Sleep during the day was impossible. My mind was always snapping my body to attention just as it shut down. I would sit on the screened-in porch, under the ceiling fan, and try to read one of Katie’s favorite books. There is a passage near the end of The Razor’s Edge where the hero, Larry Durrell, cures his friend’s crippling migraines through guided meditation. The friend holds a Tibetan coin until it drops from his fist; the pain subsides, and the friend is restored to health. A few times I held a Romanian coin in my fist and imagined a great ball of light opening out into the room and consuming, gradually, me, my grief, Indiana. Nothing.
I managed one side of consciousness vigilantly, meticulous about therapy and recovery; I tried to understand how trauma affected the body and brain. The other side of consciousness—sleep—remained vulnerable to unwanted memories and intrusions. I could not guard against or control them. Sleep was a transaction whose terms I negotiated daily. What did I need to sleep. What would make it less scary. Transitional spaces lost their boundaries. Often, I would dream in some symbolic interchange with the circumstances of Katie’s death: trying to pull a friend out of a sinkhole, catching my nephew before he fell off the bed.
Sleeping medication altered the terms of my grief. It diminished my sense of need, absolved me of guilt and anxiety, and threw a broken switch, which stuck. It was comforting to take a pill, complete the routine of each day, and then transform the coming night. It was terrifying to think about the dreams I might have if I didn’t take the pill. How would my mind accommodate its obligations to memory and imagination without the filter of chemistry? However hard I thought about it during the day, come bedtime, sleep was made to seem, again, inevitable.
That first year, I had two recurring dreams about Katie’s death.
In the first a pack of wolves arrives slowly from a great distance to attack someone I don’t know. I can hear them whimpering, they move quickly, their bodies are lean and mangy. They seem to come at once, full of implication, never ending, like ants toward a sugar dish. Sometimes, I wake before their arrival or just after the attack begins. Other nights, I try to make an emergency call on a cell phone that doesn’t work, or I follow the wolves to reclaim the body. It is mangled and bloodless, smooth to touch. I carry it through a city.
In the second dream I am again a Peace Corps volunteer, back in South Asia after Christmas. The staff, teachers, and superintendent from the teacher’s college greet me and take me to my old room. My bed, radio, ceiling fan, bamboo table, and bookshelf are exactly as I left them. There is a yellow quality to the light and dust everywhere. Or, it is evening, and there are only a few hours to arrange things and then get to the market to buy food and water. Katie is coming the next morning on the overnight bus. She is thin and young, tired but smiling. I can smell the baby powder deodorant that she used to wear, the sweat dried on her skin after a long bus ride. This part of the dream is brief but also the most fully present; the sense of time is uneven and particular, the feelings urgent but unfocused. I need to explain things, I think, and quickly.
We sit on the bed, or she sits on the bed and I sit at my desk, or we walk together across the lawns of the school, deserted now. No cows, mosquitoes, or students. We are alone on the small campus. The hostels are boarded over, and the grass is thick. We do not have to watch for sinkholes and snakes. We can walk a great distance in no particular direction. As we talk, there is never a moment of dramatic confrontation about my continuing life, and this almost always disappoints me: in the dream neither of us seems especially determined to fight for the life we had together. It does not occur to me to warn Katie about her death, its violence, the few simple things either of us might have done to prevent it.
As I wake, I lie in bed thinking how simple the story is, how easy it will be to retell. I believe that I am committed to a single fidelity, a sequence, and that a sense of continuity is preserved in the waking world. This is tidy and only partially true.
There is an act of withstanding that relocates violence entirely within the realm of imagination. There is a locus to violence that, like grief, makes a single point in time stretch in every direction. It can be named, managed, and witnessed. In the first dream, restoration—claim the body, take it to the proper place—precedes my obligation to the dead. Katie is the occasion for a dream into which she never enters. In the second dream, Katie is recognized but not accommodated, welcomed but not invited. I am grateful to see her and even to seek her out, but only on another continent.
