Young Widower (10 page)

3.

The first night I arrived in Indiana, I came down with a terrific fever and cough. The neighbor, a family friend, came over with her doctor’s bag, listened to my breathing, counted my pulse, asked me questions. I sat up in the bed, pulled the covers around my chest, and listened to her prognosis. I did not need to go to the emergency clinic, she explained, in three to five days I would feel better. The cough would subside. The congestion would loosen. Because my ears might fill with fluid, I should take a general antibiotic to prevent a broader infection of the lungs. The best thing to do was to get some rest. She wrote out three prescriptions: the antibiotic, a short-term prescription for antianxiety pills, and a long-term prescription for sleeping medication. Treating grief, she said, was like treating the symptoms of a patient with terminal cancer. I should take whatever I needed to get through the worst of it. As it got better, she explained, I could taper down the doses, in the regular care of a different doctor.

The morning the fever broke, I walked to the pharmacy in the strip mall and waited while my prescription was filled. The pharmacist said it would take twenty minutes. I wandered the aisles, filling my basket with every variety of remedy. Nasal sprays, antihistamines, cough suppressants, cough drops. Ear drops, ear plugs, wax removal kits, menthol rubs. Antacids, suppositories, hair-loss and shaving creams, antifungal pastes. Heavy and light syrups, flavored orange, bubble gum, strawberry, mixed berry, sugar free.

Which of them might cure anything?

Several bottles interchanged the same four or five ingredients mixed with sucrose and water, dried into powders and capsules. In the place of certain medications, a plastic card was fit onto a snap-away rack. These medications were so powerful I might transform them into poisons. The very mechanism of their distribution was mutable and, so, controlled. I might solicit them or make their chemicals unstable in laboratories, home bathrooms, high school
playgrounds, my bloodstream. These drugs were not to be trusted to certain owners. They expired on a regular basis. Paperwork made accountable to state and federal drug agencies any desire to own them.

How far into the aisles might I wander before I inevitably turned back toward the pharmacist? Her office in the store was emblazoned with back-lit, neon letters three and four feet tall, outlined in bright plastic tubing, turned on in the morning and turned off first thing at night, before the store closed down, a regulated and regimented space from which all clarity might arrive, into which there would be no certain crossing, no means or way to step across the white badge, white jacket, white skin, and close-cropped hair, the white aisle behind which every drug and symptom, on white stacked shelves, waited to be summoned for the body’s need, want, and desire.

I was accountable now. I was being watched. My driver’s license was scanned; the number was printed on the bottom of the receipt, next to the legal percentage of each drug I might own in the remainder of the year. I signed one paper to claim my drugs. I signed another to agree I understood how to use them. At a booth, at the far end of the wall, a different pharmacist waited to make some explanations. A man stood behind me, with his own plastic cart.

Near the last aisle I sat down at a blood pressure machine. I unbuttoned and rolled up my shirt. I inserted my arm into the black cuff, all the way up. The machine clicked and whirred. The cuff tightened. The digital screen ran a circle of hashes. I waited for two numbers and checked them against the graph. For my height and weight, my blood pressure was high. Both numbers were outside of the normal range.

I walked back to the pharmacist and waited to ask my question. Did I need to worry about these numbers? The pharmacist explained that she was not a doctor. She could interpret and explain,
but not evaluate. I should be sure to talk to my doctor if I had any concerns. The machine in the aisle, she explained, was only there to make approximate measurements. My doctor was the person to ask about my health, but could her colleague answer my questions about the drugs I was buying?

Was I doing something wrong? Was it right to ask the neighbor about the numbers? Should I report them to someone and hope for intervention, clarification, purpose, sensibility? A doctor would probably process the numbers into some system of accountability. Did I require supervision? Would I die soon? Did the numbers predict my death? Did they matter, at all? Or, had they already disappeared into the ether, never made certain; had they become nothing other than some red digital light shone briefly against my skin, reflected out under the fluorescent lights, bouncing back and forth against nothing, disappearing nowhere as the store’s motion sensors recognized the movement of my leg, then opened the door to convey, even ferry me out of the strip mall and back to the world?

