by Gail Griffin
I don’t know how I did this, disembodied as I was, as I am. Some part of me seems to be functioning as a kind of emissary from the unavailable remainder of myself. Maybe the deepest part of me after all is my incorrigible sense of responsibility. Or maybe that part kicks in as an attempt to throw some kind of anchor into reality lest I float entirely away. The way I grabbed that branch in the river.
After the calls I lay on our bed, trying to breathe, staving off the recognition that he would never lie here next to me again. My hair was still damp. My body was adrenalin-scoured, shaky and nauseated. Time fractured and folded back on itself, sending me periodically back into the river, screaming. I slept in ragged fragments, jerking awake and yelling. I tried to quiet and calm myself viscerally, as if I were a traumatized animal in my own care.
Now, on this brilliant morning in May, I find myself Elsewhere—still in human life, apparently, but in a province unknown and fearsome. The place I have come from, the one where I have a life with Bob, is gone, and if I allow myself to think about it for longer than a millisecond I will shatter on the floor. This new place is uninhabitable but must be inhabited.
I am fifty-seven. I have lost many people, including four parents. I don’t have to be convinced, as young grievers do, that the pain will lessen, that the monstrous event will slowly seep into my life like chemicals seeping into groundwater. I know this will happen, and that’s the problem: the prospect of how much time must be lived through in order for that process to occur is more than I can think about. First I will have to bring myself to believe in last night. The time it will all take stretches before me like a wasteland. I want to opt out, yield to disaster, collapse in the face of it and die. I want to be put away somewhere safe until I am fit to live.
But standing here in the middle of the cabin, staring around me, trying to understand that this nightmare is real, I am, in fact, already living through it. You are living right now, I remind myself. So I might as well move, one foot and then another, toward the shower, to wash the river out of my hair. And then, breathing shallowly, get dressed. And then actually blow-dry my hair, as if it mattered. And then, moving very slowly but methodically, wash the dishes from the dinner we ate together last night, without thinking of the dinner we ate together last night. They will just be dishes, soaking in now-cold water where he put them last night. How they got there I will not think about. I take off my grandmother’s wedding ring so it doesn’t go down the drain. I don’t put it on again.
And it goes from there, step after step toward noon, when people begin to show up and I am held, and decisions are made, and the earth begins to turn.
*
Somehow it has been arranged that Linda, the widow of a stepbrother, will take custody of me. She lives an hour away on the Lake Michigan shore. She takes me to an emergency care center where a kind, gentle P.A. checks me out. She also takes me to the funeral home in Kalkaska, the one that called me in the middle of the night. She knows things like how many copies of a death certificate one needs. At her house I watch the lake, which brings moments of something like calm.
Three days later I am ferried downstate to my house in Kalamazoo. Entering my house, I walk into immediate and unexpected relief, a sense of safety and comfort. I am no longer in the Terrible Place, our poor little cabin, poisoned like a well with a body in it. I never want to see it again. Here, I can breathe a little. Diane shows up on my porch. Later she tells me that when she put her arms around me I wasn’t there in my body.
Two days later my brother and niece arrive from Oregon. He takes over. A lawyer, he pages through Bob’s files, pulling documents I will need, writing me instructions, making calls. He also shops and cooks substantial meals that encourage me to eat. He takes care. I vaguely recognize a watershed: my brother and I have been semi-estranged for a long time, reconnecting only recently. But that was before. This is after, where perspective operates differently. Many enormities have instantly shrunk to insignificance. My niece, sixteen, controls and interprets the television for me and buys me waterproof mascara for a memorial service, organized by Bob’s kids, which I can barely bring myself to attend. The two of them shepherd me past displays of photos of Bob that I steadfastly refuse to see, through waves of music that is not Bonnie Raitt or Koko Taylor, not his music.
The summer comes on, with its long bright days to be lived through. Mornings are worst. Birds wake me early, when it’s still cool, and a few weightless seconds pass before I remember and sink into my life. Craving unconsciousness, I dive for sleep again as the heat rises.
