Grief Goodbye

Grief Goodbye

 

Doug is home and he is leaving.  Leaving for good.  I keep remembering when I would leave him, during graduate school, for ten weeks at a time.  The days before the leaving my breath would catch in my throat at the thought of parting from this man I loved, this man who was my whole world.  He has supported me so, for many years. 

At the airport I would sob through security, forcing myself not to turn back around and run to him as I waited for the plane.  I am terrible at goodbyes.  I always chocked it up to the many moves I made as a child, the goodbyes I was forced into by my father’s promotions at work.  But now as I contemplate this final goodbye to this man I’ve grown into adulthood with, as I say goodbye to knowing him in the way I have for eight years of life—a long enough time to forget there is anything else—I wonder if my painful goodbyes have more to do with my own lack of self, than missing another.

Who am I without this man who has defined my life?  Who am I without his presence in the morning, his ears to hear my thoughts, his stories to fill my evenings?  This is a question I delve into while he is away on business for a month at the beginning of this talk of “divorce.”  It is a trial period to be sure we are sure.  While he is gone I ask myself the question over and over again, “who am I?”

 I am frightened, not so much by the answer as by the not knowing, the emptiness.  The whispered response in my head, “I don’t know…”

I am frightened by the vacant-ness of waking up morning after morning alone.  The lonely sound of my feet on the floor through the house of no concern to anyone but me, the sight of a mouse under my bed and no one to share the absurdity of it with but my cat, who finds it exciting. No one to help with dishes, or lawns, gardens or dirty floors.

 

But did he ever help with this while he was here? I’m not sure anymore, our relationship, now that it is ending, has become a blank space in my memory.  Long ago fights visit me in the darkness, merging with a dream-world.  Did he say that? Did I do that, no it can’t be, I don’t remember it that way.  Did it happen at all? Does it matter? 

It is the week of his return when I get the phone call from Boston which tells me he is really leaving.  The conversation we have started is going quickly from this slippery word “separated” to the hard consonant of “divorce.”

I knew it was possible that he would leave Colorado, where we moved because I longed to be back amidst the rock and sky of the west.  I knew this was a possibility but I imagined we’d start out as friendly neighbors, then slowly shift to long-distance friends.  “Maybe, even,” I thought, “we could live together as roommates.”

On the phone he says,

“I’m moving back to Boston. I’ll leave when the lease is up.”

“I know.” I reply, because I do somehow. 

1,000’s of miles of wire phone cord  between us and I feel our separation more final than any paperwork could signify.  He is leaving in February, six months from now, and then there is a friend who needs a roommate in September, six months earlier than the end of the lease, but it makes sense and I understand what it feels like to live in a place you no longer want to inhabit, so I tell him, “Go.”

 

During the phone conversation it all seems rational, bearable.  Somehow it seemed like all this “understanding” and “rationale” that we had brought to the situation, all the analysis, and “sense,” and logic all the of course’s:

 

“Of course you should move, you aren’t happy here.”

“Of course, we aren’t in love.”

“Of course, you want to be in the city.”

“Of course, I’ll be fine.”

 

would have prepared me, or stopped me, or prevented me from grief.  I thought actually that all the tears and screaming at myself, at each other, at our parents—who just didn’t understand how two people who are so lovely could possibly want to get a divorce—I thought all that was the grief.  I even said it, to myself in the mirror, to friends at the bar, to strangers I met at coffee shops,

“I’m just grieving the loss of this person in my life, I need to take some time.” But I wasn’t taking time I was postponing the inevitable.

When he comes home from his business trip we meet coincidentally on the front lawn.  He is stepping out of a blue shuttle bus, I off of my bike.  We embrace.  And then I realize that both of us are searching for a flicker of something, a moment that might signify we’ve acted too quickly, a feeling that might flare up from the bottom of our groins, passion, or love, or…  But when we look in each other’s eyes, each of us scanning for that flame and finding nothing, we know this is real. 

 

He walks in the door with his suitcase and says,

“I don’t even feel like I live here anymore.”

I nod, I know. Because I felt the same way every time I returned from my graduate school trips to our tiny Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment in central square.  I didn’t mind the apartment.  It was the location.  The bedroom window opened on to a dumpster and a white steepled church where every morning before six the sound of trash compaction woke me.  Sometimes, on those rare occasions that we were having sex I stared at the white steeple of the church while I came.  I do not identify as Christian but somehow, I felt a white bearded God staring at me through the pure white paint. Did he approve? Or was he just observing? The urbanity, filth, and noise of Cambridge was a struggle for me from the start, and so I knew the look that Doug wore on his face when he walked through the door,

“I live here?”

“How?”

