Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  My therapist uses the phrase cognitive bandwidth to suggest how I might think about what I can and cannot offer to the people in my life. At any given moment, 30–40 percent of my bandwidth is devotional: grief or trauma, Katie and our life together, her mortality and my own. Another 30 percent is functional: it gets me through the day, across intersections, to the gas station, out on walks, planning lessons and meeting with students. The last 30 percent is discretionary: I might entertain myself with movies and music, sit in my room with the door closed, talk with Beth over lunch, or bake cookies with my nieces and nephew. The therapist’s point is that I can’t do too many things right now, and I certainly shouldn’t expect to do more than one of them well.

  How present do I seem in any of these circumstances? Aren’t they all temporary, anyway? I suspect sometimes it is my obvious detachment, my disinclination toward the world, that makes me so welcome. I remember best and most fondly those throwaway moments with my nieces and nephew; my lunches with Beth, eating French fries and cold curried chicken salad, talking about Katie, then swim lessons, the neighbors, then The Office. Sitting on the back porch talking about class rankings and math tests. Declaring unpatriotic a niece’s classmate named “Tory.” I make a welcome space for the spontaneous connections but also the concessions that sustain independent feelings and relationships.

  My time in Indiana evolves in stages: grieving widower, live-in uncle, surrogate. I am less often the interloper. Afterward, I miss that certainty of fragile feeling and waiting to understand my place. Vulnerable and partially present, I live in small incidents of grief that bring us together. I float through major incidents against which I make no real progress. I am shaky but resolute. I am kind to whoever will have me. I expect very little, and we get along very well because of it.

  Tying the Knot

  After a terrific storm, I decided I was in love with a friend. I drove from the house to the public library, where I wrote a long email confessing my true feelings, which she no doubt shared. Katie was dead, and I missed being in love. Five months later I thought my friend would save me.

  For the first time since Katie’s death, I was bored. Those minor rituals of daily life that had once sustained the practice of hard emotion seemed increasingly mannered, sometimes canned. In my room, at night, I played the same three or four songs that I knew might overwhelm me and again make the pain of grief fresh and urgent. But I also listened to them in the car and at the burrito shop, while walking around the shopping mall or mailing packages to the friends who had sent small gifts all summer. I tried to think about grief in the past tense. I wanted to see myself as someone who had once grieved without consolation and who now knew how to live with grief in a continuing life.

  Daylight Savings Time ended. Halloween decorations poked out of trash bins or became backdrops for paper turkeys and husks of Indian corn. Long evenings of streetlights, ice, and rain became the pitched, gray season. Because heat from the house did not circulate well to my room just off the garage, I purchased an electric blanket and space heater. In the morning I ran the shower to fill the bathroom with steam. Evenings, I drove with Ed and Beth to indoor soccer games or sat in the next room during Boy Scout meetings, looking over math problems with a niece and then running spelling lists. Once everyone headed off to bed, I filled out request forms online from the circulating desk.

  That I was declaring my love electronically, and that time seemed of the essence, might have warned me off my task. Also, that I did not mention the plan to my therapist, my family, Ed’s family, or anyone else I knew in my daily life. I did confide my secret in two friends, both men, who lived in Miami. For a while they even resented my friend for not doing the right thing, by which I understood they meant she could at least have humored me a little. I had been through something tragic. She was having boyfriend problems. Surely, there was common ground.

  In the library that evening, parents with small children passed my desk. Teenagers in big coats and backpacks hurried to the far cubicles. Along the perimeter of the parking lot, a snowplow made great hedges of ice. From my window I could see the blacktop shining up under the overhanging lights: yellow hashes and numbers marking off each space. There was great potential in urgency, I told myself, and good reason to be hopeful.

  I got to work. I took six or seven anthologies down from the stacks and made neat piles to hide my progress. I opened my laptop, my internet browser, and finally the email program. I loved the sense of risk, yes, but I also felt due whatever might come after grief. I was certain there was something. I had made my position redemptive and sympathetic for long enough. Now the world should come to me.

