"Children are playing
At the end of the day
Strangers are singing
On our lawn
It's got to be more
Than flesh and bone
All that you've loved
Is all you own
In a land there's a town
And in that town there's
A house
And in that house
There's a woman
And in that woman
There's a heart I love
I'm gonna take it
With me when I go..."
Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan, "Take It With Me"
My three and a half year old daughter woke me up at three forty five last night, crying out: daddy, daddy, daddy.
I went to her, for the third time that night. Tired and bruised and feeling somehow defeated at having had my sleep broken yet again.
Fix my blankets, please, daddy. Fix my blankets.
OK, I said. I straightened out her blankets and rubbed her tummy for a minute and said to her, you need to get some sleep if you want to have fun tomorrow, don't you want to have fun tomorrow?
Yeah, she said. I wanna have fun tomorrow. I'll go to sleep.
And she did.
I did not, however.
Grief, they say, exhausts us, and my tired bones seem intent on proving that truism. Yet as I tired as I felt, as much deep-down-in-my-bones fatigue as I felt, I could not sleep.
I laid in my bed, the bed that up until late last October used to be OUR bed, wide awake.
I laid there wide awake thinking about how we got here, myself and my three children, about how we live together but how it feels like alone now without my wife, without their mother, here with us. I laid awake and wondered why I failed to find the right words to talk her out of the rash course of action she took when confronted with the presence of a benign tumor on her brain.
This should have turned out differently, I thought. She should have had the surgery at a major hospital in New York or Boston, or she should have availed herself of the radiation or the stereotactic options I had researched. I failed to convince her of the wisdom of any of those other options, though.
So I laid awake and replayed the conversations in my head, as the clock moved past four a.m., toward four thirty. I replayed those conversations and wondered what I could have said differently. I felt guilt and anger wash over me, guilt that I failed, and anger that she refused to listen to whatever I had to say.
Maybe she would have wound up dead no matter which path she choose to take, but I can't help but think that it should have turned out differently, and that she should not have died as a result of a benign tumor, but then, I realize, it makes no difference, and no amount of rehashing and wishing and wondering will change the truth:
she is gone.
&&&&
The last time I looked at the clock it read five oh nine; I fell back asleep sometime after that.
At six thirty I heard our youngest, a twenty one month old boy, waking up. Can a human being feel any more tired than I do right now, I wondered. Rationally I know the answer to that question is yes, but it seems impossible. My eyes burn, my mind fumbles away the simplest thoughts from the land of reason into the ether of nonsense, and my limbs seem close to lifeless. I want to turn over and go back to sleep, I want to sleep for years and wake up in some magic land to find this was all a bad dream.
&&&&
I load them up into the car and drive us down to the farmer's market. Our oldest son had spent the night with my sister and her husband and his cousins, in a place that makes it easier for him to forget this, so it is just me and the two little ones.
I park and put the baby in the stroller and let Evie walk on her own. They both squeal with delight upon spying the mighty Hudson. "Wivah, Wivah, Wivah," the baby yells. He points out at the water. "Boat, Boat, Boat."
"I wanna see the river, I wanna see the RIVER!" Evie yells.
I roll over to the edge of the dock, unused in decades. Evie wants to throw things into the water. I hold her off, for a moment, with the promise of a cookie from one of the bakeries selling their wares at the market.
We make quick work of it once inside the market. A strawberry-rhubarb tart and a bag of six chocolate chip cookies at our first stop. I open the bag of cookies, give one to Evie, one to Riley, and one to myself. They're good. I get some potatoes, a goat cheese and carmelized onion tart, and a Boston Butt pork roast that I'll use to make pulled pork on Monday. They eat the cookies with joy and greed. leaving chocolate stains around their lips.
On our way back to the car we stop at the dock so I can let Evie throw some stones into the river. She does so with glee. I look at her and see her mother. Riley laughs and yells out some form of baby encouragement that I do not understand. What do I understand, though? How much can we understand? Very little, I think.
&&&&
Mid-afternoon and we have arrived home and they have had their lunches and they go in for their naps. I lay down in bed, seemingly even more tired than before. I try to sleep but cannot. I reach to my right and open a dresser drawer containing some of the letter me and Lauren wrote to each other fourteen, fifteen years ago, as young lovers living an ocean apart.
We lived so far apart yet from the beginning we had no doubt. We fell in love quickly and with a ferocity that surprised me then and surprises me still. I pull out a letter randomly. It is one from her, postmarked August 4th, 1993. I had just called her to tell her that I had booked a flight over to see her. We had parted at JFK on April 28th, and I would not arrive until September 1st. More than four months without seeing each other, and it seemed then like an eternity, only, we did not know then what an eternity really was. I read the words..."I've been jumping for joy all day, I'm so excited I haven't stopped smiling, oh, I just cannot wait to see you"...and I think of us then, so young and innocent, filled with visions of nothing other than sunshine and blue skies and a happy marriage and growing old together, and I lie in what was once our bed and think of us then and it makes me smile and it makes me weep. We had sunshine and blue skies and a happy marriage, only to see it end horrifically and far sooner than we ever would have imagined.
&&&&
I dried my eyes and got out of bed and fired up the grill. An hour or so later my parents and my brother and his wife and their two children arrived for dinner. Their kids played with ours and the grown-ups sat at the table me and Lauren bought in 1995 with money my Nana had given us as a wedding gift, and we ate and drank and talked and for a few scattered here-and-there seconds I almost forgot that my wife is dead.
The clock turned toward eight, past their bedtimes. My mom helped me get Riley ready and he went right in, but Evie fought us, hard. My brother and his family left and we thought that might relax her, but she fought more, and then she let us have it with a full-fledged tantrum.
I tried to deal with her calmly, I tried to reason with her, but to no avail. I picked her up and carried her into her room, and she kicked and screamed and wailed as I did. I could feel my heart breaking and my resolve failing, but I carried on. I got her into her pajamas, and then into bed. She calmed down, but I felt like a failure, like a mean person, for dealing with her so firmly.
My parents came into her room and we engaged in the usual bedtime routine; she sings "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and then we applaud and request an encore and then she sings "Rock-A-Bye Baby" and then the lights go out. Tonight, she sang through the muffled remnants of her tantrum's tears, but she sang, and we clapped, and we said our good-nights.
I came out into the living room, and the weight of it all, of the hideous loss and the lack of sleep and the tantrum, it all collapsed in on me and I buried my head in my hands and cried. My father came over and patted my shoulders and told me that I was "doing great, better than I would have, and better than a lot of other people would," and I wanted to believe him, but I couldn't.
&&&&
Maybe a half an hour later I heard a voice from Evie's room. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.
I went in.
What's wrong, Evie.
She looked up at me and smiled and said,
I want you to be happy, are you happy now?
I am, I said.
I tucked her back in and went back out. I thought of all the long and difficult days ahead, days of sorrow and tears and anger and regret and most of all, days that will contain none of the glory of Lauren's love for us all. I think, I lied to my daughter, for I am not happy now, and it seems as though I never will be.
I thought of all the days to come, and of all of the pain that we will feel during those days, and I once again feel defeated, broken, less than half of what I once was and expected to always be.
But still...our daughter was happy, this morning, throwing those stones into that water, with her eyes as bright and as blue as her mother's and with her smile as deep and wide as that river...and while I know that we are forever dimished, forever weakened, while I know that we will never be what we would have been, still, I must appreciate the moments like the ones we had down at the dock today, and I must keep believing that we have more such moments to come.