Young Widower (2 page)

Much of Katie’s life went missing from what I wrote on the blog and said to other people. Friends, family histories, secrets, fights: I did not actively exclude them, but I did not invite them into conversations, either. A polite consensus simplified certain silences. I told myself that what I omitted protected a fragile recovery; that I was not exploiting Katie’s death, but rather being noble in the face of adversity; that I was distinguishing the occasion of my sorrow from its origin. The silences, I believed, somehow protected other people from
what they should never have to know
. But that was nonsense. To begin the story in Indiana rather than Romania meant I wasn’t just putting the cart before the horse; I was insisting that, really, I had been pushing the cart all along.

We had gone with our friend Sara to Busteni, a few hours north of Bucharest, to celebrate my thirtieth birthday. Our guidebook said there were hostels on the ridge with rooms to let. At the trailhead we met a Romanian on holiday and two Israelis celebrating their honeymoon. We hiked together all day in clear weather: trails, waterfalls, rockslides, switchbacks, lakes. We arrived at the first hostel about an hour before sunset. There were no vacancies, but the kitchen was still open. We ate a dinner of pork soup, pickled vegetables, stale bread, and cold beer. Katie and I took a picture by a kilometer marker showing the highest point of the peak. Then we set out in two groups—me and the Israelis at the front; Katie, Sara, and the Romanian following—to walk the mile or so to the next hostel.

Just after dusk, at a long turn in the path, we noticed that Katie’s group had fallen behind. The Israelis went ahead, while I waited at a stream. Glacial ice was melting on the ridge, and there was enough water to make crossing in the dark tricky. When Katie’s group didn’t come, I hiked back up the trail to find them. It was darker now. I followed one trail, but it led in the wrong direction. I doubled back toward the first hostel, whose light I could see in the distance. Near
the kilometer marker, I found pages from our guidebook strewn on the ground, next to Katie’s backpack and shoes. I yelled her name. I tried to walk in circles, remembering an old Boy Scout trick about not getting lost. From about twenty yards off the trail Katie called back.
Don’t come closer
.
Find a gun
.
Get back quickly
.

The trail was rocky and hard to follow at night. I kept losing my footing. I fell. I got up. The second hostel also had a porch light. A group of tourists standing under it were waving at me. The Romanian, they explained, had escaped the bear and run ahead of me to the hostel. Now they were watching for other survivors. Sara was running down the trail, too. She was just behind me. Katie was alone on the ridge.

Inside the hostel the owner refused to give me his rifle. With so many witnesses, he kept insisting, he would be fined for discharging a gun without a state permit. His business would be ruined. I tried to buy the rifle with American dollars. I offered to trade my passport for it. Instead he called for a hunting patrol from a nearby village.

I stumbled back to the trail. Three men staying at the hostel followed at a distance. It was hard to find the kilometer marker again. When we saw the bear and heard Katie’s cries, the three men ran. I stood now ten, maybe fifteen yards from Katie, shining my flashlight across the ridge. I had a better view of the bear: large, brown, straddled over Katie, dipping its head back and forth across her torso, with white fur on its front paws and muzzle.

I sat up all night with Katie’s body. Three doctors from nearby cities arrived to certify her death. They defaced Katie’s body with various crude tests—eyelid check, stethoscope,
CPR
, reflexes—that only confirmed the obvious. I remember that as each took turns compressing her chest, I could hear ribs crack. I wondered how the eventual autopsy would distinguish this trauma from the bear attack. Probably, it wouldn’t.

I understood immediately that there would be a funeral, an obituary, explanations, maybe at some point accusations, clarifications, and misunderstandings. I don’t know why I was thinking about it. I imagined it: standing in the first few pews of the church in Illinois with the faux-gothic exterior and uncomfortable wood benches. The spread of food in the basement after the service. In a diner across the street, people who grieved for Katie might ask questions, then decide to blame me, hate me, or feel genuinely sorry for me. I was a witness now and a young widower. I did not know any witnesses of bear attacks or young widowers. Someone thought to cover Katie’s body, and as the night went on, I started to fear it. Whose body was under the tarp? Katie’s body was under the tarp.

In Indiana my taste in television evolved. I became suspicious of representations of suffering, especially gratuitous violence. What was the point of imagining bloodlust and apocalypse, if not to enjoy it? I preferred alternative logics—superheroes, universes, Texas—and comedies. They rejected finality. I found comfort in their repetitions. What did it matter that I was real and the people I watched were not? I felt present by proxy in constant variations on redemption: charity, sublimation, self-actualization. Even the most iconoclastic and antinarrative shows—
Seinfeld
,
The Larry Sanders Show
,
Lost
,
The Sopranos
—eventually grounded relationships in longevity, delivered moral comeuppances, and established continuities where none seemed to exist. Successful series—
X-Files
,
Battlestar Galactica
—generated spinoffs. Writers pursued in new series the subject matter, stylistic flourishes, and ideas that had interested them in previous ones. A habit of continuation had the ironic effect of making it
feel
like my favorite shows never really went off the air, when in fact it was the stories themselves that repeated and therefore resisted closure.

