"When you come back we'll have a party
We'll hang up the Christmas lights
You'll be my bride
I'll be your groom
I miss you so much please make it home soon."
Damien Jurado - "I Am Still Here"
I woke under my own power, at a couple of minutes past four in the morning.
For the first time in weeks, I felt good. Strong, optimistic.
Here it is, I thought. The day I have dreaded for weeks, upon us now, and soon, this will all be over. She'll come back, and we'll have a party. My bride and I will stand tall, and we'll talk and sing and laugh and look knowingly at one another, in a way that no one else would ever understand.
I opened the French doors to our bedroom slowly, so as not to disturb the children, or my mother, asleep there on the living room couch.
She would watch them, over the course of what was sure to be a very long day, the day the doctors would remove a large but benign tumor from Lauren's brain.
I tip-toed over toys strewn on the floor and on into the bathroom. Turned the water on, hot. Got in and let it soak me, and took a few deep breaths. This is it. This is it. It's all downhill after today. It's going to go fine, and maybe next week at this time she'll be home, tired for sure, but my mother and I had already worked out how we'd share the load of childcare and cooking and housework over the coming weeks of recovery.
I got out of the shower, dried myself off, tip-toed back to our bedroom, and got dressed. I put on the jeans of mine that Lauren liked best, thinking they might bring us some luck. She'd bought them a year and fifty pounds ago. She'd asked me to lose some weight, and I had. Her father had died not long before, at seventy-one, and she said her mother had told her, Lauren, no matter how old you are, it's never enough time. She didn't want me to die young, and neither did I, and so I lost the weight, had started taking care of myself, and now those jeans not only fit me, honestly, they had gotten a little loose on me those last weeks of October, 2007.
I walked out of our bedroom. My mother stirred. We said our goodbyes. As I walked by the computer in the dining room I decided to check my email one last time for some reason. Hit send and receive, saw a message coming in, must be junk mail at this time of night, I thought.
It wasn't.
The subject line read, "The harvest moon is a great sign."
From Vanessa, an old friend of ours. Dated Friday, October 26, 12:58 a.m.
"Wishing you much love and all the best tomorrow. Thinking of you."
The message put a little extra spring in my step, gave me a little more confidence. Damn straight, I thought. Harvest moon, no harm can come now.
I walked out the back door and into the driveway. We're yards from the Hudson, so the fog often rolls in thick in the hours before dawn, and it did that morning. The fog moved around me and I looked up at the sky and sure enough, you could see it, the light of the harvest moon, dulled somewhat by the fog, but you could see it still.
Backing down the driveway, I heard a thwack and was nearly overcome with the smell of ammonia or bleach or something, I wasn't sure. I stopped the car and got out. Near the back driver's side wheel was a plastic bottle of bleach.
The harvest moon optimism drained from me. Why the hell was there a bottle of bleach out there? It wasn't there when I came in a few hours prior, from getting apple juice for Riley, who was fourteen months old and constipated at the time; apple juice used to get him going, so to speak.
The bottle of bleach freaked me out. I took it as a bad omen for a moment or two, then I got back into the car and said, the hell with it, doesn't mean anything.
&&&
I decided to take a very specific route to the hospital, out 146 West and then onto 236 and onto 9 South to the Route 7 interchange onto the Northway. This was the exact route I took to pick up Lauren fifteen years before, on the night that turned out to be out first date, or whatever you want to call it.
At around five after five I pulled into a small parking lot next to the entrance that we used to get into the neurosurgeon's office. The lot was empty. I got my ticket and put it up on the dashboard, with no idea of how long it would sit there.
I walked in through those doors, with a cup of gas-station coffee in one hand and the next day's Racing Form in the other, for the next day was Breeder's Cup Day, horse-racing's Super Bowl, an event Lauren and I used to throw gigantic parties for. She had told me she wanted me to read the Form to distract me while she lay there in surgery.
&&&
When I got up the neuro unit, she was already awake, with all kinds of tubes running in and out of her.
I asked her if she'd slept.
Some, she said, but they kept waking me up to check this and that, it got a little tiresome.
I grabbed her hand, and I did not let go of it for the next two hours and change.
I had wanted to stay with her that night, but she told me to go home and look after the kids.
She knew what I would have done had I stayed.
I would have wanted to talk about everything, our past, and our presumed future. She knew what I was thinking: that this could be the last night we could have ever talked, and as it turned out, it was the last night we could have ever talked.
But she was the one facing what they told us would be a minimum of fifteen hours of surgery.
She wanted to be alone.
And while that desire hurt me then, as it will on odd occasions for the rest of my life, I had to honor it.
SHE was the one they were wheeling into that operating room.
Not me.
&&&
I came home from work tonight frazzled, not even realizing what day it was, what the anniversary was; I'd written reports under deadline pressure all day, with Pandora on in the background. At one point I half-heard a song called "I Am Still Here" and I remember it stinging a bit, but I brushed it off.
I am still here. And I had work to do, and life to live.
And she's not, and there's another wife now, and another child, four in all, there's six of us here, in too small of a space.
I lugged in three gallons of milk, some half-and-half, and a couple bottles of red wine. Put it away and got down to business, dicing red peppers and slicing white onions for some turkey chili we'd have for dinner. I listened to music and talked to Sheila about our days and the kids ran around and argued and fought and wrestled and laughed and teased and joked and did homework and I switched some laundry from the washer over to the dryer and threw another load into the washer and the house filled up with aroma of the chili, and what happened five years ago to the day escaped from my mind.
But after we got the kids to bed, after we'd had some red wine and some vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and made love like our lives depended on it, Sheila passed out, but something kept me awake.
&&&
At bed-time tonight, I sat on the edge of Riley's bed and got ready to sing the good-night songs to he and Evie.
He bolted upright.
"I can't find my animals," he said.
He and Evie sleep with a veritable army of stuffed animals: lions, tigers, dogs, cats, bears, and so on.
I got up and looked around and found Froggy.
"Well, Bud," I said, "you got Froggy, and that's enough."
I told him about how when he was a little baby, five years ago in fact, Froggy was his favorite; back then, he really could not sleep without Froggy.
He got a big smile out of this.
"Fwoggy was my favorite?" he asked, as he snuggled up against me.
I choked back the tears.
"Yup."
I thought of him, not six years but fourteen months old, his mother on the verge of the surgery that would ultimately take her life, I thought of this night five years ago, and how I gave him apple juice and then laid him out on our bed and coaxed him into relieving himself, and then we sang, and said our goodnights.
&&&
Life is for the living, they say, and I suppose it is.
Sheila and Bailey and Evie and Riley and Sophie are in the living, and they all deserve what they got from me tonight, a best effort that admittedly took a lot of effort on my part.
The dead are dead, and whether it's nothing or everything they get afterwards, there's nothing we can do for them.
Life is for the living, indeed, but I suppose every once in a while, the living need to spend a little time with the dead, and I suppose that's what I've done tonight.