Six months
I'd make you out of words
Dear Eric,
Parts of this pain feel as though you left me only yesterday. The memories of that fateful night are burned onto my retinas and seared across my brain like a still-sizzling cattle brand. This is the part that reaches for you in the night, fully expecting to find your waiting arms. Half-asleep-me can’t figure out why you’re out of bed at two o’clock in the morning. Once I rouse enough to remember, confusion turns into chest-wracking sobs.
Other parts of this pain feel as though I have carried it for eons. Since the dawn of time, it seems, I have trekked across this desert wasteland sucking lungfuls of scorching air, sand stinging my eyes and filling my mouth with grit. I am bent and broken under this heavy load, but I cannot put it down; it is a part of me, fused with my back and arms and neck. This burdened soul feels ancient in her loneliness, her Sisyphean task unending and pointless. Here, time has lost all meaning; it is upside down and backwards. There is no restful night here, no cool moon or sea of endless stars. Only an unrelenting sun barely discernible in a scorched, white-hot sky.
Are you rolling your eyes? The storm of time in which we are all lost (apologies to William Carlos Williams) is less dramatic in real life, of course. As you well know, I end up drowning in word soup trying to find the right ways to express the inexpressible. You’d congratulate me, I think, if you knew I resisted adding a Herculean effort phrase to my overwrought Sisphean task metaphor.
Here, in the mundane every day of small-town life in Idaho, there is no burning wasteland with stinging sand, and though our area is probably full of cattle brands, none are held to my retinas or brain cells. There is only this house you lived in. The streets we drove through. The lake we swam in. The same lavender-drenched sunrises and vibrant pink and orange sunsets we walked beneath.
Six months is two-thirds of a pregnancy, it’s two trimesters at the high school, it’s half a year. How did we get here? When you died only yesterday? And also sixty years ago?
Those beautiful but ordinary sunrises and sunsets take my breath away. I stand in the yard, Molly’s soggy tennis ball in hand, staring open-mouthed at a sky that no longer arches over you, breathing air you no longer breathe. And my already broken heart twists and splinters.
Sometimes I try to find our square-shaped constellation in the stars; the one you said we should gaze at while talking on the phone together during those heady salad days before we met in person. It’s been so long, I’m not sure if I’ve ever managed to find the exact same arrangement, but it should be visible now. This is the same season, after all, the same sky we spoke beneath all those years ago.
I’d sit out in the backyard in Arizona, my feet in the pool, my little red Nokia phone cradled between my cheek and shoulder. You’d sit on an old sofa on the balcony of your apartment, your little dog curled up in your lap. Out there, you said, your roommates couldn’t hear you talk “romantic smack.”
I think to myself, if I can find the same set of stars, maybe I’ll find you.
I took Ben to the batting cages tonight. We had the place to ourselves for a while and the quiet allowed us to explore. We figured out how to use the bigger pitching machine and Ben tried out the weighted bat. I don’t know how to help him in the ways you’d be able to. I am not sure if I should tell him to step closer to the plate, to keep his eye on the ball, or to work on the way his back foot twists as he swings.
I am trying so hard, but I cannot be you. And when the weight of that reality threatens to suffocate, I try to remind myself that if it were me who had vanished into the ether, you would be lost in this same stinging desert. You would be here, without me, stumbling through the things I did well and feeling as though you were not enough.
My feeling less-than is not a sign of a weak character, it is simply the reality I find myself in without you. There is no one that can take your place. No matter how many times I wheel the trash can to the curb, no matter how many nights I cook the same kind of pasta you loved, no matter how many times I bring home the same treats you would buy at the store, there is no filling this empty space you’ve left behind. I can take Ben to the batting cages, but it is not the same. It cannot be.
None of this is new. It’s nothing I haven’t already said (or written or scream-cried alone in the car), and it’s not like anyone is fighting me on this. Of course no one can take your place. Of course I am not enough all by myself. Of course I cannot be both you and me. But I keep staring into all the empty places you should be and find myself trying, desperately, to fill the void with words.
Sometimes I imagine that I can. I imagine I can string enough words together to create a whole person. The words would lift from the page and swirl around in the shape of you. Sentences would run down your arms and legs and coil into curls across your forehead. I’d write our memories into every inch, write until our love saturated every letter. You’d be silent, perhaps, but your word-hands could once again clasp mine; your word-arms could once again hold me close. And there would be something in this space we cannot fill. Memories made real.
I can see your smile and that twinkle in your eye. You’d say that sounds like a great modern fairy tale. You’d tell me to write it, and I’d smile back, imagining the cover depicting the heartbroken girl with her shadow-love made of words.
