Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  My siblings arrived in Bucharest after Katie’s death to help with my departure. We spent a week making lists, contacting officials, closing down the apartment, shipping cats. We attended together two memorial services for Katie, a public service at a basilica, and a smaller service in her work office. Katie’s officemates had decorated her desk with photographs and candles. We drank brandy, pouring out onto the carpet a first sip for Katie. For the rest of our time in Bucharest, then back in Illinois, we repeated the custom.

  There were so many details to the relocation of Katie’s body. Insurance claims, embassy paperwork, long-distance shipping, meetings with Katie’s former boss to decide the language for the international press release, the ambassador’s condolence, the patriarchate’s official statement. We were exhausted and overwhelmed, and yet we knew that, upon arrival in Illinois, it would all continue. The wake and funeral, explaining everything to Katie’s family, greeting and thanking other mourners, the spreading of ashes, public and private dinners, hotel bills, conversations about and tributes to Katie. I believed, and said at the time, that my siblings’ actions were heroic, but I also felt anxious for what lay ahead. Who could I lean on next? Who would help me get through the coming days and weeks?

  In our hotel room, at night, I wrote email updates, reached out to friends on Skype, and talked constantly to Katie’s family. The rest of the time I tried to manage a delicate and forthright silence.

  As we spread Katie’s ashes, Judy and Katie’s sister each took handfuls into their pockets. They did it to prevent the end of the rite, perhaps, or to keep a part of Katie for themselves. Maybe they were addled by grief and vulnerable to its excesses. I believed this for weeks, until I decided, after talking it out with a friend, to take the much simpler view. I had no idea what they were thinking or why anyone did what they did. But I wanted Judy to be happy. I wanted to protect Katie and to keep sacred her death ceremony and our invented rite. The body I had taken such care to convey down a mountain, into a city, across an ocean, through customs, and finally to the small town in northern Illinois that Katie had spent her whole life avoiding would never be whole or wholly in one place again.

  I agreed with Katie’s family about so many things: collages of photographs for Katie’s wake, hymns and passages chosen for services, how to stand together and thank people for their sympathy and generosity. We thanked the funeral director for his discretion and asked him to convey Katie back to us for our final, private rites, which we practiced together. We loved Katie for many of the same qualities and reasons. We spoke with great feeling about her absence, our memories together, and what she might yet have done with and away from us.

  We accommodated together our need. I resisted those parts of a spectacle that had nothing to do with Katie and everything to do with the intersections of grief and minor celebrity: radio interviews, obituaries in local free newspapers, the order of eulogists at the mass. I had the legal rights of a husband. I was final arbiter. Katie’s sister, brother, mother, and father will speak, I explained to Katie’s stepfather. You know, the family.

  After the insurance check cleared, I plotted an elaborate expression of my gratitude to my brother and sister. I hired a babysitter for the kids and paid for my sister’s plane ticket from New York. I made reservations at a restaurant that I knew my brother liked. That evening a horse-drawn carriage arrived at their courtyard and ferried us to the Loop. Well south of my old apartment in Uptown, plodding down La Salle, the city was still bright with the end of summer. Streetlights came up over full trees. Cars made the rush hour commute in the opposite direction. Our relative progress seemed so earnest, methodical; we slowed at stoplights, waiting to follow the traffic. At the restaurant a bottle of chilled champagne waited in a bucket next to the table. We drank bottles of wine and picked over plates filled with meat, cheese, and pasta. As dessert arrived, I made a toast. I had practiced it, but not so much that the feeling was not genuine. Was I trying to settle the account, to pay off my siblings for their earlier generosity? Were my siblings honored guests, or was I asking them again to do something extraordinary: to receive my thanks but also to witness again my grief? Gratitude is merely the secret hope of further favors. I had read that somewhere. Between courses I made my way to the bathroom, where I locked the stall door, slouched into a corner, and tried to catch my breath. I felt the pressure ease a little. I washed my face, blew my nose, and returned to the party.

