When Things Get Back to Normal Page 2

  But if I’m taking your death so well, why do I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? I feel as if I’ve been scooped up by a tornado and spiralled into another dimension, where nothing is as it was or as it should be.

  I have taken on the responsibility for the details of your life at a time when I can barely cope with the details of my own. Every day the list lengthens. Get the death certificate. Send in the insurance forms. Cancel memberships here and there. Close out bank accounts. Clear out safety deposit box. Change over Medicare coverage. Change car registration. Let this one and that one know you won’t be chairing a meeting, attending a conference, giving a paper. While I try to get these things looked after, the thank-you notes for mass cards, letters of sympathy, flowers, food and donations to your scholarship fund lie fallow on the coffee table in the front room.

  Then too, the vultures are circling. Will I be selling the house? Lawnmower? Snowblower? Tools? Am I interested in a monument? If I place an order for a monument before Christmas but agree not to have it installed until the frost goes out of the ground, I can take advantage of a special bonus: my name and age engraved for free. Imagine! Me, a chronic falsifier of natal date, making a public proclamation of it on a slab of marble.

  Yesterday I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Only I did. If I will order fifty four-by-five-inch laminated copies of your obituary notice, I can have the lot for the same price as the two-by-two size. Now what use would I have for fifty laminated obituary notices? It isn’t the sort of thing you’d display on your coffee table, is it?

  DECEMBER 4 – Wednesday

  I broke the lease on the Arizona apartment today. Man proposes, God disposes. We had planned our sabbatical year so carefully: a novel for me, a textbook for you, and all of that sunshine, not to mention our first release from domestic responsibility in thirty years. I used to lie in bed and happily anticipate the coming months. On the night of November 21 I told myself that nirvana was only five weeks, two final examinations and seven hockey games away.

  It is difficult to believe that your life petered out while I placidly watched the “doings of the Ewings” on television. Surely the earth should have trembled to presage such a terrible event!

  When the doctor told me you were dead, I didn’t believe him. At any moment I was certain you were going to burst into that room at the hospital they euphemistically call “the quiet room” and announce you were ready to go home. I was even prepared to be embarrassed by your wet-with-perspiration uniform, especially with that battle-scarred sweater. But you didn’t come to me, and later, at home, I lay on our bed and waited well into the night for the call that would announce you had been revived.

  How could you be dead? You were never sick in your life. You’d get a touch of a headache, a touch of the flu. Surely what you had suffered at the rink was only a touch of a heart attack. But as the night wore on and friends and relatives came, I knew you were gone – permanently gone – and it was as though someone had dropped a wet tarpaulin over my head and smothered the life out of me as well. In those very early moments, I could feel the loneliness of the years ahead.

  I huddled on top of the bedspread, drew my legs up towards my chin and let the night slide into morning.

  DECEMBER 6 – Friday

  I don’t know which is the more difficult to do – leave this house or return to it after I’ve been away for a few hours. When I am inside its walls I feel safe, but once I go out the door I become vulnerable, my wounds uncovered. I cringe as if a thousand arrows are waiting to jab at my naked self.

  When I return home, even if after only a brief absence, the silence of the house assaults me. One night last week, I slept at a friend’s house. I came back before the neighbourhood had wakened up. How still the rooms were! Even the refrigerator with that ever-running motor was silent. The reality of your death and the rawness of my widowhood made me sick to my stomach.

  DECEMBER 7 – Saturday

  Two weeks plus a day since you died and the first weekend without you. This is not technically correct, but the other two weekends, like the weekdays, went by in a blur of disbelief and horror. I am conscious of today. I am conscious of being lonely.

  We had our first snowfall last night. A really big one. I spent the morning shovelling the driveway. I forgot to put your car in the garage so I had to broom the snow off it as well. I raged at you with every swipe. Why did you have to skate yourself to death? Why did you have to die in the winter? Surely you, above everyone else, knew how much I hate winter.

  Once I had the cleaned-off car moved into the garage, I attacked the driveway. I must have looked a pathetic sight, wielding that big shovel of yours, because our neighbours’ boy came over to help. I worked along with him, although I wanted to pitch the shovel in a snow bank and come in where it was warm. When I finally did come in, my hands and feet were so numb I had to sit in a bathtub and let warm water thaw my flesh. I wondered if warm water would thaw out a numbed heart.

  DECEMBER 8 – Sunday

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table, staring at your empty chair while sounds of the neighbours leaving for church filter in through the clapboards.

  I miss you so much even my hair hurts. Your death has blinded my eyes to beauty. Do you know I can no longer see in colour – just black and grey?

  I stood before the bathroom mirror this morning and sized up my reflection. It’s the first time since the funeral that I have given more than a hurried thought to my appearance. I’m sure there must have been many days during the last couple of weeks when I looked as unkempt as if I had spent the night under newspapers on a sidewalk grating. The person who looked back at me from the mirror was a stranger. She had a stupefied look. I was reminded of a cat I had as a child. She liked to sleep in the rocking chair by the fire. We all respected her wish – all except Grandfather. He would come in and, with a scoop of his hand, land her on the floor. She would stand there blinking in confusion, a dazed “what happened?” look on her face.

