Was there one more thing I knew, which I might tell, or to which I might confess, that would make continue these moments of disclosure; and, if I did choose to disclose them, would the telling itself be still one last rite of grief, a part of it kept back so as to lose neither the feeling nor the end the ritual? Had I secreted that knowledge away, and would its arrival one day surprise me?
I wanted there to be a secret. I wanted to pursue its origins in the cities where we had lived and visited, in the songs and stories Katie had loved, in the movies that would seem one day full of outdated slang and bulldozed skylines—fashions that suggest, all at once, a different time and place, but also a changed moment, an idiom, a place that can only be imagined with such certainty that the place never really existed. I needed to believe there was something more that might explain everything more clearly, and yet, the fact of Katie’s death made me certain I had all of the pieces in front of me. I could not explain the absence of sense in Katie’s pain, suffering, and death because I did not see any.
If I tell the story of Katie’s death, years later, will it still be a confession?
Both the death and the marriage are lost to consolation, witness, and revelation: the arbitrary survivals perpetuated in myth. I have only Job’s silence during and after his test. His surrender to the will of God is also the absence of a protest, the evidence of a faith, all evidence to the contrary, in divine order and mercy.
For Katie’s death, and my witness of it, I was comforted, loved, and made a part of a new family. That community sympathized with me during the year I lived in Indiana. So, perhaps my restitution to the family was ordered, immediate, and complete. My lamentation of Katie’s absence exists within an ordered universe. In this version of the story, I am Job, the messenger is the bear, and both Katie’s family and my family comfort me.
Alternately, I might be the community that comforts Job by receiving a story about death and unreason from the natural world. Katie is the messenger. It is unclear to whom, and with whom, I offer restitution and also to whom I tell this story. To what extent that restitution happens is made a test of faith for someone else. I do not yet know Job, but I ready my offering to him.
Or, I am Job’s messenger. I escaped Katie’s death in order to relay its fact and witness to Katie’s family, my family, and everyone who grieved for her absence in the world. Everyone is Job. Everyone’s faith is tested. Because I am only Job’s messenger, my fate is unclear. No one comforts me. I am not meant to lament or to be consoled and instructed.
I might one day become that best part of Katie continuing in the world: wise, centered, empathic. Perhaps I will omit the story of the death from the witness of the trauma, in order to clarify a sense of the continuing life. The term here, I think, is still consolation: to perform the lie that insists meaning, duration, and stability into our very brief lives. The terms of that witness are immoral, unjust, and absolute. I fear both accepting and being judged by them. They make the events of a life arbitrary and Katie’s death meaningless.
In Bucharest, at night, I sometimes knocked on the wooden bedframe as I fell asleep. It was a superstition I had learned from a colleague in Chicago who was fond of mythology. I knocked the wood so that the spirit world would not hear me confessing my worst fears, which, according to the legend, I was required to say out loud, lest they become true. I found it comforting to do this every night until it became a ritual and then a habit, a pattern I could not disrupt without imagining greater consequences for the interruption. Sometimes, I woke in the middle of the night so as not to miss the ritual. When I felt especially vulnerable, I said a short prayer. I rolled over in the bed and clung to Katie, who woke enough to pull my arm across her chest. And then, I fell asleep.
About the Author
John W. Evans, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, teaches creative writing at Stanford. His award-winning work appears in Slate, the Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA, and the Rumpus.
Winners of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize
Five Shades of Shadow
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Young Widower: A Memoir
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