Young Widower

by John W. Evans

  How did we like working in Romania?

  Did we want to walk the next morning to the frozen pond at the edge of his property?

  Who would like a nightcap of homemade brandy before he showed us to our rooms?

  Ion explains that he owns all of the land from the road, past the cabin, to the mountain. He purchased it from the government after the fall of Communism, and now no one patrols the area. He has made a number of renovations. He is building new lots. He will make an enormous profit, and after the sale he will move back to his village and never work again. His daughter will study medicine or law in the United States. His neighbor’s daughter is a junior at the Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

  The brandy is bitter and burns in our stomachs. After a few more we are all pretty drunk. There is a back staircase to a room under the cabin where Ion keeps his dogs, and do we want to see them? We might hear whining in the night, and he doesn’t want us to worry. He is conditioning the new litter for the following winter. If their coats grow thick now, more fur will grow back with the first freeze.

  The door rattles on its hinges, even before he turns the deadbolt. He tells us to stand back. Then it starts: the low baying, or maybe it is howling, then the staccato yips of puppies intermixed with irregular barks. Some of the dogs are growing faster than the others, Ion explains, now that they are weaned. He keeps the mother inside the house, because otherwise she might feed only her favorites.

  We wouldn’t think to look at them now, Ion says, but these dogs will triple in size before spring. Every day they will eat their weight in raw meat. Then he will really begin to train them. He will isolate them from human contact to teach loyalty. Fully grown, this will be the only species of dog in Europe that can kill a bear: snap its neck and bring it right down to the ground.

  He will sell the dogs to hunters and neighbors and make still another fortune. Tonight, though, we should stroke their soft bellies. We should reach between the slats and feel the heavy fur. They will not imprint on us; they will grow docile only if they learn to expect us every night. If this happens, Ion explains, then they will be useless. He might as well shoot them. These could be vicious dogs, Ion reminds us, but they make lousy pets. Tonight, though, their howling makes the cabin safe. Whatever walks toward the cabin that night, coming or going to the mountain, will let us be because of it.

  5.

  My last night in Indiana, after everyone has gone to sleep, I roll a notebook, a blanket, and some beers into a backpack. I drive to the storage locker, enter the code, turn the deadbolt, and open the box that contains Katie’s journal. The cover is soft, black faux-leather. The pages are crisp but have a give toward the middle. They will soon crease. I have a little more than an hour before the gate will lock for the night. I sit in the hallway, under a row of fluorescent lights, and read Katie’s journal. Nothing belongs to Katie, not any longer. Or, it is all mine: her detritus, her daily life, even her secrets. I don’t have to share them with anyone.

  I fly out to Boston that spring to attend the wedding of a friend from college. The whole weekend I feel alternately humored and suffocated. Perhaps I am selfish and do not want anyone else to fall in love. Or, I am intimidated and unsure of myself. Or, I want to warn everyone about how this marriage might end, however improbable. It is obvious to me that I have made a foolish decision to attend. I am not even in the wedding party or a part of the service.

  My friend is Russian, and at the rehearsal dinner we drink too much vodka. I halfheartedly hit on a married bridesmaid, who details at great length the failures of her own marriage. Really, I am desperate to confide the secret of Katie’s death, to practice its power, but my friend has warned everyone in advance about my situation. He has asked them to treat me gingerly, with a sense of deference. It is a sensitivity and kindness on his part, and it magnifies both my need and my shame. I am marked as someone special. I am sympathized with. I have no secret.

  A few blocks from the restaurant, I throw up in the bushes in front of the Prudential building. I pass out on the T and wake up at the end of the line, last train, Braintree. I spend seventy-five dollars to take a cab back to the hotel. The next afternoon, before the wedding, I buy a new pair of very expensive shoes. I feel uncertain and unstable. I try to make small talk, but I can only think of one thing to talk about, the inevitable subject I am terrified to broach. I sit for the beginning of the reception, the first dance, the toasts, and when the music picks up, I leave early.

