Young Widower (11 page)

Every few weeks I showed up at my brother’s apartment and spent the weekend at the park, going to the sandwich shop with my nephews, watching the Cubs on
WGN
. Some nights he and my sister-in-law would go out, and I would stay in and not do much; or my brother and I would go to a nearby bar, and my sister-in-law would watch the kids; or my brother would be traveling for work and my sister-in-law had night classes, so I watched television with the babysitter. In our old city, I visited old friends. It was a two-mile bus ride from my brother’s neighborhood to the neighborhood where Katie and I had lived for three years. I watched a man in a blue jumpsuit, bobbing his chin under headphones, polish off a five-pound bag of pretzel
M
&
M
’s between the eight stops.

It was beautiful to leave the home in Indiana where I lived with Katie’s brother and his family every few weeks. I understood that, however life continued in one place, it continued also in another. Where did this neutral ground end? I arrived in Chicago on a Thursday and was taken in, fed, sheltered, and given a quiet place to read, sleep, and grieve. I left the following Monday, as everyone set off on their week’s routines, and most of the time I felt refreshed and restored, emergent from a very specific withdrawal. Then I would arrive back in Indiana to a place where I was again taken in, fed, sheltered, and given still more solitude and space.

At the North Street underpass for
I
-94, I could take the onramp east toward Indiana or west toward Katie’s hometown. The highway continued in both directions, but I couldn’t see where I would ever really get clear. Iowa or Ohio. The Rockies or the Appalachians. Two oceans, then two continents where Katie and I had lived for a time, and finally the central point toward which everything seemed to converge—Istanbul maybe, where we had spent my
twenty-ninth birthday together, or St. Petersburg, where we had always meant to travel—before the journeys turned in opposite directions.

Time and again, with the same few people, I told the same few stories. Themes emerged, then repeated: failure, good intentions, absence, limitation. I defended myself from certain accusations. I anticipated, even preempted criticisms. Always, in this defense, I was desperate in my failure. I had done all I could to save Katie. Night after night, I wrote down in a journal the story of her death without looking at the previous entries, then crosschecked them across different days. I needed to audit the public version of my story against the private, the told story against the true one. But it was the secondary narrative of my survival that people were most interested to hear. How was I getting better? How did I live now?

Details came forward with more than a little polish. Katie’s sense of charity, her big-heartedness toward family, her willingness to mentor and advise.
Saint Katie
, as Beth joked we might remember her. We knew better. It was easier to imagine this version of Katie—the martyr, the cipher—just as it is was convenient to bring forward myself, and the things I wanted after her death, now, as a kind of contrast.
Charitable John
.
John the Beneficent
.
Saint Johnny
.

My confessions prompted exchanges. Sometimes, the sharing became reciprocal. People said things about themselves and how they made sense of the world after their own tragedies: pills, doctors, deaths, secrets. What was the limit of such empathy? I had never felt so close to so many people. I learned and shared things I never expected to know. The cost of such honesty and transgression seemed, at best, uncertain. It was one thing to comfort a grieving widower with secret knowledge, believing all the while that the listener was pathetic and feeble. It was another to crash in the
boundaries that had shaped years of interaction, familial and otherwise. It was possible that we might grow closer, now, and more honest as a result. But perhaps later, we would need new boundaries and discretions.

I met my friend Stephanie at a bar in Kankakee
,
Illinois, three weeks after I moved to Indiana. She was in town for a conference the next day, so we met at her hotel, then spent all afternoon at a local brewpub overlooking the river, just past the small downtown. Until that morning I was not entirely sure I would make the two-hour drive. It was just close enough to seem a great distance to travel and return in a single night. But what else did I really have to do? I printed directions, plugged in my music, and set off.

We drank beer all afternoon. We ate chicken wings and garlic fries. We walked down to the river and sat on stone benches, counting sailboats and talking about Katie. I said I was scared I had not yet felt the worst of it. Wasn’t more fear always just below the surface; wouldn’t it come forward as the immediate grief rites ended, and the long slog of whatever happened next began? It was easy and calming to talk it all out; even when I turned the conversation to Stephanie’s wife and family, she brushed off the pleasantry and turned it right back to me. I could do anything, she kept telling me. I had a brief window when no one would hold me accountable, when I would be given a very, very long piece of the rope.