  DECEMBER 10 – Tuesday

  The weight of my grief has slowed me down almost to a stop. My friends say I should seek therapy, but I say I have a right to this grief and don’t want to pay big dollars to have it lifted from my shoulders. In the words of Richard II, You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those. Maybe some people would call this wallowing, but I call it survival.

  My memory refuses to function. I miss appointments, mislay documents and forget house keys, car keys, office keys, as well as leave behind umbrellas, gloves, scarves, purses and whatever else of my personal belongings that can come loose. I’m forever jimmying our porch door open, and the secretary at work has threatened to tape my office key to my wrist.

  I even forget to buy food. Not that eating forms a big part of my life. I’m really into comfort food, though: ice cream, bread, yogurt, chocolate. Already my waist is beginning to expand. But ask me if I care. Two questions consume me. How can I continue without you? How can I spend a winter alone in this house, scared as I am of things that go bump in the night?

  People keep coming up to me and saying, “I’m sorry you lost Walt.” I know they use this word because they can’t bring themselves to use any part of the verb “to die.” Still, I come away feeling that I’ve misplaced you, along with my other belongings. Careless Jean has lost her umbrella and her husband. And all within the space of a few weeks.

  DECEMBER 12 – Thursday

  The contents of your office arrived today. I felt like a voyeur going through your cancelled cheques, copies of notices to students, reminders to self, receipts for donations and memberships, etc. As I sorted out the remnants of your life, I had a perverse wish to uncover a secret life – a short tryst, a lengthy affair, a few stolen moments. The anger over your deception would have been a welcome respite from the pain that now saturates me.

  I found no such evidence, though, and, as a matter of fact, the innocent accumulation of material just made me more aware of how special you
were. Do you know that some evenings when I’m approaching the house, tired from work, I get angry because you were such an affable human being? I think that if you had been a difficult person to live with, I could cope a lot better with returning to the empty house. Is this crazy thinking or isn’t this crazy thinking? Maybe I do need therapy. Maybe I am going over the edge.

  People think they can make me feel better by telling me about others who have had harder blows than mine. They don’t seem to understand that at this time I have no capacity for dealing in degrees of pain, and because I am expending all of my emotions on myself, I have none left over for the hardships of my neighbour.

  My soul is dead and my heart is overflowing with emptiness.

  I can’t seem to cope with the neverness of death. Will I never again feel your arms around me? Never? Will I never again hear your laugh? Never? Will I never again watch you getting dressed and pulling your partly buttoned shirt over your head because it’s quicker to get it on that way?

  Sometimes I catch myself playing “let’s pretend.” I look at the picture of us that is hanging in the dining room – the whole smiling family – and I make believe the children are small again, and at any moment you will come striding in from work and scoop us up in your arms. I save this game for especially terrible times because it is scary how tempting it is to permanently slip into a place where the ugliness of reality doesn’t exist.

  DECEMBER 14 – Saturday

  Today I was walking downtown, and I saw someone I knew walking along on the opposite side of the street. He waved a cheery hello, and I returned his wave, equally cheerily, even though I had just mopped away the tears that, seconds earlier, had streamed down my face, unbidden and unannounced. Afterwards, I wondered about the number of people who go about their day waving cheerily while their hearts are weighted with sorrow. Thoreau was probably right when he said most of us lead lives of quiet desperation.

  Later on during that walk, I came face to face with someone who made it impossible for me even to force a cheerful exterior. She wanted to know the gory details. Did you die on the ice, in the dressing room or in the ambulance? Were you in the shower? Were you still dressed in your hockey equipment? I wanted to be mischievous and say you almost never took a shower in your hockey equipment because water plays havoc with shin guards, but I couldn’t manage that much levity, especially when she added consolingly, “But Jean, you have so much going for you. You’ll be remarried in no time at all.” She predicted on the outskirts of a year. I said when my cat got run over by a car I waited longer than that to get another one. She nodded without the slightest understanding. “That’s the trouble with cats,” she said. “They get themselves killed.”

  I’ve slowed down almost to a stop. I used to be such a mover and shaker that I practically met myself on the way to going somewhere else. Now it takes me a full hour to get dressed, a feat I could once accomplish in twenty minutes, fifteen if pressed. Some mornings are worse than others, and I’ve often used up two hours with nothing to show for the wasted time except washed teeth and combed hair and the books and papers I have to take back to the office humped into a pile by the front door. I’m told this slowness is a sign of depression. If that’s the case, I must really be in the depths.

  DECEMBER 16 – Monday

  Thank God for good friends. They let me lean into them when I can no longer stand upright. We had three categories of friends: yours, mine and ours. In the beginning, all three were on hand. Now the group has withered down to a few of ours and a lot of mine. Mine are mostly women. Over the years they have enriched my life, and now they are sustaining it.

  They have the sensitivity not to tell me that I must get on with my life. They know that, for now at least, I have no life, nor do I want one. Acquaintances are not so sensitive. “Life goes on,” they say, as if I am malingering and it is now time I was up and about. Perhaps they say it because they think it is something I want to hear or to confirm that, for them at least, life does go on. Or perhaps it is as Shakespeare said, everyone can master a grief but he who has it.

