Young Widower (12 page)

After Katie’s death, need did not always manifest itself in moments of desperate, semirehearsed spontaneity; in quiet accusations and a closing of the ranks; in incoherent, late-night phone messages that, the next day, no one seemed to remember leaving. The therapist said I should take my wedding ring off of my finger, put it on a chain, and wear the chain next to my skin, around my neck.

Did I want to hide these physical markers of widowhood? In the day-to-day, could I ignore Katie’s death if it was not always in front of me?

I told Ed of my plan to stop wearing black every day, and he said,
You were still wearing black every day?

I went with my niece to the chain store, and we bought the season’s bold madras prints and bright ringer-tees. I took them home, cut the price tags, and folded them in neat piles on the bed. I took the black shirts—oxfords, polos—out of the drawer and stacked them on the closet shelf.

I tried to stop mentioning Katie in conversations about the past whenever I met and talked with new people. I made my references
singular: my time in Bangladesh, my work in Romania, my graduate alma mater. Clean and simple, uncomplicated by clumsy elaborations—“my wife Katie who died seven months ago,” “living with my in-laws from my first marriage, which ended after my first wife’s death, which is why I’m in Indiana”—I made two versions of myself. Privately, one expressed grief. Publicly, the other elided it.

What could be expressed in moral terms—ambition, the pretense to tragedy—and what was circumstantial, incidental to our intentions?

In therapy aspects of Katie’s life were made imperfect by its sudden end. A certain gravitas simplified our storyline. I could idealize Katie or be angry with her, but I less and less thought of her as a person, with a life separate from me. There was the death, our life together before the death, and my life after it.
The death
. Was this really how I was saying it now? As I pieced back through journals, letters, and emails, I wondered how much of what she had left behind would remain unsettled and how much had settled into fact and story.

I told myself I was investigating a life, but the inquiries seemed to have unclear methods and purposes. Wasn’t another name for this scrutiny, the turning again and again, neurosis? I was trying to end Katie’s life by asking questions. I was generating still more suffering, in order to put it on public display and then worry about it. Here was the benefit of therapy: everything was made to have two sides. The trauma of watching Katie die had a context. It became singular. Katie’s death was neither expressly my fault nor anyone’s fault. I was not exceptional. Everyone went to therapy all of the time, for all varieties of suffering, however real or imagined or trivial. Therapy said that a life would improve with witness and scrutiny, that meaningful change required a desire to change and the understanding of circumstance. Had desire always been so easily twinned with meaning? Witnessing Katie’s death did not mean understanding the death, but rather
its context; the terms of our life together, rather than its end. In therapy, living after Katie’s death required arrangement, but not necessarily adjustment.

In the weeks after Katie’s death, I learned to watch my life at the distance of a shared responsibility. I monitored it with the therapist and was relieved to defer, for her consideration, the worst judgments about myself. Days we did not meet, I walked out the front door of the house, plugged my headphones into an iPod, and turned in any direction. I sought out new streets and cul-de-sacs in doglegs from the main road but usually circled back. After a while, it seemed I knew every inch of the city limits, from the highway on one side to the park with the well on the other. If it occurred to me that I was penned in and mapping out the well-defined limits of a temporary place, I do not remember it.

At home I returned compulsively, hungrily, to the same few rituals. When there was no anniversary, birthday, holiday, death date, I borrowed the emotions from songs, television shows, novels, documentaries, photographs, movies. The gestures of grief seemed separate of the feeling, foreign and terrifying again, something I wanted to both guard against and not let go. I thought,
I would rather run back our life together to any moment we might not have stayed together and follow it instantly to here
. To make a different kind of gap, then close it.

If I had chosen one of the other two therapists in Indiana, would I seek now cure—lasers, prayer, medication—rather than accommodation? Would I understand as well, if differently, Katie’s death and her absence in my life?

