CHAPTER 4

The Letters

The Letters

DEE

He left twenty letters.

I found them after, in a folder on his laptop labeled, with the particular John-humor that could still gut me from beyond the grave, Last Words (Rough Draft — I’ll Edit Later). He never edited them. Twenty letters to twenty people — his brother, each of the children, two of his AA sponsors, a man he’d wronged in 1974 and made amends to in 1986 and apparently still thought about, the friend who cried at our wedding. He had written a farewell address for nearly everyone he loved, because he was a man who believed everything was a farewell address if you wrote it right, and he had decided, dying, to prove it.

Mine was the longest.

I have it memorized the way you memorize scripture or scars. I am not going to give you all of it — some of it is only ours, the private jokes and the passwords and the practical instructions for a life he knew I’d have to run alone — but I will give you the parts that matter to why I am lying awake on this ship, because those parts are the reason for everything that happens after tonight, including the man at the casino table I am not yet ready to remember.

He opened it by apologizing for not taking what he called the chicken exit. He’d considered leaving no letter at all, he wrote, and then decided that saying nothing was the one thing he could not do. In the end, to say nothing was not an option. I love you so much.

He listed what we’d done. He was a great one for the list, John — the bucket list, the classified ad cut to nine words, the twenty letters — and he made one final inventory of the marriage, the children raised, the world shown, the continents crossed, the meals that were social rather than nutritional, and he said the whole of it had been transcended by a love that rose to the highest level, and that the list was endless, and I believe he ran out of paper before he ran out of list.

Then he did the thing that I did not understand for five years, and understand completely now, tonight, on this ship, with a red dress still turning behind my eyes.

He gave me advice for the future.

Don’t wait very long, he wrote, before beginning to open new chapters in your life. He named them, the chapters — cruising, my work, the children and the grandchildren, friends, the travel we hadn’t finished. And then, in the middle of the list, so plainly that I read past it the first three times, he wrote the sentence that I have been running from ever since:

And if a good man comes along, and it’s a good match — go for it. Be sure. But go.

He put it in parentheses, almost, the way you’d mention picking up milk. The most important instruction anyone has ever given me, and he tucked it between the grandchildren and the quilting, because that was John: he could hand you the thing that would break your life open and make it sound like an errand, so that you’d take it before you knew to be afraid of it.

He told me I would be called upon to be the rock, and that I had already learned, in his own dying, how difficult the rock could be. At least I’ve given you some practice, he wrote. Be ready. He was right about that too. Two sets of parents came after him, and the long slow work of it, and I was the rock for every one, and each time I heard him: be ready.

He told me he wasn’t afraid to die, and I believed him, because he’d spent thirty sober years learning to be present for his own life and he was not going to flinch from being present for the end of it.

And he told me — this is the part I could not carry, the part I folded away and did not open until years later — that there would be a solution to whatever came. Remember, he wrote, there is a solution for every problem. The only real error is failing to decide what you believe is right at the time. If you decide honestly — no error, no foul, no problem, whatever the outcome.

Near the very end he apologized, laughing at himself even there, for his lifelong need to control everything, even after I’m gone. He could see it in his own letter, the instructions, the lists, the arrangements — a dying man trying to run the world he was leaving. Sorry, he wrote, but some of this might be useful.

He closed by telling me it was the ride and not the destination that had made it all worth it — the planning, the visits, the writing, the eating, the traveling, the whole imperfect process of a shared life — and that he wanted me to smile as he went over the falls, because he had, truly, enjoyed the ride.

Have a great rest of your life, he wrote.

And he signed it with his name, and nothing else, because after a letter like that there is nothing else.

I have obeyed almost all of it. I opened the new chapters — slowly, too slowly, but I opened them. I was the rock, over and over, exactly as promised. I kept his journals and his stories and his pictures and they have, as he said they would, kept me company.

But I have gotten ahead of what those years actually took out of me, and if I let the letter stand for the whole of it I will have lied to you by leaving out the cost. Because obeying John looked, from the outside, like a woman coping beautifully. From the inside it was the hardest schooling of my life.

Forty-two months of watching over someone every minute of every day ended with a single breath, and in the space of that breath I stopped being a caregiver and stopped being a wife, and both titles were taken and replaced with one flat, awful word. Widow. I was fifty-some years old and I had never in my life lived alone. I went from my parents’ house to my first husband, and after that divorce I had the children with me, and then I had John. Two men in one lifetime, both of whom I married, and no other dates and no other romances in between or on either side. I did not know how to be a person by herself in a house. And then, after the service and the casseroles and the endless small legal cruelties that follow a death — the accounts to close, the name to remove, the forms that ask you again and again to state your relationship to the deceased — after all of that was finished, I was, for the first time in my entire life, alone. Not only without a husband. Without my best friend, my companion, my mentor, the one person who had made me feel like myself. I stood in the quiet of a house that had always had John in it and I thought: now what.

