I had read about the practice online. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing showed great promise for victims and survivors of trauma, especially soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurance companies were beginning to cover it and sometimes recommend it in lieu of talk therapy. There was much research to indicate that, in fact, the brain did store traumas in places the pen light reached; the brain could be healed without the anecdotal complications of storytelling.
At our only session the therapist dimmed the lights and flashed the red dot on the wall. She touched my knee and told me to relax. Everything would be fine. If I wanted her to stop at any time, I should just say so.
As she started the countdown and initiated the process, I could not stop staring at the business card holder on her desk. It glowed in the dark. I thought, How can someone with a glow-in-the-dark business card holder heal me? I felt bad for her, and I started to worry about her hand on my knee, which is to say now I felt superior and judgmental, even as I then pretended to relive the experience of Katie’s death each time she flashed the light into my eyes.
Why was it so hard to submit to her method? Why did I adapt it into some inferior pantomime? It seemed a matter of accountability. I wanted feeling in a therapist, but also detachment. I wanted someone who did not seem to worry whether I got better, who facilitated my own self-cure rather than administered her own; a therapist who might abandon me at any moment because, really, I was doing this on my own, and I should be made to fail if I was not sincere in the effort. In this way I felt very Catholic and midwestern. Perhaps the goal of therapy was not to get better at all, but rather to sustain one part of the conversation, so that it continued through and after Katie’s death. And yet, if that was the case, then Katie’s death was the only occasion to continue the conversation.
Which was the real interruption I sought to clarify with a therapist: loving and knowing Katie or living after her death? In the beginning I could not distinguish between the two. Mine was only one side of a conversation about tics and habits, familial awkwardness, the shared generational tensions into which everyone escaped or submitted through marriage. Here I was now, after my marriage to Katie, and the story still had so many beginnings and no end.
Sometimes, in therapy, it seemed as though I was speaking only in abstractions. In my Marriage, Independence accommodated Need very well and was rewarded with Companionship and sometimes even Approval. I was once the Husband, and now I was the Widower. In fact I was the Young Widower.
Were these categories helpful? I made a claim to Katie based on memory. After her death, that claim seemed as hypothetical as anyone’s. The high school boyfriend who checked himself into the hospital after they broke up. The girl who spread Vaseline across her windshield and bumpers, then kept the economy-sized jar out on her dresser until Katie came by a few days later to visit. The coworkers, friends, family members, and strangers who paid their respects at her wake and funeral and who continued to be in touch in the weeks and months that followed. They all loved Katie, I believed, even as she had chosen me. Nothing that followed could change the fact of our marriage; our marriage, now, that was ended.
Were these connections and associations real? Could I really follow one perspective so clearly that it might interconnect everything and everyone to Katie’s death?
Katie’s death is the Large Hadron Collider, I told the therapist. It reveals in a fraction of a fraction of a second the nature of the universe, ourselves, the world around us. What happens in an instant to create or destroy everything else.
The therapist said, Let’s talk about the pills. Do you need one every night? Could you try every other night for a week and see how you sleep?
I thought, What would be the point of lying to my therapist?
What I meant to say was I had no intention of letting go either the ritual or its significance. If I took the pill, then I was sick. If I was sick, then I was still traumatized. If I was still traumatized, then I still missed Katie. If I still missed Katie, then I still grieved. If I was still grieving, then I needed therapy. If I needed therapy, then I should not yet leave Indiana, my nieces, my small room in the back of the house, next to the truck driven by the brother-in-law with whom I talked less and less.
Was I really still grieving? Did I want to leave Indiana?
I said, I’ll give it a shot.
Many friendships complemented the steady slog of grief. Some did not. Those conversations with friends that began with consolation, privation, and the absence of sense sometimes found no transition to the stuff of regular living. They began instead to repeat themselves and gradually became silent. I missed some of those friendships very much. I told myself, They are foul-weather friendships. They are good only in bad times.
All lives existed now on some continuum of self-sympathetic comparison, beyond any coincidence of fact and imagination. Wasn’t this the terrible secret of grief, the hedge against which so much talking, therapy, and time could find no certainty to obscure? I could survive anything. I could walk away from anything. There was no underlying structure, no interconnection, no resolution so permanent toward which we all had to work collectively. There was, in fact, no empathy for Katie’s death, her absence in my life, or the tragedy of witnessing it. There was only sympathy and, after a short while, omission and silence. Our choosing or not choosing to be together.
My conversations with the therapist came to concern equally Katie’s death, our marriage, my personal history, and my sense of a future. I could especially see the lens widening in how we talked about the present. It made a neat loop we overlaid onto the past until the connections became particular and vivid. We paused our sessions less frequently so that I might cry. We talked frankly about the rest of my life and how it continued, sometimes unremarkably, regardless of my sense of intention.
