...Can't believe you're really gone for good.
I still haunt the places you once stood.
I should move on, but I never could,
Really believe that you were gone for good...
All those years,
disappear,
All my tears,
are not enough, not enough...
I still have your memory.
One or two pictures of you and me.
Life is long and life is tough,
But when you love someone,
Life is not long enough.
Emmylou Harris, Not Enough
I sit here tonight and I let the memories run roughshod over me: I can remember just where I sat fourteen years ago tonight; I sat in a backyard somewhere in northern England, I sat next to my Lauren, my betrothed, just seven short days away from our wedding day.
We had gathered with some of her friends for a barbecue and we sat together eating, drinking beer, talking, and laughing as they gently teased us over the way we kept kissing and making eyes at each other. Somewhere in a photo album packed away somewhere in this house lies a picture of the two of us that night, Lauren sat on my lap as I planted a kiss on her forehead.
After a courtship that spanned a shade more than eighteen months and the thousands of miles between her home there and mine here, after a courtship that saw us weather five different months-long periods of separation from each other, on this night fourteen years ago we stood at the edge of the rest of our lives, me twenty eight years old and her twenty six, a dark and mysterious and beautiful forest of decades together laid out in front of us, and tonight I can do nothing more than wish that I could for once find the words to describe just how good the view looked from there on that night.
Next week, three days after crossing into the ninth month of my life without her in it, I will attempt to navigate the fourteenth anniversary of our wedding day. I have no idea how I will manage to walk myself through that day, but no matter, the day will come and I will live it, whether I want to or not.
&&&&
The light of a full moon streams through the windows behind me tonight, and I listen to this song again and again, and I alternate between tears and smiles as I think back to those days filled with a magic I never dreamed existed in this world.
I stare at the moonlight and as I do I contemplate our naivete and our sheer, utter blind faith in what we had, and I smile and think that we must have lost our minds. We'd spent her last few months here as a student as friends, and a day and a half before she left the country we decided we might have something more; four and a half months later she came back to visit me for two weeks and a few weeks after she went home, we decided to get married.
And in addition to barely knowing each other, we, in the wise words of my Nana, a woman who'd lived through the Great Depression, didn't "have a pot to piss in." Even though Lauren had a steady job doing graphic design and contract work for a candle factory, she wanted to move here and so we decided to set up shop here in my home territory.
In the months before our weddding I studiously avoided anything approaching what I used to, in those days, refer to as a "real job"; I did temp work, partly because the employment market for inexperienced, love-crazed liberal arts types in early 1990's upstate New York was not exactly what you'd call brimming with opportunity, and partly because I wanted the freedom to go visit her whenever I could raise the necessary capital to make the trip.
This worked out well in one regard, for we did manage to see each other every three to four months, but all of a sudden, after her visit here in April 1994, after we bided two glorious weeks cavorting through deserted southern Maine sea-side towns, I realized that those two weeks of living large had left me tapped out: all of a sudden our wedding date loomed close by and I realized that I would have to madly scramble to raise enough capital to attend my own wedding.
I thought perhaps the fact that I didn't know if I could even afford to show up for my own wedding indicated that maybe we had gone a little too far, a little too fast, but Lauren was nothing if not an eternal optimist, and she just didn't see any problem at all. You'll get a job, she said, and I have some money saved; don't worry, she said reassuringly; it'll all work out, we'll make it work.
&&&&
And so we did.
A few days after she left me behind in that April of 1994, I took a temp job working nights at a local bank, in something called a tape library. Basically, we had to read a computer printout that a dot-matrix printer spat out on green and white bar graph paper and run around like mad-people through that library looking for tapes that looked like those old eight-track tapes from the '70's; we had to collect as many of those tapes as we could pile into our hands at the same time and then shove them into the right ports on a super-computer that resembled a bunch of old washing machines welded together.
I had no interest in working the night shift, I had no interest at all in staying up all night in that god-forsaken place, but they dangled an extra dollar fifty or so an hour and since I needed all the money I could get my hands on, and then they let me go to my wedding and promised to take me back upon my return, and indeed we got married, fourteen years ago this coming Wednesday, we got married and then we spent one glorious week together, and then I came back home without my bride while she waited back home as the INS processed her green card application.
