Making Piece

by Beth M. Howard

  He could have spared himself the physical effort and hassle had he agreed to let his company move us. Instead my stubborn, frugal and fiercely independent husband took the ten-thousand-dollar cash equivalent/moving allowance paid by his employer and opted to do the heavy lifting himself. This was yet another case of me not being happy about his choice. “I am not going to do this self-moving crap again,” I had barked at him, as I taped yet another box while packing for Mexico. But the end result of his decision was much worse and farther reaching than either of us could have ever imagined.

  “It’s the anaerobic activity that could have contributed to his aorta rupturing,” I was told by a heart specialist in Boston for whom Alison’s mother-in-law worked. “Moving heavy furniture by himself would have put more pressure on the aortic wall than regular exercise, including his bike riding. And you must understand, there is absolutely no evidence that emotional stress causes a rupture.”

  Yeah? Well, it would still require a lot more convincing than that to accept that I did not kill him. But for the time being my guilt had been replaced by resentment toward the trailer, the storage unit, the furniture and the fact that the company even offered a moving allowance. If only he had used the company’s moving services…

  I asked one of Marcus’s coworkers to post an ad for the trailer on the bulletin board at work. The thing sold in two days and the poor guy who bought had to console me as I handed him the registration and keys. This man was excited to use the trailer for his Harley-Davidson and instead of being happy that the rig was going to be appreciated and put to good use, I diminished his enthusiasm over his purchase by having a meltdown in front of him.

  “It’s like I’m selling off a part of my husband,” I sobbed. He put his arm around me to keep me from collapsing on the pavement. “This represents everything about Marcus’s dreams. He wanted to turn this into an adventure camper for his mountain bike. How can I let go of this? It’s like letting go of him.” Surely the guy wanted to get away from me as fast as possible, but he was kind enough to squeeze me closer against his burly body and let me cry a little longer before driving away in his truck—with a piece of Marcus in tow.

  Setting foot inside the storage unit for the first time was another form of hell. There were the couches, chairs, Chinese medicine cabinet, mattress, bar stools and boxes that Marcus had arranged himself. I had brought a crew of friends with me, all men, all friends of Marcus, to help transport some of the big items over to my guesthouse. If only Marcus had asked these friends for help when he was moving the furniture… I turned my back to them so they didn’t see my tears. And when I composed myself enough to tell them what needed to be moved, I got us out of there as quickly as possible.

  Like with every single post-death task, activity or encounter, spending time in the storage unit and going through Marcus’s belongings was something that required conditioning. The first time for everything was inevitably the hardest, but over time and with repetition, emotional fortitude builds up like a muscle, making unavoidable tasks at least bearable.

  I went back to the storage unit a few weeks later, on November 19, the three-month mark of Marcus’s—what does one call it?—passing. I had gone only to look for a tax document but ended up staying three hours. I bravely peered into the black garbage bags that held the clothes Marcus had packed for his vacation, clothes that friends had tossed inside in our rush to make funeral arrangements.

  Marcus had always taken good care of his belongings. He folded every shirt, sock and pair of underwear with painstaking precision. He wouldn’t have liked his things being treated this way. So I emptied the garbage bags, folded everything—his bike jerseys, his running tights, his surfer shorts, his cotton turtlenecks, his jeans—and placed each article neatly in the large plastic tubs. What took me so long is that I had to sniff every item before putting it away.

  I talked to my California-based friend Melissa that evening, commenting on how the majority of the storage unit was taken up by his things. She said, “Why don’t you just pick ten things to keep and give away the rest?”

  I snapped back angrily, “It was enough for me just to organize. I’m not letting go of anything!”

  But the question had been raised. When would it be time to let go of his stuff? Six months? A year? Ten years? Never? The solution for me was simply this: do it incrementally. In baby steps.

