by Becky Aikman
I couldn’t think of a thing to do to stanch the tears. The others held their tongues, too, until Lesley, bless her, blew past the awkwardness with a story of her own. It wasn’t going to be another one of her funny stories—that was apparent in the forthright set of her face.
She borrowed Dawn’s “it’s funny” phrase. “It’s funny,” Lesley said, her voice at a low and even pitch, “we all have these things. The day Kevin died he knew I had an appointment for a facial. Now, I was always at home, never on any particular schedule, so he could never know when I wouldn’t be there. But he knew I had this appointment, and that I’d be out for an hour.”
Before she left, she asked him what he would like for lunch. She was the homemaker. That was her job. A Subway sandwich, he said. That meant Lesley would take some extra time after her appointment to stop by the Subway shop.
“So I got the Subway, and when I came back, he had taken his life.”
Unlike Denise, Lesley didn’t smile. She was setting an example again: Tell your story. Don’t let it rattle you. “I can never eat Subway now. It’s like your roast chicken.”
Dawn followed Lesley’s lead, seeking a way to show Denise that she had more company in her distress. “I’m trying to think if I can associate anything like that,” she said, casting about in her mind. “Not food, because we were apart when Andries died. But I’m thinking about a song. I was driving along the New Jersey Turnpike a few months ago, or I thought I was, and suddenly I realized I was on the wrong road.” Her voice rose unintentionally, more forceful and slightly shrill. “I didn’t know how that happened. I saw a sign that said Route 301. Where was I? What was I doing there?” Dawn threw her whole body into the story, lots of hand gestures—operatic. “And this song came on the radio, a John Denver song, ‘Country Roads,’ which Andries always liked. ‘Country roads, take me home to the place I belong, West Virginia …’ And that’s where Andries died.”
Dawn hit the dial. She pulled off the road, stopped the car with a jerk. “All I could do was say, ‘Oh my God. He’s really not coming back.’ ”
Everyone at the table stiffened. Recognition. And triggers, those simple, familiar sights and sounds and tastes and smells that spark feelings sharper than any in the sensory world. For Marcia, they included an Italian restaurant that she passed almost every day. For me, there was the briny tang of freshly shucked oysters.
“It’s a shame when you associate something you enjoy, like a food or a song, with a person who is gone and you feel you have to give it up,” I said. “I loved eating oysters with Bernie, but if I didn’t force myself to eat them now, I’d never get to have one again. What would that accomplish? But it took me a while. I felt too guilty doing things without him that he used to enjoy.”
“I have no guilt at all,” said Dawn. “Because Andries wouldn’t want me to. If you have guilt, it’s an excuse to hold on; you’re not ready to release.”
Denise’s tears stopped, and she seemed embarrassed, apologetic. “I’m sorry I told that roast chicken story,” she said. “I cannot tell that roast chicken story, ever again. That roast chicken story, it’s terrible.”
“Believe it or not, it won’t always be.” Lauren, the one outsider, bravely ventured a comment.
“I make a good roast chicken,” said Denise.
“I’m sure you do,” Lauren said. She hustled into the kitchen and returned with an abundant heap of chocolate cookies, pungent with cinnamon, still hot from the oven. We clapped with appreciation and passed them around.
“Denise,” Lesley said, “after our last dinner, when I went home from your place, I couldn’t sleep, so I went to Craig’s and talked to him the rest of the night about … oh, everything. I told him that I was just blown away by where you were at that point, only five months. You are doing what you should be doing, with grace and dignity.”
“I tell my friends, just ignore me if I start crying,” Dawn assured Denise.
“Denise, look at you, you can function!” Lesley said. “I don’t think I could function at that point.”
“I think all of us functioned,” I said, remembering my fumbling attempts at work. “In a daze, sure, but we all looked functional on the outside.”
“I don’t want to wake up every day with a panic attack,” Denise said suddenly, more tenuous again.