“ Really?”

We went out for dinner the night he returned “home” for the last time.  We discussed rationally and matter-of-factly the details of his move, the discoveries of his trip.  We laughed about the divorce party we might throw.  All the talking was painless, it felt good even, to plan.  Together we’d always been great planners but somehow, terrible actors in our life together.  The planning anchored us in reality, in each other. When the waitress came inquire about desert we both declined. We were running out of things to say.  “This isn’t so bad.” I thought.  “We’ll make it through without too many scars.”

Then, in the middle of the night, or the early morning hours, or only a few moments after I had gone to bed, in the pitch black of night, I felt it come and sit itself down in the middle of my chest and I could not breathe.

 I couldn’t see it, but I knew what it looked like, grey and colorless, brooding and senseless, a figure you could get lost inside if you stared too long and I did, I stared at grief, I looked it in the face crouched above me in the dark. 

Panic coiled in my chest, fear, loneliness, loss.  All I had accomplished while Doug was away forgotten, had I accomplished anything at all?

“No, I am a mess without him.  I haven’t even eaten a proper meal in a month.”

“Don’t go!” I wanted to scream into the black of death, into the confusion of life that doesn’t make sense in the middle of the night when you can’t remember daylight.  But I didn’t mean it. 

“Just go now.” I would say instead when the sun came up, but I wasn’t ready for this either.    

“This is grief.” A voice said from deep within.  “I am here.”

“No, no. I’ve already done grief.” I replied. “I’ve been crying for months!”

“There is more.” The voice came back.

Over the course of the next days the grief stayed where it started, sitting in the middle of my chest between my throat and my lungs.  Looking up at me with vacant eyes that said “I’m sorry honey. I’m here, and you don’t get to decide when I leave. I do.

I resisted. Of course I did. Surely this was a senseless emotion.   

“This is what we both want, so why am I so sad?  Time to move on!”   

My body succumbed despite my fighting mind.  I got sick. A hacking cough and pleghm for days.  I sniffed and cried and whined, and finally accepted what grief was telling me,

“You have to let him go,

            let him go,

                        let him go

let him go.”

This was the grief that I hadn’t yet felt, the grief that was the reality of the thing, the grief that meant I and this man, who was truly the only person in the world who could look at me and “know,” the man who had seen me crash and fly, fall and break, over and over again, the man who had helped me through the most torturous years of my life confronting my past, my family, the man who had held me night after night, morning after morning, hour after hour as I cried.  This was the man who had worn costume after costume, wigs and mustaches, who had made me laugh, and scream, and come, and breathe.  And this was goodbye.

This was goodbye to the man who made me food when I was sick, lunches when I was healthy, who made me laugh when I cried, and laugh when I was happy, the man who had helped raise two kittens to cats, the man I made love to on the floor of a hotel room in front of a full length mirror in Australia, on his teenage bed at his parents’ house in Chicago, in the bathroom on our honeymoon in Hawaii, in every bedroom of every apartment, we’d lived in, the man who watched me rage against the “injustices” of the world, the man who helped me find my voice again when it had been thrown deep into a dark well of depression. 

This was the grief then.  Here it was.  The reality of the thing that means it’s over sitting in the middle of my chest and not moving until I faced it full on. 

This was goodbye at the airport but I wasn’t leaving this time, he was, and instead of forcing myself to wait for something to take me away I had to stay with the decision, I had to feel every inch of its weight.

This was grief saying, in a few months he will walk out the door.  You will stand in the front lawn and watch as the man you have loved more than anyone on earth walks away into his new life, which doesn’t involve you.  My sick body made me feel it.  I couldn’t leave the house, or distract myself with exercise or meetings.  We were housebound, the three of us, me, my husband, and grief drawing it out, my body the sketch pad. 

I woke for a week with new aches and pains, new depths of coughing.  In the mornings I felt like I’d run a marathon my muscles aching with the letting go, mind fuzzy with the details.   The sickness lasted seven days.  With every bit of phlegm rising from my chest, I could breathe a little more.  He stayed with me through all of it.  He made me food while I wept, he helped wash dishes, mow the lawn.  I cried in his arms just to feel him there.  We tried to kiss, to touch, but as soon as we felt each other’s lips we knew it wasn’t right. 

We fought too, and remembered why we were doing this.  “We” were over.  “We” didn’t exist anymore.  I coughed us up, one centimeter of grief at a time.  And finally on the eight day I woke up and knew that my body was telling me: I would be okay without him. 

I lay in bed watching the sun light on the mountain ridge.  I took an unencumbered breath.  The grief slipped so quietly out the door, the greyest, wispiest shadow, I almost didn’t see it go.