When Things Get Back to Normal (2 page)

As my mother would have said, you had a lovely funeral, and I thought it a pity you couldn't have witnessed the packed church. I'm told there was standing room only. Even the choir loft was filled.

On the drive to the church, I saw people going on with their lives just as if the world hadn't stopped. A young
man wearing a radio headset stood on the sidewalk and absently watched the procession as he waited for the light to turn green. His arms kept time to the music that flooded his ears.

I was so certain you'd be home by the time I returned from the service that I filed away bits of information I thought you'd enjoy: for example, how Steven, without my knowledge, smuggled your hockey stick to the cemetery and dropped it into your grave so you would have something familiar waiting for you there.

I started searching the crowd for you the minute I got back to the house. I was so tired. So woebegone. I wished I could find a private corner where I could crouch into a ball and keen my misery away. But how could I escape when I had a houseful of guests and you hadn't shown up to take over?

As time passed and there was still no sign of you, I began to get angry. What was keeping you? How could you expect me to wake you, bury you and be a hostess as well? I wandered aimlessly through the crowd, making robotic conversation here and there, and feeling I should be apologizing for your absence. Even as I passed the sandwiches and replenished the tea, I kept an ear cocked for your footsteps on the back veranda.

A woman remarked as she picked up a watercress sandwich that President Kennedy also died on November22. That night, when I lay wide awake in bed, I wondered how Mrs. Kennedy had felt on her first “after the burial”
night. Did she substitute her pillow for his, hoping it would make the bed less lonely? Did she want to get dressed and go to the cemetery to keep him company in case he felt abandoned and lonely, surrounded as he was by strangers – dead strangers? Did she herself feel abandoned, the relatives and friends having gone back to their own lives and the fever of the last few days suddenly no more? And later, as the weeks and months passed, did she search the calendar for that significant date, saying, as my mother had said, her voice far away. “This day last month he was still here.” And still later, “This day last year. . . . ”

I was called a widow today. “Sign here,” the girl in the office of vital statistics said when I went to pick up a copy of your death certificate. She pointed with a geranium-red fingernail to indicate the spot she had Xed for my signature. “Right here. In the block that says widow of the deceased.” The word pierced me like a lance, and my sharp intake of breath was audible even though the office was noisy with others seeking proof of beginnings and endings.

Later, as I walked home, I tried to give voice to my new label
. Widow! Widow!
I mouthed the word over and over, and although I could hear it thundering in my soul,
no sound would leave my lips. The letters bunched up on my tongue and clung there like soot to a chimney. Until two weeks ago, widow was only a word in the English language. Now it was me – a woman with a life as bleak as that sky on the day we lowered you into the half-frozen November ground. I have been daughter, sister, wife, mother. These labels covered only part of me, yet increased all of me. Widow covers all of me and decreases all of me. I learned yesterday that the word widow is derived from the Latin
viduus
, meaning empty.

Went back to work today. Farewell sabbatical leave! Walking in through those university gates alone, when for the past fifteen years we had gone together, took an act of strength I was convinced I didn't have. (Yes, I said walking. You predicted correctly. The day did come when I wished I hadn't turned the driving over to you.) When I got to my office, I closed the door (I wasn't up to condolences) and attacked the piled-up assignments. I think I was lenient with my red pencil. What, I reasoned, signified a pass or a fail in technical writing when, with the swiftness of a pen-stroke, some higher force could snuff out a life? Maybe later such things as standards of excellence will once again be important to me.

I'm told that going back to work is the best medicine
for “taking my mind off it all.” People say this with such conviction that I'm sure they believe it. Don't they understand that nothing – absolutely nothing – can divert my thoughts? The pockets of my mind and heart and soul are bloated with pain. The trouble with grief is that it can't be viewed. If my arms were newly severed, would anyone suggest that I go to work to take my mind off my loss? My friend L. said she wished people could have a barometer in their foreheads for measuring pain of the heart. If others could see the extent of your suffering, they wouldn't be so quick to ply you with platitudes.

They say I'm taking it well. They mean your death, of course, even though they can't bring themselves to voice the word. I've cancelled your credit cards. I even registered the envelopes bulging with chopped-up plastic. I gathered your belongings into piles: to be thrown away, to be given to charity, to be passed on for memories – diamond ring, gold cuff links, new tuxedo, never worn, an anniversary gift from me in October when I still had expectations of a long and full social life. I know what I'm about to say is a cliché, and you know how I hate clichés, but it is so true that old habits hang tough. Before I threw your cast-offs into the green garbage bag, I got
the scissors to snip the buttons from your shirts. I actually had a couple in my hand before I realized what I was doing. It was a really low moment when I came to grips with the fact that I no longer have any need to save shirt buttons. My sewing box already has a quart bottle filled to the top with small, white pearlized buttons, and, unless I intend to open a button factory, I now have enough shirt buttons to last a lifetime, however long or short that may be.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.