When I meet Katie in the dream, I explain myself without worrying about the consequence to either past or present. When I do not meet her, explanations are made to whoever is listening. In both versions of the dream, an account is rendered in the negotiated terms of a witness and a survivor who is married again. It is my mind and heart that resist complication. Whoever expresses them to me, they are my terms and my corrections.
2.
Leaving the therapist’s office, need for sympathy induced a certain vertigo. Shame often accumulated in the silence after our shared witness. When I was critical of myself or our life together, I saw less of what Katie and I had loved and valued. There became no high ground on which to stand at a distance from the day’s event, from Katie’s death and our life, and say, No, it did not happen that way at all. There is a part of this we cannot understand together.
Wasn’t shame the means for self-transformation? Shame required sacrifice and contrition. It was a grammar for failed self-regard that terminated, always, in affection and distance. I sought it beyond hunger and rational thought, beyond even feeling. Rather than high and open ground, shame was, finally, the closed room only I could enter. I groped at these walls, too. I held myself up in the darkness, knowing I could find my way again and again to it. Whoever I invited, however I explained it, the walls were near and would not press closer.
When I had called Judy from the mountaintop, she did not demand explanation or story from me as I feared she might, and she did not indict me for the fact of Katie’s death. Instead, she offered to help me. I felt gratitude for her kindness in the days that followed. I tried to reciprocate it. The day before the funeral, Judy and I walked to a park near her house, where I again told her the story of Katie’s death, this time more slowly and in great detail. I paused to make explanations, to clarify as best I could the parts she did not understand. There were not many. Above all, she loved her daughter and admired Katie’s courageous life. That life made sense to Judy because no one else could do it as she had, or so well.
Mostly, Judy struggled to piece together the narrative of the afternoon. How we had stayed on the mountain so late. Where we meant to go that we could not wait until morning to hike there. Was my gratitude part of the story I told Judy about Katie’s death? It seemed awkward to include it, as though I would only shift the tone back to me. This wasn’t therapy. My purpose was not entirely my own. And yet, my understanding of the night was incomplete without my gratitude. My feeling for Judy, and my need for her understanding, was a fixed part of the story I now told. I wanted her to know everything. I knew Judy very well.
Wasn’t my failure to save Katie’s life the part of the story that neither of us was particularly eager to articulate? However I told the story, Katie had left me on the trail. I had hiked back to find her. I had gone for help when she asked me to do so. I had returned to her when no one else would: to wait with her, and then stay up all night with her body, certain to move it across a country and city, two continents, an ocean, glaciers and wheat, and her hometown, to bring her to Judy, as I knew Katie would have wanted.
I ran these emphases over in my mind. Each time I failed to find in their articulation the courage I hoped they might retrospectively express.
It was defensive to make such distinctions. No voice argued with me. Doctors, friends, and family members agreed the mind was a mechanism of self-preservation. The body submitted to the mind. I did what any rational thinker would do and should want to do. What I had done. And yet,
for all of my explanations, I understood clearly my failure. I hated to feel forgiven. I needed to feel ashamed—that I had moved through mud that night and felt nothing—if only so there might be some moral component to what had happened.
To a sympathetic stranger, I did not understand how things really worked in nature. To Judy, even, I was too hard on myself. Wasn’t this what I could do best as witness and survivor: to make the fact of Katie’s death undeniable, vivid and void of euphemism? In every telling of it, I might do something very generous to assuage the curiosity and terror about which any listener might otherwise feel some hesitation to inquire too closely. I did not want the story of Katie’s death to be only the story of my having watched Katie die. And yet, weren’t my emotions that night exceedingly relatable? Outside of anatomy and logic, how else might I make the imagined experience vivid and particular to someone who was not there?
