Evanescent Calm

I touch the cool mahogany surface, blotting out my reflection in its luster with the palm of my hand. I don’t really want to look at it anymore. I don’t like what I see there. 1

It’s over, or it will be very soon. The last of them are coming to pay their respects and give me their condolences…the ones that I know by face at best and some not at all. I wonder if they’d known her name before the eulogy. I have to wonder if they share the same vague, what’s-her-face recognition with the pretty lady in all the pictures as I do with each and every one of them. That brings a feeling that lays somewhere deeply beneath grief. One deeper than despair, even. Each of those I would’ve expected, even if they are nearly impossible to cope with. This emotion, if it can be called that, scares me in some fundamental way. As I shake each of their hands and look into their eyes, I see that they are not sorry as they say, but distant. Aloof. Thinking about their next meal, perhaps, or a business transaction. ‘Hey mistah, real sorry about your wife, ya got crumpets in the back for us, dontcha?’ 2

And all I feel is a steely and complete lack of faith in the inherent good of people. Chris would either laugh or scoff at my cynicism on any given day, depending on her mood. With this reflection comes the unbidden notion that Chris would never laugh or scoff at anything again. I feel myself beginning the inevitable downward spiral and I push it away with a pleading weariness. The last couple is upon me, their just-sad-enough smiles at the ready. I want to knock them each away with my fist. I need something to blame, and I have no qualms about blaming wrongly if it’ll alleviate any of this tidal wave. Murder, by definition, is the crime of unlawfully killing a person. Murder is also, by its second and lesser-known definition, something outrageous or blameworthy. Though my wife was not killed by another person, her death meets enough of the criteria to be called murder. Murderers are brought to justice, largely for the piece of mind of those the deceased left behind. 3

How do you bring cancer cells to justice? How does one bring a set of rotted, blackened lungs to justice? 4

She didn’t even smoke. I’ve known Chris since college and she barely touched a pack of Camels in the course of her short life, let alone smoked one. Hell, she made me quit. Said she couldn’t kiss a smoker. I said I didn’t blame her, thinking she’d forget the whole thing by morning. Chris was a scatterbrain like that. Brilliant but disorganized. I woke up the next morning and she wasn’t in my dorm anymore because she liked to jog, but I liked to sleep. She left a note on the nightstand though. A note and a box of nicotine patches. 5

I wear contacts now, but I wore glasses then, and since nobody sleeps with their glasses on, I couldn’t see what that little post-it proclaimed, though it was clearly written in Chris’s graceful hand. It couldn’t have taken more than a minute to locate those ridiculous coke-bottle-framed monstrosities, but if it had taken longer, I’m almost sure that my heart would’ve burst. It was beating that hard, and I dropped the glasses twice because I was shaking and sweating like a junkie ten hours from his last fix. It had only been two months back then, but I was sure as I’d ever been of anything that I loved her. Maybe that isn’t saying much for a college kid, but I loved her and that was that. 6

In that moment, I was sure as I’d ever been of anything that she had left me. We’d had a great night and that was the last one that there was ever going to be, and in that blurry minute I came as close as I ever would to having an anxiety attack.7

The note said that she’d be back in an hour, and you should try these, xoxo, love Chris. I threw my head back and I laughed until tears of relieved laughter leaked from my eyes. Chris came back as promised not minutes after that and I was still laughing, sitting in bed, naked as I came from the womb (except for my glasses), and cackling. When she asked me to let her in on the joke I just looked at her. I had time enough to think that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in a ragged NYU sweatshirt and a pair of jogging shorts, and then I pulled her into bed with me. I kissed her, and she kissed me, and we didn’t stop kissing until one or the other of us had to go to class that afternoon. By then we had each forgotten that I had been laughing in the first place. She didn’t ask me again what was funny and I never had another cigarette in my life. 8

Fifteen years later she died of fucking leukemia, and I suppose that settles that. I suppose it’s all goddamn history now, as they say. 9

Everyone’s gone now, and the irony of the empty pews makes me want to throw back my head and laugh like I did on that morning. I’m afraid to laugh, though, because it isn’t funny, and I’m not happy. Chris always said that my laugh had a way of turning on me. When it was real, she said, it could light up somebody’s eyes from a mile off. When it wasn’t, it chilled. I thought of that empty braying echoing down to me from the home’s vaulted ceiling. I thought of that chill. I thought it might drive me insane. 10

I turned back to Chris’s coffin, seeing it but looking through it. She and I both elected long ago not to have anything open-casket, because post-mortem was something that deserved privacy if anything ever did. We discussed that on one of those sleepless nights, when the harsh light of dawn seeping in through filthy shades seemed magical and sacred. We could talk about death because we were young, and we assumed that death was far, far away. If we had known otherwise, I can’t say what we would’ve done different. In fact, I can’t say that we’d have changed anything at all. 11