I lived for thirteen months in Indiana. After I left, my room next to the garage was converted into an office. Filing cabinets and a large desk were moved into the corner. The bed was moved into the basement. The carpet was torn up, and the exposed wood was finished. At first, when he lived in the house across town, Ed would sneak back into the house to reclaim power tools, amplifiers,
albums, a weight bench. One weekend Beth hired an industrial dumpster and loaded all of the extraneous crap from the house into it. A truck came to take it away. Large spaces in the house were now exposed so they could contain other things and be arranged again.

Erasing the Room

1.

The hallway outside my room in Indiana was narrow, well lit, and tiled in every direction. Most nights, I was terrified to enter it. I knew where it would take me: into the kitchen, past my bathroom and the laundry nook. There were forty-one parallel tiles on the other side of the door, a cat, two dogs, and five family members coming and going. I stood on my side of the door, imagining it held back a world all day filling with halved distances, closing the gaps between places where I felt safe. How many steps would it take to summon our old apartments in Bucharest, Chicago, and Miami? The mountain where I had watched Katie die?

A lamp near my window reached a shadow most of the way to the closet. Someone had always just mowed their lawn, and in the darkness the scent filled my room. It smelled nothing like Romania. I could imagine, then, that Katie had died months, even years earlier, or that she had died someone else’s wife, or that we were again visiting Indiana together, as we did most summers, and in a few days would leave together and resume our interrupted life. I would lie on the bed and wait for the room to fill with thick fog: quieter sounds, deeper breaths, a sense of fumbling toward familiar places.

Once, after I had taken a sleeping pill, I stumbled into the hallway and then the laundry room, locked the door, and caught my breath. I stood there awhile. It was hard to open this door, too. I imagined that I was playing a video game, stranded on a floating tile, waiting to time my jump back to safety. I understood that there was a finite period of time to get myself back into bed, before the pill erased the room entirely. So the room, too, was part of the game. Get inside before the clock runs down, and everything falls off the screen.

Summer mornings in Indiana were humid and sunny. Dampness took off the chill. I awoke under a sheet, earplugs in, my two cats nestled on either side. I felt relief to see light under the blinds and to hear the kids watching television in the kitchen. I had disappeared for the night and now I was back. I became adept at holding in my mind this first instinctive reaction to the world. Fractions of seconds, a few seconds. I awoke grateful and happy to be alive.

Sleep during the day was impossible. My mind was always snapping my body to attention just as it shut down. I would sit on the screened-in porch, under the ceiling fan, and try to read one of Katie’s favorite books. There is a passage near the end of The Razor’s Edge where the hero, Larry Durrell, cures his friend’s crippling migraines through guided meditation. The friend holds a Tibetan
coin until it drops from his fist; the pain subsides, and the friend is restored to health. A few times I held a Romanian coin in my fist and imagined a great ball of light opening out into the room and consuming, gradually, me, my grief, Indiana. Nothing.

I managed one side of consciousness vigilantly, meticulous about therapy and recovery; I tried to understand how trauma affected the body and brain. The other side of consciousness—sleep—remained vulnerable to unwanted memories and intrusions. I could not guard against or control them. Sleep was a transaction whose terms I negotiated daily. What did I need to sleep. What would make it less scary. Transitional spaces lost their boundaries. Often, I would dream in some symbolic interchange with the circumstances of Katie’s death: trying to pull a friend out of a sinkhole, catching my nephew before he fell off the bed.

Sleeping medication altered the terms of my grief. It diminished my sense of need, absolved me of guilt and anxiety, and threw a broken switch, which stuck. It was comforting to take a pill, complete the routine of each day, and then transform the coming night. It was terrifying to think about the dreams I might have if I didn’t take the pill. How would my mind accommodate its obligations to memory and imagination without the filter of chemistry? However hard I thought about it during the day, come bedtime, sleep was made to seem, again, inevitable.

That first year, I had two recurring dreams about Katie’s death.

In the first a pack of wolves arrives slowly from a great distance to attack someone I don’t know. I can hear them whimpering, they move quickly, their bodies are lean and mangy. They seem to come at once, full of implication, never ending, like ants toward a sugar dish. Sometimes, I wake before their arrival or just after the attack begins. Other nights, I try to make an emergency call on a cell phone that doesn’t work, or I follow the wolves to reclaim the
body. It is mangled and bloodless, smooth to touch. I carry it through a city.