Dawn reached over and took Denise’s hand. “The first six months are very hard. I’d have to convince myself not to get all panicky and weird.”
“It’s really helping me, talking to all of you,” Denise said. I couldn’t tell whether she meant it. I might have felt better if she wiped that proper smile off her face.
Marcia checked her phone—the New Yorkers would just make the last train home. Dawn set off on her own while I gave the rest of them a lift to the station, Marcia riding shotgun. I heard Lesley in the back, talking to Denise and holding her close in the cold. Lesley, who lived to take care of others, threw herself into full gear now. The two women were less than ten years apart in age, but she spoke in the voice of a mother, mellowed by two decades of ministering to the scraped knees and prom-date letdowns of three growing girls. Lesley, I could tell, drew comfort by offering it herself.
“This is why we’re all here,” she said. “This is how we’re going to learn from each other. I know for sure that you’re going to see a side of me where I just blub, and Dawn, too. Those of us with the big mouths and the bravado are going to have tough times, too.”
Denise didn’t answer.
“Just last month, when I learned that I got the house I bought,” Lesley continued, “I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was because I was so proud of what I’d accomplished on my own. But it was also because it didn’t have to be this way. But it is.”
ON MONDAY MORNING, I heard from Denise, her feelings still in disarray.
“Everyone is in such a different place,” she said. “There are those who do the chatty, funny, sexual-reference thing, which is funny. Those who have people in their lives and those who are totally alone.”
Maybe, I said, this whole project was too much like a traditional support group, excavating unpredictable, unwanted emotions. Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown such a new widow into the mix. The first few months of loss might be better suited to introspection than engagement with others, however well intentioned. Or maybe food, with all its intimate associations, all its sensory cues, cut too close to home, firing the receptors in our noses, eyes, ears, and tongues and lighting up memory neurons deep in our brains that were better left to rest.
Denise questioned whether she could make it through a year of this. “Here I am with these people I like,” she said, “but when we talk about this stuff, I get jerked right back to August and how I felt then. It’s emotional time travel. If that is going to happen to me once a month for a year, it is going to be really hard.”
She didn’t have to say more. I treasured the solidarity of the group, but I was as wary as she was about the emotional expense, for myself as much as anyone. The right balance between sharing our common pasts and leaving them behind was a fine one, perhaps too fine for a group of amateurs to calibrate.
I hung up realizing that I had taken grief for granted. I had thought that food and the nurturing it implied would be a consoling motif. But grief has a way of invading the simplest things, the most everyday things, the happiest things, sometimes more than the sad ones. It can take a roast chicken or a song on the radio, the most familiar details of a daily routine, and turn them into symbols of what can no longer be.
Grief, in its rawest form, is a state in which the everyday can become a torment rather than a comfort. I understood that now. For Denise, that night had been a reminder not of what sustained but of what was lost. I only hoped we hadn’t lost Denise. I had a month to come up with a better plan.
chapter
NINE
i should have known better. Over the next days, I remembered how I would have felt if somebody had dragooned me into an evening of rowdy kitchen shenanigans when
I was newly widowed like Denise—traumatized, spent, unable to sleep, unwilling to eat. I had wanted nothing more than to curl into a protective crouch. I remembered when my fondest wish was to leave all the horror, all the sensory stimuli behind and check into the local Marriott, all alone.
I began this unnatural fixation on a room at the Marriott even when Bernie was still alive. He and I used to pass the hotel near the Brooklyn Bridge every time we took a cab to the hospital once he was no longer able to navigate the subway. I had never been inside the hotel—still haven’t, in fact—but the exterior was just bland enough, just generic enough, that I fantasized about finding someone who could care for Bernie for just one night while I took a room there. In my fantasy, the room was always beige—beige walls, beige bedding, beige carpeting, beige curtains, which I would draw tight, and a beige telephone, which I would unplug. Nothing could happen in that three-hundred-dollar-a-night beige vacuum, nothing at all. If I slept, which was unlikely, I would dream beige dreams.
