Wake up.
Wake up.
Wake up.
Over the past thirty-two years, the level of challenge this seemingly simple task presents has varied widely, but today is nothing like any other day, because there is nothing quite like trying to wake up after spending six hours not-actually-sleeping, curled up in the most uncomfortable chair in the living room. This chair is safe, though. Because it’s so uncomfortable, no one ever sits here. You never sit here. Your friends never sit here. He never sits here.
Sat here.
He never sat here.
He never sat here, and so it is safe, and you will not violate its sanctity with your new, devastating knowledge. Obviously you could not sleep in your bed, the bed you two have shared for nine years, which you should have replaced four years ago, whose mattress you never flip and thus is permanently molded to the shapes of your two bodies, and how could you ever sleep there alone? The couch is almost more inviolable than the bed, the countless hours you two spent here, entwined together and awake, working, reading, watching television. You cannot sleep on the couch. It’s probably time to throw out the couch.
So instead you slept in a straight-back chair, curled up between the arms with your head wedged against the weird wing these chairs always seem to have, and now it’s time to wake up, and you wonder how it’s possible to wake up when you haven’t slept for what feels like five years.
In the kitchen, you consider several options: coffee, tea, breakfast. You do this out of habit, but on further consideration have no idea what it feels like to need coffee, tea, or breakfast.
It is eight o’clock, and you wonder if it’s too early still to start making phone calls. It’s Saturday, so people are home, but perhaps they aren’t ready yet. Perhaps they need something you know from your previous life that people like to have before receiving phone calls, but can’t remember what exactly. What was it? Coffee. Yes. People like coffee before phone calls.
Which leaves you an hour. You have an hour to fill with whatever joyous tasks you choose before making phone calls.
Except that the phone rings, because the doctor at the hospital who has known your parents since you were knee-high to a grasshopper – so he says; he really, honestly says that; who the fuck was ever knee-high to a grasshopper? – knows a family who will give a fitting tribute and service to your husband and will do their best to ease you through your first steps into widowhood. Family-owned-and-operated Jenkins Funeral Home is calling you at eight o’clock in the morning, before anyone in the entire world has had any coffee.
What the fuck.
You can almost see him checking off the list of almost-but-not-quite trite truisms as he introduces himself, but you also quickly understand why some people are paid to do this, and some people should be paid not to do this, because even though you have never met him, you suddenly feel as though no one in the world has ever loved or understood you quite as Aaron Jenkins does at just this moment, and you burst into tears.
He waits. That’s part of his job. The waiting. He knows how to do that. He asks you questions about the type of service you’d like, and whether you wish for a traditional burial or cremation, and you answer with silence at the astonishment that someone could spend his days asking these kinds of questions, and what kind of person is Aaron Jenkins anyway, is he some kind of sick shit who gets off on asking people if they want their husbands burnt to ash?
Don’t say that aloud. Cremation. A quiet, simple service for close friends and family only. Let his mother talk. Seriously, the cheapest, simplest service you offer, because reverence for the dead was like his own private joke. Tuesday. Perfect. Your needs are so simple, they don’t even need you to come in.
Nine o’clock. Time to make phone calls.
After the third call you stop to make a script, after stumbling through sharing this new information three times, being overwhelmed by the questions you would have assumed people would be too embarrassed or ashamed to ask. The script is quick and gets to the point swiftly without allowing time for small talk that might lead the recipient to believe this is some sort of social call or lunch invite. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure script with options for, “Oh my god, what happened?” and “Oh, sweetie, how are you doing?” and “What can I do?” and “When’s the service?” You might later want to script an answer for, “Would you like me to bring over a casserole?” and the answer should be “no.”
After the fifth phone call, to your sister, who never liked him, you discover that you don’t have to make these calls yourself. Your sister has informed you of this fact, and it is her opinion that having to explain your husband’s sudden death to everyone you’ve ever met is a terrible Saturday morning activity, and someone who never liked him might be better suited to make those calls. She’s on her way over, but you continue calling until she arrives.
Some people will wonder silently to themselves how you knew to call them, but you simply figured that everyone listed in his cell phone would probably be interested to know. Your sister hasn’t arrived yet when you get to the entry that might be the biggest reason she never liked him. You’re not certain, but you suspect Caitlyn is the woman your husband has been cheating on you with for nine months. Your sister is certain, of course; you’re just suspicious. It doesn’t really bother you that much. He never stopped loving you; he never even seemed to stop needing you. He just needed a distraction you didn’t provide, and you only wish he would have told you. Now you call Caitlyn to tell her that her lover died at thirty-seven of a stroke yesterday, and you are astounded by the anger that overcomes you when you hear the tears she cries, the tears of a lover who’s known your husband less than a year and who has never had the intimate bonding experience of helping him wipe his ass when he broke both his arms three years ago. Before you can tell her what a worthless, home-wrecking whore she is, you quickly rattle off the pertinent funeral information and hang up without letting these thoughts assaulting you turn into words you’d never imagined before.
Your sister arrives and takes away what you’d come to appreciate as a meaningless, mindless task. Once the script was written, telling people about your dead husband became an excellent distraction from your dead husband.
