My fear of illness and dying ebbs and flows with circumstance, but a baseline awareness and dread of loss is a part of every one of my days. Sometimes, when Eric falls asleep in his chair, I gaze at him, and think about how frantic I would feel seeing him in a coffin. I imagine videos of service dogs scampering frantically around the open caskets of their deceased owners, and can easily envision myself darting and crooning in confusion and grief. The difference is that there would be no videos of the event posted on social media, with enthusiastic offers of adoption, and multiple “crying face” icons indicating “empathy.” There would instead be horror and repulsion, because one is still supposed to hide one’s terror of death and separation. It is almost a civic responsibility. Hence, I have learned to feign calm at airports, kissing Eric chastely, the way “normal” people do, and driving away from him, suppressing thoughts of him encased in a metal capsule and hurtling at 500 miles per hour across treacherous ocean waves, away from me and my imaginary capacity to protect him.
Soon, Eric will leave again for Asia to travel for four more months, and I will drive him through a landscape of wintery and barren trees and huge, concrete franchises to the airport, where I will “pop the trunk” of the car, marveling at my capacity to do so, after having learned to drive at age 32, and help him with his backpack, and then he will be gone and I will be alone in Kansas. People will congratulate me on my generosity in allowing him to travel, and in “being so independent,” and I will resume my single life, which is peculiar indeed but not without its pleasures.
In the mornings, I will brew tea in the small, Polish teapot decorated in floral motifs, and I will read the paper in blissful silence, with no one to interrupt with comments on what they have just read, or discourses about what is wrong with academic administration or anti-vaxxers. In the evenings, I will be profligate, and order in three dishes and an appetizer from the Indian restaurant, and eat them until I am sick of them, and then throw them away, carelessly and with scant guilt, my fingers stained yellow from turmeric. At night, I will fling my arms akimbo, while lying on Eric’s unwashed pillow, enjoying the last hints of his scent while luxuriously allowing myself to stretch out. It is a mixed bag, having him gone, and yet it scares me, because I vastly prefer him to be there. With me. Loud, and messy and beautifully warm. And this state of affairs makes me think about death, and loss, and its inevitability.
I lost a first husband to mental illness. He didn’t die, but became increasingly verbally abusive and erratic, insisting that people were intentionally trying to make his computer malfunction, spending days in bed when he wasn’t scrubbing the kitchen floor with a toothbrush, and sometimes threatening to kill himself. After I left him, I was broken, but relieved. Often, I sat in silence in my soulless rented townhouse, watching the light play across the wall. What is odd, is that though I was in grief, I still enjoyed being alive, enjoyed my deep armchair, novels and my dogs. The loneliness was profound but so too was an awareness of details. I would walk the dogs in the huge, rustling prairie grasses, and be filled with wonder at the infinite range of grey hues on winter bark, how the veins in a dry leaf look like aging hands , how beautiful patches of green grass look emerging from melting snow. It is as if in the loss of a beloved human being all distractions to life’s essential meaning and grandeur are cleared away, allowing us to experience awe. Eric’s decision to travel, and my decision not to travel comes from the experience of mystery that is the positive facet to fear of death.
Eric saw his father die, diminishing for two years before the common narrative of pneumonia, the ICU and the call to hospice commenced. Many of us in Middle Age are experiencing this story with our parents, and the shock of the final loss, the moment when the spirit actually leaves the body and the discarded carcass of a parent confronts, shatters all illusions of immortality. And so, we are left with the question of how best to use these last shining seconds on planet earth.
Last night, Eric and I drove into Kansas City and ate dinner at an expensive and extraordinary restaurant with friends. The restaurant was dark and shiny, with lush, deep booths and a cacophony of noise. In the bathroom, I encountered two drunken women, with blond manes of colored hair streaked with highlights, open-back tops and spiky heels. They were gossiping together, their heavily outlined eyes squinting in malicious delight over the savory tidbits of human interest. At the table, focaccia was served, its pillowy center soft and white, its crust ornamented with herbs. A couple sat across from us, and when they stood to leave I saw that the woman was wearing a hot pink coat and thigh-high boots. I imaged the outfit displayed in the showroom of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with a placard next to it that read that in our lost culture, when women wanted sex, they wore this outfit to dinner. I won’t forget her. Nor, will I forget sitting next to a broad-shouldered Belgian man with a rich, chestnut-brown moustache on a flight to Sweden, who told me he was a Communist and then we slept, our arms pressed against each other in the small space companionably. Watching human beings being human has always been one of my life’s great fascinations, though I do not know what to do with what I record, other than to preserve it in the ephemeral and fragile space of my mind. And Eric is doing the same on his travels, marveling at the experience of a long train voyage in Central Asia, the woman who flirted with him, the Chai sold by vendors in empty Vodka bottles.
There is no answer to what gives life meaning, as the answer is as varied and inconclusive as the manifold ways we chose to live, but I do know that when the distractions clear, and I can notice each detail—the reflection in my dessert spoon last night, the one, thick hair that sprouts from the mole on my dog’s chin, the way a tiny current of anger runs through a person’s voice when they speak of something supposedly happy—these moments add up to something that feels like beauty. And because Eric will leave again soon, I am back to being observant, and it is the gift of imminent separation.
I do not really believe in a God of intention but I do believe that there are brilliant realms beyond our capacity to comprehend, encased as we are, in meat. And those sacred and mysterious places are filled with compassion. There is an order there that scatters here, and breaks into a million beautiful shards, and we gather as many as we can, before we return.