4.

From patterns of domesticity a persistent vein of illogic was made to shine. Nothing could ever be so singular as Katie’s death. I grieved now to unsettle that initial caprice, to practice what I had learned on the mountaintop, that I should be ever vigilant of a world out to surprise and unsettle me. A world without mettle, overrun with collateral, kept the shadow of apprehension at bay and under the door. I had only to choose whether to resist or yield to it.

And yet, I had
money
. So much money I could only picture it in a briefcase, or a bank vault, or on a city street with banknotes fluttering comically in the wind. The money made me curiously welcome everywhere. It lost a small fraction of its value every day, then earned an even smaller fraction of its value back. I should spend it; the world seemed to be insisting I do so.

I worried I was an imposition, that I needed to counterbalance favor with acts of generosity. The line needed to zero out, so that the debt I incurred would not become too severe. The insurance check had a serial number, zeroes, a line of endorsement, my name in embossed letters, and two or three markers to guard against duplication. It expressed a precise figure that was not negotiable, blackened in block letters across the middle, squared by edges embossed with gold and green finish. All I was required to do to relinquish the amount was to accept it, then slowly give it back to the world. An accountant said I had no financial reason to give the money away to Katie’s family. My sister-in-law said no one had any expectation that I would suddenly give away money, and the less Katie’s family knew about it, the better. It might only further complicate a raw and volatile dynamic. My sister suggested I put the money away for a while, that I make two portions: enough to live on for the moment and the rest to save for later. Everyone, she said, always needs more money. It is good to save, the therapist agreed, a continuing life requires it.

I made the decision quickly: in a few days. I thought,
This is just how it happened on the mountain. In a moment of true self-evidence I am not a generous person. Or, I want to be generous, but I cannot act on the intention. I cannot suffer the risk. Instead, I protect myself
.

I received sympathy cards, letters, and still more notices of donations made in Katie’s name, phone calls. Friends who annotated them with memories and condolences posted photographs of Katie on the blog. It was a simple and beautiful time that did not hurry and would not last. I was prodigal and humbled. On an especially busy afternoon I walked to the strip mall, shopped for clothes or toiletries, and then walked back home. Every few weeks I drove to the mall and bought inexpensive trinkets and elaborate gadgets. I paid rent, mailed gifts to Katie’s family, and did my best to pick up checks at family dinners. It gave me pleasure to spend the insur
ance money, thinking about Katie as I bought bakery bread, organic milk, imported chocolates, microbrews.

I filled out forms connected to the new account. I called Katie’s family and said I would like to give their information to the bank in order to make them beneficiaries. I wrote out social security numbers, addresses, and dates of birth. Katie’s family would receive the balance of whatever was left after my death. Whenever I checked the balance now, I saw beneath it four names: Ed, Judy, Katie’s sister, Katie’s father. I felt both generous and stingy. I no more expected to die in Indiana than I had in the apartment in Bucharest, when Katie and I had signed the insurance contract. And yet, then as now, I asked for the consideration. That my presence in Indiana, and around Katie’s family, was genuinely appreciated, even welcomed, seemed as remote a possibility as Katie and I ever choosing to live again in the Heartland. I acknowledged that, in the event of any such future catastrophe, I would need money, and so, they might, too.

The local notary received her business at the nearby Kinko’s. We sat across from each other at a plastic table, and in plain language we discussed the financial obligations of designating Katie’s family on the account. The process was formal and exact. She read out loud each line, then I signed, and then she countersigned. At the very end she pressed her seal into the paper so that it made its indentation and shape.