  My youngest brother, Patrick, who lives in Seattle, wears exactly Marcus’s size and I suggested that I could give him Marcus’s cashmere sport coat as he was about to start a new job. Patrick said yes and added that he was in need of more business clothes. It made my decision easy: the rest of Marcus’s work clothes would go to him, keeping them in the family was a win-win. Marcus really liked Patrick and therefore would approve. And, unlike the trailer, I wouldn’t feel like I was truly letting go of them.

  I went back to the storage unit a week later to collect Marcus’s dress shirts and wool trousers. As I rummaged through the tubs, I noted the abundance of Marcus’s hats, gloves, socks, fleece jackets and sweaters. I had experienced a recent manic desire to clear out all clutter from my life, to simplify, to downsize (if one can actually downsize from a studio apartment), to lighten my load. In case I dropped dead, too (I lived in a paranoid world imagining anyone could disappear at any moment), I wanted to make sure I wasn’t leaving much behind. I had already, impetuously, donated to Goodwill my doll collection consisting of Mrs. Beasley, which might have been worth something, and a handmade Raggedy Ann. I also donated my Catholic high school uniform, a pleated, plaid skirt with the “It’s Better in the Bahamas” patch I sewed over the hole made from holding the iron down too long. The skirt still fit me and held many memories of cheerleading tryouts and student-council meetings, truancy and subsequent detentions, of first loves and first broken heart. And I let go of my baby blanket, made from light yellow bunny-print cotton filled with wool batting, still usable for spare bedding. None of these were doing me any good in storage and I had no one to pass them down to, so off they went in an unceremonious departure. Kicking them out of the nest, my childhood treasures were given the boot. (I came to regret this later, but that’s grief for you. It erases consciousness and common sense, like a kind of temporary insanity.)

  In this purging state of mind and rummaging through Marcus’s things in storage, I considered giving away his warm clothing. “Winter is coming. Think of all the homeless people out there who could benefit from this pair of fleece gloves or this great hat,” I thought.

  But then the other side of the brain began arguing. “Yes, but he always wore those gloves to the park when he threw the stick for Jack. You bought him that hat in New York City, in Little Italy. He looked so cute in it. You had so much fun together on that trip…” No, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give this stuff away, his stuff.

  With tears—those pesky, ubiquitous droplets that leaked from my eyes—dripping onto his clothes, I put away the hat, gloves and everything else, except for the dress shirts and trousers for Patrick. I also kept a box of German books to give to Joerg, as I was realistic enough to know I would never read them. (No later regrets about those.) I wadded up the empty garbage bags, snapped the lids shut on the tubs, pulled the storage-unit door closed, hooked the padlock and left the rest of Marcus’s belongings where they were—secure, unused and waiting for some distant day that I might be able to let go. Let go, or at least go back and smell them again.

  CHAPTER

  7

  There is nothing like facing your fears—and overcoming them—to boost your confidence. The fear that filled me with terror was driving the recreational vehicle, the RV that Marcus had left behind. What we had referred to as “The Beast,” the RV was (and still is) a twenty-four-foot camper built around a commercial-size Ford truck chassis. In RV terms, this is called a C-class. It is also known to veterans of the RV world, the ones who drive those shiny hundred-thousand-dollar buses, as “the runt of the litter.”

  Marcus, being Germa
n, possessed a dream very common among Europeans: he wanted to drive an RV around the country, visit all the national parks and camp.

  “You call that camping?” I had growled at him. “If you buy one of those, you are traveling on your own.” My bitchiness toward him may seem unwarranted—and it was—but I was used to real camping, roughing it. I had graduated a semester early from high school (it was either that or get kicked out for being “too disruptive”) and instead of going to senior prom, which was no big deal to me seeing as I had already lost my virginity, I spent three months in the Rocky Mountains completing a semester at the National Outdoor Leadership School. Instead of shopping for a taffeta gown that spring, I was building igloos, crawling through caves, hauling seventy pounds on my back, sleeping under the stars and going for weeks at a time without bathing. I loved it; I had found my comfort zone.