  Every few weeks I showed up at my brother’s apartment and spent the weekend at the park, going to the sandwich shop with my nephews, watching the Cubs on WGN. Some nights he and my sister-in-law would go out, and I would stay in and not do much; or my brother and I would go to a nearby bar, and my sister-in-law would watch the kids; or my brother would be traveling for work and my sister-in-law had night classes, so I watched television with the babysitter. In our old city, I visited old friends. It was a two-mile bus ride from my brother’s neighborhood to the neighborhood where Katie and I had lived for three years. I watched a man in a blue jumpsuit, bobbing his chin under headphones, polish off a five-pound bag of pretzel M&M’s between the eight stops.

  It was beautiful to leave the home in Indiana where I lived with Katie’s brother and his family every few weeks. I understood that, however life continued in one place, it continued also in another. Where did this neutral ground end? I arrived in Chicago on a Thursday and was taken in, fed, sheltered, and given a quiet place to read, sleep, and grieve. I left the following Monday, as everyone set off on their week’s routines, and most of the time I felt refreshed and restored, emergent from a very specific withdrawal. Then I would arrive back in Indiana to a place where I was again taken in, fed, sheltered, and given still more solitude and space.

  At the North Street underpass for I-94, I could take the onramp east toward Indiana or west toward Katie’s hometown. The highway continued in both directions, but I couldn’t see where I would ever really get clear. Iowa or Ohio. The Rockies or the Appalachians. Two oceans, then two continents where Katie and I had lived for a time, and finally the central point toward which everything seemed to converge—Istanbul maybe, where we had spent my twenty-ninth birthday together, or St. Petersburg, where we had always meant to travel—before the journeys turned in opposite directions.

  Time and again, with the same few people, I told the same few stories. Themes emerged, then repeated: failure, good intentions, absence, limitation. I defended myself from certain accusations. I anticipated, even preempted criticisms. Always, in this defense, I was desperate in my failure. I had done all I could to save Katie. Night after night, I wrote down in a journal the story of her death without looking at the previous entries, then crosschecked them across different days. I needed to audit the public version of my story against the private, the told story against the true one. But it was the secondary narrative of my survival that people were most interested to hear. How was I getting better? How did I live now?

  Details came forward with more than a little polish. Katie’s sense of charity, her big-heartedness toward family, her willingness to mentor and advise. Saint Katie, as Beth joked we might remember her. We knew better. It was easier to imagine this version of Katie—the martyr, the cipher—just as it is was convenient to bring forward myself, and the things I wanted after her death, now, as a kind of contrast. Charitable John. John the Beneficent. Saint Johnny.

  My confessions prompted exchanges. Sometimes, the sharing became reciprocal. People said things about themselves and how they made sense of the world after their own tragedies: pills, doctors, deaths, secrets. What was the limit of such empathy? I had never felt so close to so many people. I learned and shared things I never expected to know. The cost of such honesty and transgression seemed, at best, uncertain. It was one thing to comfort a grieving widower with secret knowledge, believing all the while that the listener was pathetic and feeble. It was another to crash in the boundaries that had shaped years of interaction, familial and otherwise. It was possible that we
might grow closer, now, and more honest as a result. But perhaps later, we would need new boundaries and discretions.

  I met my friend Stephanie at a bar in Kankakee, Illinois, three weeks after I moved to Indiana. She was in town for a conference the next day, so we met at her hotel, then spent all afternoon at a local brewpub overlooking the river, just past the small downtown. Until that morning I was not entirely sure I would make the two-hour drive. It was just close enough to seem a great distance to travel and return in a single night. But what else did I really have to do? I printed directions, plugged in my music, and set off.

  We drank beer all afternoon. We ate chicken wings and garlic fries. We walked down to the river and sat on stone benches, counting sailboats and talking about Katie. I said I was scared I had not yet felt the worst of it. Wasn’t more fear always just below the surface; wouldn’t it come forward as the immediate grief rites ended, and the long slog of whatever happened next began? It was easy and calming to talk it all out; even when I turned the conversation to Stephanie’s wife and family, she brushed off the pleasantry and turned it right back to me. I could do anything, she kept telling me. I had a brief window when no one would hold me accountable, when I would be given a very, very long piece of the rope.