I tiptoe around my own mind. If I stumble, I will land at the river’s edge in the dark, screaming. A too-quick move and I will feel the monstrous fall upon me like an axe. A clumsy turn will bring me face-to-face with Bob’s absence, with the incredible fact that I will never see his face again. My head is a dark cave resonating with an endless shriek.
Reading is the sole activity that keeps it all at bay, so I read the hours away. Gradually I take on one minor task per day, like dishwashing or laundry. When I can accomplish two things, I congratulate myself. Like a person recovering from a debilitating illness, I feel my limits. If it seems too much to walk from one room to another, I don’t. Each day is like a closed room. Looking back or forward exhausts and terrifies me. So I am here, now, and nowhere else. I am abstracted from the ongoing narrative that constituted myself. It went over the edge, into the river.
Periodically I must confirm to myself that what happened was real. This has nothing to do with denial. It is the difficulty of integrating the unimaginable—not just the terrible but the weird. Realization—making something real—turns out to be a process. I am impatient to get this monstrosity ingested, to swallow the surreal lump and get on with grieving. Like Emily Dickinson, I know I can wade grief, whole pools of it. But this—this is a different beast, a three-headed Cerberus. This bottomless, roiling pain comes flanked by trauma’s residual terror on one side and existential outrage on the other. And all three of them howling.
At the very western edge of the eastern time zone the summer sun hangs in the sky, glaring, invasive, until after 8:30, when the light begins to thin. Finally, by 9:30, night starts to bloom up from the earth and drown the sky, which is still bright in the west an hour later. I breathe in the cool, the dark reprieve. I welcome the television voices, or read some more. Another day lived through.
Several years after all this, two thousand miles from home, I will see a dog lying on a sidewalk, his person kneeling beside him. The dog isn’t dead or even bleeding, but it has been stricken. People stop to offer help, but the human just kneels and waits. It is as if he knows the dog is waiting too, to see if its life returns.
*
When I arrive home in Kalamazoo, five days after Bob’s death, I immediately notice that the house and yard are pristine. Friends from the college have had the place professionally cleaned; a crew of them has mowed my grass, blown clean my walkways, and raked my gardens. Part of the huge relief I feel upon walking into the house is the calm of order and cleanliness. Neither my friends nor I could have known how important this would be.
Diane has coordinated everything, functioning as Information Central for the world of people concerned about me. She turns her attention to me like a doctor making rounds. At first she calls thrice daily—morning, afternoon, night—to gauge my state of being. One day when she asks how I am I hear myself wail, “I’m mad at Bob!”
“Why?”
“He wasn’t supposed to leave me!”
This is where I start to laugh, and she joins in. It’s the first time I’ve laughed. It’s a bit like a dam breaking. As I become increasingly functional, the calls diminish to two a day. By the end of June, it’s one.
My friend Karyn is the nexus of the food network that has been organized—scheduling, collecting meals, dropping them off. I am apparently not to be disturbed. I’m grateful for this, but also a little embarrassed. Round about 5:00 in the glaring afternoons through June, aft
er I have inched through the terrible hours, Karyn creeps up to my back door and deposits a container, then creeps away. I’m Bertha Rochester, voiceless, outraged, helpless, fed intermittently by the silent Grace Poole.
Other friends confront my calamity in their own idiom. Chris, for instance, ignores the food network and its vinyl containers of comfort food. He shows up in person, his long, tall figure striding up to my back door wearing shorts, a flowered shirt, and an antique turquoise necklace that I have coveted for years, bearing before him a silver platter featuring charcuterie, an assortment of cheeses, sliced and fanned out, and fresh asparagus, steamed to a brilliant green, chilled, the stalks lined up like soldiers. He wants to plant a tree for Bob. I just want to sink my teeth into the perfect asparagus. I can’t tell him, or explain to myself, how comforting it is to have a man with me.