Sometimes, after I returned a disc or checked out a new one, I stopped in at the chain bookstore across the street. I poked through
tall displays of bestsellers and new releases, then the poetry and magazine racks, and finally, inevitably, the self-help aisle. It seemed to be the largest section in the store.
Personal Growth—Grief
targeted a demographic three, four, and five decades older than my own. Wistful elders looked out plaintively from dust jackets; they seemed to reach out to each other, around me, across titles and spines. Sometimes just a hand filled the cover, or a nature scene, a gravesite, a blank white page marked with the singular, patronizing jargon of consolation.
Coping
.
Grieving
.
Making Sense
. I tried to imagine the subsection where I would find some particular instruction after Katie’s death:

I bought books and did my best to read them. It was reassuring, even comforting, to see their titles stacked neatly on my bedside table each night. I might glean, without intention, some cumulative wisdom. With enough time I could pursue recovery. For now my room was filled with dubious comforts: sleeping pills, anxiety pills, allergy pills, earplugs, antacids, a humidifier, a white noise machine.

Ed, ten years Katie’s senior, was nearly her physical twin: slender framed, square jawed, dark features and those same light blue eyes. Friends and neighbors remarked on the resemblance constantly, though at first I didn’t see it. Ed didn’t
really
look like Katie to me, but he told many of the same family stories. He smiled, paused extra beats for jokes, and shuffled across rooms with Katie’s easy grace. Sometimes, when he did not act like Katie—his voice inflecting in slow turns between words, his sense of humor less sharp—I was surprised to feel disappointment at the divergence.

Those first weeks in Indiana, Ed and I went everywhere together, out for walks, to movies, to the city park near his house. We drove his truck to new neighborhoods to do advance work for his tuck-pointing business. Everywhere, chimneys stood in disrepair, magnificent houses with satellite dishes and two or three exposed joints worn through. The recession was a boom time for home repairs: people did what they could to stem the loss of their home’s value. On the roofs, Ed explained, he could get a better sense of the damage. We wrote down addresses, so that Ed could return the next morning, or week, to pitch an estimate.

At night we sat on the back porch smoking clove cigarettes, Katie’s favorite. The sugared filter was sweet on my lips, the nicotine strong and heavy in my lungs. My head seemed to lift a little from my shoulders, and it felt good to say everything I could think to say, to talk about Katie and not hold anything back. I saw no reason to know things about Katie and not share them with the people who had loved her.

The late-summer Indiana heat relented a little earlier each night. In the dark I could see less and less of Ed, but I heard his voice. Really, we both knew something about Katie that the other person did not. We traded these stories like two kinds of currency: Katie’s childhood for her adult life and ambitions. The gap between us was something to narrow. Already close, we made a new bond of getting to know Katie better through each other’s eyes: the little sister with whom Ed grew up and the wife who had been my best friend.

There was another side to this proximity. Each time we talked, I stemmed the low-level, persistent guilt for how much I still loved Katie’s family and for how my enjoyment of that connection seemed only to intensify in the days and weeks after her death. We grieved together. We grew closer. If the guilt was tangible, real, and unavoidable, then so too was the affection. I worried what would happen if I ever became, in their eyes, unsympathetic.

I had wanted to survive Katie’s death in Romania; now, in Indiana, something beyond grief insisted still on survival, as though I were courting some second life, free of the obligations and structures of the first. It might never be so certain and stable, or insulated and naïve, but it would be entirely my own. Anything might happen next. I was grieving but healthy. I had been married before and liked it. A certain undeniable hopefulness twinned with the sense of debt, proportionally, as though each should only magnify the other.

Perhaps Katie’s death protected me now and made me a kind of talisman to the people I loved. The sheer improbability of the circumstances of her death could make all of us exempt, I thought, by association, from such future calamity. More and more, it seemed, I could hardly remember that night myself. I had gone up one side of the mountain with Katie. I had come down the other side with her body.