Stephanie’s stepsister had been widowed a few years earlier, also violently and suddenly, and had not taken care of herself after the loss. A quick and positive resilience to grief and mourning after her husband’s death was sustained, increasingly, with narcotics, speed, poor decisions, distraction, recklessness. Everyone agreed that in the beginning she was so brave. Then she moved near the ocean, took up with another man, and they blew through the insurance money in weeks. When she finally broke, it was spectacular
and final. She worked small jobs now and did not take on too much. She had children with two other men and abandoned both of them to her parents. She was in some ways her former self, but mostly she was an empty space, a cautionary tale about how not to grieve, a rock in a river around which the world, her family, and friends navigated, continuing their lives with great care.

Stephanie spoke in the reasonable, authoritative tones of a witness. I trusted her, and so I believed it was important to trust the precedent. Stephanie wanted to take care of me, but she also understood the limits of empathy. The world, she said, was presenting me with two very clear and unfortunate options. Withstand, and so move forward with some aspect of a new life unrelated to Katie. Or, retreat into my former life, and sacrifice the rest of it to Katie’s death. Whichever I picked, I would not easily walk it back in the other direction.

We sat a while longer, talking about our lives in Miami those three years, Saint Katie, the deep well of grief that seemed only to rise and crest when I was angry about something else. And then it was time to head back to the hotel and say goodbye. The gas station just off the highway had a chintzy display of overpriced, Christian-themed trucker wear: t-shirts and handkerchiefs, vests and mud flaps and mirror guards. Stephanie picked a pink corduroy ball cap with rhinestones ornamenting the phrase,
Jesus, Take the Wheel!
Because Jesus can’t drive, she said, laughing. She insisted I wear it on my drive back to Indiana.

When she was alive, Katie and I drove everywhere together. Always, we started in one place and arrived, quickly and efficiently, in the next. Now I wondered: how long could I stay in a car, on the highway, before I really needed to arrive anywhere?

I
-65 was one of seven highways that ran spokelike from Indianapolis out across the state. I could return to the city, circle it, and go anywhere else. Why then was I always choosing Chicago, rest
ing a while then leaving, bouncing quickly between two families like a nervous pinball? I told myself I was looking for Katie, but I knew that wasn’t true. She was gone now, and life continued everywhere without her. I said I was retracing a memory and making sense of a loss. But I had at best a cursory knowledge of our few days together. I had not known Katie would die. I recorded the particulars of the world around me now in painstaking detail, but they did not seem to add up to an especially compelling sequence or sense of order. It was all marked time, meant to fill this gap between when I was broken and whenever I emerged, finally, healed.

Jesus, Take the Wheel!
I worked the brim until it gave at the edges. I pulled it down low across my eyes. Life was so slow now. I had spent all day with Stephanie, and it was only six o’clock. I had been back in the United States a little more than a month, and it was only the end of July. I lived a year in Indianapolis. Before I left, I would turn thirty-one. Everything I said that first summer seemed to express its half-life in minutes, seconds. Numbness, irritation, anger, shock: these feelings were to the listener mere symptoms of a deep and abiding grief I could never really understand, which would one day pass. I seemed in terrible shape, and it meant that I had been through something awful but also that I had really, truly loved Katie. They knew it. Or I merely convinced them of something they wanted to believe. In the end what did it really matter?

I had forgotten the emptiness inside of cars on long drives, the way loud music can fill them and bounce off the glass, the easy and quick way a wheel slides a car across lanes. Alone, I could play the same songs again and again; singing at the top of my lungs, crying, screaming, and making still no explanation for the intervening silences. To drive, then, to be in a car pointed in a direction, gave me the thing I missed most in life: intention. This was my Fortress of Solitude, exactly between two places, neither arriving nor depart
ing. And yet, I drove fast. I tried to keep to the schedule I had given Katie’s brother before I left that morning. How pathetic and uncertain I must have looked, a large man in a tiny car, racing down the highway, the same few Bruce Springsteen songs always shaking the frame. How small I felt. It didn’t really matter when I arrived back at the house. No one was waiting for me at a particular hour. No one was following close behind or eagerly tracking my progress. At whichever moment I finally pulled up the drive, Ed’s family would already be asleep or long since gone off to bed.