  Stephanie’s stepsister had been widowed a few years earlier, also violently and suddenly, and had not taken care of herself after the loss. A quick and positive resilience to grief and mourning after her husband’s death was sustained, increasingly, with narcotics, speed, poor decisions, distraction, recklessness. Everyone agreed that in the beginning she was so brave. Then she moved near the ocean, took up with another man, and they blew through the insurance money in weeks. When she finally broke, it was spectacular and final. She worked small jobs now and did not take on too much. She had children with two other men and abandoned both of them to her parents. She was in some ways her former self, but mostly she was an empty space, a cautionary tale about how not to grieve, a rock in a river around which the world, her family, and friends navigated, continuing their lives with great care.

  Stephanie spoke in the reasonable, authoritative tones of a witness. I trusted her, and so I believed it was important to trust the precedent. Stephanie wanted to take care of me, but she also understood the limits of empathy. The world, she said, was presenting me with two very clear and unfortunate options. Withstand, and so move forward with some aspect of a new life unrelated to Katie. Or, retreat into my former life, and sacrifice the rest of it to Katie’s death. Whichever I picked, I would not easily walk it back in the other direction.

  We sat a while longer, talking about our lives in Miami those three years, Saint Katie, the deep well of grief that seemed only to rise and crest when I was angry about something else. And then it was time to head back to the hotel and say goodbye. The gas station just off the highway had a chintzy display of overpriced, Christian-themed trucker wear: t-shirts and handkerchiefs, vests and mud flaps and mirror guards. Stephanie picked a pink corduroy ball cap with rhinestones ornamenting the phrase, Jesus, Take the Wheel! Because Jesus can’t drive, she said, laughing. She insisted I wear it on my drive back to Indiana.

  When she was alive, Katie and I drove everywhere together. Always, we started in one place and arrived, quickly and efficiently, in the next. Now I wondered: how long could I stay in a car, on the highway, before I really needed to arrive anywhere?

  I-65 was one of seven highways that ran spokelike from Indianapolis out across the state. I could return to the city, circle it, and go anywhere else. Why then was I always choosing Chicago, resting a while then leaving, bouncing quickly between two families like a nervous pinball? I told myself I was looking for Katie, but I knew that wasn’t true. She was gone now, and life continued everywhere without her. I said I was retracing a memory and making sense of a loss. But I had at best a cursory knowledge of our few days together. I had not known Katie would die. I recorded the particulars of the world around me now in painstaking detail, but they did not seem to add up to an especially compelling sequence or sense of order. It was all marked time, meant to fill this gap between when I was broken and whenever I emerged, finally, healed.

  Jesus, Take the Wheel! I worked the brim until it gave at the edges. I pulled it down low across my eyes. Life was so slow now. I had spent all day with Stephanie, and it was only six o’clock. I had been back in the United States a little more than a month, and it was only the end of July. I lived a year in Indianapolis. Before I left, I would turn thirty-one. Everything I said that first summer seemed to express its half-life in minutes, seconds. Numbness, irritation, anger, shock: these feelings were to the listener mere symptoms of a deep and abiding grief I could never really understand, which would one day pass. I seemed in terrible shape, and it meant that I had been through something awful but also that I had really, truly loved Katie. They knew it. Or I merely convinced them of something they wanted to believe. In the end what did it really matter?

