Let's Take the Long Way Home (15 page)

I would learn to accept these periods of equanimity for what they were: reprieves from the vortex. But they
startled me at the time, as did the foggy memory I would have of this later, along with a few other primal responses. I went home and started cooking enough black beans for an army, even though no one was scheduled to appear. I found myself counting friends with a child’s cruel pragmatism—who was remaining in the tribe? When I realized I was doing this, with a singsong interior list-making, I scribbled down the names and posted them on the refrigerator: These were the people I could call at three a.m. I never called anyone at three a.m., probably because I had the list.

The black beans were gone by the end of the night. People started coming to my house and then kept coming, wandering through the kitchen into the backyard or sitting on the front steps. Marjorie, whose seasoned wisdom was born from her own losses, walked into my garden with a beautiful smile on her face; Tom called, crying—“Oh my God are you all right?”—then appeared with bags of Chinese food. Francesca, who didn’t know Caroline but cared about me, walked in with a honeysuckle vine that’s still growing in the tangle of the garden. Kathy, the dog trainer who had first connected us and had become a good friend, stood in the kitchen with her husband, Leo, crying and laughing while I told the story about Lake Chocorua and Caroline’s mission to teach me how to row. There were dogs and people and empty plates all over the house until midnight, when I finally took an Ambien to sleep. Alongside all this
heartache was an irony and a wonder. Caroline and I had reached out to each other from similar shelters of quiet and solitude. Now she was gone, and her leaving had flung open my doors in every direction.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence and linear expectations, where I thought grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that gradually receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. I would move as though I were underwater for weeks, maybe months, but those first few days between the death and the memorial service were a dazed cascade of tears and surprises. A part of me went through the appropriate motions with frightening alacrity: finding the poem to read at the chapel on Friday morning, practicing it aloud. But another part of me had the simple conviction that I wouldn’t be able to get from point A to point B—that giving her over, in spirit and in public, was as perplexing and unfathomable as string theory. My old friend Pete, out of town when she died, called from Ohio to see how I was. I told him what I had been afraid to say. “I don’t think I can do it,” I said about getting through the service the next day. “I don’t know
how
to do it.”

He was quiet for a minute, and then he said something
of such consolation that I will hear him saying it forever. “You know, Gail,” he said, “we’ve been doing this as a species for a long time. And it’s almost as if—it’s like the body just knows what to do.”

CAROLINE, WHO HALF BELIEVED
that her circumspect existence kept her relatively unknown and thus protected from the masses, would have been amazed by the service. The chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery was filled and overflowing. There was a cold, pelting rain all that morning, and Kathy had come to my house to get me; when we drove up to the entrance of the chapel I told her I didn’t know if I could get inside. To her great credit, she did not rush to reassure me or assume I was speaking metaphorically. “Can you get to the door?” she asked. It was four yards away. So I got to the door, and Morelli was there waiting, and from there I was all right.

I read a poem that morning from Louise Bogan, “Song for the Last Act,” the first lines of which are “Now that I have your face by heart, I look / Less at its features than its darkening frame.” For two days after the service, I carried the meter of the poem in my head, a sweet interior background to the walks I took, the laps I swam, the last thoughts before sleep. It was as though some ancient choir had taken up residence inside me, giving me this exquisite chant, a measure of my own
movement and accompaniment to an otherwise unspeakable sorrow. After two days, it disappeared as naturally as rain on pavement.