I appreciated her help, I told her. I was eager to be done with the process. How many times a day did she notarize documents? I was her first client that afternoon. The designees are my wife’s family, I explained, but she’s dead now. She died a few weeks earlier in Romania, where we had lived for a year. She was killed by a bear and I had been there. I had seen it happen. I was only now living in Indiana for a short while, with her family—with her brother’s family, who lived down the street—until I understood what I
should do next, and in the meantime I needed to notarize these beneficiary forms, then send them to the bank with the certified copies of Katie’s death certificate, so that, if I died, Katie’s family would receive some of Katie’s money and maybe appreciate having it and also think well of me.

The notary said nothing right away. Later I was grateful for her discretion. I immediately felt ashamed for saying so much to a stranger, even as I understood I was doing this sort of thing more and more often. I was telling people I did not know about the great recent tragedy of my life. Why was that? If it was a pattern, then I might be a manipulative and opportunistic hustler, seeking minor advantages. If it was an exceptional reaction, even a spontaneous one, then I might be the designated mourner, carrying forward Katie’s life after its end. Probably, I was in shock, grieving, irrational. There was a place for the absence of sense; strangers recognized and accommodated it. The notary and I sat together a while, and I thought for a moment we might hold hands or cry together. Instead, she closed her stamp, and when I went to pay her, she refused the fee, wished me well, and said she would keep both my wife and me in her thoughts.

From what table of calamities and misfortune did two axes on an actuarial table resolve at the moment of Katie’s death? Who decided its financial value? Age, work experience, circumstance of death. Nationality, gender, surviving family, health. In graduate school, for a small fee, Katie and I had participated in a biometric calculation of our respective longevities, based on weight, strength, flexibility, and aerobic capacity. Katie’s
body age
was judged thirteen years younger than her physical age. Calamity was an unlikely probability, as it was in Bucharest. The insurance policy was a minor benefit of employment. Would someone else now pay a fee so that my receiving the payment increased the premium of some ex-pat living in Eastern Europe, for another fifty, eighty, one hundred
years? A friend from the Peace Corps had lost his hearing in Bangladesh—infection, nerve damage—and received a few months later a check from the government, with a short letter containing the table of amputations and lost functions from which different amounts were determined. Had it been his hand or foot, he would have received three times as much money.

A process for surviving calamity was standardized, even monetized, so as to be inclusive and accommodate any largesse. That process required the beneficiary to feel placated and the payer to remain solvent. Did I submit to this system by accepting Katie’s life insurance? Or was it something less generous to be paid off to stay for a while in one place; to receive counseling and medication as a protection to society; to keep a secret about nature and the world from which Katie had been removed, when no amount of money could restore her presence? What part of me felt happy to be acknowledged by that process? To be relieved of my own anxieties about wellness? Didn’t Sara and the Romanian deserve to be compensated, at least as well as I had been, if not more so? The sum was so large that I felt as if I owned something alongside my grief, which might initiate some sense of obligation for my own vitality. The process required a different kind of order.

Katie was a number now, a fact of place, a consequence in a life. Nowhere did it say her death was witnessed. Only that the body was observed, officially, many days later, and determined to be dead. And many days after that a generous sum of money to which no one else could make claim was entirely my own. A gift. A fortunate coincidence. The order of a world, seemingly restored. A minor, unassigned deception, practiced in Katie’s absence, which I quietly deposited into a bank account, so that my life might continue.

The Number Line

Two days before Thanksgiving, I drove thirteen hours to a resort in Newport, Virginia, to spend the week with my family. We had not all been together since Katie’s funeral that previous July. My parents’ home, so near the North Miami campus where Katie and I had lived for the better part of three years, spooked me enough to avoid it. For our first holiday without her, we would meet on what my sister-in-law jokingly called
neutral ground
.