The Circle Game

The goal was to get better. The method was talk therapy. The premise was that it was not my fault that Katie had died, so I needed to find a better explanation for both the tragedy and the interruption of my life.

We used this word constantly: process. Therapy was a process. Survival and witness were processes. Marriage and family were a single process teased elaborately into infinite, abstract, and repeating parts. It seemed that an entire life had conspired to make me garrulous and uncertain at precisely the moment I needed to talk. I could explain and rationalize, but I did not really understand. How had Katie and I ended up on that particular mountaintop, at that time of year, in that part of the world? Why the Buscegi Moun
tains of Romania and not, say, the Adirondacks or Rockies? The Himalaya? Why didn’t we take the train further west and north toward Hungary or Iasi, to a festival or metropolis rather than the blank natural landscape of central Romania?

The scope of other questions seemed less certain after Katie’s death. What part of me resented finding Katie that night on the mountain? Which part followed her blindly all day and hoped for the best? How far in any direction should I pursue an argument for or against myself, before speculation, rather than sense, became the guiding ethos? What did it mean to speak honestly and directly about Katie to a therapist? To Katie’s family? How much would I need to describe to get better? Which parts did I want to leave out?

The therapist I met with in Indiana wore turquoise jewelry and smiled when she was not talking. She had a way of looking both at and through me, and it did not feel unpracticed. She counseled only trauma victims, and her office resembled an outsized children’s playroom: board games and rag dolls, a desk in one corner, two overstuffed chairs, and a butterscotch dish between them on a Plexiglas table. She had been doing this for twenty-six years, she explained, and people from every walk of life had come through her door. Firemen, police officers, soldiers, teachers, business executives, families, and college dropouts. The tone of our conversations was friendly and reassuring but also forthright. The process would only work, she explained, if I followed it carefully and diligently, two and three times a week at first. We would name the problem, face it, make a context for it, and eventually I would learn to live with it. Like everyone else.

If there seemed some predetermination in her method, then it also excluded more extreme and prescriptive methods. There would be no antidepressants and mood stabilizers. I would not drink or smoke. I would get a job—any job—quickly, and I would not miss work to grieve. I would not seek out a support group or attend
group therapy; my situation was exceptional, the therapist explained, and any group situation would only magnify the singular experience of Katie’s death and lead to resentment. I would sleep, every night. We would keep an appointment every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m. I would arrive ten minutes early and pay her fee in full before I walked out the door on the hour.

Talking felt good. I left our sessions feeling relieved of a burden I could not yet name, and even as the burden returned, between sessions, I was certain I could keep ahead of it. In therapy I tried to share everything, even overshare. I believed no piece was so exceptional I should exclude it from the consideration of Katie’s death. Whatever I said or thought to say was probably connected. It was all a rich tapestry, though this last part was my own ironic commentary, a tone that was not especially clarifying. I found more straightforward tones.

My first week in Indiana, I tried two other therapists. The first ran a practice in the basement of a church; our meeting was brief. The second had just opened a new, expanded practice, to complement the more traditional work she had done previously with clients. She was a life coach who, she explained, healed the brains of trauma victims with lasers. This involved shining a pen light at the wall, then into my eyes, until we located and rewired the physical part of my brain that stored trauma. After only a few sessions, she told me, I would begin to notice definite results. Fewer night terrors, waking dreams, and flashbacks. A greater feeling of peace and serenity.

I had read about the practice online. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing showed great promise for victims and survivors of trauma, especially soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Insurance companies were beginning to cover it and sometimes recommend it in lieu of talk therapy. There was much research to indicate that, in fact, the brain did store traumas in
places the pen light reached; the brain could be healed without the anecdotal complications of storytelling.

At our only session the therapist dimmed the lights and flashed the red dot on the wall. She touched my knee and told me to relax. Everything would be fine. If I wanted her to stop at any time, I should just say so.