*
My house is the only safety; it feels like a cave of comfort and protection from a random and terrifying world. I go outside into the yard to see what summer has brought up, but I stay close. My first foray beyond the perimeter comes when Marigene and Mary take me to dinner at a restaurant forty minutes away—chosen, I suspect, so that I won’t have to worry about seeing people I know. It feels strange to be out, and the world looks dreamlike, far too bright. I get through dinner and am relieved to reach home again.
Part of my agoraphobia is that when I am around people, I feel my distance from the human species much more acutely than when I’m alone. A recurring mental image: I am standing on an unpopulated shore as a giant ship sails away, bearing a noisy crowd that includes everyone I know and everyone else besides. I am left behind because I have experienced something so far beyond the pale that no one can speak to me or comprehend the words I might find. I desperately want to escape the island, but I can’t bear the thought of being onboard that teeming ship where I will be a shadow.
I think of all those people contemplating me, the wreck of me, and I know that they feel nothing but love, sorrow, and pity. But what I feel is shame. Now I know why shame follows trauma. To be truly violated—in your body, in your life—is to be seen and known as completely vulnerable, akin to being naked in public. You become the “carrier,” bearing the curse of human powerlessness, the stigma of disaster and delusion. Everything I am has been subsumed by catastrophe, like a sinkhole. After all I have been in my years, I am now only one thing: the person to whom this happened.
*
I do not ask why. I know there is no reason for what’s happened. I’ve always been very clear about the meanings in my life—my work, my writing, my relationships; now Bob’s death draws meaninglessness down like a raptor. But sure as I am that the cosmos has shown its utterly indifferent face once and for all, I can’t seem to root myself there. I abandoned any notion of a personal deity in high school, yet my mind is constantly running up against God, another name for “Why.”
A couple of good friends coincidentally light on the word cruel to describe what has befallen me. The word falls into place with a satisfying click, apt and right. I have been the object of a cruel hoax, like Carrie at the prom, and I’ve now suffered my baptism of blood and I want to explode everything in sight. Like Carrie, I’ve been led down the garden path. Throughout our eighteen years together I have been writing Bob into the story as redeemer of my isolated life, the late love come to rescue me from my persistent loneness. I, who have preached to generations of students against the deceptions of the Romance Plot; I, who have enjoined young women not to imagine that a man will redeem their lives—I have fallen for the same ruse. The Cosmic Pedagogue has just intervened brutally, not merely to demonstrate power but to show me my mistake.
But now we’re back to Divine Purpose. What is this version but another narrative, another word-net cast into immensity, no more reliable than romance? While we may have an interest in learning, the universe itself has no interest in teaching us, and no capacity for cruelty, which by definition is intentional.
Which is worse: cruelty or indifference? Something taking aim at me, or a stray bullet finding my heart?
The stories we fashion for our experience constitute a kind of gravity. I bounce between these two incompatible notions like a loose astronaut pinballing between two planets. And neither one can sustain life.
*
Mary Ellen comes by regularly, to sit quietly with me and check my spiritual vitals. She is chaplain at the college and she performed our marriage. Four months later, it was she and her partner, Suzanne, who drove north to bring me home. One day she arrives lugging a large, cumbersome black garbage bag she can barely lift. Out tumbles a huge afghan, an accretion of rectangles without pattern or plan: wildly disparate colors, thicknesses, textures, some pieces adorned with beads or pearls or fringe or bits of wood. The pieces have been knitted by various staff and faculty members who answered Mary Ellen’s call. The gift comes with a handbook of homemade paper, each page bearing a scrap of yarn and a message from the knitter.
Taking the ungainly softness onto my lap like some big sweet animal, I weep. I cry all the time, but this is the first time I have wept from something other than grief laced with rage. And I’m aware of the change.
Diane mentions that she’s about to take her cairn terrier, Doon, to the groomer. I hear myself say, “I want to take her.” She demurs; I insist. I want to pay for it too, and Di, with her sensitivity to people’s odd needs, accepts. This is the first voluntary car trip I’ve taken. Doon and I are particular friends, as she affirms by peeing on the kitchen floor whenever I show up. There is something deeply reassuring about ferrying her to the beauty shop and then retrieving her and returning her home—silky and trimmed and clean-smelling, no perfume, no bows. I have done a thing, simple and singular, and the result is good. Doon’s matted blond fur has been solved.
