Grief, Once Removed

Late Winter

You’ll find out it’s terminal on your birthday, the stomach aches your husband’s father has been having since Christmas. You hug your husband in a strange town you’re visiting for the weekend, watch him closely on the drive home. 

Spring

Your spouse is gone now to see his dying father, so you must watch him from afar, and at a slant really, because your eyes need to be on your children so they don’t die, too. It’s a joke, you tell yourself. It’s okay to joke.

As you are sitting in a classroom, waiting for text updates on the latest chemo, a student tells you about horses. Although horses evolved for the express purpose of speed, their legs are similar to human fingers. All cartilage and tendons, no real muscle. The student scissors his middle and index fingers across the grain of the desk. Someday your children will have fingers like this, almost a man’s. And because they’re designed for speed, their bones need to be light, he tells you. So when a horse’s leg is about to break, it bends first, then shatters. He lets the back of his wrist fall to the table, his palm and fingers contorted and exposed. 

A thousand pieces, near impossible to fix, and if it is fixed, it’s fixed in the exact shape that it formed just before breaking. You imagine living atop a capital J. But wait, there’s more, he tells you. The soft tissue that connects the hooves to their feet gets a new added burden and becomes inflamed, but has nowhere to swell, it's encased in a hoof-y prison which causes the horse excruciating and long lasting pain.

You don’t want to be rude, but you turn your phone over on the desk. Chemo not working.

On a call, you note your husband has bought a sherbet sweatshirt. A strange choice of color. And you notice the strange center of the passion flower outside your children’s window, like a propeller hat. You’re mildly ashamed because on the phone call you can’t stop looking at them, the sweatshirt, the flower’s center, back-and-forth, just like a propeller.

When he is back, your husband develops tinnitus, insists on a fan in your room to drown out the swelling static from inside with more static from outside. It’s so loud you don’t hear your children’s cries in the night, but he still will. A war of internal dirge and external pibroch. And you sleep on. 

Summer

A Brazilian friend once told you how much she detests terms like “second cousin” and “cousin once removed”. They’re all cousins. As a kid, you spent hours creating and poring over family trees, labeling each by its distance to you.

Over the phone, his father asks you to write him a poem for his memorial service. His voice is high like faucet water. You begin reading Maxine Kumin’s horse poems compulsively thinking the answer to your poem—his poem— is in the horse. Maxine Kumin knew something of New England summers and loneliness but as it turns out, the answer is not in the horse. And when you try to write about him, you write about his son—your husband—instead. He is so still these days. An easy portrait.

You drive to say goodbye, bring your two older kids. His father has lost 70 pounds and his illness precedes him in everything like a welcome mat. His scapulae are climbing crimps and each time you hug, the instinct is to grip harder than is safe. 

The kids’ fingers are circling for the right Lego piece, a loud backdrop to your muted death-talk. You are trying to determine whether or not to cancel your summer holiday. Your husband’s father tells you to go. Your husband extends his hand to his mother, promises to return for her, too. You’re a good son, she says. 

And then his mother promises his father that she will be there up until and when he dies, talking to him or reading to him, they say you can often still hear, even when unconscious. His eyelids are heavy with the relief of that promise. And you wonder what relief will look like for the living. And then the two of them are talking back and forth, like a poem, and the rest of you, the readers. 

The house fills with half-drunk tea cups. 

While your husband is in his father’s office seeing to the piles of technology his mother will have to dispose of, his father asks your eight-year-old to come to his cotside, where he is curled like a shrimp. It’s all so weird isn’t it? But I’m so glad you came. I love you. Your son guards his chest with a pile of books from his grandparents’ attic, but he puts them down at I love you and his grandfather puts his hand on the book, a swearing in on Dr Seuss. Then, and this is when your heart slips, your son puts his hand on top of his grandfather’s, like a stack of Saturday morning pancakes. And you are relieved and devastated that your husband hasn’t witnessed this.

Late Summer

And then in the last week of his father’s life, when your husband talks to his brother on the phone from an Airbnb where the summer holiday has decided to go on, a bat will fly in the window of the Wi-Fi room, and he and a friend will freak the fuck out and turn out all the remaining lights, moving through darkness in crouched positions, closing doors like men in battle or mishandled marionettes. And he will burst in your bedroom ablaze with the story and you will know that part of surviving grief is batshit interruptions.

The two of you are eating tuna, the afternoon breeze whipping in and slamming shutters, making tuna salad strangely dramatic, when his dad’s name appears on the phone. But it is his mother’s voice when he answers. This is going to be disturbing but it’s your father, he’s called the cops to say he’s been held against his will since February. His father is put on and these words, incoherent, hysterical, a highway accident in their delivery, are the last words his father will say to him. A psychotic break as final flourish.

Can you come talk to me? You climb out of the pool, leave a child with floaties on and he tells you at the hydrangea bush that his father is no longer conscious but may have smiled when his mother held him up to his father’s ear. The bush is blue and bulbous, the sky is blue and searing.