We thought, or hoped at least, that they'd let us live together, finally, after a couple of months, but it dragged on much longer than that, and then the bank offered me a "real job" a couple of months later, working in the ATM network, and I took that offer, I had no choice I thought, they had me over a barrel at that point, and besides, the bank wanted to put me back on the day shift.
Within five months I had picked things up to the point where they asked to go back on nights, running the operation on third shift, and they gave me a fat raise and threw in a night shift differential, and I could not turn any of that down, thinking that I had to try and impress the INS.
&&&&
I thought of myself as a night owl, but I liked staying up all night only when I got to do it with Lauren by my side, and I soon discovered I hated the night shift. Even under the best of circumstances I couldn't sleep much during the daylight hours, and I did not have the best sleep-inducing circumstance then; I lived with my parents at that point, socking away all the money I could get my hands on, but my Nana and my sister and her babies would come to our house very often, and my half-deaf but still very-much there Nana would scream out, about everything and nothing at all, at the top of her lungs, and my sister's babies would wake up and cry at what seemed like regular half-hour intervals, and I considered myself lucky and rested if I managed to get four consecutive hours of sleep in.
&&&&
In their infinite wisdom, nine months after we tied the knot, nine months after we last saw each other, the INS finally gave Lauren permission to enter this glorious nation of ours, and on April 17th, 1995, she arrived here on these shores as what they call a permanent resident alien; she did not then, and she never did, have any interest in giving up her British citizenship.
The bank gave me nine days off and we went on a second honeymoon up and down the coast of Maine. She could not work for six months after her arrival here; rules and regulations. Why would you want to give a newly married couple the advantage of two incomes, right?
Anyway, we settled into life as a married couple, and I worked all night at a job I hated with a passion, but at least it had downtime, and we'd spend the hours of that downtime on the phone, giddy at thought of the conversations taking place on a local line rather than on some seventy-five cents a minute international calling plan, giddy at the thought that we talked while four miles, rather than four thousand miles, apart.
&&&&
Eventually the bank put me in charge of the day-shift and I got real sick of that, real fast. The day shift offered no downtime whatsoever, just one problem after another, and the problems all developed in front of every bank big-shot on campus, meaning they all had to get dealt with, and pronto. Me and Lauren had a lot of good times back then, but sometimes the stress and aggravation got to me and I'd come home in a foul mood and I'd force a fight, with her, because I had no one else to fight with, and I sometimes worried that job would squeeze the life right out of us, and that night in the backyard of her friends would seem like something that happened to some other person, in an old movie I'd watched in the middle of some night I couldn't sleep.
&&&&
In April of 1997 I came home from work one day and Lauren announced that we were going home for a visit to her friends and family. She hadn't been home in two years. She was the one temping at that point. I told her that my boss had told me none of us supervisory-types could take any time off for the rest of the year, as we sat smack-dab in the middle of a merger and they couldn't spare us.
Well, she said, I bought the tickets. And we've both wanted you to leave that place for a long time now. The tickets cost us twelve hundred bucks, if you want to piss away twelve hundred bucks to stay at a job we both hate, go ahead, do as you will, but I am going home, and I hope you plan on coming with me.
Twelve hundred bucks was a lot of money to us back then, and we had come by most of that twelve hundred extra when Lauren temporarily went out to Buffalo, NY, to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for a month, working with a team of people dealing with the after-effects of a terrible wind-storm that had afflicted the area. She'd sacrificed, working like that, and coming here to live with me, thousands of miles away from her friends and family, so I felt like I had to do the right thing.
A couple of days later, with no plan, with no job to fall back on and not a whole lot of money behind us, I went in and talked to my boss and told her that as of the Friday before Memorial Day, I quit my job.
