Material Stuff

When Al died, one of my widowed friends offered to come to my apartment that week and help me get rid of his things, as her sister had done for her in her time of need. It was a generous offer, but I declined. I wasn't ready to let go of all the material stuff that had meant so much to him. He had treasured his collections of clothes, belts, boots, hats, other accessories, and when he especially liked the fit or quality of something, he bought duplicates, ensuring their replacement when the original wore out. His assumption was that he would live a long, long life, and his fear was that he would not have enough to last to its end.

As a result I wound up with closets and drawers stuffed with his possessions. Somehow his reverence for these things transferred over to me (partly because he had occupied the apartment for a couple of decades before I'd moved in). I couldn't even contemplate cracking open his closet doors, let alone entering and emptying their contents. Three months after his death, when our relatives flew to New York for a memorial service, I invited our nieces and nephews to take whatever they wanted. They had no trouble whatsoever in breaching the hold. The girls took his cashmere sweaters and ties. The boys shirted and suited up for post-college interviews. When they were finished, my bedroom looked like the end of a 75% off sale day at Barney's. I consolidated what they'd left behind and lived around it all for a couple of years. It's funny what a person chooses not to see or feel. 

I'm not sure what made me decide to make more space for myself in my own living quarters or, rather, in my own life. I needed to work up to a major change in my perceptions before I could take what felt to me like a major action. It was a few years after Al's death that I hired an organizer to come in and help me. The project took nearly all day. We started with two industrial-sized garbage bags: 1) to give away and 2) to throw away. A third pile was to keep. Hiring a professional was money well-spent. The woman was ruthless and relentless, just what I needed. She gave me little time to dwell on or protest the process, and I was swept up in her determination. We wound up with about twenty-five bags and a tiny keepsake pile. We drove to Housing Works with about twenty bags stuffed with contributions, brought the refuse bags to the basement, and redistributed my things into the emptied drawers and closets. Done, done, and done. 

I sometimes wish I was like my friend who offered to help me clear out my apartment the week Al died. She tends to act with immediacy in other circumstances too. People like that get more accomplished more quickly, and life, as we know, can be so brief. But I'm just not made that way. I suppose accepting the way we are made and figuring out how to work with our own material is an accomplishment too, whenever we happen to come to our realizations.

Lifelines

As the years accumulate since my husband died, I am beginning to retrieve a sense of myself, the part of me that did things on my own and dreamed on my own even when Al and I were married. Part of that self is what I protected all the days of our relationship. There's another part from the literature I've been reading all of my life.   And then there's a part that's pure mystery.

I was in my late 30's when Al and I met and, by then, had drawn lessons from observing what happened to women who hadn't nurtured their independence when divorce or widowhood struck. He and I agreed to continue  our alone time and to maintain our long-time friendships, together or individually--whatever worked. Like many couples my husband and I weren't always drawn to the same pursuits. He was an athlete, and I was drawn to books, theater and contemplative workshops of different kinds, especially writing. Most days we happily made plans for dinner together while he left for his morning run, leaving me to read or face the blank page. On the nights when I went to a play with one of my single friends, the experience was made sweeter by my knowing he was waiting for me at home .

When he died I continued many of my routines, but theater stopped making sense to me. Contemporary art didn't work at all, seeming like empty, futile exercises in callow intellectual neatness. The only workshops I attended were for the bereaved. Writing was out of the question. The last thing I wanted to do was delve into my thoughts and feelings without a workshop leader or counselor holding the other end of a lifeline.

Even my teaching was infused with grief and isolation. I taught across a wide gulf, a chasm really, that was only apparent to me, or so I believed. Sometimes students would come to me with their own loss of parent or sibling. Some were trying to maintain discipline in the face of their devastation. Others had lost it and were drowning in their own confusion. I was able to be the steady one then, offering compassionate coaching I wasn't yet ready to take for myself.

I taught literature by rote then, having accumulated enough years of experience by that time to draw on the combined wisdom that had once guided me. I had no choice but to keep the faith that, even though the gates were presently closed to me, the poets and writers continued to light the way for others. I always understood that much of great literature is written in the shadow of the knowledge of mortality, but where I once conceptualized that belief, now I knew it in my heart.

