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I know that
having your dead husband come back as a visible spirit may seem impossible, but
for those of us who have experienced the death of a life-long partner, it
really doesn’t seem that far-fetched. In
fact, I’m pretty surprised that I didn’t see the signs that Henry was here all
along. Because I’ve come to the realization
that most of us widows are actively looking for them.
During one of the first grief
support meetings I went to after Henry died, the entire cast of widows started
talking about how they knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that their husbands had
visited them. I was sitting in a
windowless meeting room at a local church that I had never been to before,
trying to pay attention but really focusing on the clock on the wall. My mother had encouraged me to go out and
find people in my similar situation – which is harder than it sounds. Sure, there are a lot of widows out there,
but I’m beginning to think that the young widows are meeting at some bar and
aren’t as organized as the older ones because they don’t advertise.
So there I sat on my third (and what
would turn out to be my last) meeting, looking around at silver-gray hair,
listening to women mourn the loss of husbands they had known for fifty years,
keeping quiet as I usually did because I felt the fact that Henry and I had
only technically been married for five didn’t give me the right to speak up,
when the group started talking about signs they had received from their
husbands.
“I was sitting on my couch eating a
family-size bag of Lays potato chips – you know Gary always loved potato chips,
I told y’all that, didn’t I?” said Emma, one of the 70-year-old widows in my
group . “Anyway, I was feeling pretty
sorry for myself when – and you won’t believe this – I picked up one of the
chips and noticed that it had a burned spot on it that was a dead ringer for
Gary’s profile! I just knew he was with
me.”
This declaration made me think that
the woman was a raving lunatic but to my surprise, the entire group of women
starting murmuring and nodding their heads as if they too had experienced a
sign from their husbands in some sort of snack food. I started questioning my skepticism and
wondering if I should start looking into my ice cream for Henry’s likeness in
the scattering of the pralines in the vanilla.
But I guess I really wasn’t so
different from those women. During the
first weeks after Henry died, I would go to bed every night almost giddy with
anticipation, thinking that surely he’d visit me in a dream. And then every morning, I would wake heavy
with disappointment, having only dreamed about insignificant things like flying
to the moon with the Pillsbury Dough Boy or that I was back in high school
getting ready to take a final for a class that I hadn’t attended all year. I once had a dream that I was living back
in the house I grew up in, having a fight with my mother and it looked like
Henry was in the background. But I was
never quite sure.
Of course, it did occur to me, the
morning that Henry appeared, that I might be suffering from some sort of grief-induced
mental breakdown or that the neon make-up I had put on the night before had
been laced with something that had seeped into my system causing me to
hallucinate. But the truth was, I really
didn’t care. He was there and that was
all that mattered to me.
I didn’t want to leave him for even
a second, afraid he would disappear as suddenly as he had materialized, but I
was suddenly conscious of how I looked, make-up smeared and only wearing my bra
and underwear from the night before. And even though I knew at that point Henry
and I wouldn’t be “hooking up” in the physical sense, I still wanted to look my
best. Dead or not, he was still my
husband.
“Do you mind if I hop in the shower
for just a minute?” I asked.
“Go right ahead. I’ll be here.
At least I think I will.”
“Okay,” I said, backing slowly into
the bathroom while watching him, afraid he might disappear into a cloud of
smoke at any moment. And then I stopped,
a thought suddenly popping into my head.
“You don’t…go in there with me do you?”
“Naw,” he said, smirking a
little. “Well, once. But watching you shave your armpits kind of
killed it for me a little and I decided that you deserved your privacy.”
“Once the romantic, always the
romantic.”
“I do what I can.”
I took the quickest shower in
history, spending the majority of the five minutes I was in there scrubbing at
my face, afraid that once I got out Henry would be gone. But when I emerged from the steam, my robe
wrapped around me, there he was, sitting on the bed, looking at a picture of us
on the nightstand.
It was taken when we were in Europe,
standing on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
We had asked another tourist to take the shot and right before he did, Henry
said something funny – to this day, I can’t remember what – and in the picture
I’m looking up at him laughing. He’s
looking straight at the camera with a smile on his face, happy and content and
appearing as if life was just what he wanted it to be.
It was one of my favorite pictures
because he just looked so…Henry. In the
time he’d been gone, I had looked through so many pictures of him that I knew
them all by heart. But that picture
somehow captured the spirit of him, truly the face I’d seen every day since I
was 22-years-old. It wasn’t posed or
artificial. It was just Henry as alive
as he’d ever been, enjoying his dream vacation without a care in the world. When I looked closely, I could see him –
really see him – and it both
comforted me and made me long for him every night when I went to bed and kissed
the glass protecting the photo.