After fights, or to get a rise out of me, Katie was fond of singing the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” I understood that she meant to explain something about her feelings and also to draw a contrast between the trauma in her life and the absence of trauma in my own. In high school she had rolled a conversion van on a rural highway and walked away with minor injuries. After her parents divorced, she had lived with her grandfather during the end of his life. One brother had died suddenly, while we were in the Peace Corps, from complications following a common illness. Katie’s sister had lost a daughter in childbirth. Loss was, if not an entirely common experience, then something to anticipate and expect. Katie found little to admire in its denial.

On my desk in Indiana, I arranged a few objects. A roll of candies that Katie liked. A framed photo of us on the ridge. Her St. Christopher medal. At the strip mall one day I purchased a large
pumpkin-spice candle. The next time I sat down to write, I arranged the objects into a new order. I lit the candle and moved our photo off to the side. I didn’t like that emphasis. So I switched them. I taped loose photographs on the wall. The metal on a tulip engraving that Katie had given me for a birthday present began to peel. I stacked some pocket texts on top of it. I took rocks from the garden to prop everything in place. Before her last trip to the Republic of Georgia, Katie had left a miniature plush Paddington on my pillow. I turned him so that the tag (
Please look after this bear
) faced toward me. Over time I added to the arrangement. I took to tending it a little each time I sat down to write. A map of Bucharest. Some letters and a bandanna. Individually they were bric-a-brac and hodge-podge. Together they were a place made sacred by association. A shrine.

Katie is not the intellectual experience of a grieving mind
. I wrote this over and over in my journal, but it was not quite right.

I had no shrine in my home until I built one. For a while I added to it.

I will not rebuild the shrine. It was a temporary and important place for acknowledgment. I have other places now more permanently sacred to me: Indiana, Katie’s hometown, the nature preserve where we spread her ashes. One I can begin to approach now, if only on the page and in memory: a mountain ridge in Eastern Europe. I hope to never visit it again. I wrote most mornings in Indiana my confusion, then my guilt, Katie’s work and life, the story of our marriage, and finally my memory of that day. The shrine grew with what I added to it. And it is lost forever.

There Are No Words

At the end of a long workday, Katie walks barefoot the mile or so from our apartment building near Revolution Square to the bar-basement Teatrul Act in Bucharest’s city center. Though I am not there to see it, a friend says years later in a letter that Katie is smiling: looking for me.
As though
, the friend writes,
she was on an adventure
.

In fact, Katie has locked herself out of our apartment, while chasing the cat. And because I do not write down how she told it to me later that night, I can only imagine she must have paused a moment outside our door, then thought it was a beautiful spring day to walk anywhere; to stretch her legs a bit even on the hot pavement and busy streets would be a nice change of pace. She arrives at the the
ater, watches me rehearse my lines, and perhaps even laughs a little, proud; Katie likes watching me when I don’t know she’s there. In a play about America I am a cartoon tyrant, a corrupt state governor manufacturing a mild virus for profit. The English-language comedy runs three nights.
Epidemic of Fear: The Influenzical!

Always, whenever Katie walks into a room, I think I can’t miss it—a Christmas tree on fire, a loyal and friendly dog—but that afternoon, even in my imagination, she is gone before I see her, finding our keys in my bag and leaving a note I do not keep. We will see each other later. She pauses a moment to make small talk with the friend whose letter becomes my only occasion to make this witness. In that last year of her life, on everyone she meets, Katie makes such an impression. The memorial service in the basilica is packed with friends, students, colleagues, and strangers.

It’s not just that Katie
was strong and lovely
, the friend writes,
not just her dark hair and blue eyes, her charming and easygoing nature;
all of her
was just
so
beautiful
.

Even in memory—in my imagination—can’t I stop the moment long enough to turn and watch her leave? Didn’t I always admire the sadness of her absence and the occasion of my temporary solitude? Over and over I turn it in my mind. My beautiful wife. My Katie. What the poet calls the elusive particular against
the luminous clarity of a general idea
. Katie walking across the city to find me, without her shoes. How I could be useful and loved by her in that moment. However minor, that part of her life continued without my help.

Six months after we leave the Peace Corps and move to Chicago, Katie and I drive north and west from the city to the Theater at Marriot Resort Hotels in Lincolnshire, Illinois, to spend the weekend with her family.

I am wearing a light blue oxford shirt with gray wool slacks, thin dress socks, and freshly polished penny loafers. The shirt and pants
have been tailored by a man named Iqval, in his small shop in the city in Bangladesh where I have worked and lived for the previous two years. Katie knows the shop. She likes Iqval. Whenever she visited my town, we would sometimes stop there on the way from the bus stand, to buy him tea and talk about his favorite American sport, professional wrestling.