As she started the countdown and initiated the process, I could not stop staring at the business card holder on her desk. It glowed in the dark. I thought,
How can someone with a glow-in-the-dark business card holder heal me?
I felt bad for her, and I started to worry about her hand on my knee, which is to say now I felt superior and judgmental, even as I then pretended to relive the experience of Katie’s death each time she flashed the light into my eyes.

Why was it so hard to submit to her method? Why did I adapt it into some inferior pantomime? It seemed a matter of accountability. I wanted feeling in a therapist, but also detachment. I wanted someone who did not seem to worry whether I got better, who facilitated my own self-cure rather than administered her own; a therapist who might abandon me at any moment because, really, I was doing this on my own, and I should be made to fail if I was not sincere in the effort. In this way I felt very Catholic and midwestern. Perhaps the goal of therapy was not to get better at all, but rather to sustain one part of the conversation, so that it continued through and after Katie’s death. And yet, if that was the case, then Katie’s death was the only occasion to continue the conversation.

Which was the real interruption I sought to clarify with a therapist: loving and knowing Katie or living after her death? In the beginning I could not distinguish between the two. Mine was only one side of a conversation about tics and habits, familial awkwardness, the shared generational tensions into which everyone escaped or submitted through marriage. Here I was now, after my marriage to Katie, and the story still had so many beginnings and no end.

Sometimes, in therapy, it seemed as though I was speaking only in abstractions. In my Marriage, Independence accommodated Need very well and was rewarded with Companionship and sometimes even Approval. I was once the Husband, and now I was the Widower. In fact I was the Young Widower.

Were these categories helpful? I made a claim to Katie based on memory. After her death, that claim seemed as hypothetical as anyone’s. The high school boyfriend who checked himself into the hospital after they broke up. The girl who spread Vaseline across her windshield and bumpers, then kept the economy-sized jar out on her dresser until Katie came by a few days later to visit. The coworkers, friends, family members, and strangers who paid their respects at her wake and funeral and who continued to be in touch in the weeks and months that followed. They all loved Katie, I believed, even as she had chosen me. Nothing that followed could change the fact of our marriage; our marriage, now, that was ended.

Were these connections and associations real? Could I really follow one perspective so clearly that it might interconnect everything and everyone to Katie’s death?

Katie’s death is the Large Hadron Collider
, I told the therapist.
It reveals in a fraction of a fraction of a second the nature of the universe, ourselves, the world around us. What happens in an instant to create or destroy everything else
.

The therapist said,
Let’s talk about the pills. Do you need one every night? Could you try every other night for a week and see how you sleep?

I thought,
What would be the point of lying to my therapist?

What I meant to say was I had no intention of letting go either the ritual or its significance. If I took the pill, then I was sick. If I was sick, then I was still traumatized. If I was still traumatized, then I still missed Katie. If I still missed Katie, then I still grieved. If I was still grieving, then I needed therapy. If I needed therapy, then I should not yet leave Indiana, my nieces, my small room in the
back of the house, next to the truck driven by the brother-in-law with whom I talked less and less.

Was I really still grieving? Did I want to leave Indiana?

I said,
I’ll give it a shot
.

Many friendships complemented the steady slog of grief. Some did not. Those conversations with friends that began with consolation, privation, and the absence of sense sometimes found no transition to the stuff of regular living. They began instead to repeat themselves and gradually became silent. I missed some of those friendships very much. I told myself,
They are foul-weather friendships
. They are good only in bad times.

All lives existed now on some continuum of self-sympathetic comparison, beyond any coincidence of fact and imagination. Wasn’t this the terrible secret of grief, the hedge against which so much talking, therapy, and time could find no certainty to obscure? I could survive anything. I could walk away from anything. There was no underlying structure, no interconnection, no resolution so permanent toward which we all had to work collectively. There was, in fact, no empathy for Katie’s death, her absence in my life, or the tragedy of witnessing it. There was only sympathy and, after a short while, omission and silence. Our choosing or not choosing to be together.

My conversations with the therapist came to concern equally Katie’s death, our marriage, my personal history, and my sense of a future. I could especially see the lens widening in how we talked about the present. It made a neat loop we overlaid onto the past until the connections became particular and vivid. We paused our sessions less frequently so that I might cry. We talked frankly about the rest of my life and how it continued, sometimes unremarkably, regardless of my sense of intention.

