Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  I have met Judy once before, over dinner, the week before Christmas. It was a formal occasion at the nicest restaurant in Katie’s hometown, with heavy tablecloths, dim lighting, a full bar, and very good manners. At that dinner Judy’s husband discussed new fronts in the War on Christmas; I tried to make small talk, asking questions about a family I knew only in the broadest details, from stories Katie told me on another continent. Even then Katie’s family seemed so large—six or seven aunts, a few dozen cousins—that I got to worrying I would screw up someone’s name, mistaking a brother for an uncle or a great-aunt for a niece. Judy was kind and generous, a little distracted; holding back, maybe, curious to see if things might really take between Katie and me now that we were back in the United States.

  At the resort I see Judy in what I later know to be her truest and happiest element: relaxed and vibrant, surrounded by the adult children who adore her, a little nervous for the weekend’s plan, but hopeful and optimistic. I see her smiling the same bright-eyed smile Katie sometimes unwittingly breaks out, the one that, when she knows someone is watching her, quickly settles into a more modest grin.

  That weekend I do not get my chance to wear what Ed will later, and regularly at family events, call my “church clothes.” I do spend hours in the pool, tossing one child after another high and into the deep end. I sit at dinner, making still more small talk, then dancing in the resort lounge with Judy and the nieces. Both nights, we play 4-5-6 dice with Katie’s cousins for three dollars a hand. I sneak off with Ed to the gaming room, a small converted closet that just fits a Galaga–Ms. Pac-Man stand-up console, a quarters machine, and a broken foosball table. We take turns playing both games late into the night, buying each other beers.

  I take to Ed right away. He is kind, a little mannered, but a genuine and decent guy. I really like Beth, who seems to read and listen to everything. I think we will manage an easy alliance of outsiders to the family.

  Our last night at the resort, Ed and I sit at the bar watching the end of a basketball game and talking about high school. When Katie joined the cross-country team, Ed explains, the coach gave her a teddy bear, saying she would need it because, following Ed, she had awfully big shoes to fill. Katie has told me this story before, but as Ed and I sit there drinking now, I come to understand a part of it differently. Ed is proud of his little sister for following in his footsteps, but he is also worried she might feel stuck in his shadow. He believes it is a given that she can, and will, with time come into her own, but he’s not sure she wants to do it. In his mind the placard on the gymnasium wall containing their names is a marker for her beginning, rather than his end.

  And so, Ed explains, it was a shock when Katie quit the team her senior year, gave up competitive running altogether, and focused instead on graduating from high school a semester early. He does not know what to make of the full scholarship to the small state college in rural Minnesota that followed that spring, or the move that summer, or especially, four years later, her decision to leave Minnesota altogether and join the Peace Corps in Bangladesh. What does Katie hope to get away from, Ed asks, and how far does she have to go to do it? Is she coming back home, now, for good?

  I say that I have not thought much about these questions. Really, they are Katie’s to answer.

  In Bangladesh, I tell Ed, Katie seemed so eager to move back to Chicago, to be near her family. Now that we are living in Chicago, and she is settled into a daily life, she seems restless with the long-term picture. What we are doing together, the plans we want to make eventually, the jobs we think we might want for ourselves: all of these are conversations that begin and end in the broadest terms, sometimes with a fight, often after only a few sentences.

  I tell Ed that Katie is beautiful, strong, and happy. But she does not like expectations. She will not prove anything to anyone. She thrives in the moment, in a way that I find both attractive and unsettling. How can anyone seem so able to walk away from anyone and anything? How has she, in fact, done exactly that so many times before, in anecdotes and conversations about her family and life? The year, according to Katie, or the years, according to Ed, she and he just didn’t speak? Will she and I one day follow the same pattern? If so, why is she choosing me now?

  The next morning I feel stupid for confiding so much in Ed. Surely, I tell myself, I had too much to drink and let down my guard.

  But there is another part to my indiscretion; one that, however unaware I am of it in the moment, lays the groundwork for a closeness I cherish immensely during Katie’s life. It takes form, not in wholesale drunken declarations, but in the careful and quiet practices of disclosure, the sense of exception to her life that being loved by Katie allows me.

  At last call I tell Ed that, secretly, I have always wanted people to call me “Jack.” Jack Kennedy, London, Gilbert, Kerouac, Nicholson, even C. S. “Jack” Lewis. I like the idea of being the sort of person everyone knows formally by one name and informally by another. I tell Ed that I have always secretly wanted to be anyone else; that this other person I mean to become requires those qualities natural to Katie, which I have never mastered: discretion, distance. The sense, always, that one carries internally a secret born of a different life.

  Ed tries “Jack” out that night, and for the next couple of years he takes every occasion to address me by it, alternately teasing and reminding me of my request, until finally, one afternoon years later, I ask him, please, to just call me “John.” I say at the time that my opposition is instinctual—I just can’t get used to hearing the new name—but I also feel dishonest for the easy rationalization. Ed is teasing me. I don’t like being teased. If it is stupid to think now, after Katie’s death, that the point of a name could only be the truth it accumulates in repetition and practice, then at the time I feel deeply relieved to be free of a childish fantasy. I am irrevocable in my own way; I am also, perhaps, too easily influenced.

