???” I managed to get out a more diplomatic version of the same sentiment, and at a more socially acceptable volume. Grief is personal, more personal than sex, more personal than religion, for its darkness strikes at your deepest soul. No one can decide for someone else when the right time for anything regarding grief is, in my opinion.
I shared a bit from the book with E, then, when he asked about it, about how Didion had managed to make great headway in getting rid of her husband’s clothes, but stopped when she got to the last of his shoes, because he’d need them when he came back. E clucked at the craziness; I told him I understood it completely. In fact, one of the things that really eats at me is how excluded I was from the clean-up of his apartment and shop, in addition to everything else. No one bothered to ask me if there was anything I wanted; I was forced to broach the subject myself when the opportunity arose, and still have received no response on the two things I asked for specifically, one I made for him, one I know he wanted me to have. Which is a bit surprising, given that by the time they did it, everyone knew who I was to him, knew they’d left me out of the memorial, and yet no one offered in the spirit of solace or understanding or reparations. There are a hundred small things I would’ve wanted, gifts I gave him, his favorite Henley shirt, the dreamcatcher that he bought when he was here that hung over his bed along with the Southwestern pictures I got for him, all of them meaningful to no one but us, and the thought of them sitting in some Goodwill somewhere kills me. I feel that I am the rightful keeper of the archive of our time together, and yet someone drove a tank through my museum, looting and destroying everything without a thought as to whether it was important to anyone but them. Loss on top of loss on top of loss. I’m angry about it. I am.
It’s the insanity that makes me so upset about the picture mats and the fact that the company keeps screwing them up, and that my sweetie has a crappy mat around his picture right now when he deserves better.
It’s the insanity that makes me think it perfectly reasonable to expect all gray-haired and/or bald men to go clean-shaven so that I don’t have to see A’s face on strangers a half-dozen times a day, and that a guy at work will just have to change his name so I don’t have to say A’s name to or about someone who isn’t A.
It’s the insanity that allows me to cope pretty well all day, and then fall apart when I go to the grocery store to pick up milk. I needed a pen to sign the credit card slip, so I reached into my purse and grabbed the one that had his shop name and address on it, a pen he’d given me. The insanity is that I don’t know if it’s the “coping pretty well all day” part or the “falling apart over a pen” part that seems nuts.
I find myself shaken when I realize that there are things going on in my life that A doesn’t know about. I write to him in my journal and tell him, but the fact that I have to catch him up at all is weird to me. We talked so often that he always knew what was going on with me, and vice-versa. If anything interesting happened, he was informed by e-mail immediately. E’s surgery came up after he died. A would’ve been concerned; he liked E. I think about all the things that are going to happen that he won’t know about, in my life, in the remains of his own life. Or maybe he does know, in whatever way one can know, after. I will not know until I go there myself.
The hardest part, now that some time has passed, was described in Didion’s book perfectly via a quote from C.S. Lewis, who wrote after he lost his wife:
“I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string, then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontierpost across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.”
So many cul de sacs, and every one brings fresh grief. I miss him. I miss him somethin’ awful.
