MishMath

As the fifth anniversary of my wife's death looms, surely I must have learned something.

[From Bob Seger, "Against The Wind"]
Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

My wife did yoga. I don't believe she ever went to a studio or had a teacher, nor do I know when or why she started. I just know that she had DVDs from Shiva Rea, and she'd sweat and breathe and talk about how hard it was. It didn't look that hard, especially not when Shiva did it, but I was usually off to my karate dojo, where people kept trying to punch me in the face, so I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about yoga.

That was the early 2000s. I know she continued her practice, on and off, but the next time I remember it entering my consciousness was in 2018. We were in our new house, and she had located her DVDs and started doing the yoga again (because staying healthy was important to her). I continued not to pay much attention until she announced, one day, that she couldn't do as much yoga as she used to. (There had been a period of months when she hid her ever-worsening symptoms from me, but by then I was aware, so I understood the implication: she was deteriorating.)

Like all the horrible shit in 2018, things moved fast: the stamina gave way, and then the strength. First she couldn't hold the poses as long, then not at all. The yoga mat idled in the closet. We continued to walk (staying healthy was important to her!), but it wasn't long before we were walking slower, and then shorter, and then not at all. Her sneakers languished in the closet.

*     *     *

We have a lot of windows in our house, plus some shoji doors. Every night before bed we would close everything up. I don't know when it started, but it became a race: who could close the most windows and doors the fastest. At some point, because I'm an idiot, I started to do a sort of high-stepping, tiptoeing run, the way a cartoon criminal sneaks, only fast. The benefit was two-fold: 1) it was fun, and 2) it made her laugh so hard she couldn't run, so I would win. Handily.

Of course, as she lost her ability to walk as fast or as far, she also lost her ability to race with me around the house. I continued my weird running, for her entertainment, but she soon lost the ability to laugh at my antics. It must be hard to watch someone run when you can barely walk.

I know it's hard to watch someone who can barely walk when you can run.

*     *     *

We were Patriots fans (from before the Brady era, so I won't apologize), and we were fortunate to be together for their many years of success. She was the bigger fan: she bought a Brady jersey, and she listened to hours of Patriots sports talk (it was hard to reconcile the smartest person I knew listening to the dumbest shit on air). She would become very animated and vocal watching the games. One of her quirks—when any Patriot ball-carrier would get tackled—was yelling at the screen, "Hold the ball! Hold the ball!" If you didn't love her to death, it might have been annoying; it was fine with me.

*     *     *

[From Adele, "When We Were Young"]
Let me photograph you in this light
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were

Before I tie this all together, a couple of observations. First, under the umbrella of grief, I have found that there are no happy memories, only memories of happiness (I alluded to this in You Can't Go Back). Sad/awful memories are sad and awful, but so are happy memories, because they're gone and I want them back and she's gone and I want her back. Second, flashbacks don't happen like they do in movies. I can't replay 30-second memories of important moments or conversations. I can barely conjure her face in my mind's eye; when I try, what I usually get is an image of one of the photographs I have of her, not her. Strange.

However, there's an exception; I can't replay memories at will, but they sometimes arrive unbidden, if there's a trigger. She died 3 days after the Super Bowl. When football season came around that fall, I put a game on. I don't know how long I watched before one of the Patriot RBs (James White, I think) broke for a long run. In the moment the defender made contact, she was suddenly next to me. "Hold the ball! Hold the ball!" I turned the game off—it was too painful to bear. I had a similar experience while closing the windows one night. I don't know what came over me, but I started to run, by myself, high-steppin' like a big dope. After about four steps, there she was, laughing uncontrollably. I stopped running. Memories of happiness are not happy memories.

I no longer watch football. As I close the windows each night, I take my time. These shockingly real vignettes are not happy, they're incredibly painful. If they were happy, I'd watch all the football, and I'd run around my house every night, so I could conjure those visions of her. But those moments are like an emotional flashbulb, dazzling for an instant, then gone. Vivid but illusory, leaving behind a greater sense of darkness. Just another reminder that she is gone.

[From Jamie Anderson]
Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.

*     *     *

The one I can't completely escape is walking. I mentioned an aspect of this in Farewell. What I didn't talk about was the moment, during my first solo walk after she died, when I "felt" her hand slide into mine. Like the others, it came and went quickly, leaving a horrible void in its wake and me quietly sobbing the rest of the way home. Strangely, unlike her face, I can picture her hands.