Caption: It’s not a man made of words, but I can imagine it might be.
It would be tempting, I think, to write it so the love infused words awaken a special kind of magic. Like Rapunzel’s golden tear that revived Flynn Rider or the embrace that returned Merida’s mother to her human form, the love-drenched words would bring you back. Not a mere ghostly echo recovered by Harry Potter’s resurrection stone, but my lost love returned to living, breathing life. The space between the swirling words would turn to flesh and bone, and you would not be trapped between two worlds, but truly alive again, and back with us where you belong.
You’re still smiling at me. “It’s not how the story ends,” you’d say. “It’s a better book if the word-boy collapses, if the girl has to sweep the letters into the fire and blow the ashes from her open palm. It’s a better story if the empty space isn’t magicked away. Loss is universal. Everyone will experience it, even if they haven’t yet. It’s a truer story to tell.”
And I kick and scream and tear my hair, because I don’t like that story. I don’t like it at all.
I had a very strange dream several weeks ago. It felt like I had entered another dimension, like I wasn’t really asleep, but exploring a space where I might be able to find you. All night long, I dreamed an entire series of dreams where I was searching through rooms looking for you. Most of the rooms were wrong, misshapen and strange, and I’d wake up, turn over, and go right back to sleep, believing if I kept trying, I’d find the right room. Toward morning, the room was no longer strange or wrong. It was our room. Everything was the same - even the changes I’d made since you left me. I had sorted out the maze. You were near.
You wrapped your arms around me from behind while I rested my head on your chest. I asked you, “Is heaven anything like we were taught?” And you said you didn’t know. You said you hadn’t been there yet. You told me you were in the waiting place. I cried, because I didn’t want you to be stuck. I didn’t want you to be unhappy. If there was a light at the end of a tunnel that you were supposed to follow, I wanted you to follow it.
But it was difficult to say the words out loud, because I also wanted you here with us always. You seemed to understand and held me tighter.
I woke, my cheeks damp with tears, my own arms wrapped around my shoulders where yours had been.
I don’t know if any of it was real, but I think about the waiting place a lot and wonder. In both my dream and Jake’s dream (posted about previously but I don’t know if it’s still up), you were happy, you were content, and you were with us. You didn’t seem stuck or trapped, though you seemed to share in our sadness and grief.
The night you died, I came home from the hospital, (somehow) tucked our shocked and stunned babies into bed, and then cleaned until my knuckles bled. And afterward, I couldn’t sleep. Around four or five in the morning, I stood in our bedroom staring at the place you had rested only hours before. I told you the same thing. I told you that we would find a way to be okay. That we would survive, and if there was a light to go toward, I wanted you to go toward it. I didn’t want you to feel stuck.
Just as in the dream, those words came out strangled by my sobs. They were so hard to say.
If you were out there, I wanted you to be by my side always. I wanted you to haunt this house, to rattle some chains in the attic whenever we were missing you the most. I wanted you to flicker the lights and send vases crashing to the floor. I wanted you to knock pictures off of walls and write my name in the steam in the bathroom mirror.
I wanted to know you were waiting for me.
I have sobbed in the dark of many nights since, asking the empty space where you should be, “Will you come for me when it’s my turn?”
I’m frightened now of death. I never was before. But our kids have lost their failsafe. I am all they have left. And so I worry as I drive down our two-lane highway. I think about how easy it would be for someone to jerk their truck into my lane and hit me head-on. I think about whether or not my weak heart will fail, or if I will have a seizure while swimming and drown. I worry about which child will find me when I go, and whether or not it will be more trauma than they can bear. I think about terminal illnesses, strokes, and dementia, and I am afraid for us, afraid for our children. The fragility of life has never been more vivid. You were here, laughing and playing Zelda with us one moment, and the next, struggling for breath on the kitchen floor.
And then, you were gone.
I don’t want to live to be one-hundred because that is a very long time to live without you. But I also feel very strongly that I must. I need to be here until the children are safely grown; safely launched into adulthood with careers and partners and babies of their own if they want them. And then, when they can see that I am very old and very tired, and the pain of letting me go is somewhat eased by knowing I need rest, then, I hope you’ll come for me.
And even if it’s only my failing brain doing weird and wonderful things, if I can see your smiling face and see your hand reach for me, the fear will vanish, and I will be able to follow you into the great unknown.
Until then, I will carry this uncarryable load of grief and loss and love. I will carry it through desert after unforgiving desert. I will squeeze my eyes closed and bite my knuckles when the branding iron burns too deeply. And I will continue searching the skies for our stars.
And maybe, I’ll write that book.
Love,
Jessica