Wear it well

   Most of the hours, I am happy. I don’t remember that Michael no longer exists. Especially at work, I don’t have to trip over the non-facts of him.
   I like being happy. I like busy-ness, problem solving, quick steps and decisive gestures. I like mock-dancing with co-workers as our paths cross on the carpet. I like blurts of humor from social media, I like people’s jokes. I like the problems.
   I don’t like being reminded. 
   I don’t like the generous, tentative, thoughtful co-worker who stops to look at me and ask how I am doing. “How are you holding up?” I don’t like it when they ask that. Stop asking that. Just assume I’m too fragile to answer and ask me instead about your grammar or that TV show we like. 
   I don’t like it when kind people express their sadness, and I have to remember mine and find a few sad-seeming words to say so I won’t be like a monster to them, trashing their good opinion of me by refusing to be broken and ruined and a mess. 
   I don’t want to be a mess. I refuse to be broken and I don't need to be ruined. He left me stronger and happier than I was before he found me. He gave me decades of strength to fall back on. As soon as I am on my way toward my workday, I can lift my nose to the sky and like the high wild blue and how my heart is ready to laugh and have a great day.
   I don’t like it when they confide how much they miss him and are struggling with it. 
   Their sorrow makes my sorrow happen when it doesn’t need to happen. It makes the loss of him slop around.
   They should shut up and have a good day.

   I must avoid thinking about his last months while I am driving. I need to stop going on and on about how often he would call me at work, after he was home in the afternoons. About the joke it was between me and Jennifer, his calling while I was so busy and unable to talk. I would text him some minor information and right away he would call to ask me to recite the text, confirm the text. “You will stop at the store on the way home?” 
   It was sweet but so annoying.
   Now while I am driving I start to worry that it was awful for him. That he was frightened. That he sensed his death coming and felt alone and was frightened. That he wanted to hear a reassuring human voice, and my voice had to do.
   
   Or did I mean everything to him? Was I reassurance? 
   I hope not. I hope he had other, better sources of reassurance. I was trying to be kinder, but I was always distracted — calm, but also not often fully present. 
   Again and again over our 41 years together, my harsh treatment of his feelings would shame me, and I would promise myself to be less rough with him next time. Gradually, over the years, I did learn better self-control, I remembered to remind us both that I loved him very much even when I was biting off his ears because he was fraying my last nerve. 
   But still, there was always that need for a next time, to do better next time.
   Thank God we didn’t have run-ins or rough patches in the week before he died. I don’t think I could recover if there was a “next time” I was still counting upon, a next time that will never come. 
   No, we were on good terms when he left and took my future with him. 
   I can see myself tweaking his big toe as I walk past his recliner on my way to the washing machine. I can see myself smiling at him fondly. I know he sees me showing him how fond I am.

   But it would be better if next time would come along anyway. Just for old times sake, give me back the future I had planned.

Women in airports

   Since 2013, several big publications have published stories that purport or at least try to explain why so many people weep in airports. 
   Time interviewed a psychologist who talked about the accumulated stressors of getting onto a plane and the nagging fear that one will never see one's loved ones again.
   Dubbing the phenomenon “the Mile Cry Club,” The Telegraph cited a study by Virgin Atlantic suggesting tear ducts are more sensitive in the air than on the ground.
   In a better written essay, for The Atlantic in 2013, Elijah Wolfson cites several studies to support a theory that after we endure a stressful situation and sit down finally, alone and with no distractions, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in at the moment of transition, allowing us to shed stress hormones by weeping. Being alone is crucial to this scenario, and also could explain why grieving people are inclined to weep while driving. 
   Being inside an airplane feels like being alone, Wolfson writes:

