Tilda went back to bed and slept until the morning light crept through the crevice in the blackout shades.
The night of the Ambien dosage proved uneventful. There were no midnight snacks, drives, or other odd behaviors associated with pharmaceutical somnambulism. Tilda was simply able to sleep through the night with no more troublesome dreams or interruptions. There were, however, lingering effects from the dodgeball dream. Simply put, Tilda couldn’t shake it. It stayed with her, causing her to tremble when she thought of it, something that occurred at odd moments—in the grocery store, at the bank, at home in the kitchen and the dining room. The trembling, lasting for a minute or two, would be the first of several other physical reactions; next a chill would start from her stomach and radiate outward until her arms and hands tingled. If she was out when it started, she would try to get to her car before the onset of what came after the tingling: her heart rumbling around as though she had switched on a blender in her chest. Then came heat and sweats and a light-headedness that she always felt would surely end in unconsciousness if she could not get to a quiet place where she could calm down. Tilda figured it was anxiety and reasoned that knowing this, she could better control it, but the chain reaction of trembling to light-headedness continued just the same.
She had abruptly left Laura on several occasions. She knew her daughter was alarmed by Tilda’s sudden departures because she’d call within the hour, pleading with her mother to “see someone,” or at least to see her rabbi, who she said was very sensitive and who had been wonderful at her father’s small service.
“Laura, surely you realize that a woman my age would find it ludicrous to talk to someone . . . how old? Twenty-five?”
“He’s thirty, Mom, with a wife and a child. How about Rabbi Ross, then? Daddy liked him, and you did, too. He’s the emeritus rabbi now, but he still talks to congregants.”
Tilda had dismissed the whole conversation. She wasn’t about to talk to anyone. Once again she reminded Laura of their oath of one year, to which Laura acknowledged their agreement but also said, “On the other hand, I can’t sit doing nothing if I think you need . . . if I think you’re having health problems, and I do.”
Tilda had changed the subject, and Laura had let it go.
But the first night of Hanukkah changed everything. Tilda had turned down every invitation for remaining holidays from Barbara, Bev, George, and even Darren, who in a strange turn of events had invited her to Christmas dinner with his mother in White Plains—to which Tilda had replied simply, “You’re kidding.” Darren had laughed, and that had been the end of it. And now Tilda could not deny that her place was with Laura, Tilly, and Mark. Laura had decided a small, quiet family dinner on the first night of Hanukkah would be in keeping with her commitment to twelve months of mourning.
And so Tilda went as she said she would. Laura opened the door and gave her mother a big hug and then took her coat and told her Mark and Tilly were in the living room waiting to light the candles.
Tilda went in and kissed Tilly and Mark, noticing that Tilly once again was in jeans and her blue flannel shirt, decidedly underdressed, in her grandmother’s estimation. Laura walked in behind her and took her place, standing with the others at the table. She placed the first candle in the far right on the menorah. Standing in the very spot where she had stood for so many first nights of Hanukkah while next to Harold, Tilda was keenly aware of the warmth the softly dimmed lights in the dining room cast, of the aroma of roasted chicken filling the house, encircling her with an odd mix of sweet sadness. Here were the remaining people on earth she loved beyond measure, and here also was the absence of Harold, an absence so strong it was a presence. She closed her eyes and listened as Laura recited, “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam.”
And then Tilda, Tilly, and Mark read from the copies Laura had printed out for them, “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe.”
And Laura said, “Asher kidishanu b’mitz’votav v’tzivanu.”
And Tilda, Tilly, and Mark read, “Who has sanctified us with his commandments and commanded us.”
And they continued, “L’had’lik neir shel Chanukah. Amein.”
“To light the lights of Hanukkah. Amen.”
And soon they came to the last blessing, said on the first night only, “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam.”
“Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe.”
“Shehecheyanu v’kiyimanu v’higi’anu laz’man hazeh. Amein.”
“Who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season. Amen.”
But we didn’t reach this season, not together. This was Tilda’s thought when the floor gave way.
It was the end of this prayer that kept Laura from lighting the shamash and then the first candle of Hanukkah, let alone singing “Hanerot Halalu,” as they had always done. As soon as they recited “this season,” Tilda “went out like a light,” as Mark described it, or “fell into a heap on the floor,” in Laura’s words. “I thought you died, Grandma!” Tilly told her later that evening.
Of course, Tilda came to right away and was able to get up the stairs with Laura and Mark’s help, where she lay down on their bed for a few minutes while Laura went for water and a cool compress. Tilly, who had come up, too, stood behind her father in the doorway. Tilda, with a flick of her wrist, shooed them away. “I’m all right, honestly. Go on now, I’ll be down in a minute.”
As soon as they left, she lay back down, one arm flung over her eyes.
“Maybe we should take you to the ER,” said Laura, putting the wet cloth on her mother’s head.
Tilda objected in the strongest terms and assured her daughter it was just a fainting spell.
“I’m mortified—and embarrassed by all the attention. It’s nothing,” she said, beginning to get up.