  I knew from experience, from our trips to Crater Lake and Umpqua Hot Springs and our hiking trips in the Cascades and the Alps, that Marcus liked wilderness camping, too. All I had to do was glance at our wedding rings to be reminded of it: the gold and steel representation of contrasts, our love for camping and five-star hotels. But an RV? There was no metal band on our rings for that.

  An RV represented a definition of camping I could not, would not, subscribe to. RVs were for suburbanites who didn’t want to ruin their manicures, people who couldn’t appreciate how important bugs are to the ecosystem and killed (by poisonous means) every insect they encountered, “campers” who were so trapped by their creature comforts they couldn’t fathom a night in nature without television. RVs meant you were so insulated from the elements you might as well have stayed home parked on the cul de sac. Further, RVs were gas guzzlers, road hogs and just plain stupid. But I didn’t have a strong opinion about them.

  Several months before we were scheduled to move to Mexico, we had dodged our first divorce attempt by landing in a very useful marriage workshop based on the teachings of John Gottman and his Seattle-based Gottman Relationship Institute. During these sessions, I learned what a bad wife I had been, and how my stance against the RV represented just how awful, how rude, how reactionary I was. As we attended the workshop, sharing our feelings, our frustrations, our goals, it dawned on me that regardless of how I felt about camping, I had no right to stand in the way of Marcus’s dream.

  Marcus thought it would be “cool” (his word) to drive an RV to Mexico, as it would be a cross-continent—even better, international—road trip. To which I replied, in my newfound (albeit temporary) role as Good Wife, “Love of my life, if you want an RV, by all means, get an RV.” But my goodness went only so far, because I snidely added, “On the condition that I never have to drive it.”

  I was true to my word. I cleaned it, I loaded and unloaded it, I cooked, I made coffee in it, I made the bed, I navigated, I rubbed his shoulders. But I did not drive it. Period. I barely drove in it as it was, because we traveled to Mexico separately. I drove my own car down, making a weeklong pit stop in Los Angeles to visit my family on my way. Our paths converged in Laredo, Texas, planned that way, so we could make the official border crossing together. I followed him, The Beast and the motorcycle trailer, across the Rio Grande and through the mountainous terrain of Northern Mexico for the last three hours of the forty-hour journey, until we reached our new home in Saltillo, on the edge of the pecan farm.

  We took a few RV road trips during our stay in Mexico—to the colonial towns of Zacatecas and Real de Catorce and to the Amistad Reservoir in Del Rio, Texas. I spent enough nights in it to get irreversibly hooked on sleeping in a nest of down comforters and pillows, waking up to café lattes made in the espresso machine and lounging around the breakfast table while running the heater. (Generators are indeed a wonderful thing.) Damn it, I hated myself for being such a hypocrite.

  That is how The Beast came into our lives—the RV I didn’t want, that I refused to drive, the RV that was now mine. What the hell was I going to do with this thing?

  As with most questions in life, the answer presented itself in time.

  When I wrote on my to-do list “Figure out What to Do with Marcus’s Stuff,” I meant it as in all of our stuff, including the storage unit I had kept in Venice Beach after moving to Terlingua, Texas. I still had a studio apartment’s worth of furniture, books and pie-baking supplies to consolidate. God forbid I die with my life spread out over two states a thousand miles apart.

  After conducting exhaustive research, it finally occurred to me that I already owned the perfect moving truck: the RV.

  It was a practical concept. With the RV, I would have my own place to stay in L.A., my very own mobile Grieving Sanctuary, I could stay as long as I wanted, and I could bring my dogs. The only problem was I would have to drive it. Never mind that I would go from never having been behind the wheel of The Beast to embarking on a thousand-mile road trip across several mountain ranges in December straight into the city with America’s worst traffic. That said, I was—to use Marcus’s term—“pregnant with the idea.” Translation: a quirky German way of saying I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. And when I make up my mind, look out.