  6.

  We are standing in front of the People’s Palace of Bucharest, considering Katie’s job offer to live in Romania for the rest of the summer and the following year. It is late August and hot. This part of the city is quiet and empty. Katie asks me, again, if it is really what I want to do. Am I ready to leave Miami, to move again? Can we really make a life in Romania?

  Each time she asks, we are exhausted and afraid. We feel a little older. We have talked out every detail, and now we look at each other. Katie is holding my hands and standing very close. Her eyes are bright, and she will not look down. I hate seeing her like this, as I know she hates, more than anything, feeling vulnerable.

  Do we really want to do this? she asks again, and I know she means, I know how much you love me, and I love you, and still, this might not work out. This might be a terrible, terrible mistake we are making. And once we make it, we will not be able to walk it back, not really, not without consequences.

  I cannot tell all of this story.

  I can no longer distinguish conscience from will.

  Katie does not speak to me from the grave. Her voice does not carry across the grasses of the nature preserve and whisper stories about our life together or challenge any part of what she says now. What I make her say. Even what is preserved in letters and journals and photographs is perfected in conversations with friends and family members, in an order I continue to assemble, which refuses any certain shape, which I will one day completely imagine; all of it diminishes daily.

  For weeks before Katie’s death date, and then again before her birthday, I am edgy and irritable. I stop doing things. I spend time alone, and I think only about her death, and I hope to grieve, however contrived, because if I grieve again I will feel better and surrender, for a while, the burden. I will the emotion. I complete the ritual.

  I am not dead. I do not die symbolic deaths. I will not imagine some figurative transformation of death and say it has become truth and beauty. Death has no hypothetical aspect, however I have witnessed it. It is not mastered through ritual and practice.

  But there is this. Under the lights of the neon billboards making shadows across the empty palace, I pause a moment. I sit down on the bench and look up at Katie. I cannot change my answer, but I know the sound of my voice there, and I speak with certainty; again and again, I begin the sequence. I must. It is my obligation. We will leave together. Yes.

  Alone to Tell Thee

  Had I really once believed I could lose no part of Katie?

  If you had asked me before we left for Romania what Katie and I meant to do there, I would have said we were continuing a life. We were going to work. We were eager to travel. I would have defended the marriage as loving and honest, and however I might have articulated its limits, I would feel no melancholy for them.

  Katie would not have tried so hard to explain things. She would have said that if some pattern or habit made a provision for our life together, then we lived that life. However well we liked it, we loved each other. Then, as now, I did not know every part of Katie’s life that continued into our relationship or preceded it, but I knew the parts that began with it. Wasn’t it what Katie had asked of the marriage: to take her to new places, to do new things? This was the Katie I knew and loved: my wife. For all of us it was this Katie—wanderer or truant, prophet or prodigal—who had died on the mountain.

  I had a story to tell about this world and how it seemed to compulsively make sense; that it incentivized risk and accommodated broad intrusions u
ntil it decided to not be passive; that its response became overwhelming, complete, and final. Irrational and, very suddenly, deadly. I wondered what I had bartered with the universe in order to gain this sense of exception, whether it followed me now; shouldn’t the raw statistical improbability of it make everyone I know exempt to future tragedy?

  How closely I had come to violating it that night on the ridge, as the bear moved completely afield of me, making its wide sweep toward the stream. Even when I doubled back across the bear’s path, it was indifferent to me. It pawed at Katie, with increasing violence and focus, and ignored me. So, I watched. In this way I was made a witness. That I did not, and might never, understand what I witnessed seemed beside the point. I had been there. I could describe it.

  In the minor anecdotes of her life, Katie does not die again. Each time I imagine her death, I remember more of myself and think less of her. Willing or unwilling, there is always present the possibility of intervention. It teases the promise of a life different from this one, a continuing life I’m not sure I still want.

