Tender Grace (6 page)

Quite unexpectedly, I was taken to a place I’ve been avoiding for so long. I woke up that early morning aware that Tom’s side of the bed was empty. The lighted digital numbers on the clock radio said 3:15. I hated sleeping without him and was surprised I hadn’t awakened sooner. I got up and went to the bathroom and then started for the living room, where I assumed Tom had fallen asleep, like he did a good many nights, watching a ball game or reading a book.

“Tom,” I called as I came out of our bedroom and into the living room. He was sitting in the recliner, just as I had suspected.

But immediately, I knew everything had changed. I could tell by looking at him in the soft lamplight that he had left his mortal body behind to put on an immortality that I am not yet privileged to see. I stood across the room from him and shut my eyes, hoping it wasn’t true.

“Not yet,” I whispered.

But I knew our time together was over. I walked over to him, placed my palm on his cold face, kissed the corner of his mouth, folded his notes, and closed his Bible and placed it on the ottoman. Then, before I phoned 9-1-1 and before I made the wretched calls to the children, I backed away from Tom, looking at his beautiful, peaceful face, and dropped into my overstuffed chair across the room.

Three short words reminiscent of a line from a Frost poem came to me:
All is ruined.

I have not cried since I found Tom that morning. I have felt numb, and I have preferred it that way. Or maybe instead of insensibility it is a case of Wordsworth’s “thoughts that . . . lie too deep for tears.”

I never had trouble crying before he died; it was not difficult to touch or even break my heart. Tom said my sensitivity was one of the qualities that drew him to me. He said he was too objective, too black and white, too businesslike. He said I was his complement. He would be so surprised to hear me talk of insensibility, listlessness, stupor. I think he’d be glad I am making this journey.

I scoured his notes looking for anything remotely personal, but all I found was a lesson outline on the first section of John 4, where Jesus speaks with the woman at the well, a woman who might have been miserable enough to take off like I have if she could have managed such a thing. Tom listed three things their encounter tells us about God and his people: (1) he knows everything about us, (2) he still wants relationship with us, and (3) he offers us what no one else has to give, living water. Jesus says this water is like a “spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Tom’s notes say he’s offering “vigorous, abundant life.” That is a strange group of words, as mysterious to me these days as hieroglyphics.

If I were sitting on the edge of Jacob’s well, looking into the eyes of Life himself, would I believe that all is not ruined, that something so glorious as abundant life is possible? Can I muster up enough wisdom and trust and courage to accept his offer of living water?

I thought of something this morning as I sat holding Tom’s Bible, trying to recover from thoughts of finding Tom that April morning. The fourth of April, two days before Tom died, we spent the afternoon working in the yard. That night, invigorated by a day of spring sunshine and manual labor, we made love, candlelight flickering on the golden yellow walls. Afterward, instead of falling quickly into a relaxed sleep, we talked for at least a half hour about the kids, about what we wanted to do to the yard that spring, about the upcoming trip to Alaska. We talked until Tom began drifting off.

I raised myself up on my elbow, leaned over, and kissed him lightly on his soft, warm lips.

“I love you, Tom Eaton,” I said.

He opened his eyes, smiled sleepily at me, and closed them again. Then as I rolled over and snuggled into my side of the bed, I heard him mumble, “I love you too, Audrey Eaton.”

That was the last night I was ever to sleep with my husband.

It seems impossible that until now I have not stopped to give thanks for this gift, this lifetime of solace.

seven

August 20

I left the hotel too late and then made the mother of wrong turns. I ended up driving in what seemed like circles and never managed to find the church. I was downright mad when I finally decided to give it up. I would have missed half the service anyway, not to mention the fact that my spirit was woefully unfit for worship. This is the first time I’ve loused up so badly. I drove back to the hotel after stopping for directions—at two convenience stores I might add—and put my car away. Walking seemed prudent today.

After chilling awhile in front of the television, I took the riverboat tour, a San Antonio equivalent of my Dallas trolley ride, and that, plus the peacefulness of my room, helped restore me to my senses. I found a seat in the boat and told God, hoping he’d see the humor in it, that I would worship this Sunday in a boat like so many do. When the tour was completed and I arrived back where I started, I headed to the glass mall, imposingly huge as well as intriguing. I doubt I would have gone if I hadn’t been desperate for makeup. Because I’m getting so good at reading any sort of map, aside from today’s significant lapse, I found a department store and the counter I needed in a relatively short amount of time. It restored my confidence to a degree.

The clerk, this one quite pleasant, rifled through the drawers and quickly handed me the liquid foundation and mascara I asked for, but because the powers that be keep retiring any shade of lipstick I prefer, we spent a lot of time together looking for something I could tolerate. I use a significant amount of makeup, but the effect is nothing if not subtle. I choose earth tones for my eyes, eschewing bright eye shadows; smoky is as adventurous as my eyes get. I wear color on my cheeks, enough to look healthy, but I have an unreasonable and unyielding aversion to lip color. This clerk seemed to understand that no amount of cajoling or flattery could convince me to wear anything on my lips in the red or brown family, or even pink and most peaches. The fact that Plush Nude was the name of my discontinued lipstick made an impression on her.

“You don’t want a sticky gloss,” she said, putting the cylinder she had just shown me away. “What you’re looking for is a moist lipstick with a little shine but only the slightest touch of color.”

“Exactly!” I said.

I wanted to give her a gold star.

Each of us leaned over our respective side of the counter, drawing lines of potential candidates across the back of my hand. A counter covered with no less than twenty different testers and a colorful wad of Kleenex testified to our tenacity. We were Audrey and Ginger long before I handed her my credit card.