“I look at that picture all the
time,” I said.
“I know you do.”
“Do you know what I think about when
I look at it?”
“What?”
“I wonder how we didn’t know. How in that moment we had no idea that your
life would be over in just a couple of months.
How we didn’t have a clue that something so huge was getting ready to
happen.”
Henry turned from the picture and
looked at me. For just a moment, I swore
I could feel him and I noticed the vanity lights in the bathroom dim slightly
and then come back on with full force.
“Aren’t you glad we didn’t know?” He
asked quietly.
I thought about that for a
minute. “I guess so. But you know me. I’m a planner. I don’t like to have things sprung on
me. And your death, needless to say,
came as something of a surprise.”
“Wasn’t on my agenda either,” he said.
We looked at each other in silence
for a minute.
“Am I the only one you visit?” I asked.
“You’re the one I spend the most
time with,” he said. “I’ve gone to see
my parents every once in a while, visit my brothers. But you’re the one I don’t want to leave.”
My eyes began to tear and I moved to
sit down on the bed next to him.
“I watch them struggle with my death
sometimes,” he continued, “but they struggle together. My parents have each other. My brothers have people they can lean
on. When I’m with you, I feel like
you’re struggling alone.”
“I think that’s what I get the
angriest about…that you left me here to deal with all of this on my own,” I
said, letting a few tears fall. “I know
it wasn’t intentional. But that’s the
way it worked out. And everyone does
their best with me, but you knew me. You were the one I could be the most honest
with. And, frankly, it gets a little
old, saying over and over again, ‘I’m sad because my husband’s dead.’ It’s like I can hear everyone else say,
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a new story.’”
“I know,” he sighed. “And for me, it’s been frustrating knowing
that you’re going through what you are and that you don’t know that I’m here,
that I’m still trying to be here for you.”
“I kept waiting for you to come to
me in a dream or something.”
“I tried. Once I even tried to give you my picks for
the football pool. But you were so
freaked out about some high school test, you weren’t paying attention.”
“You’d think after five years of marriage we
wouldn’t still be having communication issues.”
“I guess a little hiccup in the
communication department might happen when someone’s been hit by a truck.”
I smiled a little at Henry’s attempt
at humor about our situation, but I was disappointed in myself for not seeing
him for so long, for not seeing the signs.
The truth was, every time one of those other widows would talk about the
outrageous things she encountered, swearing up and down that it was her husband
contacting her, I felt like I didn’t love Henry as much because I didn’t have
any stories to contribute. And I felt
like a failure.
“I know you’ve always loved me,”
Henry said as if reading my mind.
“I did. I loved you so much,” I said. “I don’t think I knew how much until you were
gone. We were just so us, you know? If there was anything I was sure about it was
you and me. And then when you died, I
wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Except
how much I loved you. And with you gone,
I didn’t know if that even mattered anymore.”
“I know. I’ve always known. And it will always matter.”
Henry moved to hold my hand, almost
as if it was a reflex and then slowly pulled away when he realized that it
wasn’t possible.
“Okay. Enough of this,” he said, suddenly standing
up. “We’re going to get out of this
house. I’ve watched you long enough to
know that all you do is go to work and then come home and sit here alone. You’re becoming a hermit. And I don’t know if you realize this, but
there is an age requirement before you can enter Hermitville.”
“There’s a Hermitville?” I
asked. “If only I would have known! Then I wouldn’t have been so alone in my
hermiting.”
“Well, the one thing I did notice
when I made my surprise shower visit was how pasty you’ve become from all of
your hermiting. And I don’t mean this as
an insult, but it’s not becoming.”
“What in the world would make you
think I would take that as an insult? It
has always been my dream to become a washed-out hermit.”
Henry smiled his old smile. “Get
dressed, Pasty. Let’s hit the town.”
~
Henry and I walked out onto the
front stoop of the townhouse and I took a moment to blink away the sun and get
my bearings. The humidity wasn’t as
heavy as it tended to get in the middle of full-blown summer, but it was still
there and made me feel wet the moment I stepped out of the dry air conditioning. I leaned against the front door, feeling
slightly dizzy for a minute thanks to my bender the night before, and ready to
go back inside and work on my pastiness.
“Bet those vodka tonics don’t seem
like such a good idea now, do they?” Henry said, a little smug.
“I may be hungover, but at least I’m
not dead,” I countered.
“Good point.”
We walked down the steps to the
sidewalk that weaved around our community and I paused for a minute, as I did
every time I came out of the house, looking at the spot on the street where
Henry had died. Some people had
encouraged me to move from the townhouse, but I knew I wasn’t ready. The weird thing was that I usually felt
closer to Henry when I looked at that spot.