  As we leave the resort that weekend, Katie says it is the first time since her brother Richard’s death a little more than a year before that her whole family, except for their father, has gathered together in the same place. She has been thinking of Richard all weekend, just as she is sure Judy, Ed, and her sister have kept his memory close. If I had known the death date, or thought to ask Katie then to name the absence or even to ask later why she held it back, then I understand during our drive that we are very much still at the beginning of our relationship. Some part of the gap between us remains unmeasured. I can only know, as she tells it to me one afternoon in Bangladesh, the fact of Richard’s death. I cannot yet recognize his absence in Katie’s life.

  In the car that afternoon, I do not want to push too hard to know more about Richard. Here is the first and most essential tension in my life and marriage with Katie; she needs secrets, and she needs me to trust that those secrets, even when she eventually discloses them, are kept for good reasons. I cannot distrust her for them. I cannot resent her for needing them. And, however wrong it feels to be either excluded or indignant because of what she is not ready to tell me, I must not push her. She does not want comfort. Perhaps she believes I will one day understand her grief or, worse, misunderstand it.

  Where our marriage seems now to close back upon itself, between the two places of Richard’s death (beginning) and Katie’s death (end), I try to make my year in Indiana the hinge. That first week a poet friend writes by email to say, There are no words for your loss, John, and I think, Isn’t that your duty? Shouldn’t poets spend all day finding words to make loss real to strangers? The anger is generative. I write my first poem for Katie a few days later and publish it on my blog. I call it “There Are No Words.” I write in my journal, There must be words for absence too finite for loss. Then, as now, I think I understand something about how easily after one unimaginable loss another can follow. In this way, thinking of Richard, I feel closer to Katie. For a time after her death, I am very eager to hear stories about Katie’s life, especially stories about us. I think they might refresh so
me certainty of feeling I have yet to understand as stable, neutral memory: a glimpse of the real thing alternately revealed in parts of a whole, held back and kept together.

  From Teatrul Act, I walk home and sit with Katie on our balcony, watching a funeral procession and drinking cold beer. From the Lincolnshire Theater, Katie and I drive home to Chicago, where our new life together continues to begin, a life I hope will become a marriage, which continues now as the story of Katie’s life and the fact of my grief after it. I stand in either place from time to time, willing her story to become either elegy or narrative. The consequence of not keeping that impossible middle means some last part of Katie cannot close down into feeling and anecdote. It is the remainder of a grief that infinitely carries forward. It must be expressed.

  Losing the Marriage

  After Katie’s death, I kept two rings in a box. The first was white gold with a polished blue opal. The second was rose gold with an oval-cut ruby. I purchased the opal ring in Chicago for the anniversary of our first date and the ruby ring a year later in Chennai, during a six-week teacher’s trip to India. Both were supposed to be engagement rings. Four, maybe five times, I meant to ask Katie to marry me, then lost my nerve. Katie was ambivalent about marriage. I was eager to marry and terrified she might say no. We fought about what her reluctance meant for our relationship and future. Better, I told myself, to wait and try later.

  Those first months after her death I wanted some of what belonged to Katie to remain my own. I wanted to keep whole and vital certain parts of her life that were already losing shape.

  It was a waning effort. Memory and grief, I quickly understood, made no meaningful complement. Each time I took down the box from the shelf, I felt as though I was begging some last bit of juju. Startle the sound of her laugh. Bring back her smile all at once. Where was the general shock of grief, the certainty of missing the Katie I knew for seven years? I wanted to lie in bed all day and wallow; to wail and moan; to collapse, withdraw, and never recover.

  I couldn’t do it. At the time I thought it meant the worst about my character and our marriage. I was insufficient to grief. I was a coward who would not face my feelings directly. I had never really loved Katie, and only a few weeks after her death I could hardly recall us. I preferred instead to dwell on the end of her life. Only much later did it occur to me that this should be what happens at the end of a marriage: I am able to lose it.

  I say “losing the marriage” because I can no longer describe how I loved that life. It is no longer present for me.

  This is part of what grief does to memory. The feelings are intercut with long gaps—the sound of a voice, the lost afternoon—that widen like dark spaces on film run too many times through the projector. The obligations are certain and particular—places, dates, words—but around them is only the suggestion of feeling: the image, bright light shining through it, a room refusing to stay dark.

  I didn’t mean to lose the marriage, that center of a life we alternately celebrated and endured and for which we both made compromises, locating in a certain honesty the truth of why and how we loved each other; that it was a marriage, hard-fought and won.

  I imagined that after, or maybe because of, Katie’s death the marriage would be magnified; a dignified widowhood would bring forward its best parts in a kind of nostalgic wash. I fantasized about holding court with friends and family members, sharing colorful anecdotes about our honeymoon and intercontinental adventures, avuncular, sympathetic, entirely separate of Katie’s death and absence and the continuing life after it.