Alone in a closed metal tube, 40,000 feet above land and miles from anyone you know. Surrounded by people who share your fate, but who do not acknowledge you. They, like you, sit facing forward in rows, focusing on their own discrete box of space. The cabin is dim and it hums; you look down at your folded hands in your lap, lit by a pool of light from above. There’s nothing to do: no email to check, no messages to send out, and minimal distraction. If you felt a gaping hollow open up inside, if you thought you were not going to make it, you would have no way to reach out to your loved ones.
Is it such a stretch to imagine a commercial plane as one of the loneliest places in the modern world?
   Somewhere among John Updike’s umpteen dozen essays there’s a poem or a paragraph that notices red-eyed women in airports. He concludes — sensibly, I believe — that women weep in airports because they are on their way to funerals or deathbeds. He doesn’t mention men weeping in airports. 
   I never have wept on an airplane. But twice since Michael died, as I’ve walked out of the concourse at Bill and Hillary Clinton and toward the staircases, and toward the spot where he used to stand, waiting for me, always, every flight for most of my adult life, I've been mugged by his absence. 
   The first time it caught me unaware. My nose flamed up and I was weeping before I realized what had happened. It was a struggle to compose my face on the stairs.
   The second time — Friday as I returned from Thanksgiving with Ben, Caroline and the babies — I was wary of that bad place, the place without him. I would walk past it too quickly to think about my loss. I speed-walked that concourse with so much determination that I turned the wrong direction out of the gate and found myself increasingly uncertain and then dismayed as the wrong end of the concourse swept toward me.
   But I turned around and rushed the opposite way, and soon enough I was past the empty place, down those stairs and out in the chilly fog and rain, headed across surprisingly deep puddles to long-term surface parking and my good old car. 
   But the place without him jumped me anyway, an hour later, as I stood on the porch of Marie’s house and foolishly mentioned having missed him there.
   I could make myself weep again, now, by envisioning that stretch of airport carpet. 

Ollie in the AM

   The cats and I are gradually creating our new routine. But the house is full of Michael’s scents. I know they are waiting to find him.
   They were with him when he died. Nobody else was. When I hurried home from Marie’s to make sure he’d eaten supper, and I found his corpse, they were huddled apart from one another on the carpet near his chair. 
   Thinking back to that moment of my protest, my disbelief and pleading, I see their tense bodies. I feel their uncertain eyes on me. They didn’t know what to do anymore than I did.
   
   These mornings I wake about 4:30, as I have for years, stirred by Michael’s super careful attempts to get ready for work in the dark, holding a tiny flashlight in his teeth, going onto the washing machine landing to dry his hair with the blow dryer, all his clothing set out the night before in the living room, so he wouldn’t bother my sleep. And yet always I woke up. Always I sensed his going.
   I go on waking up. We must have cemented a habit, he trying to keep me from waking, me sensing his tiptoe movements and waking.
   These days I stagger to the bedroom door and crack it open, knowing that Ollie will soon join me. He’ll thud upon the foot of the bed and then pad quickly across the landscape of my body up to my face.  
   There he will either settle into the angle my head makes with the pillow and commence sandpapering my nose and purring like a 23-year-old Honda Passport OR he’ll purr like a Passport while settling his suffocatingly furry weight on top of my head.
   We drift off to sleep again together. It is bliss.

Airport lonely

   There is lonely and then there is airport lonely.
   Saturday I returned Ben and Caroline’s car to them via one straight nine-hour drive to Indiana. (The car had an accident in Little Rock the night of Michael’s memorial; it spent more than a week in a body shop here.)
   Indiana 69 was about 90 miles of blazing hardwood forest, humps of color on rolling hills. And the visit was fun. The older granddaughter made me hop 2 miles up and down the hallway, according to Fitbit.
   Sunday I flew home. It was an uneventful flight, except for an exchange with my silent seatmate as the plane crossed over Granite Mountain near Little Rock. I had imagined it was the size of a mall, but it went on and on until I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. So I asked this silent, coughing man what it was, and he said, Granite Mountain. I said Wow. And he said Yeah. I asked, that’s nepheline syenite? He said, I don’t know what that is. A feldspar, I said. Oh, he said.
   Then came the mourning moment. As I hurried along the airport past the gates, headed for the exit, I realized Michael was not waiting out there.

   And it was the first time in my adult life I had walked that airport without finding him at the end, waiting for me with a hug.