Shame made me feel powerful. It allowed me to practice an exacting and particular neurosis. I played the role of constant failure. Shame permitted evaluation to fill in the gaps, arguing by proxy that, really, it didn’t matter whether I had failed Katie, so much as to what extent and in which continuing ways. Shame made me both feckless and omnipotent, a coward with questionable motives, the rube who couldn’t help not knowing better, the mastermind who willed from a chaotic mountaintop the narcissism of ardent regret.
3.
Katie had been a finalist for a different fellowship that spring, one she did not ultimately receive. With its support, rather than Romania, we would have spent parts of the year in four cities: Atlanta, Spokane, Cincinnati, and Washington DC. Katie would have interned at different departments in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I remember thinking at the time it was good that she had not received the CDC fellowship. I had never especially liked Atlanta. I did not want to move every three months to a new city. I certainly did not want to visit her in these cities while living in a different one. If we were going to move, then I wanted to live abroad again. Unlike Romania, I could not locate Spokane on a map.
After Katie’s death, I understood my reluctance meant I had wanted Katie’s application to fail. I was ashamed to tell her so. The fact of wanting anything, I thought, rather than providing the unconditional support of a loving spouse, meant I had been controlling, manipulative, uncharitable, petty. When, instead of the CDC, Katie accepted the fellowship from the Coca-Cola Foundation that placed her in Bucharest. I was excited for our new adventure.
In fact, our departure had been anything short of dramatic or poorly considered. We talked, planned, hedged, hoped, and waited. We rented storage units and bought traveler’s checks. Katie flew to Romania while I stayed behind in Miami a few weeks to pack our things. I loaded boxes into a U-Haul and drove them to our North Miami storage unit. I sold furniture on Craigslist. Katie had sealed the contents of her drawers and desk into boxes I stacked indiscriminately alongside the rest of our apartment: dishes, silverware, books, clothes, jewelry. When I unpacked those boxes, much later, I was surprised to see how hastily Katie had filled hers. She had not put much planning or forethought into the effort. The day before my flight, I crated the cats and dropped them at the international cargo terminal of the airport. Katie claimed them the next day, after they cleared customs and animal control, and a few days later met me at the airport.
In Indiana shame made no place for either this rather pedestrian sequence or our last life together in the United States, before we left for the Eastern European frontier. But I could shape it until it became, even as I knew better, a crude prediction of our last year. In my telling, all objects were artifacts of our recklessness. The rooms of our life were bright and various. Fate might interchange anecdote and confidence, so that both might seem still vital as the conversation continued.
Katie loved superhero stories. In the early summer heat of our cross-country drive from Chicago to Miami, we had stopped in Georgia to watch a matinee showing of the Spider-Man 2 premiere. Through six hurricanes our two years in Florida, she read the first five Harry Potter books by emergency flashlight. Flipping through the DVD extras from a season of The West Wing, we marveled at how small the set was, how wide angles and high color made a distracting polish across each scene’s thin wood and fake glass.
Really, Katie loved the superhero backstories. How any ordinary person would be revealed in the secretive reluctance of talents—Vincent D’Onofrio in Happy Accidents and Sawyer from Lost were particular favorites—well in excess of his ordinary, even hapless affect.
Here was what I knew about the heroes Katie loved: they were compelled by a persistence of failure. They did not quit until they were beaten. They gave all they could, beyond the perfection of their conflict, to willingly die. Most were trained to die and made to feel mortal for their exception, while the rest, in the moment, discovered an infinite capacity for the suspension of rational judgment. Whom they left behind, and how, and why, were beside the point. The best heroes were transformed by death. The rest became martyrs.
My desire to remember Katie was many things: devoted, empathic, needy, self-important, lonely, critical, nostalgic. It was not heroic. I was ordinary. Even this acknowledgment was an excuse for the fact of my helplessness. Time and again, I was asked to explain my witness of the events of Katie’s death. Time and again, I offered also the explanation of my limited action, the occasion of my nonintervention, as though witness were a part of the sequence of facts. I was slippery. I dodged, in the everyday, the fact of my cowardice, but in my accounts to strangers, I bided my time. I did not change.