Grief was a perfect wheel. I turned it, again and again, with the hope of finding either its beginning or its end. I knew better. Therapy offered no permanent consolations after Katie’s death. Together, the therapist and I could not animate or reclaim Katie, and if I only remembered her selfishly, bringing forward only our best selves, then I risked losing her entirely. And yet, I felt better to know that grief was itself both end and beginning. I observed it closely and learned to make testament to it. I tried to resist the perfection of Heracles, who sacrificed all he loved to become immortal. I tried to embrace, often with mixed success, but perhaps some sense of optimism, what the poet Yvor Winters made Heracles to say well after the fact: This was my grief, that out of grief I grew.
The advantage of therapy was that it was good for people who liked to talk about themselves. I excelled at therapy.
I found therapy useful for articulating ambiguities and narratives, for revisiting personal challenges. I had no idea whether I was a good person; if I was doing enough to honor Katie’s memory; how to live with Katie’s death; what it meant that the family I lived with was changing; whether that was somehow my fault; whether I had wronged my parents by not encouraging them more; if I was a lousy widower, son, brother-in-law, and friend. I thought we might sort some of it out. Which is to say, I worried about everything, as I had worried before Katie’s death.
Ed came home from a consultation with my therapist and said, Maybe I need to see a different therapist.
More and more, we seemed settled into exclusive forms of grief. In therapy I felt ambitious. I wanted to understand more; to make better connections between my life before, during, and after Katie’s death. There was a deep flaw in this ambition, and it took years to realize it, but the process kept me active and purposeful in the moment, and I appreciated, however willed, the sense of continuity.
I started a memorial foundation: paperwork, fees, applications, phone calls. Everyone in Katie’s family and my family joined the board. We traveled together to Katie’s graduate alma mater and awarded our first scholarship. I made a logo and a website, wrote by-laws and articles of incorporation. The government sent an off
icial letter of designation. Then the foundation’s promising start became something to argue over. Did Katie’s father have more influence in the organization than Judy? Could we take construction crews to Mexico and build houses? Katie had once driven past a children’s camp in central Illinois on whose board a cousin sat; couldn’t we give them several thousand dollars to make renovations in her honor? A sense of hierarchy clouded our interactions. Who should be making these decisions, Katie’s widower or Katie’s family? We protected ourselves with distance, until what followed became a series of no-win scenarios. Was it really “Katie” to ask people for money, and should we risk going belly up? Could we hold the fun run in her hometown, and was it “Katie” to solicit local sponsorships? Wasn’t it awkward to keep inviting family members to attend our events, when we knew they might not want to come? Was it “Katie” to take them off the list and so risk alienating them?
I thought, In-laws are always outlaws.
I thought, A loving widower does not stop talking to the family of his dead wife.
I ran across one strip mall, then the next, toward the regional branch of a national bank. I had no cash in my wallet to pay the cost of therapy, and my session would begin in minutes. I thought, If I do not pay the therapist, then she will not see me; if I miss one session, then she might not schedule me for another one; if I miss therapy, I will regress; I will lose my progress; I will collapse. This was my fear: disrupting the process. I had faith in it. I ran across the strip mall so that I might keep my part in it. Before most sessions I made a list of things to talk about it, but today, because I had no cash and I was running late, I would have to improvise the list. Would the therapist say I was not fully committed to the process? Would she say I seemed reluctant to get better? The ATM overhung the side of the bank building. I punched the numbers on the screen and waited. I made a fist with my hand so that it would not shake. I ran back across the parking lot, toward the office, and when I could not run, I walked. I stepped carefully between cars and tried to catch my breath. I ran again. We would start the session late, I thought, if I arrived there at all. Even that afternoon I would not describe the experience of Katie’s death in terms of grief and witness. I would not think to say, until much later, that as I ran across the parking lots, I seemed to enact again the circumstances of Katie’s death. Instead, I would wonder at my failure to generate a list and try to hide my shame. I would sweat and cough and try very hard to improvise a list of things we might talk about at the session.
After Katie’s death, need did not always manifest itself in moments of desperate, semirehearsed spontaneity; in quiet accusations and a closing of the ranks; in incoherent, late-night phone messages that, the next day, no one seemed to remember leaving. The therapist said I should take my wedding ring off of my finger, put it on a chain, and wear the chain next to my skin, around my neck.
Did I want to hide these physical markers of widowhood? In the day-to-day, could I ignore Katie’s death if it was not always in front of me?
I told Ed of my plan to stop wearing black every day, and he said, You were still wearing black every day?
I went with my niece to the chain store, and we bought the season’s bold madras prints and bright ringer-tees. I took them home, cut the price tags, and folded them in neat piles on the bed. I took the black shirts—oxfords, polos—out of the drawer and stacked them on the closet shelf.
I tried to stop mentioning Katie in conversations about the past whenever I met and talked with new people. I made my references singular: my time in Bangladesh, my work in Romania, my graduate alma mater. Clean and simple, uncomplicated by clumsy elaborations—“my wife Katie who died seven months ago,” “living with my in-laws from my first marriage, which ended after my first wife’s death, which is why I’m in Indiana”—I made two versions of myself. Privately, one expressed grief. Publicly, the other elided it.