Our rented apartments looked out onto golf courses. Bright fairways and roughs shot improbable swaths of color into the late-autumn darkness. We spent our time at swimming pools, sitting in spas, eating second plates at buffets filled with lunch and dinner. We watched rented movies, played board games in antique shops,
and walked across the nearby William and Mary campus. I was sad, and I missed Katie. But I was also relieved to be somewhere new, with my own family, practicing, at least for this short trip, older routines and dynamics.

A sense of two realities—grief and widowhood, there and here—was new. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. In Virginia my family cared for me. They wanted me to get better. They hoped I might continue at least some part of a life interrupted by Katie’s death. There was a welcome lightness in how we spent time together, a corny mix of humor and sentiment that persevered, even when it was willed. We wanted, more than anything, to have a nice time together. My father made thoughtful toasts about Katie before our dinners. My mother put out a booklet of photographs on a glass table. She kept a citrus candle lit in front of it whenever we left the apartment.

Our last night in Virginia, after nightcaps and dessert, we followed signs to “live music,” a local band playing country and rock covers in a small room just off the eighteenth hole. We ordered sambucas, then whiskeys, and made toasts to Katie. My sister got it into our heads that the band should play songs that Katie liked. We folded ten- and twenty- dollar bills into cocktail napkins and sent requests for Willie Nelson, John Prine, Lucinda Williams. We struck up a bit of a rapport. When the guitarist said he didn’t know the words to “Sweet Caroline,” I stood at the bar microphone, sweat soaking through my shirt. I laughed, cajoled, and performed, more than a little self-conscious. My family danced. A few tourists laughed and cheered.

What kind of a widower
, I thought,
sings Neil Diamond with the bar band five months after his wife’s death?

Where was my sense of decorum and obligation? The band and tourists did not expect it. My grief, in fact, had nothing to do with their good time. It did not seem at all unusual that I stumbled back to the table, ordered another drink, and ate some peanuts. I sup
pose it wasn’t. After last call my sister-in-law took some bottles of wine to go. Back at the room we were exhausted. We fell asleep watching movies.

The next morning I drove back to Indiana. Ten days later I got into the car and drove east, to New York City, then to central New Hampshire, to visit a friend. I wanted to be surrounded for a while by people I did not know very well, in a place I had never been before: not with Katie, or her family, or my family, and certainly not by myself. I spent the holiday in a large house in the woods. I loved it there. I was on the side of a mountain, in a warm, glassed-in room surrounded by trees and snow. On Christmas morning, when I came out of my room, everyone had already gone off to ski down the nearby pass.

After Katie’s death I wasn’t sure how to balance competing senses of obligation to family. I wanted to disappear into one family. I wanted to comfort the other. I knew that one family was permanent; I would always be a son and a brother. I might have only so long still to be a brother-in-law, son-in-law, cousin-in-law, uncle. Perhaps this was an unfair imposition into both families, one that made simple gestures of support reciprocal and binding. It was easy to believe there was nothing more important in the world than Katie’s death, whether she was sister or sister-in-law, daughter or daughter-in-law. To me, in the beginning, the roles were equivalent. Certainly no one seemed to dispute it. Still, I came to fear that someone, somewhere, was keeping an account. A bottom line in a record would indicate an amount to settle for choosing one side. I might pay into the debt, or pay down interest on it, and keep ahead of it a little, but eventually it would come due.

Or perhaps it was better to think of the two families as a number line, with me as zero, stretching in opposite directions, all the way to death, end points that simply fell of the grid. I needed to define segments. I wanted to believe that the whole piece had
direction. Perhaps I was exempt to the basic, algebraic logic; in Katie’s absence the integrity of the line might not hold. Or, it was not a line but instead a pile of dominoes set on a track. Once they began to fall, there would be acceleration, collapse, and finally silence.