In the second dream I am again a Peace Corps volunteer, back in South Asia after Christmas. The staff, teachers, and superintendent from the teacher’s college greet me and take me to my old room. My bed, radio, ceiling fan, bamboo table, and bookshelf are exactly as I left them. There is a yellow quality to the light and dust everywhere. Or, it is evening, and there are only a few hours to arrange things and then get to the market to buy food and water. Katie is coming the next morning on the overnight bus. She is thin and young, tired but smiling. I can smell the baby powder deodorant that she used to wear, the sweat dried on her skin after a long bus ride. This part of the dream is brief but also the most fully present; the sense of time is uneven and particular, the feelings urgent but unfocused. I need to explain things, I think, and quickly.

We sit on the bed, or she sits on the bed and I sit at my desk, or we walk together across the lawns of the school, deserted now. No cows, mosquitoes, or students. We are alone on the small campus. The hostels are boarded over, and the grass is thick. We do not have to watch for sinkholes and snakes. We can walk a great distance in no particular direction. As we talk, there is never a moment of dramatic confrontation about my continuing life, and this almost always disappoints me: in the dream neither of us seems especially determined to fight for the life we had together. It does not occur to me to warn Katie about her death, its violence, the few simple things either of us might have done to prevent it.

As I wake, I lie in bed thinking how simple the story is, how easy it will be to retell. I believe that I am committed to a single fidelity, a sequence, and that a sense of continuity is preserved in the waking world. This is tidy and only partially true.

There is an act of withstanding that relocates violence entirely within the realm of imagination. There is a locus to violence that, like grief, makes a single point in time stretch in every direction.
It can be named, managed, and witnessed. In the first dream, restoration—claim the body, take it to the proper place—precedes my obligation to the dead. Katie is the occasion for a dream into which she never enters. In the second dream, Katie is recognized but not accommodated, welcomed but not invited. I am grateful to see her and even to seek her out, but only on another continent.

When I meet Katie in the dream, I explain myself without worrying about the consequence to either past or present. When I do not meet her, explanations are made to whoever is listening. In both versions of the dream, an account is rendered in the negotiated terms of a witness and a survivor who is married again. It is my mind and heart that resist complication. Whoever expresses them to me, they are my terms and my corrections.

2.

Leaving the therapist’s office, need for sympathy induced a certain vertigo. Shame often accumulated in the silence after our shared witness. When I was critical of myself or our life together, I saw less of what Katie and I had loved and valued. There became no high ground on which to stand at a distance from the day’s event, from Katie’s death and our life, and say,
No, it did not happen that way at all
.
There is a part of this we cannot understand together
.

Wasn’t shame the means for self-transformation? Shame required sacrifice and contrition. It was a grammar for failed self-regard that terminated, always, in affection and distance. I sought it beyond hunger and rational thought, beyond even feeling. Rather than high and open ground, shame was, finally, the closed room only I could enter. I groped at these walls, too. I held myself up in the darkness, knowing I could find my way again and again to it. Whoever I invited, however I explained it, the walls were near and would not press closer.

When I had called Judy from the mountaintop, she did not demand explanation or story from me as I feared she might, and
she did not indict me for the fact of Katie’s death. Instead, she offered to help me. I felt gratitude for her kindness in the days that followed. I tried to reciprocate it. The day before the funeral, Judy and I walked to a park near her house, where I again told her the story of Katie’s death, this time more slowly and in great detail. I paused to make explanations, to clarify as best I could the parts she did not understand. There were not many. Above all, she loved her daughter and admired Katie’s courageous life. That life made sense to Judy because no one else could do it as she had, or so well.

Mostly, Judy struggled to piece together the narrative of the afternoon. How we had stayed on the mountain so late. Where we meant to go that we could not wait until morning to hike there. Was my gratitude part of the story I told Judy about Katie’s death? It seemed awkward to include it, as though I would only shift the tone back to me. This wasn’t therapy. My purpose was not entirely my own. And yet, my understanding of the night was incomplete without my gratitude. My feeling for Judy, and my need for her understanding, was a fixed part of the story I now told. I wanted her to know everything. I knew Judy very well.