THE RAVAGES OF EARLY GRIEF ARE SUCH A SHOCK:
wild, erratic, disconsolate. If only I could get to sorrow, I thought, I could
do
sorrow. I wasn’t ready for the sheer physicality of it, the lead-lined overcoat of dull pain it would take months to shake. Whatever I thought I knew about loss—what I had anticipated about the After Caroline state, when the fear would be over, the worrying ceased—I had no inkling that it would mean deliverance into a new, immutable world. I lived in the reality of Caroline’s absence all the time, it seems, and yet sometimes the fact of it would nearly knock the wind out of me. One night a couple of weeks after the service I tried to make dinner for two friends, and I managed to get about half a meal together before I realized I didn’t know what I was doing. They sat there kindly before their spartan plates of chicken and rice—I had forgotten to make anything else—and I excused myself and went into the kitchen and held on to the counter. She’s
dead
, I thought. The word itself was brutal. I had always disliked the euphemisms the culture embraced for dying: “gone,” “passed on,” “passed away.” They seemed avoidant and sentimental, a way to bleach the concept of death of its
declarative force. Now I knew why we’d diluted the vocabulary.
She’s dead
.

I read everything I could to comprehend what I was going through.
Mourning and Melancholia
, W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson. Poetry helped more than Freud. Painstakingly, probably automatically, I began separating the Gordian knot of dual loss: My distress for Caroline in the last weeks of her life was a different matter now from my own battered loneliness. Everything about death is a cliché until you’re in it. I was half mad with desolation, and it often came masked as anger. What the books don’t tell you is that some primitive rage can invade out of nowhere, the only bearable alternative to being with the dead. Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn’t stand to lose.

I found myself doubting or dismissing the intensity of our friendship, as though I could discard the love and therefore skip the pain. This worked for about twenty minutes, or until I would say to someone we both knew, “Oh well, maybe we weren’t that close,” and the listener would burst out laughing. I started trying to remember all the things I didn’t like about her. There weren’t very many. Or I would take the boat out on the river and talk to her aloud—so much and so often that I began to refer to a certain stretch of water as the Church of Caroline. I gave her reports on Lucille, told her about generous or foolish things people had said or done, let her know how
all of us were holding up. One afternoon I had an inkling of how I must look—a solitary woman in a scull, smiling and talking to her invisible friend—and my chest seized with the potential nuttiness and emptiness of my one-way conversation. “What’s worse?” I asked her. “If I talk to you and there’s no one listening, or if you’re there waiting and I
don’t
talk to you?” I thought how helpless, probably irritated, she would feel at my silence. So I kept talking. I complained about incidents that had happened years before. “I don’t think you should’ve been mad about my losing the boat seat,” I would say. “It was an accident!” Or, “You were always in a hurry. Why were you in such a hurry?”

On a cloudy, windless day in late summer, Morelli and I met to move her boat from Riverside Boat Club, where Caroline had been a member for years, to my boat club a couple of miles upriver. It was a day we had both been anticipating, maybe fearing, for weeks, because we knew what Caroline looked like on the water and what rowing had meant to her. We parked my car at Cambridge Boat Club and drove together to Riverside, where a rower who had known Caroline helped us locate her scull and carry it from the inside bay down to the water. I had brought my own pair of oars; Morelli wanted to keep the set Caroline had used. No one spoke while we put in the boat and attached the oars. Then I hugged Morelli and they pushed me off from the dock, and Morelli stood there watching while I rowed away. Caroline
had loved this boat and taught me to row in it; she had logged some five hundred miles a year for the last decade of her life. She had been a picture of stillness itself, carried by flight. I didn’t want Morelli to see me break down, and for the first fifty yards I could concentrate only on this: that I had to keep going or he couldn’t stand it. I got to the first bridge and made the turn, just beyond the last point where I knew he could see me. Then I squared the blades and pulled the boat into the shadows, and put my head on the grips and cried.

MORELLI AND I TOOK CARE OF HER HOUSE ALL THROUGH
the first winter, before it was sold, taking turns driving over to pick up mail or start the car or check on the heat. It was a particularly fierce winter, and I would walk into the foyer, where it was about fifty-five degrees, and feel the sadness ahead of me; it was like walking into fog. Life interrupted: Caroline’s shoes were still lined up by the door; her coats—one for every kind of dog-walking weather—still had biscuits in the pockets. On her refrigerator door was a photograph of the two of us, our arms flung around each other, that Tom had taken that first summer at Chocorua. I could never bear to take the photo from where she had placed it years before, and one day when the house was being dismantled it simply disappeared—no doubt thrown out with the old spices and plastic bags and everything else that constitutes the bread crumb trail of a life. Morelli had taken Lucille to live with him since Caroline’s last trip to the hospital, so
her scent was gradually fading. I always made these trips to the house with Clementine, who barked with excitement and looked for Caroline and Lucille only on the first visit. Her nose must have told her what I could not, and after that she simply stayed by my side while I made my way through the house.

