Diarist's note: For the past year and a half, I have posted a series of diaries about the awful after-effects of the death of beloved wife Lauren. I've written of nothing else; her loss consumed me, defined me.
I received so many kind and supportive words in response to those diaries, and for that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
But now, I feel like there's not much left to say. Just one more song to sing, tonight, and I will put the subject to rest for good.
In the meantime, like I said, one more song, tonight, and one more simple but heartfelt word to the folks here who have stopped by on the odd night or two to give me some much-needed encouragement: thanks.
"and the decades disappear
like sinking ships
but we persevere..."
The Killers, A Dustland Fairytale
It's an hour past midnight as I finally sit down to write tonight; it's just a little past two weeks since my forty-third birthday. Even with this gorgeous Killers song pulsing through my headphones, I can hear the wail of a train whistle not far behind me. The massive railyards of this town may have shut down for good close to twenty years ago, but we still get a lot of trains coming through all hours of the day and night. My babies love those trains, the way I did back in my baby days, and as I watch my babies watch the trains come through town, as we make our way through our daily afternoon walks, I see a beautiful symmetry: I see my baby self and their baby selves and their babies, too.
And I can't help, these days, to think back to the thoughts I thought, a year and a quarter or so ago, as I heard those trains rumble by. I knew, by heart, that those trains carried tank cars filled with combustible chemicals, and, in the early days of my bereavement, when the pain seemed insurmountable, when the pain seemed to pose an obstacle I could never hope to overcome, I would hope with all my might, every time I heard a new whistle wail, that the train would come off the rails laid less than a football field away from where I sit tonight, I would pray that those tank cars would come off the rails and explode and take us all out at once, together.
&&&&
One of my earliest memories of life, perhaps the earliest of all, involves the first day that man walked on the moon. July 20th, 1969. Lauren was seven months old, and I was almost three years and two months, myself. My mother walked me and my two sisters across Saratoga Avenue, across the same railroad tracks I walked my two youngest across this afternoon, and she pointed up at a moon hanging in an afternoon sky and she said to us, there's a man walking around up on the moon today. What I remember most is looking up at the moon, squinting, looking hard, looking for the man on the moon.
I couldn't see him, but I believed my mother anyway, I believed there was a man on the moon.
&&&&
"Daddy," said Evie, my four and a half year old girl, as we drove out of a supermarket parking lot, a few yards from where my mother pointed to the moon almost forty years ago.
"What is it, Evie?"
She pointed up at the sky.
"Is Mommy flying around up there with the angels?"
I supressed a sigh. She's asked a lot of this kind of question of late. She's told a lot of strangers lately, out of the blue, that her mommy got sick, too sick to come back. She's talked a lot about going to the beach with mommy, too. In the summer of 2007, Lauren took her and the others to a beach just north of Saratoga Springs several times. I went with them some of those times. I remember those days well. Warm summer days on the beach, none of us with any clue as to how our family would fall of the face of the earth barely three months later. Apparently, Evie remembers them, too, the way I remember my mother telling me about the man on the moon.
"I don't know, Evie. Maybe. No one knows what happens to us when we die."
"Yeah, Mommy died. She got too sick, Daddy. She can't come back down here with us anymore, can she?"
I feel nearly frozen. It seems there's no right answer I can give her. But I know the wrong answer is to pretend I don't hear her questions.
"She can't come back, Evie. She would if she could, but she can't. OK?"
No man on the moon for my girl. But she remembers those days at the beach, and I like to think that she will remember those days forever, the way I remember July 20th, 1969. My mother lost her father at the same age Evie lost her mother. Sixty three years later, my mother still remembers her father sneaking her out to run an errand, she remembers him sneaking her an ice-cream cone. When my mother tells me this, now, I take comfort. I imagine Evie telling her grandchildren about her mother taking her to the beach sixty-some years prior. Somehow, this brings me comfort.
&&&&
Sometime in early May, out of nowhere, I decided to throw myself a birthday party.
My birthday, May 29th.
Last year, as my birthday approached, I forbade my friends and family from so much as mentioning it. I didn't want any cards, I didn't want any presents, I didn't want anybody so much as wishing me a happy birthday.
It wasn't a happy birthday. Last year, I cursed my birthday, I cursed the fact that I had ever been born.
Not this year.
Oh, let's not kid ourselves: I will never, never, never "get over" Lauren's death, I will never "heal." I don't think anyone who ever lives through this kind of tragedy ever truly "heals," and I believe that her death will, in various ways, haunt me until the day I die myself.
But in the eighteen months since she died, I have, finally, learned to live with it.
With it.
It's always there and it ain't ever goin' anywhere, but that's OK. It's not a death sentence. It doesn't have to define my whole being. I smile now, and I feel joy and sunshine and something like happiness in the days now, and I thought that the ability to feel those things was something worth celebrating. It called for a party.
And so I invited a bunch of people over and I bought a bunch of beer and I made pulled pork and potato salad, and people brought other stuff, and we had a party, in honor of my birthday.
&&&&
As the sun got seriously into the business of setting, a bunch of us gathered in the garage. We didn't have a cake, but my sister, who has been there for me, with everything she had (and she's got plenty of her own problems to deal with, no joke) since Day One, she made a huge bunch of cupcakes, and someone, I don't know who, stuck some candles into some of them, and someone else lit the candles. And a bunch of people gathered around that table holding all those cupcakes; a lot of kids stood there singing "Happy Birthday", including my own three.
I stood there and stared at the candles and choked back the tears.
"Speech!" my sister yelled.
"Yeah," said my mom. "Speech."
I didn't say anything. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I wanted to thank everyone for coming to my birthday party, I wanted to thank my friends and my family for being there for me, for carrying me when I didn't have the strength to walk on, for carrying me through the days when I hoped for nothing more than those tank cars to rumble off the rails and explode me right out of my misery, I wanted to thank my parents for giving me life, I wanted to thank everyone for helping me get to a place where I saw my birthday as something to celebrate rather than curse.
But I couldn't say a word. I just listened to them sing and fought off the tears.
&&&&
And now a couple of hours have passed since I sat down here. I took the headphones off, so the music has stopped. No train whistles blowing. Just the occasional car passing by off in the distance. The moon hangs bright and fat, approaching three-quarters full now, and a bright star, I don't know my night sky but it looks like Mars to me, hangs nearby. Three very drunk girls a block or so away, laughing and yelling at the top of their lungs as they stagger home.
"THIS IS SO AWESOME!!!" yells one of them.
I laugh and think, yes it is.
And I think of my wife, and her smile, "not just any old smile" as a friend of hers said to me after her funeral: not just any old smile, she smiled with her whole face, her eyes would crinkle and her cheeks would rise and flush and I could see all of her, and all of us, in that smile, and even if she's not flying around with the angels, as Evie put it, even if she's not dancing with the man on the moon, I can see that smile now, and I know she'd give it to me now, if she could, and I know she'd smile now to hear me say that tonight, it's good to be alive.