  DECEMBER 17 – Tuesday

  Is there sleep after the death of a spouse? I walk myself into exhaustion every evening and yet sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care eludes me. Maybe Macbeth was right – only the innocent sleep. I am tortured with guilt over my sins of commission and omission. I won’t allow myself to recall the happy times. Instead I dwell on the things I said which I shouldn’t have said, or on the things I should have said and didn’t. I can’t think of any shortcomings of yours. When I telephoned our friend Al in Arizona and mentioned this to him, he said he can’t wait to die so M. will canonize him. Is that what I’m doing to you?

  What gives me the worst case of the guilts – positively the worst case – is that I can’t recall you. I mean I can’t recall the details of you. I try to picture you mowing the lawn, shovelling the walk, sitting at your desk grading exams, hunkered in your chair watching sports on television, and on and on, but no pictures come to mind. All that remains is the knowledge that you did do these things.

  But now ask me to describe you in that casket and I will supply you with the most minute detail. I can even see the rust stain on your little finger, just underneath your engineer’s iron ring. I try to change the channel, but the same picture returns over and over again. It is as though the horror of you lying inert on that cold pleated satin has choked the life out of all other memories.

  DECEMBER 18 – Wednesday

  I’ve discovered there’s nothing romantic about a sunrise if you have spent the dark hours roaming through empty rooms hoping daybreak will come before its time. Are insomnia and widowhood synonymous?

  DECEMBER 19 – Thursday

  The days trudge towards Christmas. Yesterday I suggested to the children that we go to a restaurant for dinner on Christmas Day. They wouldn’t have been more shocked if I had suggested we peddle pornography on a street corner. Only those to be pitied, they said, eat in restaurants on Christmas Day.

  It isn’t easy for them, either. They remember other Christmases – the stairs garlanded in red and green, the fireplace burning brightly and friends and relatives seated at a laden table.

  I’m certain the three of us would prefer to wake up one morning and discover we had slept through the twentyfifth. I have learned a truth that my friend A. knew all along: special holidays make happy people happier and sad people sadder, and the more special the holiday, the more terrible it is for those who have no reason to celebrate it.

  Christmas Eve

  Haven’t entered any thoughts for days. But then I haven’t done much of anything for days. Heartache is consuming me.

  This is the first Christmas Eve since we met that we will not be in church together. Isn’t that an amazing record of togetherness? Steve came home last night for three days. We are going to early service. Although we haven’t discussed it, neither of us is up to Midnight Mass. I hope the sermon doesn’t dwell on the family aspect of Christmas.

  Christmas Day

  Morning has broken. It’s finally here. Dreading its arrival didn’t hold it back for an instant. Steve and I are sleeping late – or, more precisely, we are clinging late to the bed. Neither of us has even turned on our radio, knowing the Christmas music will pierce deep into our flesh.

  Christmas Night

  Hallelujah the night! We went to the hotel for dinner. The four of us – Sue, Ben, Steve and I – were so very polite to each other. Ben was on his best behaviour and acted more like thirty-nine than nine. On the way home we confessed our relief that the dining room had been crowded and we hadn’t felt like waifs in a storm. We came back to the house and gave Ben the gifts you had bought for him early in November. After he opened them, he said shyly that he dreamed about you last night. He saw you smiling down at him from Heaven. Were you?

  Already I’m dreading next Christmas. Does time really heal? I wish I could believe it does.

  Tonight I’m remembering other Christma
ses. I remember when you were an engineering student and Susan was just an infant. We had an attic apartment, and the roof was so slanted the only place you could stand up straight was in the centre of the living room. On Christmas Eve, after we put Susan to bed, we went out to the back veranda and reeled in the day’s diapers. We had to crack them off the line. We brought them in and stood them over the heating ducts in the kitchen to thaw, and after a few minutes they leaned against the wall like tired old men. That night the sky was so blue it made the snow look blue, too. I have no idea why this memory has stayed with me all these years, but to this day, whenever I smell clean cotton drying, I recall that Christmas Eve.

  Another special Christmas was the first one we spent in Arizona, when you were working on your doctorate. Alan was visiting us, and on Christmas Eve he played a record of Mel Torme singing “The Christmas Song.” I got so lonely for home, especially when he sang that part about chestnuts roasting on an open fire, that I began to cry and Alan chided me, saying we never even had a fireplace at home, much less roasted chestnuts over one, so why the nostalgia? A little later we took the children for a drive in the desert, and we brought back a scraggly mesquite bush and decorated it with cookies because we were too poor to buy proper decorations. In the morning, Alan scoured our housing area for other displaced persons like ourselves. He found eight, and we had a delightful blueberry pancake breakfast.

  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I need to believe in the existence of a hereafter. I mean I always believed, but now it is essential that I believe. I want to be able to rejoin you and Alan and the significant others who have left me behind. John Keats said, “life is but a day; a fragile dewdrop on its perilous way.” For my part, I want life to be only an anteroom in that mansion of many rooms.