Wasn’t my failure to save Katie’s life the part of the story that neither of us was particularly eager to articulate? However I told the story, Katie had left
me
on the trail.
I
had hiked back to find
her
.
I
had gone for help when
she
asked me to do so.
I
had
returned
to her when no one else would: to wait with her, and then stay up all night with her body, certain to move it across a country and city, two continents, an ocean, glaciers and wheat, and her hometown, to bring her to Judy, as I knew Katie would have wanted.

I ran these emphases over in my mind. Each time I failed to find in their articulation the courage I hoped they might retrospectively express.

It was defensive to make such distinctions. No voice argued with me. Doctors, friends, and family members agreed the mind was a mechanism of self-preservation. The body submitted to the mind.
I did what
any rational thinker would do
and should want to do.
What I had done
. And yet, for all of my explanations, I understood clearly my failure. I hated to feel forgiven. I needed to feel ashamed—that I had moved through mud that night and felt nothing—if only so there might be
some
moral component to what had happened.

To a sympathetic stranger, I
did not understand how things really worked in nature
. To Judy, even, I was
too hard on myself
. Wasn’t this what I could do best as witness and survivor: to make the fact of Katie’s death undeniable, vivid and void of euphemism? In every telling of it, I might do something very generous to assuage the curiosity and terror about which any listener might otherwise feel some hesitation to inquire too closely. I did not want the story of Katie’s death to be only the story of my having watched Katie die. And yet, weren’t my emotions that night exceedingly relatable? Outside of anatomy and logic, how else might I make the imagined experience vivid and particular to someone who was not there?

Shame made me feel powerful. It allowed me to practice an exacting and particular neurosis. I played the role of constant failure. Shame permitted evaluation to fill in the gaps, arguing by proxy that, really, it didn’t matter whether I had failed Katie, so much as to what extent and in which continuing ways. Shame made me both feckless and omnipotent, a coward with questionable motives, the rube who couldn’t help not knowing better, the mastermind who willed from a chaotic mountaintop the narcissism of ardent regret.

3.

Katie had been a finalist for a different fellowship that spring, one she did not ultimately receive. With its support, rather than Romania, we would have spent parts of the year in four cities: Atlanta, Spokane, Cincinnati, and Washington
DC
. Katie would have interned at different departments in the Centers for Disease Con
trol and Prevention. I remember thinking at the time it was good that she had not received the
CDC
fellowship. I had never especially liked Atlanta. I did not want to move every three months to a new city. I certainly did not want to visit her in these cities while living in a different one. If we were going to move, then I wanted to live abroad again. Unlike Romania, I could not locate Spokane on a map.

After Katie’s death, I understood my reluctance meant I had wanted Katie’s application to fail. I was ashamed to tell her so. The fact of wanting anything, I thought, rather than providing the unconditional support of a loving spouse, meant I had been controlling, manipulative, uncharitable, petty. When, instead of the
CDC
, Katie accepted the fellowship from the Coca-Cola Foundation that placed her in Bucharest. I was excited for our new adventure.

In fact, our departure had been anything short of dramatic or poorly considered. We talked, planned, hedged, hoped, and waited. We rented storage units and bought traveler’s checks. Katie flew to Romania while I stayed behind in Miami a few weeks to pack our things. I loaded boxes into a U-Haul and drove them to our North Miami storage unit. I sold furniture on Craigslist. Katie had sealed the contents of her drawers and desk into boxes I stacked indiscriminately alongside the rest of our apartment: dishes, silverware, books, clothes, jewelry. When I unpacked those boxes, much later, I was surprised to see how hastily Katie had filled hers. She had not put much planning or forethought into the effort. The day before my flight, I crated the cats and dropped them at the international cargo terminal of the airport. Katie claimed them the next day, after they cleared customs and animal control, and a few days later met me at the airport.