  From the moment of Katie’s death, I was an exceptional case for sympathy and comfort. Everyone said it. No one should have to witness and accept so close to the start of a marriage the life and death of his spouse. No one should die so young. To want to help to heal me, to try to mend the enormous tear in the social fabric through which I had fallen, made everyone decent. It was safe, even noble to love me.

  Accepting that sympathy was a tricky catch-22. In order to grieve, I needed to leave the world for a while. In order to heal, I needed to embrace some part of the lives around me. I fashioned a continuing life in the molds of those who took me in and loved me. I participated in their lives, and in my participation I grew less wary of the world that had, in an instant, trapped and killed Katie. A gap developed. I cried at night, alone and behind closed doors, but during the day, with family and friends, I smiled. I was insistent, optimistic, stubbornly willfully and firmly engaged. I thought of the quote by Basho. What is the point of trying to say everything to anybody? I grieved for Katie’s death. In different ways, we mourned the loss of her life. Our senses of grief were already long divergent. Katie’s family took time and space to close ranks and reform the structure of a family in her absence. In order to heal, I needed to believe my grief at losing my wife and partner, magnified by the trauma of witnessing her violent death, was unquestionably the greater loss.

  A few weeks after the funeral, I stood in the kitchen assigning tasks. Katie’s nephew melted and whipped the butter. His sister packed brown sugar and sifted flour. Her older sister measured the baking soda and salt, cracked the egg. Their cousins chopped the chocolate bars into chunks, crushed the walnuts, tasted the batter. We all took turns measuring teaspoons of batter, and then we waited for the first batch to finish baking. Or, I waited and did dishes, while they watched television.

  Judy and Katie’s sister sat on the back porch, talking about divorce. I could hear their voices in the gaps between John Prine songs. Katie had loved John Prine. When we first met as Peace Corps volunteers in Bangladesh, she lent me her John Prine mix tape, which I only grudgingly returned, months later, after we had started dating. In the kitchen I kept restarting “Lake Marie,” self-consciously playing it over and over, eager to telegraph the similarities between the girlfriend’s murder in the song and Katie’s death. I can’t imagine what effect this had on Katie’s mother and sister. I didn’t ask, and I’m not sure they noticed. Ed might understand, I thought, but he was upstairs, putting his boy down for the night.

  There was a terrific pile of dishes from dinner. We had made spaghetti together, following a recipe that Katie liked. I loaded soap into the dishwasher and ran it. I washed each of the pans by hand and laid them out on a checkered towel. It was warm out, but not so warm that we had to run the air-conditioning. I propped the front door to get a breeze going through the kitchen. I started “Lake Marie” again and took each of the coils off the burner. I scrubbed down the stove with big piles of Comet until it shined and smelled of bleach. I slid the coils back into place. The cookies were done. The kids came back to scoop them, still warm, and pour glasses of milk. They took a plate out to Katie’s mother and sister. I made two more sheets of batter, ran the disposal, washed the bowl and spoon, dried the pots and pans, stacked everything into the cupboards, checked the cookies, waited.

  I needed to ke
ep moving forward. I wanted to slow down. I drank a big glass of whiskey. I went to the bathroom and dug out the anxiety pills a doctor at the embassy had prescribed. I had taken Katie to see John Prine and Iris Dement in concert at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall for her twenty-seventh birthday. They had closed the show with a sing-along of “Lake Marie.” The chorus is simple, Prine explained; you just sing “Standing by peaceful waters” over and over. At the concert only one person, sitting just up behind the stage, knew to yell out Shadows! during the last verse. You know what blood looks like in a black-and-white video? John Prine asked again, laughing, and we all yelled back, Shadows!