That first winter back in the United States, Katie and I get in the habit of running three or four miles most nights along the paths that face Lake Michigan. Katie is a natural athlete. I notice it especially when we run, her long and easy jogging stride, her slender runner’s ankles. She almost always legs out the last stretch at a faster pace. I can’t help admiring from a distance Katie’s slight shoulders, her high cheekbones, and the pale blue eyes that, watering against the cold, flush with our semirace, her clear victory, looking back at me. Waiting. In such moments Katie exudes vulnerable and immodest strength, well in excess of her cautious talent for being naturally good at many things; the mix of strength and humility that ironically makes her, for so many people, essentially, undeniably “Katie.”

Sometimes, Katie shuffles to a stop during our runs. Her ankle, which has never quite healed after a fantastic sprain, swells and clicks at the slightest instability. She has yet to see the doctor who will diagnose a permanent structural flaw in the ankle, one that requires periodic anti-inflammatories and rotating braces to keep the joint from moving too far outside its natural range of motion. With time these interventions only mitigate the severity of the injuries that come, on hikes and runs, even long walks, more and more frequently.

We arrive at the Lincolnshire a few hours ahead of the rest of her family. I am all dressed up for no good reason. I remember worrying that the mud on the shoe leather might ruin its finish, that I shouldn’t sit too long if I want everything to look freshly pressed. I stand in the pool deck, bouncing on the balls of my feet. Eventu
ally, we check into our room and unpack our bags. We put on our running clothes and set out into the late-winter cold to find the jogging tracks that circle the resort.

After our first lap Katie stops, covers her eyes, smiles, and waves to the parking lot. Ed, Beth, and their two young daughters are unloading the family van after a long drive from Indianapolis. For all of the adoring stories Katie tells, alternating wonder and frustration, Ed is much smaller than I expect, five-feet-seven maybe. He takes his time saying hello, pretending to look me over, reaching high over my head to confirm that, indeed, I am six feet and seven inches tall, as Katie has told him. Beth, his wife, smiles and gives me a quick hug; she is eight months pregnant with their first boy. The girls hold back, standing with their mother, shy and polite. I carry their bags to their rooms. A few hours later Katie’s mother, Judy, calls from the lobby to say she and her husband have arrived with Katie’s sister and niece. We should all meet in the lobby and check out the pool.

I have met Judy once before, over dinner, the week before Christmas. It was a formal occasion at the nicest restaurant in Katie’s hometown, with heavy tablecloths, dim lighting, a full bar, and very good manners. At that dinner Judy’s husband discussed new fronts in the War on Christmas; I tried to make small talk, asking questions about a family I knew only in the broadest details, from stories Katie told me on another continent. Even then Katie’s family seemed so large—six or seven aunts, a few dozen cousins—that I got to worrying I would screw up someone’s name, mistaking a brother for an uncle or a great-aunt for a niece. Judy was kind and generous, a little distracted; holding back, maybe, curious to see if things might really take between Katie and me now that we were back in the United States.

At the resort I see Judy in what I later know to be her truest and happiest element: relaxed and vibrant, surrounded by the adult children who adore her, a little nervous for the weekend’s plan, but
hopeful and optimistic. I see her smiling the same bright-eyed smile Katie sometimes unwittingly breaks out, the one that, when she knows someone is watching her, quickly settles into a more modest grin.

That weekend I do not get my chance to wear what Ed will later, and regularly at family events, call my “church clothes.” I do spend hours in the pool, tossing one child after another high and into the deep end. I sit at dinner, making still more small talk, then dancing in the resort lounge with Judy and the nieces. Both nights, we play 4-5-6 dice with Katie’s cousins for three dollars a hand. I sneak off with Ed to the gaming room, a small converted closet that just fits a Galaga–Ms. Pac-Man stand-up console, a quarters machine, and a broken foosball table. We take turns playing both games late into the night, buying each other beers.

I take to Ed right away. He is kind, a little mannered, but a genuine and decent guy. I really like Beth, who seems to read and listen to everything. I think we will manage an easy alliance of outsiders to the family.

Our last night at the resort, Ed and I sit at the bar watching the end of a basketball game and talking about high school. When Katie joined the cross-country team, Ed explains, the coach gave her a teddy bear, saying she would need it because, following Ed, she had awfully big shoes to fill. Katie has told me this story before, but as Ed and I sit there drinking now, I come to understand a part of it differently. Ed is proud of his little sister for following in his footsteps, but he is also worried she might feel stuck in his shadow. He believes it is a given that she can, and will, with time come into her own, but he’s not sure she wants to do it. In his mind the placard on the gymnasium wall containing their names is a marker for her beginning, rather than his end.