4.
A year after we moved to Miami, my first published poem appeared in a small literary journal. Before its publication Judy asked for a copy of the poem. I sent it to her in the mail: “Crepuscule.” I had picked the title from a thesaurus. I was in the habit then of titling my poems with obscure words: “Zugzwang,” “Lepidoptera,” “Scumble.” The poem was eight short lines, a plainspoken tribute to dusk.
Judy printed and framed the poem then placed it on her mantle. She asked me to sign it, and I did. We talked about the meaning of the title, “Crepuscule,” then the meanings of some newer poems I had sent to her. I loved sharing my poems with Judy and the instant, kindhearted encouragement she offered me. That, she said, anyone might sit down to write a poem, then share it with the world, is a pretty wonderful thing. It was easy to talk about writing with Judy. She wanted only to know that I loved what I did. She loved that Katie and I seemed so happy.
After Katie’s death, I wanted to find in my life in Indiana a sense of myself living still as her husband. I could not always do so. To understand the difficult oppositions between that first life and the life that continued in Indiana, between the obligations of marriage and degrees of individual freedom, meant acknowledging that on some level I had chosen to live in Indiana—I was not a victim there—just as my obligation to Katie was a choice, rather than a contract. It followed, like any obligation born of traditions, the clear limits of self-preservation. There were, in the end, exempt clauses—divorce, annulment, custody, common law—and ends to status—widower, divorcée—the distinctions of which, after a period of time, made the marriage an idea as fixed and uncertain as death itself.
In Indiana I saw no wedding ring, bedroom furniture, kitchen and chopping board, closet filled with work clothes. I lived in a borrowed room with simple things. What troubled me, increasingly, was not whether Katie had liked our marriage during her short life, whether she felt shame or relief at her place in it, but whether, when she left it, against her will, before her time, she might have wanted her absence to be sustained outside of it and then, for how long. I could not reclaim the lost present, any more than a blessing might reanimate Katie’s dead body.
During a snowstorm that January, I taught my nieces and nephew how to play chess. My parents had sent them two hand-carved sets for Christmas. I lined the pieces in order on the table and showed how each one moved, running the axes across the board.
Katie and I played a lot of chess, I said, especially when we first moved to Chicago.
We played together almost every day, after school, for the next two weeks. My nephew, the youngest, played it like checkers until he got the hang of it. The older niece could see several moves in advance, while her sister played a more intuitive game.
I had teased her once about a boy in school she liked. I called the house phone and pretended to be him, throwing my voice. Even after she knew it was me, she played along. For a while she called my cell phone, throwing her voice, pretending to be Ben.
One afternoon we decided to watch television, rather than play chess. We made popcorn and flipped through the cartoons. We walked to the strip mall and picked out a couple of movies for the night. We never talked about Katie on these walks, not directly. But a kind of alliance was formed by my presence in the house, in exclusion of the rest of Katie’s family. The first time I left the house, six weeks after Katie’s death, to visit my brother in Chicago, I returned home to find a painting on my bed. My younger niece had painted eight black planets on a white canvas, extending out from a black sun. There were a few small black stars. In large black letters, along the bottom, she had painted katie.
5.
In Bangladesh we took mefloquine pills as a guard against malaria. The medicine was mildly psychotropic and had the effect of making our dreams incredibly vivid. I jerked the wheel of my car hard to the right and turned donuts in the parking lot of a grocery store near my high school. It was raining, and the tires had the effect of changing the color of the water. Or, I walked the near-north neighborhoods of Chicago, in winter, until I arrived at the Music Box Theater. I could never make out what was playing on the marquee, and I did not go inside. I would stand by the ticket window, waiting for a friend to arrive. I would wake feeling young, overwhelmed, homesick. I did not want to have these dreams, or I wanted to dream about Chicago and my hometown but feel ambivalence, not nostalgia.
Young Widower Page 13