“Oh, Mom, please. You don’t have to be embarrassed. We’re concerned, that’s all. Lie back down, just for a minute, okay?”
Reluctantly, she then told Laura about the anxiety attacks. To her surprise, Laura had already become suspicious.
“I knew something was up, when you kept disappearing on me, but I didn’t know what it was. I’m relieved, actually, and glad you told me, thank you. I would’ve been after you about it at some point,” she said, readjusting the damp cloth on her mother’s head.
“But, Mom,” she continued, “you can’t just self-diagnose like this. It could be something serious. You need a full medical workup, a stay in the hospital . . .”
Tilda had to think fast. She had visions of an ambulance pulling into the driveway to escort her into the Medical Hell the practice of medicine had become.
She immediately sat up and assured Laura she was okay. “Look, I’m completely revived. No need to call anyone, really.”
Laura stared at her mother.
“Okay, I’ll tell you what, I promise I’ll call Dr. Willis first thing in the morning to make an appointment.”
Laura relented. “Do you think you can go downstairs? You don’t have to sit at the table. We can eat buffet-style, around the fireplace. You might like that.”
“I think I would,” replied Tilda, starting to rise. But instead she reached for her daughter’s hand.
“That night, Laura, the night your father died. It was the first night in a long time I had fallen into a deep sleep. I never heard him. I wasn’t awake to help him.”
“Oh my God, Mom. Is this what you’ve been carrying around? Surely you know it wasn’t your fault.”
“I guess in fact I don’t.” And then Tilda cried.
Laura stayed with her mother, her arm around her quaking shoulders.
When Tilda had exhausted herself with tears, she pulled a tissue from the box on the night table and wiped her eyes. She let out a deep sigh and patted Laura’s hand.
“I need to freshen up,” she said, rising and heading toward the bathroom.
Before opening the door, she turned to her dau
ghter.
“Laura, thank you,” she said. “I think that cry did me some good. I guess I know in my heart it wasn’t my fault, but I’ll probably never forgive myself for not waking up.”
“Mom . . .”
“No,” said Tilda, holding up her hand. “You don’t need to say anything. You’ve done more than you know, just being patient, letting me cry, talk, whatever I needed to do. I’m relieved to have finally admitted it to you . . . to myself.
When they went downstairs, Mark and Tilly were waiting for them. Tilda was all right, but Laura had exacted a promise. Tilda would not only make an appointment with Dr. Willis; she’d also promised to see Rabbi Ross.
“I’m fine. It’s vasovagal syncope. Simply put, fainting,” Tilda told Bev in the afternoon after her appointment with Dr. Willis. “Of course he wants me to follow up with some tests, but that’s the bottom line.”
When Bev asked what had caused the episodes, Tilda told her it was triggered, in her case, by strong emotions and that Dr. Willis believed it was all part of what she was going through after Harold’s death. “So, just as I told Laura, anxiety or panic attack.”
“Isn’t that a little simplistic? Look, I don’t mean to be callous, but not all widows go around keeling over at their daughters’ houses.”
“I can always count on you to delicately get to the point. You think there’s more to it, some underlying, as yet undetected, cause?”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself. You’re the one who brought up the whole guilt thing to Laura that night. Don’t you see the connection?”
Tilda knew she didn’t have to respond, that Bev would simply go on to answer her own question—and she wanted to hear it.
“So that night you slept soundly, and, ever since, you’ve been blaming yourself. Then the dodgeball dream, where you dream about the random nature of our mortal lives, leading to the obvious reality that our notions of control are illusory. What else can’t you control? Everything, except maybe you could’ve saved Harold. Except you couldn’t have. Crap, I might pass out myself just thinking about it. I haven’t figured out the Kent State part, though.”
“We were young then. We thought our good intentions would save us, could save the world,” said Tilda.
“Yes, save the world. We were cocky, weren’t we? But we did make a difference, I think, for the better, but people forget. Oh, don’t get me started, please. When I see what is going on today, what is passing for reasonable . . . whatever, anyway . . .” Bev trailed off, as she often did, these days, thinking no doubt about her attempts to still make a difference. “What else did the doctor say?”
“He prescribed antidepressants, but I’m not taking them.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Maybe I should,” Tilda responded.
Before hanging up, Bev had some advice. “Try to avoid guilt trips. There are better ones to take. So choose one, okay? While you’re still here.”
“My God, Bev. You certainly have become the dispenser of Zen-like wisdom these days. Too many fortune cookies and too much Chinese takeout, I think.”
“Now you’re being mean, and don’t scoff. You’ll see I’m right.”
Tilda had been mentally crossing off dates until the end of the year when she realized she hadn’t paid her supplemental health insurance. Harold had always paid their premiums, and Tilda had yet to set up automatic payments for herself after Harold’s had been canceled. Her payment was two weeks overdue when she dialed the customer service number listed on her last unpaid statement.
“Your call will be answered in the order it was received,” a recorded voice told her.
This was enough to set her off. Whatever happened to the preposition followed by the relative pronoun? “In which it was received!” she screamed into the phone. After five minutes of repetitive announcements about how important her call was and an inane orchestral version of “Love Me Do,” she hung up.