The thought of actually spending a night there came to me when we traveled to radiation treatments for the tumors in Bernie’s brain, tumors that began their relentless march by stealing his short-term memory.
“Where are we going?” Bernie would ask, genuinely curious, as if we might be embarking on a vacation.
“To the doctor,” I would answer.
“Where are we going?” he would ask a moment later.
I would take his hand and answer again.
Ever more clearly, I envisioned that beige room, that sanctuary where nothing could happen, when the memory loss started to intermingle with generalized confusion so that Bernie began to imagine developments worse than, or at least different from, what was real.
“Where are they taking us?” Bernie would ask with growing agitation, over and over, never specifying who “they” might be.
“To the doctor,” I would answer, over and over, in my most reassuring voice, wishing there were some way to keep him safe for just one night while I holed up in that tantalizing hotel. It was all just too much, and that room at the Marriott would be blessedly too little.
One morning before a trip from Brooklyn into Manhattan, I had made the mistake of leaving the news on television while a report of a terrorist atrocity aired.
“Where are they taking us? Are they going to cut off our heads?” Bernie asked in the car, frantic with alarm. The driver and I exchanged nervous glances in the rearview mirror. No answer could comfort Bernie. He had to live in that terrorized state, hostage to preposterous demons, again and again, and I had to witness it, again and again, unable to assuage his irrational fears, unable to assuage my rational ones. I tried to tamp down my own panic, keep my answers as smooth as the gentlest surf, but my fantasy of the night in the Marriott wasn’t strong enough to blot out the vision of where they were taking us next.
Once Bernie was gone, I gave up on the beige fantasy and tried to live it instead, residing alone in my echoing apartment, but in many ways seeking an even emptier place. A place insulated from pain at a time when everything, as mundane as Denise’s roast chicken or a husband’s sweater still folded in a drawer, had the power to inflict pain. After a few months, to keep myself from becoming Miss Havisham, I donated most of Bernie’s things to charity, retaining a few of his T-shirts that I wore to bed. I didn’t tackle his office for almost a year—his work had defined him more than his possessions. When I did, I found notes he had written to himself in scratchy script as his memory failed, information he was desperate to retain. Home: followed by our address. Wife: followed by Becky. I wanted to check into that hotel all over again.
After my first year of grieving, I knew that I needed to re-engage with humanity. What was the alternative—marathon phone calls with Mom? Solitary forays through the gulch of Saturday night? I devised elaborate campaigns to avoid it, booking excursions weeks in advance and keeping lists of which friends tolerated goofy comedies, which were up for a museum or a concert. Nobody signed on for visits to the better restaurants—those were reserved for lovers celebrating anniversaries. It was pub food or pan-Asian tasting plates for me.
Fine, fine—I was all for keeping it small. Determined to insulate myself from pain, I vowed never again to become close enough to anyone to risk the anguish if that person were lost. Anything—loneliness, lack of popularity, solitary confinement—would be preferable to going through that again. I chose as my mantra the vaguely Buddhist concept, “Attachment is suffering.” My theme song, courtesy of the Everly Brothers: “Love Hurts.”
Some of my research into what it means to lose a husband, I decided, justified my approach to seek a wide community of less involving companions. Sociologists came out with a study around that time that showed Americans were spending more and more time with their spouses and engaging less and less with friends or community, leaving us all without networks to fall back on if the marriages ended. I swore I wouldn’t let that happen to me. My calendar was chockablock with engagements. I volunteered to tutor kids after school. They were perfect: a couple of hours of company and someone else assumed their care.
Dating, in particular, was out of the question during my first two years of widowhood. Oh, I might have accepted a gift of food had it been offered from somebody like Denise’s platonic widower, but the thought of pursuing a true relationship made me anxious. Zombie anxious. Never again, I vowed, would I view attachment as essential to my well-being. It became vitally important to subscribe to a definition of happiness rooted in remaining alone. If that meant giving up sex for now, so be it. I couldn’t risk kick-starting endorphins that might make me feel attached.