Mowing the lawn

   While I was mowing the lawn at my Mom's former home today, it struck me how easy it was to do. And yet, over the past two months, Michael dreaded being asked to do it. Dreaded it.
   Also, I remembered how he would call me at work to report all his lawn-mowing. In the past two months, he called several times in a row every afternoon. Usually he would report that he had mowed some section of our lawn. Usually, I was slamming my head against a deadline and had to apologize that I couldn't talk.
   I did feel bad about continually rebuffing his calls, but also I felt annoyed. 
   I forgive myself for that. 
   If he had said to me, “Something is wrong with my heart and I am scared,” not only would I have stopped what I was doing, I would have rushed home to be with him.

   Maybe he didn’t know he was worried.
   Maybe he wasn’t worried.

   Throughout the last year, his final year, if I sent him a text, he would immediately call to repeat to me the information I had just texted him. Every time.
   He must have been worried. 

   I was a little worried. He was puffing through his lips for no good reason, as he did 20 years ago before the bypass surgery. 
   I was trying not to worry about that.

The Widow Hood

    Several things are happening:

   • Sunday while Song and I were dismantling Michael’s cubicle at work, creatures of the type not covered by my homeowner’s policy held WWF auditions atop some fragile drywall between the attic and the landing where the washing machine sits. I came home to find washer, landing and stairwell full of blown-in insulation and rat poo. 

   I have a call in to a well recommended contractor, but in the meantime am not turning on the heating because there also is a creature hole on the corner of the roof outside. It’s unusually cold for October — we’re having one of those Arkansas Octobers, which might as well be Arkansas Decembers or Arkansas Mays or Arkansas Februaries ... any month might happen at any time here. It’s cold enough that creatures will be looking for warm cubbies to move into, and I don’t want to make the attic any more enticing than it already obviously is. Let it remain a cold place until a contractor closes up the hole and repairs the ceiling.

   The cats have been huddled, miserable, in their plush beds. That is, they are using for the first time ever the plush bends Michael bought them.

   This evening I brought my studio space heater upstairs to take the edge off the 58-degree den, and everything eased just enough that love and peace reigned for an hour. Ollie and I curled up to eat soba noodles and watch Grey’s Anatomy in standard definition.

   But then the space heater tripped a breaker. 

   Back we are in the icebox.

   • Standard definition is the new rule on the TV here. Now that Michael isn’t watching our TV, my dear daughter-in-law has figured out how to make AT&T sell me fewer and less fabulous TV channels so I can pay less not to watch TV. 

   Michael and I talked about doing that while he was alive (oh! what a painful turn of phrase, “while he was alive”!), because we were wasting money paying for top-level options we neither wanted nor used. But change is a hassle. He preferred to let things ride, even though it made sense to be more conservative with our disposable income since he was made part-time last year.
   But I should talk. I have been paying $5.38 a day for coffee I could be making at work. That has to change.

   The basic option Caro and I selected includes some HD channels, but only shopping outlets. How mean is that, AT&T? The local channels (which I might watch) are all in standard definition. But standard def looks pretty good when you don’t compare it to HD. I will probably miss the heck out of AMC and HBO, but now I have an incentive to use Michael’s Netflix subscription and stream Amazon Prime.

   • The coroner signed the death certificate in time for the memorial, so the cremains were ready for us. But the sexton at Mount Holly and his assistants were all unavailable last week while the family was gathered. So I have Michael’s cremains tucked into a niche here at home. 

   I thought it would make me insane with grief having them in the house, but compared with the mess on the landing, they are easy to live with. 
   And this delay gives me time to make a ceramic box for them. I am going to make a noble porcelain box, carved all over with cats and fired in soda. 

   Then we will put it into the ground and never look at it again.

   But I will know it is down there, being pretty in the dark.

Let it go

   One by one, the kindly experts tell me to let it go. 
   Don’t try to repair Mom’s house. Don’t try to fix the damage done by the family that lived in it for more than 40 years. Do not spend any money. No money. Do not spend any more time. No more time. Find somebody willing to take it, and if necessary, pay him to take it — all, do not differentiate — so you can move on. 
   Then move on.

   I do not want to move on.
   I want to fix it.
   I want to go back in time, to the time when I didn’t want to live there. I want to want to live there. For Mom’s sake. For the sake of us. To make it better. Cleaner. Less stinky. No longer broken. No longer built in a hurry — I want to rebuild it the way we deserve it to have been built.
    I want to go home again, and I want my mom and dad to be there. Only this time, I want to be there, too.