I picked up Ben at Kennedy Airport a few days after Christmas. He had flown from Berkeley to make the trip with me back to Indiana. There was just enough time that afternoon to visit the house in the city where I had lived alone with my parents during high school. Then, the house had seemed outsized and ancient to my transplanted Kansan eyes; dim, stuffy, and guilty of that cardinal sin of midwestern suburbia, that it was not, and did not seem to want to look,
new
. Now, I could only remember loving that house for its oddities and nooks. The miniature bathroom under the staircase. A long attic stuck up in trees. A flat side of the roof out which I could climb to sneak cigarettes. It was our home in Kansas that was less certain in my memory: summer-evening games of tag, bike rides, church picnics.

We drove into Pennsylvania, talking about Katie, therapy, Ed and Beth and the kids, movies, bands, books we were reading, my teaching, his work as a journalist. At the Somerset Diner a waitress gave us directions to the Shanksville Memorial site. The entrance was a few miles off the road, behind an unlocked gate, over a hill backlit by the city. Rain, then snow melted on the windshield. For ten minutes we ran the heater on high, idling while two deer never quite crossed our high beams.

I wrote Katie’s name on the back of the diner receipt. I would leave it at the memorial. But when I stood, finally, at the long V of names taped with flowers under the plastic, written across pictures and photographs, or co-opted into typed statements of vengeance and retribution about terror, violence, and the government, the makeshift cement wall seemed suddenly too accommodating, as
though it might not return whatever was offered it. We could only make our impromptu pilgrimage there, to wail, gnash our teeth, and curse the heavens, so long as we left something. The accumulation and momentum of many deaths made the place sacred.

Wasn’t this what I was trying to tell Ben about Bucharest: that Katie had liked it so much because it made her feel both anonymous and distinct? “Romanian Gigolos: First Night Free.” It was a fashion that summer. Throughout Bucharest, embossed in gold letters on green fabric, the phrase stretched across the chests of skinny boys walking in groups or smoking cigarettes with their girlfriends in the park. Katie loved the gawky chic, the sweet undertones of irony, the toothless sexism; how, out of habit, walking in front of a basilica, the kids would always pause to silently cross themselves. Katie kept meaning to get to the market to buy the shirts for friends, but then the fashion passed, or whatever stock of cheap cotton tees finally ran out, and finally it was only the idea of a gift, one she had kept for herself. Maybe, she said, she would find a press online to print the shirts and mail them back home. Eventually, the garish neon poked up only occasionally under the open collars of long-sleeved shirts or on a lone chest somewhere else in the city, utilitarian, warm against the skin of people we did not know.

I wanted to tell Ben that the first part of grief had seemed very simple—mourn, withstand, survive—while this next part required diligence, speed, a specific plan and intention. With whom could I still mourn Katie’s absence in my life? Where would the emphasis settle each time I tried? I had carried grief at first so that everyone would see it, maybe even be forced to acknowledge it. Now I had to learn how to step back and protect it, to cover my body and reveal only what I needed someone else to see. In a lesser moment I thought,
I am Superman learning to become Clark Kent; I have a double identity and a corresponding, exceptional weakness to hide from everyone.

I was beginning to make choices I did not quite understand. Katie’s death was my story to tell, yes. Because I had seen her die, I was the witness to her death, and I could choose to tell that story. But I had also been unable to prevent her death. And this meant making a far more complicated distinction. Either I decided the bear had been large, terrifying, and impossible to head off that night, which meant that anyone might have survived or died on the mountain. Or I decided that I could in fact have saved Katie’s life and simply had chosen not to do so. If I chose the former, then my witness was the inevitable fact of Katie’s death. It might as well be a story told by someone else. Then I could surrender my guilt at not being able to save Katie because there was nothing to do. But if I chose the latter, if Katie could in fact have been saved and I didn’t save her, if the bear would, in fact, have been attacked, distracted, or discouraged, at least enough that she survived, then I might have died, too. I was the only person who could tell that story: my failure. Week after week this was the distinction I could not tease out with my therapist. Had I been the witness or the coward? Driving with Ben, talking it out over and over, the distinction refused to settle.