  When Katie died, I was twenty-nine years old. She was thirty. Every two years we moved to a new place: Bangladesh, Chicago, Miami, Romania. We were volunteers in the Peace Corps, teachers in high schools, working professionals, and graduate students. Always, we tried to keep some option for the future unsettled, so that we might see ourselves as individuals joined in a common life.

  A week before her death, Katie applied for a public health job in Malawi. I read about the country’s per capita income (low), foreign debt obligations (high), highlands (vast), infant mortality (egregious). Was Malawi a home I would come to like more than Romania or Bangladesh? Was it the place, unlike Chicago or Miami, where a more permanent-seeming life might finally begin? Could we have started a family there? Before Katie’s death, it did not seem important to make these kinds of choices. We either did not want the obligations, or we didn’t know we wanted them. Wherever we went next, I thought, someone will need a public health official, and someone else will want an affable English teacher. I will teach my classes. At the end of the school day I will cross whichever city to Katie’s office and wait while she finishes her work and shuts down her computer. Then we will head out together to dinner, for drinks, to the shops, to a friend’s house or the countryside for the weekend, maybe to the cinema to watch the latest American movie. And when her contract is finished, we will start to feel restless. We will consider our options, make a decision, and see what comes along next.

  The medieval walled city, birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, was guarded that year, as it had been for centuries, by bell ringers greeting tourists in forty languages. Good friends, Dave and Meghan, visited from Chicago for the week, on their way to Hungary. We had planned the trip with them as much to watch the scenery as to see the place. It was spring. Snow still peaked the taller mountains off the track. We wore heavy jackets and drank long espressos as we rode the train through tunnels and valleys. We moved to the forward compartment of the new express rail—lightweight, sleek—and for the first half of the journey, we were the only passengers.

  Dave and I sat together by the window, talking about Chicago. Much, he explained, had changed since Katie and I left our apartment in Uptown three years earlier. Our favorite bowling alley had closed suddenly that New Year’s Eve, sold to developers; a parking garage was already up in its place. Ross and Melissa were gone to Wisconsin for graduate school and engaged. Sarah and Jason lived now in Seattle. They had a son. Everyone else, it seemed, was headed for the near-north suburbs, commuting still to the city, but starting families.

  Dave was handsome and modest, an exceptional bowler. He had the habit of genuinely apologizing when he won, as though he enjoyed the victory but hated beating me. He had recently been promoted, so he could finally start to pay down his student-loan debt and save for retirement, family, a house. They had purchased life, term, and disability insurance. They had written wills and advance directives, given powers of attorney, and named beneficiaries and legal guardians. Meghan would quit working, if she wanted to; they were thinking hard about having a baby sooner rather than later. Dave wanted a big family, like the one he had married into, but Meghan was less certain about a number. Mostly, he said, it would be a matter of timing. The clock was ticking.

  Children and parenting was a conversation Katie and I could never quite begin. We doted on nieces and nephews. We were good with babies. We had always imagined ourselves individually as adults with children. Together, we were less certain. How would parenting alter a life that valued speed, work, and travel? Would our children inherit, from either side of the family, certain illnesses and conditions? The prospect of caring long term for a sick or disabled child terrified Katie. She dreamed about it frequently.

  Other considerations were less hypothetical. We had decided to marry as much to stay together as to continue a life we both liked. Would we really stay together long enough to raise a child? Did we want our longer life to follow those patterns that had established the shorter one? A lot of people seemed to be doing this, though now many of them were having babies. Wasn’t it so very ordinary to think about settling somewhere where we might want to work, live, and raise a family?

  I was happy for Dave. I liked that he was so pleased. As I listened and took mental notes to fill in the details later with Katie, I wondered how she was managing what must have been a similar conversation with Meghan. Katie had noticed that trip how Dave and Meghan kept referring to themselv
es as “a family.” Their ambitions, like their marriage, were the beginning of something to which they were committed, rather than its continuation or end. I envied their certainty. Here was a corollary that said marriages worked with planning and thrived on certainty with the best of intentions. Like bowling with Dave, however competitive I felt, I couldn’t help rooting for the guy.

  Katie was skeptical of the convention. Weren’t there other reasons to make a life together, and did the comparison between motives have to seem so stark? You need kids to have a family, Katie and I agreed later that night, and it didn’t feel so defensive as it does now. We took comfort in a certain resignation. Perhaps we worried: could that ever be us?

  That first year in Chicago, when Katie wore the opal ring I gave her as a birthday present, I sometimes imagined it meant we were engaged. I enjoyed the fantasy. I told my brother, over nachos, that I planned to propose. And yet, when it came time to pop the question, the precious events I had so clearly imagined lost their sequence. I did not drop to one knee at our favorite restaurant, announce my intentions, and bravely smile. I knew Katie might say no, and I didn’t want my fantasy to end in rejection. So, instead, I hedged. I made more reservations. We walked out to Lake Michigan, along the path, and talked about how much we liked each other. I fumbled at the ring box in my pocket. I told her to open it, and when she looked up at me, uncertain, I said that by no means was I proposing marriage, but wasn’t it a fantastic ring?

  Each time I failed to propose, our life continued. Katie liked the opal ring: its elegance and simplicity. And I liked very much that she liked it.