Her death was hers alone and the proceedings were conducted with the desired discretion, but she and I had never kept anything private from each other. A marriage, if it is a good one, is its own realm. I knew what she was wearing and just how she looked, laying against the lush satin lining. I knew that her auburn hair was cascading from her head in natural waves, and I knew that her dress was burgundy because it was her favorite to wear and my favorite to see her in. I knew that she was made up just enough that the grotesque features of a corpse were not evident in her, but I also knew that nobody who saw her now would mistake her for the same Chris that I had loved. The brilliant vitality that was ever-present in her steel-grey eyes until the moment that she died was gone, and pale lids were closed over their glassy blankness- a sheen not unlike the stain of the coffin’s lid. 12

I tried to stop thinking that she was dressed in her best so that worms could eat the flesh that I had loved so dearly and lusted after so often. I tried to stop thinking that her stunning eyes would sink into her head. Most of all, I tried to stop thinking about her hair. I tried to banish its color from my mind- the natural and utterly flawless marriage of reds and browns that people paid obscene amounts of money for in salons. I tried to stop thinking about how the sunset set it on fire. I tried to stop thinking about its silkiness, and about how Chris had frowned upon the idea of making its graceful waves straight like so many girls did today. I tried not to think that it would all fall out and crumble to dust. 13

I took in the rest of the alter-like set-up as I felt an impermeable lump rise in my throat. I looked at the roses and lilies, an odd combination but always, always her favorite.  I thought about how incongruous and how beautiful they were. I felt my heart ripping and stitching itself together, ripping and stitching, ripping and stitching. As I withdrew my hand from the coffin, a single red rose petal detached itself from its blossom, unbidden by any wind or outside force. I watched it fall with all of the grace in the world. At the same instant, the petal kissed the floor and the last of the steamy handprint I had left on the coffin’s lid faded away. 14

I didn’t so much snap as melt in that instant. My resolve slowly ebbed and my knees slowly buckled and before I knew it I was on the floor, I was on my knees, and I was sobbing with my face in my hands like a kid. I heard someone open the door at one point, I guess it must have been a member of the staff. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I saw a grown man on his knees, and I guess that they didn’t know what to do either, because they slipped out the same way they had come in. I thanked them privately for that. I couldn’t have dealt with someone in that moment any more than my wife could step out from that godforsaken box and say ‘Boo.’15

Time was a blur from there. Her burial was unceremonious because that was how she had wanted it. I went and I stood and I threw my dirt and said my goodbyes, except that they didn’t feel real. I said goodbye to her as she drew her last breath in my arms and I said goodbye to her then, but I wasn’t really saying goodbye, whether it was because I didn’t want to or just couldn’t. There was too much of her everywhere, too much of her existed in my own mind. How could I say goodbye when she was so clearly right there, and yet so definitively gone? 16

Later on in bed I lay alone. For hours and hours I lay there alone and was tired. I did not sleep because the side of the bed opposite mine was empty. Dawn came around the bend and nothing seemed magical about its filthy light or my filthy shades. I thought that if Chris hadn’t wanted to live so bad, that if I didn’t at least owe her my sticking around, I might’ve just died of a sheer lack of interest in living. 17

Dawn reached its peak and for one moment that was far too short, I was not alone. I didn’t see her, not in any physical sense of the word, but she was there. It’s possible that I wanted her to be there so badly that it was a manifestation, but I’ve never been able to lie to myself and I won’t start now. I felt her, and for an instant I smelled that shampoo of hers which had become so familiar to me from nights of sharing a pillow. At first I thought it was the pillowcase, but that wasn’t right, because I had changed the sheets… the night I didn’t have to sleep in the hospital with her anymore.18

I felt her there and I cried, but not nearly the same way I cried at the funeral home. I cried from that same sense of raw pain and loss, I cried because she was gone and I would never have her back, not the same way. I cried because I loved her like I hadn’t ever loved anything. Mostly, though, I think I cried because for that instant she was there to tell me that she wasn’t in pain anymore. I cried because I was relieved that wherever she was, there was no cancer. I cried because I wanted to be there with her. I wanted her to be able to save a seat for me, and I cried because I was sure that was beyond her control. 19

She was gone after so short a time, but she was there and I don’t care what anybody would say, because I haven’t told anyone. I visit the grave more often than I probably should, but I would give everything for another moment like that one, and maybe just a chance to see her face. Some people think that if you don’t let the dead go, they will never rest in peace. But once they’re gone, what, besides us, is there to justify their existence in the first place? To let go is a sin, because to let go is to let someone fade away, just like a handprint on a chilly day.20