I didn’t visit the cemetery where he was buried very often because I
really thought of that spot on the street as Henry’s final resting place. It was the last place he was Henry.
“What’s it like?” I asked.
“What?”
“To die. What did it feel like?”
“To be honest, it didn’t feel like
much. One minute I was crossing the
street and the next I was looking at myself.
I think there was a minute when I didn’t even know it was me because the
first thing I thought was, ‘Ouch. That
had to hurt.’”
“And did it?”
“No. It was actually like a weight had been
lifted. I don’t know if it was the losing
my body or what.”
“Well, you had been talking about
dieting before you decided to wrestle that Fed Ex truck. This was a quicker way to go about it.”
“No, I meant that the things that I
would have normally worried about…I suddenly just didn’t anymore. Like getting the oil changed or fixing the
leaky faucet in the kitchen.”
“Yes, well, that all conveniently
fell to me.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. Actually the one worry that didn’t go away
was you. Which was funny because I’d
never really worried about you before. I
always knew that you could take care of yourself. But the moment I realized what had happened,
I felt pulled to you. It’s been a pretty
helpless feeling, wanting to take care of you and knowing that I can’t.”
We began walking down the sidewalk,
falling back into that companionable silence that I loved so much about us and
had missed since he’d been gone. Here
and there, neighbors were out in their yards, weeding or sitting in lawn chairs
and enjoying the day, but for the most part the neighborhood was quiet and we
walked, unnoticed and unacknowledged as we rounded one corner and made our way
to the park across the street from our neighborhood. Since the weather was less intense that day
than it had been the weeks before, the park was full of people picnicking,
running, and playing with their kids.
The good spots under the shade trees had all been taken and a group of
guys who looked to be in their early twenties had set up a volleyball net in
the far corner of the park.
Suddenly,
another thought occurred to me.
“Henry…can anyone else see you?” I
asked.
“I don’t think so. There was one time when I walked in on Jimmy
after he’d had his 13th beer and I thought he could see me. He looked right in my direction and squinted
really hard. I started waving at him and
then he threw up. I didn’t know how to
take that.”
“No, I mean can anyone see you now? Like I can.”
“Oh.
I don’t know.”
At that moment, I spied one of the
single girls who lived a couple of blocks away from us jogging on the path
around the park. Henry and I didn’t
really socialize with many of our neighbors much more than an occasional
“hello” in passing, but Katelyn was different.
If Jimmy and Henry had had a few beers at our house after work, one of
them would turn to the other at around 7:00 and say, “Is it time?”
“Yup. It’s time.”
“Let’s assume the position.”
Then they would go outside and sit
on the front steps of our townhouse and wait for the show.
Katelyn didn’t just jog. She bounced.
All of her bounced. Her feet
seemed to have extra springs in them that lifted her whole body in a perky
mini-jump and then she would land with all of her wiggly parts touching down a
millisecond later. And then the next
foot would make it happen all over again so that everything moved up and down
at a rapid pace, much to the delight of my husband and our lonely and horny
neighbor. And Katelyn didn’t believe in clothes
that might constrict or inhibit this motion, preferring to wear sports bras in
colors I didn’t even know were in the spectrum and bottoms that, as my
grandmother would say “barely covered possible.”
“Hey Katelyn,” the boys would say in
unison as she passed by our townhouse at 7:05 on the dot every weekday. Their grins would be a combination of leering
and boyishly charming and I swear I saw Jimmy drool once.
“Hey, boys,” she would say with a
little wave and bounce on by.
Even if I sat out there with them,
Katelyn would never acknowledge me and I knew she performed this show on purpose. I mean, there were other routes she could have
taken, but jogging by our house was something that she never changed. She never really stopped to engage in
conversation, something I was kind of disappointed about. I was sure that if she did, we would find out
that she didn’t know any words over two syllables. And then my status would be confirmed as the
maybe-not-quite-as-physically-sexy-but-intellectually-sexier-than-Katelyn girl on
the block.
Judging by Henry’s expression as he
watched her jounce her way toward us, it was plain that death had done nothing
to curb the 12-year-old boy hormones he seemed to carry with him to the age of thirty. He stared and stared and if I had been able
to, I would have elbowed that stare right off of him.
“Seriously?” I said.
“What?” He said, blinking away his stupor.
“If you thought she was unattainable
before, how do you think it would work now?”
“Oh, come on. You know she does nothing for me. You’re the only woman I’m truly attracted
to.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, rolling my
eyes. “Just remember: All of that looks good now, but someday
gravity will take over and those things will be down to her knees which she’ll
have to have replaced thanks to all of that ridiculous jogging.”
