“I cannot take all of these losses,” I said to my therapist, The Great Wayne, as I lay down, sniffling on his absurdly proto-Freudian Peruvian rug-covered couch.
I had a list of large and small losses: my parents (whom I miss every day, but orphaned at 55 does not feel like someone has done me wrong); my old house (which I miss only at the holidays when my new house is an exploding clown car of children and grandkids); my perfect, helpful and unintrusive nextdoor neighbour who moved away suddenly, replaced by someone who is none of the above; my older sister, hospitalised twice; and, more than all of these, my husband, Brian, my constant companion and best beloved, who had been gone from me and from this world for a month. Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 65, and, having seen its ravages in his own family and witnessed his own decline, he was determined not to make what he called “the long goodbye”. I supported and helped and wept, every day, while he arranged for his own peaceful and painless assisted suicide at Dignitas, in Switzerland.
I flip over on the couch, to look at Wayne, hopefully. He is very old, quietly kind and nobody’s fool. He wears monstrous orthopedic shoes, has the eyebrows of Robert Morley and gets in and out of his armchair with hydraulic assistance. Wayne glances at me.
“You cannot take all of these losses,” he says. He laughs out loud. “Buckle up, kid. It only gets worse.” He says it with such good cheer, and such frank surprise that a sensible person like myself would think that moping and moaning was the best approach, that I laugh, too. And the two of us are cackling away, him nearly ossified in his hi-tech armchair, me, curled into a wet ball. I will get about four in-person sessions with Wayne, from early February to early March, talking and sometimes napping on the slightly grotty, very reassuring rug-covered couch and then Covid will come down like the snow in Joyce’s The Dead, just a few flakes at first fluttering into a wide, relentless storm, transforming the world.
***
After Brian’s death, what I thought would be months, years, of private grief and me tottering my small, dark, detached way through the world as a widow, turns out to be Life all over me; grief, like the turtles of Hindu cosmography, is grief all the way down, small on top of big. There were regular tsunamis of rage and loss that left me wiped out, soaking wet but still lodged firmly in the turtle pile.
Brian had come into my life quietly, although he wasn’t a quiet man. We liked each other for years as neighbours, then tumbled into love, then caused a little scandal in our little town, then settled, as even the most scandalous do, into everyday life, and then, just as we were hitting our stride as very settled people and devoted grandparents, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
I gave away most of his clothes, except the undershirts that smelled like him and his father’s grand, louche silk bathrobe, which I wore, while mourning, while watching TV nonstop. I couldn’t finish reading a single page of prose. (Derry Girls and Jane Kenyon. Shetland and Auden.)
I discovered that, having occasionally watched American football with Brian for 15 years and having made a small effort to understand it (having grown up in a family in which even the men were amused and disdainful about sports-fandom), I now hated it and was fiercely glad to talk about what a disgusting, cruel and dangerous game it was. (Brian and his neurologist both thought that football was the cause of his dementia as it has been for so many football players. I knew that Brian would not have given it up; if he’d been offered a time-travelling chance, he would have stayed with football, but as far as I was concerned, football had killed him.) I knew that I was only a few steps short of harassing people in stadiums and even those not in stadiums. And even those not supporting the NFL, even those whose only crimes were living, unconcerned. I began writing an account of our life together and Brian’s death, crying, drinking more tea and watching the cold sea from my office window. I found it impossible to talk about much of anything (except the Scandinavian murder mysteries/international dating shows I’d watched between 3 and 5am).
Brian’s memorial service was on 8 February, in the library across the street from our house. It was the poem he wanted (Szymborska’s Allegro Ma Non Troppo), the minister he wanted (an old friend, who had advised me not to marry Brian and then relented), the music he wanted (Bill Evans). His mother and siblings came and they held a second memorial service on 22 February, near his family home, in Pennsylvania, a few hours from me. It was lovingly centred on the young Brian, the big, long-haired, pot-smoking footballer, before he left home for university. The music was not what he would have chosen and he had largely stopped watching sports, but he would have loved all the remembrances by men in their mid-60s who appreciated him as a tough defensive lineman and a warm-hearted (hot-headed) pal. It was a little bit out-of-body for me. I hardly knew any faces in the crowd and most of them didn’t know me. I was very aware, very suddenly, that I was a blip (albeit a 15-year blip) in his life and I found it rawly painful – all that I missed, all that we wouldn’t get.
Back from the second funeral, hoping that I’d behaved well, I shed my mourning clothes, brushed out my beehive (those funerals pushed me, strongly, into later-Sophia-Loren territory and I wanted very much to be done with the black coats and black jumpsuits and massive black sunglasses, which I should have bought by the gross, and be returned to my own mild denim frowsiness) and – to my surprise – I went shopping. I replaced the dining-room table and chairs Brian and I spent 10 years planning to get rid of. I began to peruse The World of Interiors the way another, better person might be rereading Proust or The Iliad. I ordered two little couches for my living room (in the magazine, this clever idea of back-to-back couches is located in a living room the size of a swimming pool. Mine is not.) and it felt cosy, and I found that I was completely uninterested in anyone else’s opinion of this arrangement. I sit in one couch and read and then saunter into my tiny kitchen and sashay over to the other couch, scone in hand.