  What was I doing in Indiana? These people couldn’t heal me. John Prine couldn’t heal me. Cookies and pasta were making me fat and keeping me awake at night. The pills and liquor felt good, like a heating blanket under the skin. I had a secret now; I was high, and no one else knew it. I would have to explain this to my therapist. I walked back into the kitchen. The kids had disappeared into the neighborhood, so I scooped the last batch of cookies onto a cooling rack, scrubbed the baking tray and poured myself another drink. The stereo sounded tinny now and too loud. I took out the John Prine, put in Lucinda Williams. I walked out onto the back porch and spent the rest of the night talking about the Fourth of July when Katie had beat me in her hometown’s 5K Race for Freedom.

  We did not always find the rhythm to share certain stories. Sometimes they became performances or claims to possession. It was possible that things had happened to Katie she never told me, that they knew and I didn’t, but I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. I had the full picture; I knew secrets, too.

  The secrecy was corrosive. It was all we had to impose order. Together, we drank, told stories, and confided in each other. Individually, we named our grief and its cause in the most intimate terms. What we had lost. What we missed. Almost immediately, I hewed to a careful regimen of medications, therapy, and work. I sought, always, progress and action, accountability and disclosure. In an email to a friend I said that what mattered now, more than grief or teaching or even therapy, was that I knew how to be a good uncle. I started to want something that Katie and I had never planned for ourselves: a family. The idea that grief was singular, and that everyone mourned Katie’s death in our own ways, on our own timelines, seemed too easy. Or, I saw it in much harsher terms. I was the widower, and I was taking care of my shit. Everyone else should, too.

  I liked being married to Katie. In Indiana I realized I had also liked being married, period. I was, for the most part, pretty good at it.

  I knew men who did not like marriage. They had not been eager to marry and felt saddled, even trapped, by its obligations. These were men who needed prompting to make the commitment, who resented social and family pressures and so made sure always to keep the door open just a crack. Intensive extracurricular hobbies abounded. Rock climbing. Ultra-marathoning. Amateur journalism. When they spoke casually about their marriages, they were seen as confident, even practical. When they forgot anniversaries and birthdays, the women who married and loved them declared that they were works in progress, models of a kind of manly independence, aloof in the most attractive ways. Perhaps these women sought also to crack the door a bit.

  Did such men, widowed, feel liberated from marriage altogether? Did they miss it as much as I did? Was the prospect of remarrying as fixed in its hypothetical aspect? I wondered how they might make sense of the end of a marriage. Did everyone imagine doing it differently a second time, possibly better, seeking out a partner whose complement improved the marriage and both people as spouses? Could we idealize together marriage through the approximations and distances of grief? There were gaps now, intercut broadly with memories. If we tied the knot again, would we tie it about the same, or would we try to tie it tighter, faster, flatter, and more elegantly?

  I say “tie the knot” to mean, of course, “get married”: binding two lives together to make each life stronger, to distribute the stress and weight more evenly, to join (at least) two families.

  The etymology of “tie the knot” is uncertain. Like any colloquialism its origin has grown less stable as its usage has become widespread. “Tie the knot” might mean to tie the first knots under a mattress, in the time before bed frames. To make a pledge together and so bind the words. To stitch ribbons into hair and mark oneself as a bride. To call forth a patriarch to stand in witness or perform a sacramental tying of cords. To bind the marrying couple’s hands together, with a promise to break the knot only after the marriage has been consummated. To make sacraments in preliterate cultures. To weave a necklace of flowers and place them around a spouse’s neck.

  In Indiana I adapted my own meaning. I would tie a knot at the end of my life to whatever might hold it. I wanted to survive. I wanted to carry forward the best part of Katie’s and my life and to begin to make an entirely new one, too. That these intentions might be contradictory was only later obvious; I sincerely believed that I could carry everything and everyone forward. As a young widower, I was indulged this fantasy because it made my survival seem more certain; healing was the important thing, and desire was a fine reason to heal. If I was still a man living in his brother-in-law’s garage apartment, wondering what might happen next, then I also could not deny that I had survived Katie’s death, able-bodied and young, the walking embodiment of an inevitable potential beyond grief. One day I would either leave the apartment or became that guy in the neighborhood, the cautionary tale, the one who moved in a while ago when things were really bad, then sort of hung around too long, never quite put the pieces back together, who belonged to that family for a while and now belonged to no one.

