Young Widower (8 page)

Just before dawn two state officials arrived to oversee the end of our time on the mountain. There was a process to complete now and a corresponding solemnity.
Police Officers
became
Detectives
.
Doctors
became
Physicians
. For each step of the process someone gave instructions in broken English.

We will pull the sheet now back from Kathryn Evans’s body, attach the heartbeat machine, and confirm no heart
.

You are writing some sentences in the box to make record of the bear
.

We wait just a few minutes. The ambulance arrives. We ride together
.

As they prepared to move Katie, the sun came up. The sky, just blue, washed the morning in a terrific, pale light that made the hostel seem ramshackle, shrunken, its bright porch lantern one bulb hung over the porch. I turned to the ridge. I could see all of the way across it, to the second hostel. I thought,
I could cross in minutes and get back around the river without a hitch
. I could walk a circle around the place of Katie’s death and make it sacred.

But then it was too late. We heard engines, and, coming up the slope, motorcycles and three-wheelers fanned out in a loose formation. In their red jackets and silly hats, I thought, they looked
like Shriners. The theme from the
Benny Hill Show
looped in my head, but they got closer, and their manners were resolute and efficient, and when they stopped, Sara stepped from behind one of the machines and shook out her bright red hair.

I thought,
Her hair would still be that color if she had died
.

She was cold and tired. She walked with a limp. She had spent all night in the smaller hostel. Someone had given her two sleeping pills. As we approached each other, she smiled. She looked at me, but mostly over my shoulder.

There is a moment just after a trauma when the mechanisms of life become weightless. Everything that happens around you is solemn and professional, and it doesn’t really matter whether you recognize how far the rituals and regulations of a culture range from basic necessities. Elaborate structures are put in place to support resolute and imperfect notions of continuity. You think,
The purpose of the living is not to understand or transform, but to survive and to make that survival incidental to the natural world and the individual life
. It is a balance but also a kind of trickery. In order to participate in the world, it must be tamed and made reasonable, and when it is not tame and reasonable, the world still requires participation. It cannot be witnessed. It is not transformed.

Of course, no one had told Sara that Katie was dead. They had left it to me. I should be the one to tell her, because she was my friend, and Katie was my wife. Or maybe no one had wanted to tell her or had yet seen the need. I didn’t know that part, and I never would. She was the survivor. I was the widower. Katie’s death was our common experience, but we would find no shared language to talk about it, no faith that would make it real and vital to each other, and close the gaps. Our experiences were singular, as were the stories we would tell about those experiences. Other people would listen and sympathize. And we would tell the story to other people.

A little over a year later, I stopped at the Lincoln Park Zoo and found the bear exhibit. It was closed for repairs. I was in Chicago
visiting my siblings and had taken the afternoon to myself to visit the places Katie and I had loved. It was a good walk from Clark Street to the lakefront, then south along Lake Michigan. We had run this route when we were training for our year of half marathons and sprint triathlons, culminating in the Chicago Marathon that October, a week before Katie’s birthday. Then, we were twenty-six. We had jobs and hopes for graduate studies the next year. We knew that we would leave Chicago, and we had no idea where we would go. But we liked to plan, so on those runs we mapped out logistics. What kind of city did we want to live in next? What sort of jobs and bosses, and where would we go after that? In the winters we would run the route I was walking now. We would strip off layers until we finished the loop in rubberized running shirts and sweatpants, our hats, scarves, and jackets pushed into our pockets or tied around our waists. Steam rose off of our bodies, radiating some last heat against the wind and night. How vulnerable we must have looked, so rigged against the elements and seemingly out of place, walking at different paces, trying to catch our breath.

The bears at the zoo had been moved inside. It was humid, midsummer. Probably, some part of me knew they wouldn’t be out in such heat. I had imagined that if I looked at them and spent time near them, I might feel compassionate and brave. I would neutralize some part of my fear and, in so doing, change something about what had happened. Or, at least, what had happened to me. But I was a witness. My role wouldn’t change. A small placard showed a photograph of two small black bears, each named for a local sports team, perched next to a tree only a few inches behind the plastic glass. Katie had been killed by a brown bear. I thought,
I can’t even get the bears right
.