  After his ordeal Job receives a piece of money and one gold earring from each person he has ever known. He is a survivor, now. His voice is articulate. Each piece of jewelry is both ornament and currency. It is worn individually to express wealth or bartered for still another kind of wealth that accumulates in excess of what the Lord has compensated Job for his suffering. The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former. His redemption is ordained. The restitution is, finally, secular. Job’s new family both consoles and celebrates his return to the world of the living.

  For the death anniversary, as before the funeral, I wrote a group email. I put together another simple ceremony. Again, our families met at the nature preserve, then walked to the clearing where we had spread Katie’s ashes. We drank tea and orange juice in Katie’s honor. We read prayers. Nieces turned handstands, as Katie had taught them, while Ben sang “Let the Mystery Be.” I had imagined it would be a moment of comfort and communion, maybe even reconciliation, but it felt instead like a performance. Rather than her death, the ritual acknowledged a year of grief. Much as we might fear and imagine it, Katie would not die again.

  We were two groups now, wary of each other’s comfort—Wife and Sister, Widower and Family, Performers and Watchers—and staking competing claims. Even Katie’s death site seemed prospected. Katie’s father made a sign we posted near the entrance, while Judy made another sign to take into the preserve, while I made a speech. Who was listening, who had not also been there a year earlier? What could I say now that wouldn’t move the emphasis away from Katie’s death and instead seek consolation before or after it? The service comforted me, but Katie’s family seemed tired of the traveling show. I assured myself as I had on the mountain the night of her death—there is nothing I can do about this—and again I resented feeling so resigned in the moment to loss.

  Was this the duty of the survivor, to narrow the loss to some manageable part, transform it, and then move forward? Katie was a saint and a martyr, a point of comparison, a transformative figure, a symbol. An occasion to remember her death and a reminder of her absence in the world. She was no longer Katie. For me the death date was also a powerful reminder of watching Katie die, but I could not say that in the nature preserve. It seemed too self-focused.

  I stayed the week at my brother’s home in Chicago. Ed and his family drove me to the city, on their way back to Indiana. I would follow by bus in a few days. I said that the worst was over, that, in the end, I had again survived the day. My family congratulated me and said the next year would be easier; the second year, which now began.

  Did I understand the obligations of the widower: that it was better to gather Katie’s family together, however reluctantly, than to let them be? To plan a day of activities no one seemed especially eager to undertake, because it would be worse to do nothing? That afternoon I felt insincere and only partially there. Perhaps the death anniversary was a command performance. I wanted Katie’s family to see that I missed her. I tried to display a range of emotions that was no longer present in my everyday life. What had happened to those emotions? I missed them.

  Grief had pitch and scale now; the key was familiar. If I was hypervigilant of what were called “triggers”—loud noises, too little sleep, large animals—then I also understood the limits of vigilance. I would not wait to be overwhelmed. I hedged. I became better at anticipating when I might grieve for Katie. Here was something I learned, which no one had told me before Katie’s death: it felt good to physically grieve. I initiated different, less intense sequences. Nostalgia and remorse. Guilt and inadequacy. The effect was to feel less often hysterical and more present in my continuing life.

  I could no longer explain my life with Katie without also analyzing it. Yet, each successive argument changed my conclusions. Katie was beautiful and heroic. Her death was tragic but inspiring. Her memory was everyone’s so that it would never be lost. Which one was right? If they were all right, where was I supposed to keep the emphasis? The sentiments seemed true enough, and yet none was especially real or felt. Where was the consolation of Katie’s life, except that it should be a beautiful thing to remember together and become more so with time? And if I still felt angry with Katie for dying, if I expressed anger at the circumstances, there would always come the rejoinder: I just don’t see it, a friend would say. I mean, I always thought you guys seemed really happy together.