Some days I would sit in the cold living room and let the ache run free; it was the only place that I felt mirrored my heart. All my other places in the world—my own house, my connections with friends, my days with the dog or on the river or in the pool—were a refracted version of my grief; they all contained me, reflected the story, even helped me forget for a while. Here was the story itself. Here, in all its subcomfort temperatures and museumlike stillness, was Caroline, gone. It broke through my disbelief, my God bartering, my every other defense, and for this reason I both needed and hated to go there.

One afternoon when I had gone upstairs to check on things, I started going through her closet, the way we used to do together and like my sister and I had done when we were girls. I tried on sweaters and blouses that we had both loved, looking in the mirror while Clementine lay on the floor, watching me. “This looked better on you than it does on me,” I would say to Caroline, and the dog would cock her head, and then I’d try on something else. I felt desperate while this was happening, and confused and guilty, and it has taken me years to remove myself enough from the pain of the incident to comprehend
it. I wanted to claim whatever of her was left. I’d always heard stories about grief-stricken families arguing over ugly lamps or cheap coffeemakers; now I understood. The frantic hunger I felt was not trivial or greedy; it was possessive, in the most primal sense. I still have her gym bag and her rain jacket, and for a while I even tried to wear her winter boots, an entire size too big, which was absurd but comforting.

Memento mori: reminders of the dead. I think we must long for these signatures of history—the baseballs and ornaments and playing cards left on people’s graves—because they take up the space left by the departed. The physical void after she was gone seemed alarmingly like a thing of physics, as if daylight had shifted or a house on the street had disappeared. Whenever Clementine heard the distinctive beep of a Toyota RAV, which is what Caroline had driven for years, she would wag her tail and start to head in that direction—pure conditioning that seemed to me a haiku of what was missing in the world.

YESTERDAY I FOUND
a note I had written to myself, in the piles of outlines and narrative maps that are a writer’s building blocks. “Let Her Die,” I had written at the top of a legal pad, a shorthand reminder to get to that part of the story. Then I saw it the next day and half gasped; for a moment it was as though someone else had given me this instruction. Let her die: a three-word definition of
the arc of grief if ever I heard one, and it takes a long time.

THE SUMMER AFTER
I had learned to row, one evening on the river in 1998, I remember thinking that someday soon I would lose my beloved dad and that rowing and Caroline would help me through. We all count the tribe whenever we’re scared. Modern Western society has mostly corralled this task within the realm of the nuclear family: The husband will clean out the garage or balance the accounts; the sister will be there to help after our folks are gone. But a huge portion of the world makes other allegiances, unconscious plans. Because of circumstance and desire, Caroline and I had each shifted a degree of that dependence onto each other—along with our siblings and Morelli, we were in line for the quotidian closeness, the emotional proximity of day-to-day life. Who has spare keys to the house, emergency contact numbers in the wallet? These are the lists you don’t even consider before a certain age, when you’re trying to get away from responsibility rather than acquire it. Then the list takes shape along with the attachments. Caroline and I had so thoroughly insinuated ourselves into this primary position that we joked about it for years, even after she reunited with Morelli. One afternoon weeks after she was gone, Morelli and Sandy and I were sitting on a park bench at the pond, talking with the combat candor of her
three closest friends about how any of us could go on. “Oh God,” I groaned, with mock distress. “Now I guess I’ll have to get a boyfriend.” Only the three of us, I think, would have found this so germane and so revealing.