All of that happened much later. Before we left the mountain, the police searched the ridge and returned with our bags. They had recovered what they could from the torn packs. Sara and I sat together in the truck, and it followed the ridge, toward the city. We
were going down the mountain now. One of us cried, then the other, but not together. Between long stretches of silence we looked at each other and out the window. We hugged. We smiled. We did not smile. What was there to say? We grieved without intention or consequence. The road was rocky and steep, the sun bright, the air crisp and clean. Periodically, we crossed a herd of animals or slowed down as the driver gently rolled one tire, then another over and across a boulder. Even accelerating through the flat parts, we made no better than ten, fifteen miles per hour. We drove for two and a half hours, downhill, with state vehicles, in daylight, until we reached the hospital in Busteni, where Sara was taken for an examination, while I waited for Katie’s body in a room across the hall.

5. Departure

I left the mountain with Katie’s body. I signed papers in Romania, and her body arrived eight days later at a morgue in Antioch, Illinois, Katie’s hometown, where I stood on one side of the room while Judy touched Katie’s hair and face. The skin was cold and soft, purple but not so changed that we could not look at the body. It was dressed in the outfit I had folded neatly into a plastic bag in Bucharest: blue shirt with small orange flowers and linen pants. There were shoes and socks, too. Her hands were tucked under a sheet.

We had agreed to arrive together at the funeral home. We would decide individually whether to go inside. It was a rare opportunity after Katie’s death to make an individual choice and still be a part of the group. The funeral director walked from his office to the parking lot, into the muggy June heat, wearing a crisp blue suit and a dark red tie. Everything about his manner suggested kind reluctance. It was good, he said, that we had decided to come. He would mix lemonade for the children. When we were ready, we should walk into the small room with crimson wallpaper. There were prayer cards in the lobby. Katie’s body was laid out on a metal table. The morgue opened from the door on the left.

We should know, he explained, that the body had not been prepared well for travel. It was not immediately cared for after the death. It had traveled a long way. Probably, we would not notice, but it was the sort of thing he looked for in his work. He would wait in the next room until we were done. We should take all of the time we needed.

I made myself stand near the wall with Katie’s sister, and when Judy said it was okay to touch the body, I touched the body. I put my hands on Katie’s forehead and tried to breathe slowly. The face was cleaner than I remembered. The skin had been washed and restored in places. Judy talked to Katie. We followed her example. I thought that I had said goodbye on the mountain, but here was Katie—her body—and a different group of people standing in a circle around her. Then, we seemed all to be praying. Why was that? I tried to think of good things to say or think. I muttered a few Hail Marys. I wanted to be reverent or to at least seem reverent, to participate and be supportive: a part of the group. But there was nothing new about Katie’s body; it only looked different, I thought, cast in plastic. How had I let
this
happen? We had moved Katie’s death to a new place and still it was not finished.

Already, friends, family members, and strangers were arriving in the room upstairs, to keep a vigil before the wake. We would speak, sing, and pray. We would stand at the front of the room, as a family, so that everyone could pay their respects. Tomorrow, on our way to the funeral mass, we would ride in the minivan. When we passed the fire station, the chief would turn on the sirens. It was a gesture of kindness and acknowledgment, this tribute, and I had not asked for it. I did not like it. The loud noise startled me. I felt rushed, conveyed to some hypothetical place past grief, a feeling, a forced memory. But we had not yet remembered the death. We had only just seen the body. It was Fourth of July weekend, and the day after the mass there would be a parade on this same street.

Before the mass we met at the funeral home to claim the ashes and say a prayer. The ashes were tied in a plastic bag snapped into a disposable tub that fit inside a lacquered wooden box we would return to the director the next morning. I carried the wooden box into the church. Katie’s family followed. I thought,
Well, at least if I drop it, nothing will spill
. Once I stood in the pew, the service would begin. Once the service began it would end. I tried to imagine myself walking out of the church without crying.