  After losing three nights’ sleep from the anticipation and anxiety of my inaugural RV drive, Alison drove me to the RV dealer thirty miles south of Portland, where The Beast had ostensibly been for sale. Marcus had left it there the week before he died, hoping to sell the RV on consignment. Make no mistake. Marcus may have been transferred back to Germany, but he had not given up his RV dream of traveling around North America. He merely wanted to sell it in order to buy a brand-new one.

  With this new brainstorm of mine, the dealership had ended up serving only as a temporary parking lot. If Marcus only knew. Did he know? Was this his idea? Probably.

  When Alison and I arrived at the dealer’s lot, we recognized The Beast at first sight. It wasn’t just that Alison was very familiar with it (it had been parked in front of her house the first two weeks of Marcus’s August vacation), it’s that not all RVs look alike. The unique identifiers of ours included a red stripe acquired when its previous owner side-swiped a building that was, yes, red. And on the upper right corner there were the prominent markings of “de-lam,” short for delamination, as buckling, water-damaged fiberglass is called when it separates from the RV’s inner wooden layer. When this happens you might as well start shopping for a new RV.

  “Oh, it’s a lot bigger than I remember,” Alison commented.

  “Uh, yeah.” I nodded, gaping at the site of it. A flimsy white shell extended out over the truck’s cab to the front and reached far beyond the rear wheels to the back, making it appear longer than—and less safe than—a school bus. The dually wheels alone were as big as an oven. “It’s about the same size as my apartment,” I said grimly to Alison. Though in fact, the RV seemed even larger than my one-room studio, given its layout of four separate rooms for the bed, shower, toilet and kitchen.

  Alison, proving she was a brave and true friend, rode along with me and the old geezer from the RV dealership for a practice drive around the neighborhood. I learned how to turn right—“Pull further out into the intersection than you would with a car, then make your turn. You need to clear the length,” instructed the man in the well-worn U.S. Army Veteran’s baseball hat. And I practiced braking—“You need to allow yourself more stopping distance than you’re used to,” he warned.

  Alison followed me home on the I-5 freeway, driving my MINI Cooper as I rolled along on my first highway outing at fifty miles per hour, which felt double that speed, given the tension in my body. One hundred percent of my concentration was focused on keeping the wide-bodied rig centered in my lane, getting used to the squishy power steering (this was not the “go-kart handling” I was used to), and avoiding bumping side mirrors with the FedEx trucks and other transport vehicles. From where I sat, as high as the semis and school buses, my MINI looked like an ant I could squash.

  “Keep an eye on my MINI while I’m gone,” I told Alison, hugging her as
we said our goodbyes. “If all goes well…” if I don’t die in a fiery crash in this monster truck “… I’ll meet you in Arizona for Christmas.”

  I packed The Beast with some food, clothes, my two dogs and a new set of tire chains, which I prayed to Almighty God I would never have to use, and headed to California.

  Once again on I-5, but this time traveling a thousand miles instead of thirty, my main mission—besides getting to L.A. without wrecking or rolling The Beast—was to avoid a breakdown of the nervous kind. My relaxation techniques for driving were many. I chanted a mantra: “Strength, grace, confidence, calm. Strength, grace, confidence, calm. Strength, grace, confidence, calm.” I said the words over and over and over in a rhythmic cadence, saying them louder whenever a semi passed me, their drafts causing the RV to veer precariously to the right. I chanted the mantra words so many times my dogs could probably have recited them, too.

  I played a CD Marcus had bought me that was called “Relax and De-Stress,” a compilation of soothing classical music from Dr. Andrew Weil’s “Music for Self-Healing” series—Marcus’s not-so-subtle way of telling me to “take it easy,” an expression he had used often with me. I almost melted the disc by playing it continuously for the first eight hours of driving, not even turning it off when I stopped for gas.

  I reminded myself at least once every fifteen minutes to release my white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, to stop holding my breath and breathe normally. As often as possible, I glanced over at the picture of Marcus I had taped to the center console, a visa photo of him in a serious, stern-looking pose that became my symbol of him overseeing my safety. A mug shot of my guardian angel.