And so, Ed explains, it was a shock when Katie quit the team her senior year, gave up competitive running altogether, and focused
instead on graduating from high school a semester early. He does not know what to make of the full scholarship to the small state college in rural Minnesota that followed that spring, or the move that summer, or especially, four years later, her decision to leave Minnesota altogether and join the Peace Corps in Bangladesh. What does Katie hope to get away from, Ed asks, and how far does she have to go to do it? Is she coming back home, now, for good?

I say that I have not thought much about these questions. Really, they are Katie’s to answer.

In Bangladesh, I tell Ed, Katie seemed so eager to move back to Chicago, to be near her family. Now that we are living in Chicago, and she is settled into a daily life, she seems restless with the long-term picture. What we are doing together, the plans we want to make eventually, the jobs we think we might want for ourselves: all of these are conversations that begin and end in the broadest terms, sometimes with a fight, often after only a few sentences.

I tell Ed that Katie is beautiful, strong, and happy. But she does not like expectations. She will not prove anything to anyone. She thrives in the moment, in a way that I find both attractive and unsettling. How can anyone seem so able to walk away from anyone and anything? How has she, in fact, done exactly that so many times before, in anecdotes and conversations about her family and life? The year, according to Katie, or the years, according to Ed, she and he just didn’t speak? Will she and I one day follow the same pattern? If so, why is she choosing me now?

The next morning I feel stupid for confiding so much in Ed. Surely, I tell myself, I had too much to drink and let down my guard.

But there is another part to my indiscretion; one that, however unaware I am of it in the moment, lays the groundwork for a closeness I cherish immensely during Katie’s life. It takes form, not in wholesale drunken declarations, but in the careful and quiet practices of disclosure, the sense of exception to her life that being loved by Katie allows me.

At last call I tell Ed that, secretly, I have always wanted people to call me “Jack.” Jack Kennedy, London, Gilbert, Kerouac, Nicholson, even C. S. “Jack” Lewis. I like the idea of being the sort of person everyone knows formally by one name and informally by another. I tell Ed that I have always secretly wanted to be anyone else; that this other person I mean to become requires those qualities natural to Katie, which I have never mastered: discretion, distance. The sense, always, that one carries internally a secret born of a different life.

Ed tries “Jack” out that night, and for the next couple of years he takes every occasion to address me by it, alternately teasing and reminding me of my request, until finally, one afternoon years later, I ask him, please, to just call me “John.” I say at the time that my opposition is instinctual—I just can’t get used to hearing the new name—but I also feel dishonest for the easy rationalization. Ed is teasing me. I don’t like being teased. If it is stupid to think now, after Katie’s death, that the point of a name could only be the truth it accumulates in repetition and practice, then at the time I feel deeply relieved to be free of a childish fantasy. I am irrevocable in my own way; I am also, perhaps, too easily influenced.

As we leave the resort that weekend, Katie says it is the first time since her brother Richard’s death a little more than a year before that her whole family, except for their father, has gathered together in the same place. She has been thinking of Richard all weekend, just as she is sure Judy, Ed, and her sister have kept his memory close. If I had known the death date, or thought to ask Katie then to name the absence or even to ask later why she held it back, then I understand during our drive that we are very much still at the beginning of our relationship. Some part of the gap between us remains unmeasured. I can only know, as she tells it to me one afternoon in Bangladesh, the fact of Richard’s death. I cannot yet recognize his absence in Katie’s life.

In the car that afternoon, I do not want to push too hard to know more about Richard. Here is the first and most essential tension in my life and marriage with Katie; she needs secrets, and she needs me to trust that those secrets, even when she eventually discloses them, are kept for good reasons. I cannot distrust her for them. I cannot resent her for needing them. And, however wrong it feels to be either excluded or indignant because of what she is not ready to tell me, I must not push her. She does not want comfort. Perhaps she believes I will one day understand her grief or, worse, misunderstand it.

Where our marriage seems now to close back upon itself, between the two places of Richard’s death (beginning) and Katie’s death (end), I try to make my year in Indiana the hinge. That first week a poet friend writes by email to say,
There are no words for your loss, John
, and I think,
Isn’t that your duty? Shouldn’t poets spend all day finding words
to make loss real to strangers?
The anger is generative. I write my first poem for Katie a few days later and publish it on my blog. I call it “There Are No Words.” I write in my journal,
There must be words for absence too finite for loss
. Then, as now, I think I understand something about how easily after one unimaginable loss another can follow. In this way, thinking of Richard, I feel closer to Katie. For a time after her death, I am very eager to hear stories about Katie’s life, especially stories about us. I think they might refresh some certainty of feeling I have yet to understand as stable, neutral memory: a glimpse of the real thing alternately revealed in parts of a whole, held back and kept together.