Letting Go

On the floor in the back corner of my hall closet are two cartons holding the ashes of my late husband. I'm waiting until the time seems right to release them. I think I may be approaching that time.

Al died in August and, knowing his prognosis, had made the arrangements for his own cremation earlier that year. He didn't want me to have to deal with it after he'd died. I was the one who worked on keeping him alive; I could brook no concept that included his death. He, the more practical one, settled those matters in his usual direct approach. He had me come with him, so that I would know. We sat in leather chairs in the wood-panelled office at Riverside Memorial Chapel. Al did most of the talking, stating his plans to the sales rep who sat on the other side of the huge, highly polished desk.

No frills, Al said. Simple cremation. I remember the lush design of the office, meant to look like a gentleman's den from an earlier time. All that soft leather and polished wood. Heavy velvet drapes. I was glad it looked the way that it did because it complimented Al's ideals of refinement.

Al got the sales rep to talk a bit about how he'd gotten into this business. I didn't listen to the details. While he told his story, he asked if we wanted to reserve the chapel for a memorial service. No service, Al was adamant. I almost argued, but the reality of "an after" was beginning to make itself known to me. I remained silent.

I think maybe Al, who was such a social person, couldn't bear to think of our having a party without him. Not that they were parties, but my congregation held a special service the week he died. And months afterwards (to allow for our far-flung families to fly to New York) I arranged for a service to be held at the Ethical Culture Society.

After the papers had been signed and the check written, the sales rep handed Al the contract and telephone numbers for the nationwide network of funeral directors who participated in the program. All of the documents were folded into a heavy cream colored envelope embossed to look like leather. Al handed it to me. Keep it in a safe place, he said.

As we were leaving the office, Al asked the sales rep what size shoe he wore. I give the guy credit; he didn't miss a step and answered that he wore a size eleven. I have a beautiful pair of cordovan lace ups, Al said, hardly ever worn. Could you use them? I don't remember the man's story, the one Al elicited from him, but I think he said it was a hardship to have to wear a suit to work every day. Sure, he said, thanks. Al had wonderful taste and an extensive collection of shoes. I don't know if the man expected to see Al alive again, but that same week Al said he needed me to drive him by Riverside Chapel. He dropped off the shoes in their original box. I didn't know which one was doing the greater favor--Al for giving the man a good pair of dress shoes or the man for taking them.

After he died a friend drove me to pick up Al's remains apportioned into three plain cardboard boxes. I sent one of the boxes to his brother, who was visiting Maui at the time. He took it to the top of Haleakala and released Al's remains with prayer. Al loved Maui, where his youngest brother, Eddie, had lived with his family. Al and I had been married on Maui, and when Eddie died several years before Al got sick, the family held a similar ceremony atop the same place, Haleakala, the dormant volcano.

I'm not familiar with cremation; it isn't a part of my family's traditions. So I have to reach deep down inside to feel my way through this material letting go. It's coming up to four years since Al died. I don't have to release him all at once. Maybe this summer I'll give some of him up to the mountains in Columbia County, where we had such good times. And maybe this fall I'll let some of him go on the walkway by the East River, where he loved to run with our dog Star. I'm thinking that will be enough for now.

Second Year Regrets

For me, the second year of widowhood was worse than the first. The shock that had enveloped me in the beginning of bereavement had begun to thaw. Relief that my husband's suffering was over had all but faded. Regrets flooded me, and I relived them over and over again. Two isolated incidents in particular nagged at me. Or I should say non-incidents. Why had I refused to go riding with him at the stables he had discovered near our house? And what made me say no to his suggestion of a hot air balloon ride over the Hudson Valley?

In the second year of widowhood, especially in the early morning hours, these two particular self-recriminatory details of the ways I had failed him played over and over in my mind. Unacknowledged were the days spent at chemo, in doctors' waiting rooms, by his bed in the hospital; pouring over research for therapies, encouraging statistics, and foods to tempt his waning appetite. Unappreciated was the exhaustion that became second nature to me as I continued to teach four college courses, chair meetings, and write the textbook I had contracted to finish before he fell ill. Unregarded were the bedside buckets, the salves and gauzes, the saniwipes, and the pill counts.

Time had collapsed in my memory. I racked my brain trying to remember when he had wanted to go horseback riding and hot-air ballooning. Was it before he got sick? Did I refuse his wish when our time together seemed as if it would go spinning on for many decades? Did I refuse during the time when I believed I had a right to say I don't feel like doing that today; when the understanding was maybe tomorrow or next year? Was it before he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer when nothing would be the same again? It must have been. It had to have been before that. After, neither one of us had the strength or will for anything but fighting the enemy.

When I had the courage to stay with my regrets over what I did and didn't do with and for Al, I recognized that a much larger remorse lurked below the surface. My main regret, the motherlode from which veined out all of my smaller, more manageable self-recriminations, was that I hadn't saved him. That's the one that grew loud in my sleep, the one that I stifled as soon as I began to detect its insidious questions that begged no answers. Why hadn't the doctors detected the cancer earlier? Why had I let him go by himself for his routine physicals? Why hadn't I known when his symptoms changed from those of a healthy athletic man who pushed his body to extremes into the symptoms of a man incubating cancer in his lungs? Oh I knew I was regretting the impossible, but I regretted it all the same.

Still, in the sleepless early mornings of that second year (and, yes, sometimes even now), I wish I had said yes to every wish and whim he had ever expressed every moment of our lives together. I imagine us waking early on a crisp fall morning and mounting our horses, the pungence of leather and steed, the steady clopping of hooves on mountain paths. I see us dismounting at the end of the trail, laughing at our aching thighs and bowed legs, eager for a hearty lunch. Or I change the scene entirely and picture us together in a basket strung to a giant stripped balloon,  amazed at our luck, rising, rising together above the valleys, over the mountains, and into the clouds.