I remember back when I was a student myself, thinking why does there have to be so much death in this stuff? Yet all that death didn't put me off from continuing my studies in literature. I was enticed by the minds whose writings helped me think beyond the mercantile world view of my immediate family. I was willing to put up with the death stuff, willing to pick around it for what I needed then, forgoing old Lear for young Hamlet, but then going back to Lear for all that juicy, blatantly-articulated family disfunction.

I remember too thinking the death stuff might be for later, much later, in my life. It was too far ahead to be of concern. I had the world by the tail when I was a college student, and death could be forestalled for many decades while I made my mark. Still I must have taken it all in, all the images on mortality I'd picked through and tried to leave untouched. It must have affected me on an unconscious level, even though I forgot about it for years.

Literature, friends, counselors, my students--they've all been my teachers in this process. And it may have been that by my dwelling for a while on the rock bottom of Lear's "No, no, no life" (a final realization before he dies--rejection and acceptance, negative and positive wrapped up in a single thought), I'm choosing to grab a lifeline and say to myself, Alright then. This is how it is and yet I live. This is how it is and yet the world goes on.

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.

Within

Within the holy
grief settles around stillness.
Who left? What remains?

This is for another day.

Now there is smoke
and a ravenous sea
barely felt through ends

and seen, if at all, on
a tiny pane, fog
from the earliest voices.

Lighten Up

Lest I give the impression that all of my hours alone were spent in the dulldrums, I want to talk about something I did to our home that would have started an argument when Al was alive. He died in August and the following summer I decided that I'd had enough of the dark wall panelling in our upstairs bathroom. The house is a rustic contemporary with skylights and many windows, and we had fallen in love with all of the light that flooded every room. But he had decided that the wood in the master bath needed refinishing and, against my wishes, had it stained brown. I was bothered by the way it absorbed the light streaming down from the two skylights, but agreed that at least the wood was protected from the shower and bath steam. So I lived with it.

The June after he died, once school was over, I bought a gallon of white pickling formula and tore up a pile of Al's old tee shirts and went to work. He wouldn't have minded my changing the walls; in fact he would probably have liked the results. But the slowness of my process would have driven him crazy. He liked things done quickly and efficiently, and he wasn't exactly a do-it-yourselfer.

All summer and into the fall I lovingly and meditatively rubbed pickling fluid into the wood, plank by plank, and inch by inch. Each board was a revelation, the way the grain stood out from the background and picked up a subtle sheen. I wouldn't have rushed through that job for anything, and it felt like a luxury not to be forced. The physical act of rubbing the wood was a great comfort, bringing me close once again to my late father who used to make craftsman-level changes to our rowhouse in northeast Philadelphia. As the younger of two daughters, I sometimes played "the son," handing him his tools and quietly keeping him company as he worked. That comfortable male compatibility bloomed in me as I reworked the wood in my own home.

And there was something about slowing the work in progress that I enjoyed. I liked seeing how every lightened plank added to the effects in the room. I liked comparing its look in the daytime to that of night. I liked too the anticipation of the next unveiling and knowing I could wait. In fact I liked to wait.

And I liked the tiredness in my arms from pressing the whitening into the wood, following the grain. I liked stopping when that exercise felt like enough. Finally I was taking care of myself and recognizing my own rhythms.

I admit it. There was even a part of me that liked doing something in a way that Al would have hated. He would not have kept his feelings to himself. In the palpable absence of his critical voice--not my favorite of his voices--I felt liberated.

The wall project stayed unfinished from June to November until the upcoming Thanksgiving, which I held at my house, pushed me to lighten the final plank. The result was glorious.

Pictures from the First Year of Widowhood

It's hard to remember my first year after Al died. I lived so much of it by rote. As Emily Dickinson put it, "The feet, mechanical, go round--/Of Ground, or Air, or Ought--/A wooden way/Regardless grown,/A Quartz contentment, like a stone--."

I didn't recognize the shock that enveloped me, but nearly four years since his death I see that it kept me upright and steady, like braces for a falling body. It kept me busy too. I went to work every day and taught my four writing and literature courses. I went out with friends every weekend, obeying the small voice inside that warned against isolation. I signed up for a three-month meal delivery service in an effort to fill in part of the nurturing that Al had offered whole-heartedly as the head cook and take-out planner.

