supplicium post mortem

Was I ever married, or was it all a brief, tender, perfect dream that I woke up from a year ago, this hour?

He woke up as usual that morning. He hadn’t been feeling well for a few days – chest pains. We’d been to the ER four days previous, and they had cleared him on every count. He worked out 7 days a week. He looked fine, they said. It was probably costochondritis, a painful but harmless inflammation of chest cartilage that would go away on its own. He was frustrated at being restricted from full workouts by the pain. He was frustrated that it interfered with wanking while sitting up. He was cranky. That morning, I got up after he did and approached him in the kitchen, me groggy, he dressed for work. “Don’t be anxious,” he told me, putting his arms around me and embracing me. I felt his green scratchy sweater and smelled his aftershave. He was having lunch out, he told me, so he might not want much dinner. It was an annual lunch he had with two colleagues at which they celebrated their AA birthdays, the anniversaries of their sobriety. He was sixteen.

“All this,” he told me, meaning, I supposed, his general mood, “is just getting used to what can’t be changed.” I can’t remember his exact words, but that was approximately it. We kissed each other goodbye, and off he went to work.

I talked on the phone to my mother that morning, complaining about what a terrible patient he was, how you couldn’t tell him anything, how annoyed he got when you fussed over him. I was trying to detach.

I was expecting a student at noon. At 11:25 the phone rang. It was his gym. He’s passed out while exercising, they said. He was in an ambulance headed to the hospital. I hung up, called my student’s mother to cancel, said I thought it probably wasn’t serious. He had costochondritis, I told her. He’d over-done it exercising. I wasn’t having it any more.

The subway to the hospital took a long time. I got there around 12:30. There was a lot of confusion at the desk. He wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there. I eventually got the ambulance on the phone. They’d taken him to another hospital. I got in a cab and in a few minutes, was there.

Inside, they let me go right back, as if they knew who I was. A guy shook my hand and introduced himself, a social worker. He took me into a tiny room with two chairs and a side table. He told me to wait. My heart started to beat hard, deep, fast. Why would I be greeted by a social worker? That was bad, right? But it couldn’t be that bad.

The social worker came back, but he wouldn’t tell me what was going on. I asked if M was dead, and he didn’t give me a yes or no answer. Shortly, the surgeon came out, and after some verbiage describing what they’d tried, said, “I’m very sorry your husband has passed away.”

I wasn’t the kind of person whose husband passed away. I used, often, to fear he’d die, usually in a plane crash. Sometimes I’d dream he had died, but when I woke up, he was there, most merciful reprieve. Whenever I went out – to a friend’s play, to a party, to a family gathering – I always felt such relief that we had our life to come home to. This was the real reality – him and me and our dogs and our apartment and Casey and Mark and RP and TL and the others. The world was just so much noise, not a real thing. My family I loved, but this was the new family. We were making the new family. We were trying to have children, too. The old, sad, long life was over; the new life was underway. At our wedding, and in a print over our bed:

Rise up, my love, my fair one
And come away!
For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and done
The voice of the turtle is heard in the land

I had never dated. I would never have to date – thank God, I thought. I never wanted to date. He was flawed, terribly flawed, and so was I, but I didn’t want anyone else. When I would dream of the end of the world – a nuclear bomb, say – I would, in that dream, only want to get home to him, to be with him to the end.

Imagine a giant eraser wiping away the present and the future.

In the emergency room, he had a tube in his mouth, but he looked just like himself. He looked like he looked asleep beside me in bed. I’d never seen a dead body before. I touched him. He was still warm.

I wasn’t crying, not yet, but when I tried to dial the phone to call someone (the church, my mother, my sister), my fingers were trembling too much. This, I thought, was curious. Did I ask a nurse to dial for me? Or did I just redial until I managed it?

By 11pm that night, my whole family was in my apartment, some from as far away as California. My mother made toast and tried to get me to eat it. I took a bite, but it was like dust in my mouth. I sat on my dog’s bed with her and fed her the rest of the toast. My sister slept in my bed with me that night. I took one of M’s sleeping pills and crashed. In the morning, I got up before everyone else and walked the dogs, sobbing in the sunshine, praying with every breath for help. On the way home, part of the sidewalk had just been redone. Barely dry, some of it covered over, but right in the middle: Love from marky.

Back at home I got in the shower and suddenly fell on the floor, water pounding over me with the realization: RP is dead, too. What about Casey? Funny how you don’t realize everything at once.

It’s 365 days later. They say a year brings relief. It’s an ancient prayer practice, the Year’s Mind. They say it’s easier, having lived through every day of the year without them.

It isn’t easier.

Was I ever married, or was it all just a wonderful dream I woke up from a year ago this day?