Unfortunately, when I picture those hands, the ones that held mine countless times, I can't help but remember the cold, waxen hands that lay in the hospice bed. (In the days and hours that precede a leisurely death, the body gradually sustains less and less of itself. The extremities lose blood flow first, as the coldness creeps inward, before the lights go out forever.) And this triggers another memory.

I've mentioned before that, for many years, I wore her ring when she couldn't. Around day 9 or 10 of her 13 days in hospice, in a moment when she was "awake" (she wasn't asleep, but her bloodstream was flooded with opioids, and she was only days away from death, so she was, at best, semi-conscious), I told her I was going to take her ring. She whispered, "Not yet." This may not seem like much, but she had turned very much inside herself weeks earlier. In all that time, there had been almost no expressions of emotion—or even acknowledgement of my presence—so what those two words told me was, "I love you, and I loved our marriage, and it still matters to me, and it isn't over until I am." (Also, the "yet" tells me that, even in her dramatically reduced capacity, she still understood that it was only a matter of time, that she was just waiting for death, and that I would eventually have to take her ring from her.)

I don't have a clear memory of when I finally did it, which I find odd, since that was the only time I ever had to remove it from her finger myself (she would always hand it to me prior to scans and surgeries). It was probably in the evening on February 4th, the first day she didn't try to escape the bed—the first day that she never woke. I believe I took it when it became obvious that she never would.

*     *     *

I wore our wedding rings for most of the next 3 1/2 years. I took them off in September, 2022, because, for various reasons, I decided it was time. On January 23, 2024, I put them back on. Five years seems like a milestone worth noting, and I've been thinking about all the horrible events as their fifth-year anniversaries roll through. So I chose to memorialize the final two weeks of our marriage, with the rings, starting on the 23rd—the last day she lived with me at home—and concluding on February 6, which marked the end of her, our marriage, and my life as I knew it.

[from I Will Always Love You, by Whitney Houston]
I'll think of you every step of the way.

*     *     *

It is February 6, 2024 as I type this. As I often do, last night I awoke in the middle of the night. When I checked my phone, the time was 12:48am, which is the time of death on her death certificate (I swear I'm not making this up; honestly, I wish it weren't true). [Note: That is not the time she actually died; no one knows precisely when that happened. The nurse had done a routine check, discovered that all systems were not "go", and woke me. We went and stood by the bed; when she looked up at the clock and declared my wife deceased, it was 12:48am.] Nonetheless, when I looked at my phone this morning, I sort of laughed and said, "Oh, Jesus Christ," into the darkness. I did not get back to sleep.

I'd like to finish this and post it today, so I can do some other things. I'm going to yoga, which I started—much to my surprise—almost three years ago. It remains the only real pleasure in my life, at least for now. I'm going to swing by the mausoleum to visit the majority of her ashes (if you don't know what that means, you haven't read You Can't Go Back), but that won't take long. I learned long ago that there is no comfort to be found there. From the beginning, from the moment the nurse and I stood looking down at her, it has seemed surreal that she is gone. It is no less so today.

[Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame]
Part of the journey is the end.

*     *     *

One thing that has changed in five years is the information that I share. In In Sickness And In Death, I said "much… needs to be skimmed over for the sake of readability," but then I wrote Countdown and laid it ALL out. For a long time, I shared the letter my wife wrote to me with no one, and when I finally did, I'd let them read it on paper then take it back when they finished. As time passed, however, keeping it to myself seemed less and less important. I ended Countdown with an excerpt from it, and I'm going to do the same here. It seems fitting to let her speak again, on our "anniversary":

If Einstein was right about time not being linear, then this is what I imagine: At any moment in your dimension, your timeline, I'm both alive and dead and not born in other dimensions/timelines. I imagine there are infinite timelines and in some of them you and I are still saying to each other: life is perfect.

Back here, in this dimension, in this timeline: my love for you isn't gone. It existed, and nothing can change that past. Your love for me existed. And nothing can change that past. But your future is all about you. Eventually, you'll get used to my not being with you. Remember that. Eventually you will.

OK, my love. Now I have to go put the rings away. I'm sure I'll see you around.