Two phone calls in, she suggests that maybe you should take a shower. You run the hot water and step in, fully clothed, and curl up on the floor of the bathtub until the shower runs cold. Your sister finds you, shivering and soaking in the tub and says nothing as she shuts the water off and lifts you bodily – with strength you never knew she had – to your feet so she can take your wet clothes and towel you off. You are numb and silent until you realize she’s trying to direct you to your bed. You collapse in a wet, naked pile on the hallway floor and wail that you can’t go in there, not yet, he can’t be dead in there yet, he’s still alive in that room, and you can’t go in there, you can’t make him dead there. Your tantrum surprises you, but the thought of crossing the threshold to your shared bedroom and infecting it is much more terrible than the thought of your sister seeing you crazy and naked, and so you lie there crying, until she returns with clean, dry clothes, dresses you, and takes you back downstairs.
You take your place in the uncomfortable chair, and your sister watches you. You know she’s wondering why you’d choose to sit there, and when she gives up and turns back to her phone calls, you know she still doesn’t understand.
You have no idea how it is that time passes while you sit in that chair. You know time must have passed, because suddenly people are in your house, and they are bringing you coffee, which you still don’t want, and water, which you drink and find that it quenches a thirst you don’t remember having, and casseroles. You haven’t eaten since the hospital, and you’re supposed to be hungry, and food is supposed to bring you comfort, but you cannot imagine ever eating again. The mere presence of casseroles does not make you want to eat them. Your sister whispers in your ear that if you don’t at least take a few bites, the more doting of your mother’s friends are likely to shove an entire casserole down your throat, and so you do.
It’s amazing how unchanged you feel after four forkfuls of casserole. They neither invigorate nor sooth your nonexistent hunger, and you imagine your inert body will do absolutely nothing with them, and they will emerge tomorrow morning unchanged, four pristine bites of casserole.
The rays of light streaming in through the windows have shifted from one side of the house to the other, so you assume evening is approaching. You look outside and wonder how it is that the weather can be so beautiful when your husband is dead. How can there be a cloudless sky and a gentle breeze and seventy-six degrees with low humidity and the tinkling sounds of children’s laughter in a park nearby and couples chatting as they walk by on the street and people riding bikes and flying kites when your husband is dead? How is it that the entire planet didn’t stop its rotation the moment that he died, how is it that you didn’t die yourself as the EMTs pronounced, how is it that every aspect of your whole world has been irreparably shattered and reshaped, but the world as a whole remains unchanged? You stare out the window and wonder how it is that they can not know that you’re dying in here.
Your sister kneels beside you, curls her arms around you, and strokes your hair, murmuring to you. She is probably saying that she’s called everyone, she’s kicked everyone out, she’s put all the goddamn casseroles in the freezer, and not to be alarmed if you suddenly receive a lot of flowers tomorrow. She tells you she can stay as long as you need her, and she hands you a cigarette case full of hand-rolled joints.
You wouldn’t think a month’s supply of weed would be the kindest gift you could ever imagine under these circumstances, but it is, and you sob into her t-shirt until you are both soaked with tears and snot.
Somehow you manage to convince her that you will survive the night alone. She leaves, and you close the door behind her, your hand remaining on the door knob for several minutes while you take in the sensation of being newly, completely alone, in the house where you live alone.
You light a joint and decide to take a tour, a survey of your new alone house. You walk the halls and let the memories punch you in the gut, thinking of every first, every last, every fight, every touch, every laugh, every thing. You don’t know how it is possible to remember eleven years of your life in an hour of stumbling blindly around your house, but somehow you’ve just experienced every bit of it just now, a high speed film that slowed to an agonizing pace to show you the end:
You did not kiss him goodbye before you left for work.
You did not tell him you loved him.
You did not cherish every fraction of every second you had left with him, which is insane, because how did you not know that he was going to die in seven hours? How could such an impending tragedy not have sent tremors to every part of your body? It is incomprehensible to you that you woke up on Friday, had coffee and breakfast with your husband, went to work, and came home a widow.
How do you go to work and come home a widow?
You wonder how you will ever survive like this. You concede that you have already survived an entire twenty-four-hour period like this, and you have no idea whether tomorrow will be easier or harder (a hint: harder), but you suspect you will survive tomorrow as well. You will probably survive many thousands of days as a widow. This is inconceivable now and, frankly, will still be inconceivable thousands of days from now.
You take what you estimate to be a four-shot swig of whiskey straight from the bottle and sit down in your uncomfortable chair, letting a kind of weariness you’ve never experienced before take over you. The exhaustion of a sleepless night mixes with the desperation of new loneliness mixes with a kind of hopelessness you always thought yourself too practical to possess, and you collapse, deflate further into your chair. You stare at your husband’s couch and see his ghost, his memory smiling back at you. You hear his voice in your head, not yet knowing now how the remembered sound will grow muddied and inaccurate over the years. You watch his face, not yet understanding that someday you will be unable to imagine him, and you will only know the face you see in pictures.
You smoke another joint, ashing on the floor because you don’t care (though you used to care very much), and wait as something that combines the best traits of a hard night’s sleep and a coma envelops you. Your sleep tonight is mercifully dreamless, though the nightmares are on the horizon. Your last waking thought before you succumb is the realization that you will wake tomorrow and will have forgotten that your husband is dead.
Wake up.
Wake up
Wake up. |
hopeful
annoyed
sad
arctic
petty