He had, of course, tried to get me ready even for this. He had made me plan. He had forced me, more than once, to sit at the kitchen table and say out loud what I would do when he was gone, and I had hated every one of those conversations and done them anyway because he asked. On his instruction I flew to California for two weeks after the funeral, and a month after that I took a transatlantic crossing, alone, because he had told me I would need to rest, to come down off the caregiving, to find some scrap of peace before the real weather hit. He was right, as he was maddeningly often right. But those were still errands with his fingerprints on them. When the traveling was done, and the ashes were scattered four months later exactly as we’d planned — then what. I had not let myself look at that particular then. I had not wanted to.

Grief is not for sissies. I had said that glib little thing to other people for years, and then it came for me and I understood it was not glib at all, it was a bulletin from the front. Half of me was gone — the better half, most days I thought. And it is not only the enormous losses that undo you; it is the thousand tiny mechanical ones nobody warns you about. John fed the dog. Every day of our life together, John fed the dog, and now Chewy stood by an empty bowl looking up at me, and more than once that poor animal went hungry a few hours longer than he should have because feeding him had simply never been my job and my mind had no groove worn for it.

John and I ate every meal out when he was well — every single one, breakfast to dinner — and even when he was sick and eating almost nothing we still went, because a meal was a social occasion to us and never merely a nutritional one. Now there was no one to go out with in the evening. No one across the table. No one, and this is the part that hollowed me, to tell about my day. My children were wonderful. They called, they came for dinner, they took me out. But they were not my partner. They did not know my work down to the details, they did not know all the players by name, they could not tell me what they’d have done. Nothing on earth changes the plain fact that you are alone — you sleep alone, you wake alone, you meet each day alone. My children had all learned this as young adults, the ordinary loneliness of a life not yet paired. I was learning it for the first time in my fifties, and it is a different thing to learn it late.

And the emotions cannot be set to one side to make room for the logistics; they come at the same time and they make everything harder. I could not concentrate. I would be moving through an ordinary hour and a wave would come up out of nowhere and stop me where I stood and very nearly pull me under — the grocery store, the car, once, humiliatingly, a tire-shop waiting room. There is no pretty way to paint this thing we call grief and there is no magic formula for it, none, only the brute animal instruction to wake up, get out of the bed, put one foot in front of the other, and trust on no evidence whatsoever that it will someday be better.

So I did the things I knew, professionally, that a person is supposed to do — and here is the strange part, they worked. I hired a trainer and made my own body a project. I gave myself permission to feel the thing instead of managing it, which for me was nearly a foreign language. I rested when I needed rest.* I meditated. I stayed ferociously busy. And I survived, the only way anyone does, one single day at a time, and I got through the first year. They tell you the second year is when you find your “new normal,” and that is roughly where I have been. The trouble with a new normal is that you don’t want one — the old one suited me perfectly. The whole work of the second year, I have come to think, is arriving at the understanding that this, this, is as good as it is going to get, and then finding a way to accept it. I am still at that work. This very book may be part of how I am doing it.

There are stretches when you genuinely do not believe you can manage. When it lands on you that you are a single parent now, and that the next time something hard happens there will be no partner in the room to steady you or tell you what he thinks, grown children or no. When you realize your income has changed in one stroke and the whole support of your life is now you. When you get sick — really sick — and do the cold arithmetic and understand that with no one to drive you, you would have had to call an ambulance, or you might simply have died in your own house, and no one would have known until they wondered why you’d gone quiet. No one to help walk the dog. No one to feed the dog. No one to keep the dog when you have to be gone the whole day. Small things. They are never small when you are the only one who can do them.

But the same season is studded with small victories, and I learned to count them, because they are what carry you. My own decisions, for one. Terrifying at first, that sole authority — and then, slowly, a pleasure I had never once tasted. No one to answer to. No one who even has to know everything I do. It is a species of freedom I reached my fifties without ever having felt. When I bought a car — and chose a different make than John and I would ever have bought, and picked my own color and my own options with no one to consult — my confidence went up like a flare. When the air conditioning died in the heat of summer and I sorted it out myself, start to finish, I gained something. When I took my first trip alone and discovered I could not only survive it but enjoy it — a different kind of fun than the old kind, but fun all the same — I gained something I don’t have a tidy word for. Proof of life, maybe.