*
People hold death at bay with verbal formulas. No one I know, thankfully, has the cojones to tell me that everything happens for a reason, or that God doesn’t give us more than we can bear. But one religious friend suggests that possibly Bob’s death was a benevolent alternative to paraplegia or some equally horrible outcome of his fall from the riverbank. Because this friend’s heart is good, and because we are dining in public, I keep my Medusa mask folded in my purse and simply ask, quietly, why the benevolent alternative couldn’t be Bob’s not falling from the bank at all.
I discover that there is a universal solvent people reach for in the presence of someone coated in death: Sorry for your loss. Not even a complete sentence, subject and verb both excised. Shorthand, like a text. Sry 4 yr ls. Oftener than not the four words are rushed together. Sorry fyaloss. Hearing it is like hearing silence, or worse, depending on who says it.
Many of the cards I receive employ some variant of You’ll always have your memories. If each of these cards produces a paper cut, I will bleed to death. As I read them—just weeks after Bob was the living, log-splitting, martini-drinking, pork-loin-with-rosemary-cooking, dancing, snoring center point of my life—memory itself is a beast I have to manage assiduously, minute to minute. Memory threatens to rise up and eat me alive. By midafternoon of the day after Bob’s death, his brother, at my direction, is hauling out all of Bob’s clothes, to be donated or dumped immediately. I see the alarm in his eyes and realize I might seem deranged at best, heartless at worst. But I know that if I see or touch or smell Bob’s things hanging in the closet, I will collapse. Who proposed this notion that memories offer any kind of compensation or solace?
With the language of grief on my mind, I find myself fascinated by the messages to dead loved ones printed at the end of the obituaries in the local paper. It’s been ten years and we miss you every day. We know you are in the stars, watching over us. Love, Mom, Dad, Brittany, Mark, Nana, and Pops. Or: Happy Birthday, Tom! This would be your 40th. Faced as I am every waking minute with the conundrum of my beloved man’s absence, I am greatly tolerant of all the ways grievers manage their loss. But I have to wonder whether people actually imagine an afterli
fe where the departed is reading the newspaper. Or celebrating his birthday? Do they regard the Kalamazoo Gazette as a portal to the Beyond?
The only thing possibly more ludicrous is a person with a PhD consulting a psychic. I, who believe in no deity and no afterlife, join the company of Mary Todd Lincoln and many others of the Victorian sisterhood. The psychic comes well recommended by one of the smartest, wisest people I know. She costs $125. She immediately tells me that Bob died of a heart attack on the bank before he hit the water.
“But he’d just had his heart monitored and the doctor said it was perfect!”
Heart attack, she insists. “Happens all the time. My daughter works in the cardiac care unit at the hospital, sees it all the time. Oh, wait, I’ve got him! He’s right here.”
She means Bob.
“Yes, he says it was a heart attack. He says, ‘I know this isn’t the way we wanted it, but this is the way it is.’”
And a sob blooms in my throat, because that sounds exactly like something he’d say.
*
July 1: I am at my desk, sitting before a computer screen. It is the last place I want to be.
Back in May, I was writing a book. In fact, I was nearing its end. It was an anatomy of a student murder-suicide that occurred at Kalamazoo College in 1999. It would have eleven chapters and a brief conclusion, and at the end of April I had finished drafting chapter 9. I usually write quickly, and keeping up my pace of a chapter per month, I planned on finishing a complete draft in June and July. I would take August to recover before returning to the classroom in September.
My inability to contemplate futurity has had a single exception: the only thing I can imagine that could worsen my present situation would be failing to complete this book. In that case, there really would be no reason to persist in breathing, nothing solid to grasp in the oceanic chaos. With two-plus chapters to go, I will need two months at least. And that means I must resume writing in July.