I enlarged my favorite photographs of Al to display in my office, city apartment, and the rooms of my house. Thinking back, I suppose I overdid it, displaying pictures everywhere, but it's just one of the ways that being married to Al changed me. When we first met, I was struck by all of the pictures of family members and friends that he had on his apartment walls. I had been raised to be private, and I took those values to the extreme. Here was a man who went to the other extreme. When I first saw all of his pictures of far-off relatives and friends, both present and past, I was reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Rich Boy" about an unfullfilled man who substitutes photographs for relationships.

I remember doubting whether the guy I was just beginning to know had any more potential than the character in the story. Despite my literary allusions I must admit I carried a sort of Good Housekeeping checklist for potential mates in my head that left no room for my instincts or Al's originality. But I saw things in Al that convinced me to ignore the deeply-ingrained, simplistic warning signs of an unpromising match and kept me moving forward together with him. In fact, if it wasn't too much of an oversimplification, I'd say that over the years he showed me how to let go, and I showed him how to hold on. In his honor I will not attempt to edit that dangling preposition.

And it was in his honor too, that I chose to exhibit photographs of him, of him and me, of him and various nieces and nephews, and of him and Star all over the place. He had put an enlarged photo of the two of us out in the dining room after he had gotten sick, and I remember demuring at the time, but not much. After he died, I nailed it to the wall. It's still there.

One of the photos I enlarged for display was taken on our honeymoon in Hawaii in 1993. It's a close-up of Al that I shot. He took a good picture. He is sitting cross-legged on a hillside. His runner's legs and muscular arms are tanned and shapely. He isn't smiling and he's starting pointedly at the camera. He is wearing a hot pink baseball cap that he never would have chosen for himself. He wore it for me because I loved how it set off his hazel eyes.

Al was 55 when we married, and it was his first marriage. It was my second at 44. I had been decidedly single since I was 29. Even though we had been together for the five previous years, we were both wary at the beginning of our honeymoon and still guarding our illusions of independence. Tying the knot had pushed us into high alert for a few tense days until I realized what was happening and clued him in during a calm moment. We both pretty much settled down after that and enjoyed ourselves. But I loved that picture because it showed him in all of his masculine glory just as he was deciding to compromise his ideals of masculine colors--mostly blues and grays, definitely not hot pink.

I had taken the second picture too, on the deck of the house that we bought in 1998. Al is kneeling on one knee with one arm around Star, our standard, and the other holding a rifle that he used for target practice. I admit that I was as attracted to his marksmanship as I was repelled by the gun. Despite the weapon he gripped with his dominant left hand, his expression had gentled in the five years since we had married. I don't think I've often seen emotion portrayed quite so potently in a photograph, except for some stills taken of actors playing their film roles. I once heard the actor Giancarlo Giannini say after a viewing of Seven Beauties that a good actor knows how to punch out the camera lens, and that statement aptly describes Al's energy, but he wasn't acting. The authenticity of Al's emotions come through in the picture just as it did in his life. People knew if they wanted to hear a blunt and intelligent perception of truth, they could come to Al. And those who didn't want to hear it stayed away, because he didn't hold back.

Al was one of those rare people who had the ability to lend the camera a piece of his spirit. Even today as I write while looking at this photo, his powerful essence comes back to me and quickens my heartbeat. Back in 1998 when I got back the developed shot, I was struck by how much his compelling gaze sent a lifeline beyond the frame and lovingly made me a part of the picture.

In 2007 after he died, I reached for those pictures for the same reasons I ordered a meal delivery service. I needed to keep up the illusion that he was still physically present and seeing to our material needs. Even now, although I'm conscious of the impression all of our pictures must make on guests to my home (I know what I'd think if I visited someone's house and saw what amounts to a shrine in the public rooms), I haven't changed any of them yet. I like keeping the tension going between his extroversion and my private ways. The tension keeps him alive to me as much as the pictures themselves do. It reminds me of how, over our years together, we had surrendered our individual ways for something far more wonderful, even as I begin to wean myself from him.