I have learned a great deal in these months. I have found coping skills that actually hold. I have learned I am more resilient than I ever gave myself credit for. I have learned, over and over, that I have an astonishing family who appear the moment I truly need them — and, harder for me, that I have to be the one to ask, and then to remember the skills and count the small victories when I do. I have to take care of myself. I have to rely on myself. For a woman who built an entire identity out of being relied upon, that last one is very nearly a new religion.

For the first time since I was a teenager, I am learning about me. Without a daily role holding up someone else’s life, there is suddenly room to remember who I was outside of another person. What does Dee like to do. What does Dee think is important. Who, under all these years of usefulness, is Dee. It is frustrating on some days and on others it is genuinely fun, trying things I never tried and letting myself meet the world a little differently. The decisions are mine, for better and for worse. Most of them land on no one but me — what I eat, whether I eat, when I eat, how I spend my hours and my money — and that, it turns out, is a freedom I have never in my life been handed. A new normal. Maybe not all bad.

And in this second year I have started to find what I have come to call the invisible losses. The ones you don’t feel at first because the huge and obvious losses are using up all the air. But as those get named and grieved and slowly folded into you, the quiet ones step forward one at a time to be discovered, and they wound only you, and often you are the only soul alive who can even recognize them as wounds. Mine was this: John was my cheerleader. My only one, once I was grown. My first marriage had specialized in taking me apart; John spent twenty-five years putting me back together and then some. My accomplishments were his accomplishments. When he went, I had no cheerleader left, no one in my corner, no voice reminding me what I was good at. Plenty of people in this world will tell you your faults. Almost no one shows you your strengths and hands them back to you stronger. That was a loss with no funeral and no casserole, and I did not even know to grieve it until it had been quietly bleeding for a year.

And there is the loss of the private memories. The things that lived only between the two of you — the intimate moments, the shorthand, the small sacred nonsense — and now one of the two people who held them is gone, and you are the last keeper of things you cannot even fully explain to another human being. You try to tell someone and the words come out too small, and they nod kindly, and you understand that this particular room is now yours alone forever. That is its own specific and terrible solitude. And in the second year, just as those invisible losses are surfacing, the world’s support quietly recedes — the calls thin out, the check-ins stop, everyone understandably returns to their own lives — and you are left with exactly these losses, the ones no one can see, all alone to come to terms with.

So let me say it plainly, the way John would have wanted it said. I loved him a great deal, and so it hurts a great deal; the size of the wound is only the size of the love, turned over. It will not be the same. But perhaps — and this is the thing I am learning to let myself believe — it can still be good again. Hope has to be redefined now around no one but myself. Another transition. Another change, when I had thought I was done with changes for a while. I have already done more than I ever believed I could, so the future is simply a great unknown, and I have learned to plan only in the short term, because the long term is not a promise anyone can keep. I found the best love of my life once, when I was not looking for it at all. And I am learning, slowly, one honest day at a time, that I can do very nearly anything I set my mind to. There will be other lived moments, good ones and bad ones. Hope, it turns out, was never only about a cure; it is about the quality of the time. And it is not only about other people. It is about oneself as well.

So, for now, I take one step at a time and see where it leads.

I have obeyed almost all of it, except the one sentence in the parentheses.

If a good man comes along, and it’s a good match — go for it. Be sure. But go.

Five years ago a good man came along. And it was a good match — God help me, it was the best match I had felt since the man who wrote me that letter — and I did not go. Or I started to go, and then he vanished, and I told myself the vanishing had made the decision for me, that John’s instruction didn’t apply to a man who wasn’t there to go toward.

But that is not the truth, and at three in the morning the truth is the only guest still awake.

The truth is that when Gary disappeared, some small and shameful part of me was relieved, because it meant I did not have to find out whether I was brave enough to obey the one instruction John gave me that I did not already know how to follow. I know how to be the rock. I did not know how to be shown a whole new world a second time, by someone new, and survive the knowledge that it too would end. So when the excuse to refuse arrived, I took it. And I called it grief, and I called it loyalty to John, and it was neither. It was fear, wearing my dead husband’s love as a costume.

John would be so disappointed in me. That is the thing I finally let myself think, lying here. Not sad — disappointed. He did not spend the last of his voice writing me a permission slip so that I could frame it and never use it.

The ship breathes. The band, at last, has stopped.

And I understand, finally, why a stranger in a red dress could stop me cold on the first night of a cruise I did not want to take: because she is a woman who lost the whole of her world and went toward the next thing anyway, who kept the appointment with joy that I have been canceling for five years, who is doing — badly, gorgeously, alone on a crowded floor — the exact thing my husband used his dying hand to tell me to do.

Go for it. Be sure. But go.

I don’t sleep at all. But somewhere before the light comes I stop lying to myself about why I’m awake, and that is not nothing. That is, I think, where it starts.