  That spring I hid pictures of Katie in various objects. I went to the copy shop and had business cards printed on cream-colored stock. On one side: the photo of Katie I kept on my desk. On the other: a poem I had written for her that she had liked. I put a card in my wallet, between my driver’s license and credit card. I put another card in the glove compartment of my car. One was stuck deep in a computer bag, so that it might fall out whenever I took my laptop to the coffee shop or across campus. The idea was to surprise myself where I might not otherwise see her and also to jostle some new sequence of memories whose practice might, with time, become a habit.

  Katie’s death presaged all varieties of calamity that never bore out. The small tragedy of a missed call, a late arrival, or a nasty fall did not escalate into broken bones, abductions, and car wrecks. I would clutch and wait: nothing. The inhabited world seemed again overly safe and insulated. I feared being so protected. I loved it.

  I expected rational thought to be purposeful after Katie’s death. I suppose it was, though not in the manner I had hoped. Where I wanted to arrive at nuanced and sensitive conclusions, I became instead exceedingly skilled at rationalization and avoidance. Where I expected a certain foreboding in nature, I faced nothing and waited for time to pass. Nature was not changed. I marked off days that became weeks, then months, then a year. At the end of that year, I gathered everyone together for a memorial service, and in many ways it felt like variations on a theme. One year of living after Katie’s death was over, and while we would never live that year again, there would be successive years.

  The memorial card in my wallet curled at its edges. I replaced it with another card. I checked that the other cards were in their right places, and I waited to be surprised. I made more cards and mailed them to Katie’s family. Perhaps I was the connection to a part of Katie’s life they tolerated but had never really understood: global health volunteer, graduate student, expatriate. Their hometown girl, choosing to leave home. My Katie looked back from the funhouse mirror: recognizable but distorted, at odd angles to the truth. Here was a mirror they could carry in their wallets.

  Hadn’t it been, in many ways, my year of consolations? Of making the story of Katie’s life and death, and our marriage, something fixed and remote, so that I could stand at a distance from it? I wanted to see us clearly, and I also wanted to live after us, in the shadow any shortcomings might make on my continuing life. Didn’t that shadow make it easier to recognize the worst of myself in our history and so step away from it entirely?

  More and mo
re, it seemed I would not be held accountable for such distinctions. Instead, they gave a certain glamour to sitting alone in my room next to the garage. They began new arguments no one else wanted to continue. Katie was fixed individually in our memories, and I was impatient with the witness.

  After our walk through the preserve, Judy had everyone over to her house for a potluck barbeque. Family, then friends, then neighbors filled the back porch with casseroles, bowls of chips, fruit-and-vegetable plates, deviled eggs. We sat for a while, making small talk about the election primaries, teaching, plans for travel. We took turns saying nice things about Katie, speaking in generalities so that we might all participate in the acknowledgment and affection.

  I said that Katie and I had always liked to visit her mother’s house. I described in detail how the first thing we did each time was unpack, say hello, and go for a run. What I wanted to say was that I imagined the world that allowed Katie to die quickly might also be a merciful one. I wanted to insist that a world absent of Katie was a world in which our lives had to have more value, in which we needed to do more to honor Katie, to try harder, to make the most of what little time we had left. Instead, I rattled off a different and equally meaningless yet more personally felt consolation. Everyone agreed with its sentiment. For a moment we all seemed to agree we would feel good together. Consolations were at least something to fill the intervening silences.

  In Bangladesh Katie and I survived monsoons, typhoons, and flooding in our small cement rooms that lost electricity and filled with water. In Miami we legged out hurricanes, reading Harry Potter by flashlight and cooking cans of beans on the outdoor grill. In Romania a blizzard, then an earthquake.

  Were these new silences between Katie’s family and me a sign of restitution? Were they meaningful? Did they protect the memory or poison it? We had around us our communities. Every polite conversation and moment of small talk contained the secret of Katie’s death. Sometimes we did not name it. I had been there. Most times, I didn’t acknowledge it. Katie’s family and I measured each other for the awareness of a distinction and kept our distances. However we grieved, Katie’s death was the point toward and from which our lives gathered, as prelude and memory. Together, and individually, we only lived after it.