  Katie and I met Ed and his family together a final time, in Germany, for a long holiday weekend in October 2006. We ate chocolates, drank wine, toured orchards and vineyards. We turned handstands in a field surrounded by sunflowers and mountains. We ate elaborate meals at the expense and generosity of a colleague to whom Ed had shown a kindness many years earlier. It was, in many ways, an idyllic trip. We flew back to Bucharest nostalgic already for the visit.

  In the Carmel library I wrote plainly and with great affection. I had not practiced the tone in some time, but it was familiar enough. I meant to overlay onto the next relationship the carbon from the last. My hands shook as I wrote. I was excited. I thought of the scene in Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody Allen confides to Mia Farrow that he stole most of the material for his one love letter to her from Joyce. In college I had read Joyce’s love letters to his wife. They were illicit, aggressive, shockingly erotic, and full of a vulnerability that made me uncomfortable. My purpose was noble, I kept telling myself. My project was restorative but also sequential. My friend was a cipher or maybe just the means to the end of knowing I was loved by one person more than anyone else.

  Do I have that wrong now? Were my feelings real, honest, and uncomplicated by grief, separate of it entirely, and only now diminished, in the anecdote, because I know the effort failed?

  Here is yet another advantage of widowhood. There is a tremendous restart button for widowers just below reality that few can deny each time it is pressed. Circumstance and time are finite measurements against the unrelenting situation of our grief. A spouse has died, and a joint life has ended, against our will. We did not choose either the death or the end of the marriage. We should not be here, and whatever we do next, we will not be held completely accountable. We are, after all, victims. We are responding to everything as best as we can. Please help us.

  My life grew certain in Indiana.

  No, that is not quite right. I was wanted in Indiana. I did belong.

  In the most extreme moments of grief and boredom, our situation was not unlike playing very well on a basketball team. Within the space of five people, I was a surrogate, a trusted sixth man who could come off the bench and play quality minutes, spell the stars, and then sit back down and wait my next turn. I sustained meaningful friendships with people I loved dearly. I learned firs
thand how families work, what good parenting is and can be. I sacrificed, contributed, and tried to play my role.

  I was not a parent. I was hardly an authority figure. Usually I needed Ed or Beth to intervene and lay down the law when a niece or nephew was really out of line. I would make a joke of it, declaring with feigned exasperation that I was an adult and the kids had to do what I said. We all laughed. But teasing only covered the gap. I could do part of the job very well: games, homework, shopping, movies, trips to the park and mall. I had no idea, in the beginning, how to do the harder parts.

  After Katie’s death, our marriage became a fixed thing in the minds of everyone who knew us. We had been married until Katie died, which meant now that we had been married until the end of her life. The corollary was that if Katie had lived a long life, then we would have been married for a very long time. Of course, there was no real way to prove this logic, but there was also no way to deny it and certainly, in the beginning, few occasions to do so. I was the widower of a successful and loving marriage that had ended too soon. That it had ended with a bear attack in a foreign country, and that I had witnessed and survived the attack, only magnified the exception. Alongside the grief, depression, and daily maintenance that consumed my life and made its routines and obligations so challenging, I began to feel something very different. I was relieved of the burden of living a full life with Katie.

  Hi John,

  I’m glad you feel comfortable enough to tell me this. I would like to be equally honest with you, because that honesty has always been one of the hallmarks of our friendship, which I treasure so dearly. So I have to say that, no, I don’t reciprocate your romantic feelings. I feel like I’m in love with my boyfriend. I do reciprocate the happiness of having such a close friendship, and I consider you one of my two best friends (and have since we met).