  I had forgotten the emptiness inside of cars on long drives, the way loud music can fill them and bounce off the glass, the easy and quick way a wheel slides a car across lanes. Alone, I could play the same songs again and again; singing at the top of my lungs, crying, screaming, and making still no explanation for the intervening silences. To drive, then, to be in a car pointed in a direction, gave me the thing I missed most in life: intention. This was my Fortress of Solitude, exactly between two places, neither arriving nor departing. And yet, I drove fast. I tried to keep to the schedule I had given Katie’s brother before I left that morning. How pathetic and uncertain I must have looked, a large man in a tiny car, racing down the highway, the same few Bruce Springsteen songs always shaking the frame. How small I felt. It didn’t really matter when I arrived back at the house. No one was waiting for me at a particular hour. No one was following close behind or eagerly tracking my progress. At whichever moment I finally pulled up the drive, Ed’s family would already be asleep or long since gone off to bed.

  The Circle Game

  The goal was to get better. The method was talk therapy. The premise was that it was not my fault that Katie had died, so I needed to find a better explanation for both the tragedy and the interruption of my life.

  We used this word constantly: process. Therapy was a process. Survival and witness were processes. Marriage and family were a single process teased elaborately into infinite, abstract, and repeating parts. It seemed that an entire life had conspired to make me garrulous and uncertain at precisely the moment I needed to talk. I could explain and rationalize, but I did not really understand. How had Katie and I ended up on that particular mountaintop, at that time of year, in that part of the world? Why the Buscegi Mountains of Romania and not, say, the Adirondacks or Rockies? The Himalaya? Why didn’t we take the train further west and north toward Hungary or Iasi, to a festival or metropolis rather than the blank natural landscape of central Romania?

  The scope of other questions seemed less certain after Katie’s death. What part of me resented finding Katie that night on the mountain? Which part followed her blindly all day and hoped for the best? How far in any direction should I pursue an argument for or against myself, before speculation, rather than sense, became the guiding ethos? What did it mean to speak honestly and directly about Katie to a therapist? To Katie’s family? How much would I need to describe to get better? Which parts did I want to leave out?

  The therapist I met with in Indiana wore turquoise jewelry and smiled when she was not talking. She had a way of looking both at and through me, and it did not feel unpracticed. She counseled only trauma victims, and her office resembled an outsized children’s playroom: board games and rag dolls, a desk in one corner, two overstuffed chairs, and a butterscotch dish between them on a Plexiglas table. She had been doing this for twenty-six years, she explained, and people from every walk of life had come through her door. Firemen, police officers, soldiers, teachers, business executives, families, and college dropouts. The tone of our conversations was
friendly and reassuring but also forthright. The process would only work, she explained, if I followed it carefully and diligently, two and three times a week at first. We would name the problem, face it, make a context for it, and eventually I would learn to live with it. Like everyone else.

  If there seemed some predetermination in her method, then it also excluded more extreme and prescriptive methods. There would be no antidepressants and mood stabilizers. I would not drink or smoke. I would get a job—any job—quickly, and I would not miss work to grieve. I would not seek out a support group or attend group therapy; my situation was exceptional, the therapist explained, and any group situation would only magnify the singular experience of Katie’s death and lead to resentment. I would sleep, every night. We would keep an appointment every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m. I would arrive ten minutes early and pay her fee in full before I walked out the door on the hour.

  Talking felt good. I left our sessions feeling relieved of a burden I could not yet name, and even as the burden returned, between sessions, I was certain I could keep ahead of it. In therapy I tried to share everything, even overshare. I believed no piece was so exceptional I should exclude it from the consideration of Katie’s death. Whatever I said or thought to say was probably connected. It was all a rich tapestry, though this last part was my own ironic commentary, a tone that was not especially clarifying. I found more straightforward tones.

  My first week in Indiana, I tried two other therapists. The first ran a practice in the basement of a church; our meeting was brief. The second had just opened a new, expanded practice, to complement the more traditional work she had done previously with clients. She was a life coach who, she explained, healed the brains of trauma victims with lasers. This involved shining a pen light at the wall, then into my eyes, until we located and rewired the physical part of my brain that stored trauma. After only a few sessions, she told me, I would begin to notice definite results. Fewer night terrors, waking dreams, and flashbacks. A greater feeling of peace and serenity.