Looking at it later, I wondered whether I’d been influenced, back when I was the only widow I knew, by societal attitudes that frowned on our seeking new love. Was I editing my behavior according to the cruel limits that mourning places on a woman in her prime? I found a survey from 1970 that showed a third of the public approving of a widow remarrying after a year, but a similar survey thirty years later showed only nine percent approval. More than ever, it seemed, people preferred the chaste Jackie Kennedy to the remarried Jackie O, the devastated woman to the recovering one. It seemed that attitudes toward widows had become more restrictive in the thirty years between those surveys, and I considered why. Perhaps the more death occurs away from home, hidden away in hospitals and nursing homes, the more power we ascribe to it. Death has become unmentionable, and therefore unimaginable, and if unimaginable, therefore unmanageable. It should be impossible to recover from, we think, a mortal psychic blow.
Many assume that a widow who manages to move ahead and be happy again probably didn’t love her partner much in the first place—the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome. But when I met Professor Bonanno, he debunked that theory. One of the first studies he was involved in followed 1,500 married couples for a decade, and over that time, some of the spouses died. The study found no connection between the closeness of the marriage and the depth and duration of mourning. Those with healthy, happy relationships were well positioned to go on with healthy, happy lives.
In my case, though, there were a couple of years when I couldn’t make the leap. After all I’d seen, all I’d done and failed to do, I couldn’t imagine having the will again to take on responsibility for another person. The idea that I might stand before my friends in a white dress and pledge to love someone else in sickness and in health? Unthinkable.
Nevertheless, a little more than a year after Bernie died, I obliged a couple I was close to by joining them for an attempted fix-up with a friend of theirs. The four of us met at a restaurant, the kind of boîte that serves real entrées instead of pan-Asian snacks. The couple had told me that the man was successful at his business; they had told him I was pretty.
My intended suitor was a suburban man with a pleasant face, a recent widower, so recent, it turned out, that he redirected all conversation toward paeans to his wife’s favorite pursuits—gardening, antiquing, shoe shopping—following up with questions abou
t whether I shared her interests. It was like a job interview to determine whether I could fill the shoes, literally, of a valued employee. His wife had been a devoted gardener, and he was so befuddled over what to do with her vast beds of tulips and nasturtiums that he had hired someone to spread hundreds of cubic yards of mulch to put them into some kind of order. Unless I heard him wrong. It might have been hundreds of cubic feet of mulch. I had no idea the quantity of mulch one needs to do whatever it is that mulch does for flower beds.
“Do you like to garden?” the mulch man asked me, while the other couple at the table hung on my answer.
“I have window boxes at my apartment,” I answered with careful neutrality.
His wife’s antiques also needed to be repaired and polished, and she owned a lot of those shoes that he didn’t know what to do with. “Have you ever restored antiques?” he asked.
“I bought an old cabinet at a flea market once,” I said. “I think it may have been a fake.”
“Are you interested in shoes?”
I felt the anticipation of everyone at the table while the question led me astray and I entered one of those altered states that I witnessed later when Denise lost the thread of a conversation. Was I interested in shoes? I was so interested in shoes that once when Bernie was in the hospital for a one-hour procedure, I busted out of the waiting room, ran outside, jumped into a cab, hightailed it to Barneys, whipped through the shoe department to ogle pumps and platforms and flats, and then repeated the whole escapade in reverse, no one the wiser, all before Bernie’s procedure ended, and all simply to remind myself that somewhere there existed a parallel universe where people concerned themselves with the delicious folly of placing something exquisite on their feet. It was a trip to the far side of Pluto and back, all in the course of an hour.
I realized that the mulch man was waiting for my answer. “Sorry,” I said. “Not interested.” I’d rather keep that room at the Marriott.