Grief was a perfect wheel. I turned it, again and again, with the hope of finding either its beginning or its end. I knew better. Ther
apy offered no permanent consolations after Katie’s death. Together, the therapist and I could not animate or reclaim Katie, and if I only remembered her selfishly, bringing forward only our best selves, then I risked losing her entirely. And yet, I
felt
better to know that grief was itself both end and beginning. I observed it closely and learned to make testament to it. I tried to resist the perfection of Heracles, who sacrificed all he loved to become immortal. I tried to embrace, often with mixed success, but perhaps some sense of optimism, what the poet Yvor Winters made Heracles to say well after the fact:
This was my grief, that out of grief I grew
.

The advantage of therapy was that it was good for people who liked to talk about themselves. I excelled at therapy.

I found therapy useful for articulating ambiguities and narratives, for revisiting personal challenges. I had no idea whether I was a good person; if I was doing enough to honor Katie’s memory; how to live with Katie’s death; what it meant that the family I lived with was changing; whether that was somehow my fault; whether I had wronged my parents by not encouraging them more; if I was a lousy widower, son, brother-in-law, and friend. I thought we might sort some of it out. Which is to say, I worried about everything, as I had worried before Katie’s death.

Ed came home from a consultation with my therapist and said,
Maybe I need to see a different therapist
.

More and more, we seemed settled into exclusive forms of grief. In therapy I felt ambitious. I wanted to understand more; to make better connections between my life before, during, and after Katie’s death. There was a deep flaw in this ambition, and it took years to realize it, but the process kept me active and purposeful in the moment, and I appreciated, however willed, the sense of continuity.

I started a memorial foundation: paperwork, fees, applications, phone calls. Everyone in Katie’s family and my family joined the board. We traveled together to Katie’s graduate alma mater and
awarded our first scholarship. I made a logo and a website, wrote by-laws and articles of incorporation. The government sent an official letter of designation. Then the foundation’s promising start became something to argue over. Did Katie’s father have more influence in the organization than Judy? Could we take construction crews to Mexico and build houses? Katie had once driven past a children’s camp in central Illinois on whose board a cousin sat; couldn’t we give them several thousand dollars to make renovations in her honor? A sense of hierarchy clouded our interactions. Who should be making these decisions, Katie’s widower or Katie’s family? We protected ourselves with distance, until what followed became a series of no-win scenarios. Was it really “Katie” to ask people for money, and should we risk going belly up? Could we hold the fun run in her hometown, and was it “Katie” to solicit local sponsorships? Wasn’t it awkward to keep inviting family members to attend our events, when we knew they might not want to come? Was it “Katie” to take them off the list and so risk alienating them?

I thought,
In-laws are always outlaws
.

I thought,
A loving widower does not stop talking to the family of his dead wife
.

I ran across one strip mall, then the next, toward the regional branch of a national bank. I had no cash in my wallet to pay the cost of therapy, and my session would begin in minutes. I thought,
If I do not pay the therapist, then she will not see me; if I miss one session, then she might not schedule me for another one; if I miss therapy, I will regress; I will lose my progress; I will collapse
. This was my fear: disrupting the process. I had faith in it. I ran across the strip mall so that I might keep my part in it. Before most sessions I made a list of things to talk about it, but today, because I had no cash and I was running late, I would have to improvise the list. Would the therapist say I was not fully committed to the process? Would she
say I seemed reluctant to get better? The
ATM
overhung the side of the bank building. I punched the numbers on the screen and waited. I made a fist with my hand so that it would not shake. I ran back across the parking lot, toward the office, and when I could not run, I walked. I stepped carefully between cars and tried to catch my breath. I ran again. We would start the session late, I thought, if I arrived there at all. Even that afternoon I would not describe the experience of Katie’s death in terms of grief and witness. I would not think to say, until much later, that as I ran across the parking lots, I seemed to enact again the circumstances of Katie’s death. Instead, I would wonder at my failure to generate a list and try to hide my shame. I would sweat and cough and try very hard to improvise a list of things we might talk about at the session.