He says to you, so maybe yesterday with the call to the police, it was his last rage. The catch in his voice like a broken door. And you can’t help but think about Dylan Thomas whom you’ve been thinking about a lot recently, realizing when you looked at the scansion and considered the villanelle as form all those years you hadn’t a clue what the fuck was going on in that poem, really. 

Your husband gets there with twelve hours to spare. But he is out walking with his brother when it happens— it’s described to you as a small noise, his mother walked over to see and listened for a long time to her husband’s silence. Having birthed four brothers, you find it weird to think of two brothers crossing a threshold quietly, but he tells you that’s what happened when they returned from their walk. And your third child is complaining of hunger as you’re having this conversation, having a fit on the landing about starvation. And you want to shout about his grandfather literally starving to death, but you fall short of that heinous crime. Just. 

Autumn

Your husband is back, or a version of him is back. He is back physically.

In bed, you brush crumbs away with your foot. Undoubtedly left by one of your children, but you’re reminded of your father-in-law, who rarely used a sponge, baked often, swept crumbs off the counter from one hand to another, like prayer. You wonder how much time in a marriage bed is spent thinking about other people? And what point in the marriage do the dead enter, stage left?

The morning is the worst, he will tell you, when his brain again tries to place the unplaceable. Rewiring itself again and again and again to establish this new world order.

Your eldest will come to you crying because his head aches so badly it won’t stop. I don’t know what to do. And you will bring a cold washcloth to cover his eyes, pinch the webbing between finger and thumb, send your youngest on whispered missions. And on the ground of his small room, you will become an earthquake, because this child is the most like your husband and like his father. Pale, predictable, deeply generous.

It’s been a month and your husband wakes you to tell you his dream of his father, returned and baking bread in a kitchen, some kitchen. When he tells his father he wants him to stay, he sees his face fall and the dream ends. Your husband pulls his legs to him in pain, like a comma. And you realize the grief is only starting.

In the morning, he is still with his dream. Children are circling like rip tides and at a pause you assume transition, you say milk is running low—add that to your list and his eyes make you want to claw the words back into your unholy mouth. 

For the sixteenth time, as you’re discussing your trip to see grandma for grandpa’s memorial service, your two-year-old asks at dinner “and we’ll see Papa Tim?” And a bubble of laughter almost spoils out and you turn your contorted face from your husband so he doesn’t see. Because how ridiculous to just be gone. And to ask is to remember, and what will it mean when this child stops asking, stops wondering? A two-year-old memory has only so long a tail. 

But then the tragicomic chorus refrain of he’s dead! from his three older brothers. 

On the flight to his father’s memorial, there will be many spills. And you hear the hard crust in your husband’s response like a warning, and so reach across the aisle, and he will hold your hand, bring it to his head like a mixed up dance of benedictions.

When your husband lowers the urn into a small hole in the ground by a mound of earth, with his brother, your youngest child pushes at his bum in the air. The urn almost slips. It was so heavy, your husband will say later on the car ride home from the cemetery. Do you think it’s all the metal he had in him? His hip?  They take all that out, says his aunt, from the backseat holding your child on her lap. It’s much heavier than you’d think, isn’t it?  

This really sucks, he and his brother say to you, repeatedly, on the day of burial. Two literate men reduced to their eighth-grade selves. 

After the service, there are wild turkeys running around, the kids are collecting feathers. Light as a feather! your four-year-old screams, throwing one in the air and watching it drift. Stiff as a board, you mutter. Huh? says your eight-year-old. They are rewilding Cambridge, says the pastor. Rewilding was a horse put down for breaking a cannon bone in his near fore-leg and crashed hard, nearly entombing himself in the earth at the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes. The horse got up and “flapped hopelessly” toward the finish line. Rewilding stopped again and for the last time 50 meters from the winning post. Turkeys took over the traffic island in Harvard Square last year, he continues. I liked your poem.  Thanks, you say, It was hard to write it. The words are stiff and the emphasis is on all the ungrateful syllables you don’t really mean.

You keep a list on your phone of recommendations. The Body Keeps the Score, Headspace Grief Meditation, Grief Works. You wait to share it with your husband, but when? Like a magpie made nervous by her gatherings.

You adopt a pet without consulting your husband because he’s thick in grief and you intend to mason the house without disturbing him. But the pet, a bird, disturbs him. It is loud and raucous and full of preening. But in the same way your husband filled a shoebox with shavings and carried a pet rat by train to and from three veterinary appointments because her sluggishness concerned him, he will choose to take care of this bird, too.

And tomorrow, there will be lunch boxes to be packed, buses to be met, instruments to be practiced, appointments to be made and kept, meals to be cooked, laundry to be folded, hands to be held, pets to be fed, meters to be checked, finances to be squared, jobs to be reconsidered, jam to be spread, beds to be remade. And you and he will do this together. That is your promise to him, his to you. And you will say many things you want to say and don’t want to say, all of it you’ll say, except the unsayable. You will breathe that, shallow at times, then big huge gulps of unsayable air.