All of my appliances break down and I call Susie Chang, my excellent tarot card reader to find out if this is Brian, from the other side, signalling wistfully or perhaps angrily to me. Not at all. Although very popular in certain kinds of movies and TV shows, this signalling is not exciting to Susie. She does not suggest exorcism or sage. I tell her I have called the plumber, the electrician and the dishwasher guy, and she says that sounds like a good idea. I follow up by asking her if Brian is all right; if he has, maybe, turned into a salmon (he liked to fish). She says, in a flat, sensible voice: that’s not a thing that happens.
I tell Wayne about my conversation with Susie Chang, expecting a little well-modulated mockery. He nods and thinks.
“Not a salmon, eh?”
I cry every night and every morning but I am up by sunrise, feeling less sodden. I am not optimistic but I am not particularly worried. I am not in a hurry. I am not urgently moved by my obligations but I want not to worry my children and I want to continue to be a good grandmother. I find the grief, kindness and harshness of others completely unbearable. I talk to Brian’s photographs. I call Brian’s mother every 10 days. I’m not looking forward to anything at all, but I see a few early snowdrops in my yard and I’m so glad I go out into the snow in my slippers to admire them. I drink a lot of tea and I eat toast. I make dinner (more toast and sometimes noodles). I am wading in the grief, still sifting through the last few difficult years, moving slow but not uncomfortable. I am in no hurry to get back to anything that looks like real life. Or even a shoddy simulacrum of life. You can just keep it all, is my view.
***
By early March, my grown children and I are all exchanging texts about Covid. Do we need to get masks? Is it nonsense? Is it just another name for the flu? Will schools stay open? I buy a box of 50 masks online, get dressed, and go to the bank and withdraw a lot of cash. I put it in my nightstand and feel like my own grandmother. My younger daughter calls me on a Friday night, beside herself with worry and work, to say that she and her wife have just been informed that they are no longer allowed to go to their offices and will both be working full-time, and from home and that their three-year-old’s preschool programme is closed for the indefinite future. (The indefinite future will turn out to be nine months.)
By the end of the weekend, my daughter, Sarah, her wife, Jasmine, and little Zora arrive with their small car piled high, escaping from Brooklyn. I am glad to see them, they are glad to see me.
In the mornings, I watch Zora so her mothers can get in at least four-to-five hours of work. We play hide and seek, mostly in my bedroom closet. Zora discovers she can hide in the laundry basket. Zora discovers that Nana can hide in the shower stall. We find these things hilarious. We watch Plim Plim, a Latin American animated series about a child who is a clown, a hero and a magician. His friends are animals, each with one personality trait. We watch bits and pieces of 140 Minutos de Capítulos Nuevos y Completos every morning, and Zora decides that we should always watch it in the armchair in my bedroom, squishing in next to each other. Every morning, she instructs me: Squish! Plim Plim! I find myself humming Los Canciones Infantiles and La Vaca Lola. My shred of Spanish is improved and Zora’s is certainly better than mine. My daughter-in-law offers to cook dinner, every night. I’m gobsmacked and slow to respond because I think I must have misunderstood her. I made dinner for four or five people most nights for 30 years. The idea that Jasmine, not yet 40 and parent of one, would volunteer to cook dinner every night for the four of us astonished me.
“I hope I’m not overstepping,” she said.
I hugged her. “Step away,” I said. “Please.”
Jasmine cooked interesting and healthful meals that were consistently delicious, more than I could have done on all three counts, and dinner was on the table by 6pm. My daughter washed the dishes. I had the pleasure of being a guest at my own table, and it was a pleasure. I also had the pleasure of seeing my daughter’s happy marriage up close. I sat, every day, in their happiness, in their parental fatigue, in Zora’s flow of new words and blossoming of self, in their family-building, in which I was included. The broken pieces of my life turned out to be hospitable to new life, flowers and grass growing in the dead log.
I planned to have a tree for Brian in my back yard. I planned to bury the urn of his ashes next to the roots of the tree, and I planned to have a small brass plaque attached to the boulder near where I wanted the tree. First, I Googled pictures of all kinds of trees, as if I were on were an aborist dating app. Too big, too small, too narrow, too mangy. The linden tree is handsome, bushy and green but its superpower is the scent of its small yellow flowers: pure honey. (Also, makes a nice tea.) I talked to Wayne about the kind of tree that would best represent Brian. I talked about trees passionately and hypothetically all winter, and then, after offering Wayne a number of choices and his refusing to do anything but listen, I bought Brian’s linden tree. The tree I wanted cost twice as much as I’d wanted to spend and would be delivered several seasons later, and I decided that there would be no stopping me. All spring and summer, I sat on the little hill where the tree would be. I found the Rumi poem that would go on the plaque. I ordered the plaque, which was also twice as expensive as I’d hoped and would also be slow in coming, by a few months. I found all the white perennials that could surround the linden tree and on the day the gardeners suddenly arrived, almost a year after his death, to put this huge tree into the yard, the plaque was there, the urn was there and I was happy to be there and the weeping didn’t change that.
Also with me, at a polite distance from me and from the tree, was a man who had come to see me for lunch, having read a novel of mine and recognised my name from when we had been friends 30 years ago, when our children played together. We did have lunch and I cried some more and when he went home, I called Wayne.
“I have all these feelings,” I said. “It’s like Grand Central Terminal in here; loss coming in and going out, happiness coming in and going out. Grief, platform five, all aboard. Changing trains, next stop, for … Change. Mind the gap. I cannot take it,” I said.
Wayne laughed.
• In Love by Amy Bloom is published by Granta Books (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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