What could be expressed in moral terms—ambition, the pretense to tragedy—and what was circumstantial, incidental to our intentions?
In therapy aspects of Katie’s life were made imperfect by its sudden end. A certain gravitas simplified our storyline. I could idealize Katie or be angry with her, but I less and less thought of her as a person, with a life separate from me. There was the death, our life together before the death, and my life after it. The death. Was this really how I was saying it now? As I pieced back through journals, letters, and emails, I wondered how much of what she had left behind would remain unsettled and how much had settled into fact and story.
I told myself I was investigating a life, but the inquiries seemed to have unclear methods and purposes. Wasn’t another name for this scrutiny, the turning again and again, neurosis? I was trying to end Katie’s life by asking questions. I was generating still more suffering, in order to put it on public display and then worry about it. Here was the benefit of therapy: everything was made to have two sides. The trauma of watching Katie die had a context. It became singular. Katie’s death was neither expressly my fault nor anyone’s fault. I was not exceptional. Everyone went to therapy all of the time, for all varieties of suffering, however real or imagined or trivial. Therapy said that a life would improve with witness and scrutiny, that meaningful change required a desire to change and the understanding of circumstance. Had desire always been so easily twinned with meaning? Witnessing Katie’s death did not mean understanding the death, but rather its context; the terms of our life together, rather than its end. In therapy, living after Katie’s death required arrangement, but not necessarily adjustment.
In the weeks after Katie’s death, I learned to watch my life at the distance of a shared responsibility. I monitored it with the therapist and was relieved to defer, for her consideration, the worst judgments about myself. Days we did not meet, I walked out the front door of the house, plugged my headphones into an iPod, and turned in any direction. I sought out new streets and cul-de-sacs in doglegs from the main road but usually circled back. After a while, it seemed I knew every inch of the city limits, from the highway on one side to the park with the well on the other. If it occurred to me that I was penned in and mapping out the well-defined limits of a temporary place, I do not remember it.
At home I returned compulsively, hungrily, to the same few rituals. When there was no anniversary, birthday, holiday, death date, I borrowed the emotions from songs, television shows, novels, documentaries, photographs, movies. The gestures of grief seemed separate of the feeling, foreign and terrifying again, something I wanted to both guard against and not let go. I thought, I would rather run back our life together to any moment we might not have stayed together and follow it instantly to here. To make a different kind of gap, then close it.
If I had chosen one of the other two therapists in Indiana, would I seek now cure—lasers, prayer, medication—rather than accommodation? Would I understand as well, if differently, Katie’s death and her absence in my life?
I lived for thirteen months in Indiana. After I left, my room next to the garage was converted into an office. Filing cabinets and a large desk were moved into the corner. The bed was moved into the basement. The carpet was torn up, and the exposed wood was finished. At first, when he lived in the house across town, Ed would sneak back into the house to reclaim power tools, amplifiers, albums, a weight bench. One weekend Beth hired an industrial dumpster and loaded all of the extraneous crap from the house into it. A truck came to take it away. Large spaces in the house were now exposed so they could contain other things and be arranged again.
Erasing the Room
1.
The hallway outside my room in Indiana was narrow, well lit, and tiled in every direction. Most nights, I was terrified to enter it. I knew where it would take me: into the kitchen, past my bathroom and the laundry nook. There were forty-one parallel tiles on the other side of the door, a cat, two dogs, and five family members coming and going. I stood on my side of the door, imagining it held back a world all day filling with halved distances, closing the
gaps between places where I felt safe. How many steps would it take to summon our old apartments in Bucharest, Chicago, and Miami? The mountain where I had watched Katie die?
A lamp near my window reached a shadow most of the way to the closet. Someone had always just mowed their lawn, and in the darkness the scent filled my room. It smelled nothing like Romania. I could imagine, then, that Katie had died months, even years earlier, or that she had died someone else’s wife, or that we were again visiting Indiana together, as we did most summers, and in a few days would leave together and resume our interrupted life. I would lie on the bed and wait for the room to fill with thick fog: quieter sounds, deeper breaths, a sense of fumbling toward familiar places.
Once, after I had taken a sleeping pill, I stumbled into the hallway and then the laundry room, locked the door, and caught my breath. I stood there awhile. It was hard to open this door, too. I imagined that I was playing a video game, stranded on a floating tile, waiting to time my jump back to safety. I understood that there was a finite period of time to get myself back into bed, before the pill erased the room entirely. So the room, too, was part of the game. Get inside before the clock runs down, and everything falls off the screen.
Summer mornings in Indiana were humid and sunny. Dampness took off the chill. I awoke under a sheet, earplugs in, my two cats nestled on either side. I felt relief to see light under the blinds and to hear the kids watching television in the kitchen. I had disappeared for the night and now I was back. I became adept at holding in my mind this first instinctive reaction to the world. Fractions of seconds, a few seconds. I awoke grateful and happy to be alive.
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