During his homily the priest explained what a good person Katie had been. A loving daughter, sister, granddaughter, daughter-in-law, aunt, niece, and friend. The priest was recently retired. Judy had asked him to perform the service as a favor to the family. Before the homily I had had a sense of myself as the center of things. People were watching me, so I should act a certain way. I bowed my head and tried to keep very still. My mother sat behind me and periodically put her hand on my shoulder. I should be grateful for the large church filled with mourners, I thought, the ushers who had come as a favor to Katie’s stepfather, the friends and family members who had traveled all that way to be there, my friends, my family, the firemen with their stupid siren, even the priest. I waited out the service, in full view, for everyone, and we walked yet again down the aisle, toward the light, and when we left the church, I took Katie’s ashes with me.

We ate lunch on long benches in the church basement. Five or six picnic tables at the front, lined with hot plates donated by the wives’ club. Baked potatoes with cheddar and bacon. Boiled green beans with bacon. Deep-fried bacon-flavored cheese curds. A vegetarian friend visiting from California asked if there was anything he could eat, and a volunteer suggested he try the iceberg wedge with ranch dressing. There were bacon bits in a bowl on the side. People were talking to each other now, scraping knives on plates, scooting their chairs across the linoleum. The luncheon was the end of the service, a built-in acknowledgment to the mourners,
who had done something and would now return home and continue their days.

After the funeral we changed into shorts and t-shirts and met at a nearby county preserve. Ed and I had gone for a run together there earlier in the week and picked the place. We walked a mile out to a turn in the path where the preserve opened out. It faced a field filled with wildflowers. A smaller group, now, of family and good friends followed us. I had the ashes in the plastic bin in the tub in the box and a clear prewarning from the funeral director that what we were doing was expressly illegal, and we should return only the container that next morning. I liked him a great deal. Katie’s uncle held the ashes, then passed them to someone else, and so on, until we arrived at the turn. We spoke still more prayers, some secular in nature this time, or perhaps they were not prayers but blessings. We spoke in turns, and when there was nothing more to say we opened the bag and walked out into the grasses and flowers.

The ashes fell in a single clump. The interior bag was heavy and caught at the latch of the container. People came forward to take turns scooping the ashes and scattering them. It became part of our ceremony. There were wildflower seeds that my mother had brought from a local florist. Later, Katie’s mother and sister would confide that they had each put some ash in their pockets to take home, but at the time I imagined only that we had moved Katie to a new and final place. She would be welcome here, and she would have liked being so close to her mother.

The sun started to set as we walked out of the preserve. That fresh smell of damp, cut grass so particular to midwestern evenings came from all directions. Joggers passed us. We separated into groups. I held back a moment, thinking still that I would have something spontaneous to tell Katie; something clever and beautiful and poignant to say in her absence, when we were alone. Nothing. Two friends waited for me down the path, and we walked together, leaning into each other a while, quiet and relieved.

Where was it now, that sadness, the emptiness and isolation that had followed Katie’s death, which terrified me still and had no name? Rather than transforming us, the day was ending. It could contain us no more certainly than Katie’s ashes now waited to soak into the ground. A terrific thunderstorm started that afternoon and continued into the evening. Water filled the streets. Everything shined a few feet beyond our reach. Porch lights, billboards, flashing reds: all disappearing into the downpour.

That night, at the restaurant bar, I went back and forth between Katie’s family in one room and my friends in the next. I felt that I should be present for Katie’s family, to console, support, and grieve with them. I wanted to sit in a room with my friends and drink and sing sad songs. Hadn’t I spent all day, all week, trying to honor some sense of obligation I could not name, which did not seem to end with Katie, marriage, sympathy, or judgment? Before the funeral I had wanted to be one kind of person after Katie’s death: selfish or selfless, good or bad, earnest or cynical. Now, my own sense of need began, in the smallest way, to exceed what I could give to anyone. I was hungry with it.