June 30, 1979

P

It's almost dark. The kids are gone to Aunt Vinnie's. I'm sitting at the little table in the front hall, the thing you used to call the escritoire, the writing desk you inherited from your mother. Through the windows on either side of the door I'm watching the last of the day go. There's a little gray left, a little sulfurous orange, around the rims of the trees. But the night is almost upon us. I can hear the cicadas, that torrent of summer insect noise, through the shut door. Once upon a time we'd be sitting out on the front porch drinking a salty dog in the tumblers with the coin pattern, on a summer Saturday night such as this. But you're gone now.

You're gone. I know that. Every cell, capillary, every inch of skin on my body hums with that knowledge, howls with it. It's as if a knife has gone through this house and through me, slicing your presence away, gouging it out, then coming back to scrape away any little lingering trace of you that remains. Scraping and cutting and gouging and tearing.

There are moments when the fact of your absence is so obscenely, piercingly vivid that tears wouldn't do justice to it, screams would be banal. I was standing in our bedroom yesterday morning, looking at the plastic cup with the long straw on your bedside table that you'd been drinking out of near the end, and a pair of those long support stockings you had to wear draped over a chair. Your blue terrycloth slippers were on the floor next to it, the ones with the roses on the toes. And I simply stood there and took it in, and the horror of your absence, coupled with the awful vividness of your remembered presence, crescendoed, thrummed in my ears until it seemed that my heart must stop, my eyes must stop seeing, the light must go out. But none of that happened. I continued to see. My heart continued to lope along. The light continued to come through the window. I heard birds from outside. I picked up a belt I'd let fall on the floor the night before and hung it on the doorknob of the closet. I left the room. So evidently you don't die of this. Not the way you'd think you would, not the way you want to.

And then there are moments, half hours, whole hours, when your death is a numb sad abstraction, both real and unreal, felt but somehow kept at a distance. During those times I fill out the paperwork, begin the cleaning out of your things. During those times I see and talk to people. Sometimes I even laugh. I laughed today when I rode with Peter to school to get a folder from the office and we saw that hippie Jesus man, the philosophy grad student that crazy elderly lady in the cafeteria used to call a "sissy." He was pedal-pushing his way across the quad, standing up on his bicycle, his hair streaming behind him, with that embroidered bag slung over one shoulder. And Peter said something that reminded me of how you climbed in that second floor window at Dorcas's when she was locked out and how you came out the front door and mistakenly let it shut behind you, and had to climb in again. I laughed then too. Do I need to say that it felt in some sense like a betrayal. And yet I was glad to laugh.

And then the choking vividness of it comes back. Then it recedes. Then it comes back. Anything can start it; its comings and goings occur according to no perceptible schedule, are brought on by no clear stimulus. Turning on the faucet in the bathroom can start it. So can seeing your things in the cabinet, your bottle of Witch Hazel, for instance. So can anything--the sun on the metal rim of the garage door in the morning. Your geraniums. Your handwriting on the calendar by the refrigerator, the one with the sunflowers. You were penciling in dates well into the fall: Laura's opening, the beach. "Start Peggy's route." That's what you wrote on September 16. I have no idea what it means but it meant something to you and now I shall never know. None of us shall.

And of course I'm remembering you when I sleep, which isn't much. Then it almost seems that I forget what has happened and have to remember again when I wake up. And I'm remembering you when I'm awake. I'm remembering awful things, the last weeks, the last days, when you couldn't stay at home anymore though you wanted to. Because we couldn't keep up with keeping you clean. And keeping the sheets clean. And the bleeding. And how you swatted at one of the children when they were sitting on the edge of the bed, how you made a feeble motion with one of your hands, a gesture of barely sentient anger, impatience, blind rage, and the children and I looked at each other and began to cry. And how you looked at me when they took you. I don't know whether you could really see me or not by then, I don't know whether you saw anything during the last few days. You had your eyes open at the last, and when you died. I remember that: how quickly it came in the end, after all those months of slow decline, bumpy downward progress. A ragged breath, then silence. Then silence. One second you're there with me, the next you're gone, gone with a completeness I never could have imagined, though I did try to imagine it beforehand. I could never have really imagined it beforehand.

And I'm remembering things about you I don't even remember ever remembering, things that never had even the status of memories in my mind. And yet here they are, vivid and precise, released from some dark corner of my brain, rushing forwards into consciousness along some synapse that has begun, for whatever reason, transmitting signals after a long period of dormancy. They're like messages from outer space, in a way: inexplicable, uncanny, without precedent. A day in summer, soon after we met, for instance. In the grass below the willows behind the dorms, at college. I was braiding your hair, badly but I was braiding it, because my sisters used to let me braid their hair. It surprised you and amused you that I could do this. Your head was on my knee, turned to the side; you were reading The Education of Henry Adams, the part about the Virgin and the dynamo, which annoyed you. And as I was braiding I saw your face from an angle I hadn't seen it from before. I saw a fullness underneath the chin I hadn't noticed before, I saw a mist of nearly vanished freckles on the bridge of your cheeks, a residue from childhood. I saw the whitened strip of skin where the red of your lips merged into your cheek. I saw that your eyes, making a succession of tiny jerks as they followed the print across the page, were a darker blue than I had thought, a lustrous cerulean. And I thought, with that startled wonderment that comes over you when the unexpected reality of some other person's presence strikes you, truly makes itself felt: I don't know her, and yet I do. I don't know her. Who is she? Who is she? I don't really know.

Did I ever? Did I ever know you? Sometimes it seems to me that I never did, not wholly--I only knew a tiny quadrant, like the small part of the moon that is edged with light. And now we shall not know each other anymore, we shall not know each other any better. The time of knowing what we had not known before about each other, the time of discovery, of seeing what we had not seen, is over. For you and for me.

Those years we had: what were they? What are they now? Now that they are over, they are a single long moment to me, something that can flash before my eyes in a single instant. All those years, all those apparently endless random moments of sudden glances at each other over coffee in the morning and bickering and seeing the shadow of your head on the pillow when I woke in the night and catching sight of your face in the kitchen window over the sink as I backed out of the driveway and the lovemaking and the sound of you running water in the bathroom and nursing the children and looking for the leash for the dog in the hall closet and picking up a fork that dropped on the floor while you are washing dishes--all of that broad swath of time that was our life together is now reduced to a sequence of memories that can be compassed in a single moment. All done. All over. All memory now. All nothing, really. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

And yet everything to me. Everything.

Everything.

Farewell, Patricia, goodbye. Goodbye.

D