“You should have my name,” Ginger said, nodding at my hair. “Is that natural?”

“So far,” I said.

“I change my color at least once a month,” she said, “but if I had your auburn hair and those eyes not far from the same color, I’d never fool with it.”

“Well, thanks,” I said.

We turned our attention to yet another tester, and I felt like I had a friend by the time I found something I could live with. The lipstick I finally chose is called Shhh. That struck me as so appropriate for the life I’ve been leading that I bought three. Ginger seemed pleased.

It was almost dark when I left the mall. As I walked over to ride the elevator to the top of the Tower of the Americas and view the lights of the city from 750 feet, I thought how nice it was to have Ginger helping me this afternoon. A gentle breeze made the heat tolerable when I stepped out on the observation deck, and I found places for an unobstructed view of all the points of interest. If it wasn’t a feast for my eyes, it was a nice Sunday meal, and a good way to end a day that started so badly.

Or it would have been.

When I came back to my room and tossed my keys into my purse, I noticed my sack of makeup wasn’t in the large outside pocket where I had placed it for safekeeping.

What could I have done with it?

When I left Ginger, I went straight to the tower and then to the hotel, except for a quick stop in the parking lot to get my shoe bag from the car.

I dumped the contents of my purse on the bed, thinking I might have put the sack inside the purse and not remembered doing it. I found a pair of earrings, a laminated bookmark Kelsie had made me in kindergarten, a ticket stub from
South
Pacific,
and salt packets, but not a sack of cosmetics. I checked the shoe bag in case I had put it in there for some crazy reason. Nothing. I was so disgusted. I had spent a ridiculous amount of time selecting that makeup, and besides that, I needed it.

I decided to check the car. Maybe it had fallen on the floor when I grabbed the shoe bag. I even checked the trunk, though I hadn’t opened the thing. By the time I finished ransacking the car, I was agitated beyond reason. I retraced my steps to the tower, willing the little package to be waiting for me on the floor in a dark spot along the railing somewhere. I walked around the circumference of the deserted tower twice, but if I had dropped my sack of makeup there, someone had already returned the lipstick for something with more color. I stood there trying to calm down, telling myself there was no reason whatsoever to be so disgusted, frantic even, about losing some makeup.

Can someone explain why I leaned against the wall, looked out at the lights of San Antonio, and sobbed as though I had lost something very dear?

I walked into the hotel hiding my swollen, bloodshot eyes behind sunglasses. I rushed to my room, washed my face, and lay down with a cold washcloth on my eyes, trying underneath the soothing terry cloth to fathom what the last hour had been about. I had been a runaway train, crashing at the top of the Tower of the Americas. There was no making sense of it.

I finally stood up, hung the washcloth in the bathroom, put on my gown, and picked up Tom’s Bible on my way back to the bed. I flipped to a highlighted passage in John 4 and had the patience to read all of one verse: “My food,” Jesus says, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

What is
my
food? What nourishes and satisfies me? What can I not live without? The madness of the last hour suggests the answer is makeup.

Doing God’s will is the last thing I’ve been concerned about lately.

Or is it?

Perhaps his will for me right now is to learn how to live without Tom, to learn to live with what is left, to somehow quit mourning “the tender grace of a day that is dead” and instead embrace and celebrate “the tender grace of a day,” each one a gift from an eminently good God.

Could I get that intravenously?

August 21

I like to ease into the morning. Dawdling suits me.

Not Tom. He liked to get up while the birds were still warming up for their early morning concert. He would have his shower taken, the paper read, and his cereal eaten before the
Today
show began. He saw a good many sunrises in his lifetime. I’ve seen few and have wished embracing the morning was as natural for me as it was for Tom.

He was always the first one to school. He was usually in his office thirty minutes before anyone else arrived, setting a fine example for the faculty and staff. His favorite saying, pulled out when he was encouraging punctuality, was “If you aren’t ten minutes early, you’re late.” By this standard I was always late when I rushed into my first class with ten
seconds
to spare.

This was an issue we never resolved. Our last argument had to do with this discrepancy in our personalities and took place on a Sunday only a month or so before he died.

“It’s seven thirty,” he said as I sat at my vanity running a comb through my wet hair.

Grrr
. This was a warning, not information. A clock sat on my vanity, less than two feet from my face.

“Don’t do that, Tom,” I said. “I’ll either be ready when you leave the house at eight fifteen or I won’t. We can take both cars if we need to.”

At 8:16 I was ready and glad to see he was still in the house, standing by the door leading to the garage. He even smiled.

Why I always insisted on cutting it so close, I cannot say. I don’t like that about myself. He probably didn’t either.

I intended to leave for Austin today, but I didn’t leave this room. After what happened this morning, I decided to dawdle away the entire day.

I got up late and headed for the shower, still thinking I would leave today.

But standing under the cascading water, I began to cry. I would have thought after last night my reservoir of tears would be depleted. Crying eventually turned into sobbing, gasping-for-breath sobbing. I stopped only long enough to shout something I haven’t uttered since I left home: “I don’t want this. I
do not
want this!”

When I could finally stop crying, I turned off the water, wrapped a towel around me, walked to the unmade bed as though I were sleepwalking, fell onto it, and stared with unseeing eyes at the ceiling.

Then, with nothing on but a towel, I tugged at the comforter and pulled it over me and fell into a deep sleep. I awoke an hour later, disoriented until the towel and my damp hair reminded me of my meltdown. Management had not knocked on my door, so I assume running water and well-insulated walls muffled the outburst.