My siblings arrived in Bucharest after Katie’s death to help with my departure. We spent a week making lists, contacting officials, closing down the apartment, shipping cats. We attended together two memorial services for Katie, a public service at a basilica, and a smaller service in her work office. Katie’s officemates had decorated her desk with photographs and candles. We drank brandy, pouring out onto the carpet a first sip for Katie. For the rest of our time in Bucharest, then back in Illinois, we repeated the custom.

There were so many details to the relocation of Katie’s body. Insurance claims, embassy paperwork, long-distance shipping, meetings with Katie’s former boss to decide the language for the international press release, the ambassador’s condolence, the patri
archate’s official statement. We were exhausted and overwhelmed, and yet we knew that, upon arrival in Illinois, it would all continue. The wake and funeral, explaining everything to Katie’s family, greeting and thanking other mourners, the spreading of ashes, public and private dinners, hotel bills, conversations about and tributes to Katie. I believed, and said at the time, that my siblings’ actions were heroic, but I also felt anxious for what lay ahead. Who could I lean on next? Who would help me get through the coming days and weeks?

In our hotel room, at night, I wrote email updates, reached out to friends on Skype, and talked constantly to Katie’s family. The rest of the time I tried to manage a delicate and forthright silence.

As we spread Katie’s ashes, Judy and Katie’s sister each took handfuls into their pockets. They did it to prevent the end of the rite, perhaps, or to keep a part of Katie for themselves. Maybe they were addled by grief and vulnerable to its excesses. I believed this for weeks, until I decided, after talking it out with a friend, to take the much simpler view. I had no idea what they were thinking or why anyone did what they did. But I wanted Judy to be happy. I wanted to protect Katie and to keep sacred her death ceremony and our invented rite. The body I had taken such care to convey down a mountain, into a city, across an ocean, through customs, and finally to the small town in northern Illinois that Katie had spent her whole life avoiding would never be whole or wholly in one place again.

I agreed with Katie’s family about so many things: collages of photographs for Katie’s wake, hymns and passages chosen for services, how to stand together and thank people for their sympathy and generosity. We thanked the funeral director for his discretion and asked him to convey Katie back to us for our final, private rites, which we practiced together. We loved Katie for many of the same
qualities and reasons. We spoke with great feeling about her absence, our memories together, and what she might yet have done with and away from us.

We accommodated together our need. I resisted those parts of a spectacle that had nothing to do with Katie and everything to do with the intersections of grief and minor celebrity: radio interviews, obituaries in local free newspapers, the order of eulogists at the mass. I had the legal rights of a husband. I was final arbiter.
Katie’s sister, brother, mother, and father will speak
, I explained to Katie’s stepfather.
You know, the family
.

After the insurance check cleared, I plotted an elaborate expression of my gratitude to my brother and sister. I hired a babysitter for the kids and paid for my sister’s plane ticket from New York. I made reservations at a restaurant that I knew my brother liked. That evening a horse-drawn carriage arrived at their courtyard and ferried us to the Loop. Well south of my old apartment in Uptown, plodding down La Salle, the city was still bright with the end of summer. Streetlights came up over full trees. Cars made the rush hour commute in the opposite direction. Our relative progress seemed so earnest, methodical; we slowed at stoplights, waiting to follow the traffic. At the restaurant a bottle of chilled champagne waited in a bucket next to the table. We drank bottles of wine and picked over plates filled with meat, cheese, and pasta. As dessert arrived, I made a toast. I had practiced it, but not so much that the feeling was not genuine. Was I trying to settle the account, to pay off my siblings for their earlier generosity? Were my siblings honored guests, or was I asking them again to do something extraordinary: to receive my thanks but also to witness again my grief?
Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors
. I had read that somewhere. Between courses I made my way to the bathroom, where I locked the stall door, slouched into a corner, and tried to catch my breath. I felt the
pressure ease a little. I washed my face, blew my nose, and returned to the party.