“Christ,” she said, and she went to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the paper, as she had begun to do again regularly now. Tilda knew her tirade over grammar was inconsequential, but what was happening in the news was serious. She read the articles and editorials about ongoing demonstrations against police brutality and looked closely at the photos of protesters holding up signs saying, “I can’t breathe.” Who could breathe after reading and seeing such barbarism? What happened to Eric Garner that day, the chokehold, the restraint by five officers, led to outrage and the rallying cry, “I can’t breathe,” the words Garner uttered before he died. No matter how you looked at it, there was no denying the horror of that video she had seen on her laptop.
She thought of Bev and knew she would be writing letters now that her days of protesting in the streets were over.
Good for her.
Then out of nowhere she began to tremble. Tilda knew by now what to do, so she grabbed a glass of water and went to lie down on the sofa until the symptoms subsided. This time she had caught it before the heart palpitations had begun.
She picked up the phone again and called the temple number Laura had given her.
While the congregation had never built its own synagogue, the new Rabbi, a secretary, and Rabbi Ross had offices in a corporate park on the border of Connecticut and New York that had been donated by a congregant who was the CEO of a company headquartered there. Rabbi Ross, or Don, the name he’d asked Tilda to call him when they had spoken on the phone, greeted her warmly when she knocked on his door, welcoming her in. It was a small but pleasant space, with large windows on one side that looked out on woods with trees, now bare, allowing the sun to cast comforting light on the book-lined shelves. There were two upholstered chairs in front of the large dark-stained wood desk. It smelled of bergamot and pipe tobacco.
Rabbi Ross nodded and pointed to one of the chairs, indicating it for her while taking his seat in the other. He looked the part, Tilda thought, a full head of white hair neatly trimmed, giving him a distinguished look. A look of cheerfulness around his eyes made her hopeful.
“Harold wasn’t very active in our little congregation, but he was very attentive to Laura and supportive of her Judaism,” the rabbi said. His smile was so endearing that Tilda did what she always did when someone spoke kindly of Harold. She cried.
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching to catch an errant tear from the corner of her eye.
“Please, no apologies. I know. You can’t really control when it hits. It comes in waves—and suddenly,” he said, sliding the tissue box on his desk in her direction.
Tilda looked at him, waiting for an explanation—that someone close had just died, his wife or a relative. It wasn’t what he said, neither profound nor unexpected, but how he had said it, as though from personal experience.
“Oh, no,” he said, shifting in his seat, realizing what she was inferring. “It’s just that I have a lot of experience with death, as part of my work.” He cleared his throat and asked Tilda to tell him what was on her mind.
She basically told him the same thing she had told Bev, but with a decidedly lower level of comfort. It wasn’t like her to reveal her feelings to strangers, and Rabbi Ross seemed like a stranger at the moment. She didn’t know what she was doing there, revealing herself, her grief, her fears, guilt, anger—all of it—in this way. The words, which she regretted instantly, came just the same, yet the whole conversation felt forced. When she finally stopped in a bit of a stupor, Rabbi Ross began a long response. She could see his mouth moving, but she wasn’t catching his words.
“I’m sure your doctor is right,” he said, and yet she wasn’t sure what he was referring to as he said this.
“You mentioned that you haven’t filled the prescription for the antidepressants, but let me tell you what I know. The people I’ve talked to about the subject, many with their own qualms at first, like yours, have found some level of comfort taking them, so I wouldn’t be so reluctant. It may help you get through this difficult time.”
Til
da nodded in agreement, but she was still sure she wouldn’t. She clung to the belief it was her portion in life, her lot to grieve and not to dull her feelings. Harold couldn’t change his outcome; why should she? In her heart she knew this stance was extreme. Death of a loved one was the greatest pain to bear. Why would anyone refuse the relief? She didn’t have a good answer, but she did remember her fainting spell at Laura’s—and admitting to her guilt. She still believed it. She never should have slept through Harold’s death. How could she forgive it?
“Is there anything more you can tell me, Rabbi? Don?”
“No matter what I say, it will sound trite. Look, Tilda, in truth there’s no magic pill to clear our hearts—not like our computers, where we can hit ‘clear all history.’ Your history is your life, with loves, regrets, and losses. You can’t hit delete.”
While Tilda thought this was a tidy metaphor the rabbi had probably used before, at least now she was listening.
“It’s only time that makes it possible to cope, to heal. I know that’s the old line, but it’s a cliché because it’s true.”
Tilda put her bag on her shoulder, shifted, and made a movement to stand, the universal signal of the end of a conversation, but Rabbi Ross ignored her.
“So time will help you to learn to live with the ‘presence of absence,’ as you so nicely put it, but your loss and the pain will always be there. That we don’t forget. No, you’ve joined a new level of attainment in what it means to be human. It’s an elite group we all join at some point.”
It was a simple thought, but it registered. She took a deep breath and let it go. Then Rabbi Ross leaned over and put his hand on her knee. She smelled the bergamot again, this time realizing it was his cologne.
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