&&&&
Not long after that I got offered a part-time job as the office manager for a small progressive political organization. Lauren did the math and figured out how we would make it work, financially. We'll make it work, she said. Do it. When she said we'll make it work we always had, so I trusted her judgement implicity, and against the advice of the elders in my life, against the advice of people like my father, I quit the bank and took a part-time job with no benefits that paid eight fifty an hour, and I followed my wife back home for a two week visit that I remember to this day: the long nights out in the clubs of London, the train ride up the Eastern coast, the majesty of the Atlantic and her inlets and bays taking my breath away as we rolled on, and her dad's birthday, July 20th, me and her and her folks spending the night at the hotel where we'd had our wedding, and the night we went out with her old friends from home, in her hometown, as I sang "Hungry Heart" to her while drunk in a karaoke bar.
Life seemed a glorious and majestic thing and as usual, she was right:
We made it work.
Relieved of the stress of working a job I detested, I became a new man. "Fiasco-Free", as my good friend Michele used to say back then. "You've been Fiasco-Free for months now..."
&&&&
I wound up staying at that job for eleven years.
The organization grew and so did I, and eventually I wound up running the IT part of the place. I met and worked with some beautiful and amazing people, and yeah, it got crazy once in awhile, and even, rarely, it got unpleasant on me, but all in all the place gave me some breathing room, and working a job I could live with, a job I didn't spend all of my Sundays dreading all of my Mondays about, gave me the space I needed to focus on the important things in life, or, the things I thought important: namely, becoming the best husband and father I could.
&&&&
I left that job two and a half weeks ago.
I didn't have much choice.
Lauren died in November, and I went back to work in January, on a part-time and experimental basis, but within a few weeks of coming back I knew in my broken heart that I had nothing, absolutely nothing, not an iota, left to give them; even now, eight months after we lost her, I feel that I have not even begun to learn to crawl, let alone how to live the rest of my life without her.
So I quit that job, too, under much less sunny and optimistic circumstances than I quit the bank job.
I feel nothing but gratitude over having worked that job.
As I said, I worked alongside some beautiful people, people I will call my friends for the rest of whatever life I have left in me, and whether what we did there will wind up mattering or not I cannot say, only the long arc of history can answer that one, but either way, we banded together and tried our best to fight back against the grotesque and awful joke that twenty-first century America turned into.
But I had no choice.
I had to go.
Our children, the children we couldn't even have dreamed of on that long-ago night in that English backyard while we sat joyfully on the cusp of our wedding, well, they need me more than anyone else does, and I need them more than I need anything else.
&&&&
Believe me, my friends, I count my blessings, that I can quit a job knowing that I can stay out of work for a long time while keeping a roof overhead and food on the table and health insurance for us all.
More than that, even in the mere two and a half weeks I have spent doing nothing other than tending to our children and tending to my grief, I have experienced more moments of magic than I could have imagined a few months ago, and I praise whoever deserves the praise for those moments:
I've seen our eldest son's face erupt into utter joy as he spotted the image of himself dancing on the Yankee Stadium Jumbotron in the middle of the eighth inning of a Sunday afternoon day game; I've seen cornstalks and I've seen orange and purple and white and yellow wildflowers dancing in the sunlight along the sides of dirt-paved country roads that I drove down with our babies sleeping in seats behind me; I've sat with a family that loves me without question and beyond words, a family that has carried me through these awful days that have followed Lauren's death, in the late sunset of an Independence Day, I've sat with them as I held an ice-cold beer in one hand and a freshly-grilled steak taco in the other, as the next generation laughed and danced and played around us; I've seen our babies squeal with delight as we circled together 'round the ancient Congress Park carousel; I've seen the moon and fireflies and shooting stars; I've sat quietly and watched as a white butterfly, my love's favorite, oh how she loved white butterflies and white carnies and white roses, dance around the faces of our children as they played together out in the backyard; I've seen Evie sing Happy Birthday to my mother, yesterday, I've seen her sing Happy Birthday with a smile wider than a month of Sundays; I've heard songs of beauty and I've heard words of wisdom and comfort, and I know that despite the unspeakable loss we have suffered, I am truly blessed,
and I've seen all this and more, and now, here in this late hour, I cannot lie, I feel myself sinking because in spite of all I have, in spite of all the magic and all these blessings, I do not have Lauren, I do not have Lauren my Lauren, and for the rest of my days I will not have her, and so all of this magic and all of these blessings are not enough, not enough.