“No they won’t.”
“Of course they will. It happens to everyone.”
“They’re not real.”
I stared at her again. “How do you know that?”
“Look at the way they bounce. Real boobs bounce differently. Here…jump up and down and I’ll show you.”
“Do you really expect me to start
jumping up and down in a public park so that you can evaluate my breasts?”
“I was just trying to help. Women get so bent out of shape about other
women’s boobs. I think if you could all
figure out the difference between real and fake, you’d be a lot less bitter
about it.”
Just then, Katelyn jogged past me
without giving me a second glance.
“I don’t think people can see you,”
I said. “If she could have seen you, she
would have given you one of those wiggly waves like she used to.”
“Jane?” I heard behind me.
I turned around and there was Jeff
with a Frisbee in one hand and a golden retriever that looked so happy his
whole body seemed to be wagging.
“Jeff? What are you doing here?”
“I just live a few blocks away. I thought I’d give Bandit a thrill and take
him someplace bigger than the postage stamp I have for a yard. What are you doing here?”
“Just…taking a walk.”
“Oh.
Do you come here a lot?”
“Not really…I mean I used to…with
Henry…,” I stuttered, suddenly nervous and not sure why.
“Were you…talking to someone a
minute ago?” Jeff asked with an amused expression on his face. I looked at Henry who, to my surprise,
was giving a Jeff what looked like a glare.
“Oh.
Ah. No. I was…brainstorming about something for
work. Sometimes I get really into it and
talk out loud. Drives Emily and Izzy crazy.”
“It’s weird how I’ve never seen you
here before, but we live so close. Do
you come over here very much?”
“Not so much anymore. Henry and I used to come over and walk every
once in a while when the weather wasn’t too hot, but since he’s been gone it’s
just one of those things that I don’t like doing because I’m scared it will
make me miss him too much.”
I blurted all of that out before I
even realized what I was saying. Since
Henry had been gone, I found myself overly conscious of what was coming out of
my mouth because the few times I’d talked about him with people I didn’t know
very well, an uncomfortable silence usually followed. This would then be followed by attempts from
me to make the other person feel better, rather than the other way around, and
I just didn’t have the energy for that anymore.
But Jeff didn’t allow that awkward
moment to happen. He nodded and said, “I
can understand that.”
I cleared my throat and allowed my
eyes to dart over in Henry’s direction and then back to Jeff. “So I guess you come here quite a bit?”
“I try to,” he said. “But like you, I just come when the weather
cooperates. Bandit is a little bit high maintenance
like that. But I guess if I had to wear
a full-length fur in one hundred percent humidity, I’d probably feel the same
way.”
I bent down to give Bandit’s head a
pat and was rewarded with what I thought looked like a grin around his panting
tongue. “Yes, I only wear my mink when
it’s eighty degrees or less.”
Jeff let loose with my favorite kind
of laugh – the kind that you can’t help but laugh right along with. “Hey, maybe since we live so close, we could
meet here some time. There’s nothing
Bandit likes more than playing Monkey in the Middle. He’s really a whiz at it.”
Henry began moving closer to Jeff
and even though he had never been much of a fighter, I could tell he at least
wanted to poke him in the eye or something.
“Um.
Sure. Maybe.”
“Okay,” said Jeff. “I’ll see you around.” And he turned around and walked away, leading
Bandit’s wagging body behind him.
“That’s right, buddy,” Henry said
under his breath. “Just move along. Nothing to see here.”
“What’s your problem?” I asked.
“I guess I just don’t like watching
someone make a pass at my wife.”
“A pass? You’ve got to be
kidding me.”
“Are you really so out of it that
you don’t know when someone is hitting on you?”
“By asking me to meet him for a
suggestive game of Frisbee? Besides,
he’s dating Izzy.”
“Oh and we all know that Izzy is all
about commitment.”
“At least we definitively answered
our question.”
“That men are assuming you’re on the
market?”
“No, you jerk. He couldn’t see you. Which means that everyone around me is
assuming that I’m talking to myself. All
I’m missing now is a tattered crocheted afghan around my shoulders and a bottle
of ripple in a paper bag.”
“Well, then I guess it’s a good
thing that your friend Jeff apparently finds crazy sexy.”
Now it was my turn to glare. “It’s a non-issue anyway. Okay?
I’m not dating him. I’m not
dating anyone. I will probably not date
anyone ever again and become a lonely spinster.
Does that make you happy?”
Henry’s annoyed expression suddenly
changed to one of deep sadness.
“No.
It doesn’t.”
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