Standing in line,waiting to check in for jury duty, I wondered which of the three people behind the counter I would rather handle this. The announcement had said they would confirm my address, employment and marital status.
I got the middle-aged man. We went through the form on the computer screen. The address was correct. So was the employer. Marital status? "My wife has died," I said. The cursor moved. The M was changed to W. It moved again to the name of spouse. "Nancy" disappeared. Then to spouse's profession. "Professor" disappeared.
It was that quick. And easy. And hard.
They are slim volumes, overlooked by most. But now they jump out on the shelves as if illuminated by some internal lighting. They are journals of loss and grief and mourning. Maybe you could say that they are not meant for everybody, just for those of us in this unlucky fraternity. But, of course, they are, because at some point, almost all of us will be members. It's just that we don't know it yet.
But why do we read them then? Is it because we should, as my doctor advised me, "wallow in it"? That is, not pretend to put on some facade of strength and dignity, but to dive headlong into this storm of agony, knowing that you are going to face it sometime or another, better now than later?
Is it because we want to know that we are not alone, that we are not some sort of wounded freaks, that others have felt this way and, perhaps, expressed the feelings better than we ever could?
Or is it because suddenly there is this subject that months, days, weeks or hours ago held little interest for you, but now is the most important piece in your life?
Something about grief does become clear in these books: It is at once a completely universal and a very specific phenomenon. Even as you notice the shared feelings, you cannot help but point out the subtle - and not so subtle - differences.
Take the two most recent of these volumes, members of the subset that attracted my attention, dealing with the death of a spouse - The Goldfish Went on Vacation by Patty Dann and About Alice by Calvin Trillin. Both are brief and insightful and well worth your attention.
Dann tells of the death of her husband, Willem, and its effect on her and their young son Jake, who went from 3 to 4 years old during the year it took a form of brain cancer to rob his father of his knowledge, his personality and, finally, his life. Subtitled A Memoir of Loss (and Learning to Tell the Truth About It), this book is clearly aimed at those who have faced this grief with young children. But it is much more than that and, indeed, teaches little about how children react beyond the fact that in some ways they seem better equipped than we are.
The Goldfish Went on Vacation is written much like the assignments Dann gives her writing students, many of them older women, at the West Side YMCA in New York. The chapters are each brief meditations on a specific subject or incident. Some seem frivolous. Others off the point. But very often, they strike at the heart with a subtle but searing intensity.
There is her remembrance of the time that a young doctor tried to seduce Dann when she was still in high school. It turned out his wife had recently died. She was cold in his apartment. He still had his wife's clothes.
"I put on one of her sweaters, a gray wool cardigan, and we got into bed with all of our clothes on and hugged," she writes. "The doctor cried, I stroked his hair, then he drove me back to where I was staying. It was not the thought of sleeping with a stranger, an older man, that shocked me as much as the dead wife's clothes in the closet. I had no idea that 30 years later, I would have my dead husband's clothes in my closet or that, by that time, it would not shock me at all."
Or the time, two weeks after her husband died, a woman on a playground said to her, "Don't you hate it when your husband is home for lunch?"
Her response: "I, without the usual, 'Well, I have a different situation. ... ' just blurted out, 'Actually, my husband's dead and I'd give anything to have a sandwich with him right now.' "
You don't say things like that to make someone feel bad - just the opposite, to make them feel good, to realize how lucky they are, even if it is irritating for your husband to come home for lunch.
In the days following my wife's death, I found myself telling people that those little things your spouse does that irritate you, treasure them because that's what you are going to miss the most. I'm not sure why I said that, I just know that it's true.
In About Alice, the gifted Trillin tries to make up for what he describes as the "sitcom" version of his wife that came through in his previous books. Those focused on those slight irritations as the prim Alice tried to keep her bad-boy husband in line, in part to keep him from leading their daughters astray.
A slightly expanded version of a piece that ran in The New Yorker - it can, and should, be read in one sitting - About Alice is most obviously a heartwarming tribute to the love of Trillin's life. But throughout it is a sense of profound loss. Trillin's self-deprecating style does not allow this to come to the fore, but his talent makes evident that he finds himself adrift without a rudder.
Alice's health problems go back to a bout with lung cancer in 1976 when she was 38. It had recurred in 1990. In a cruel twist, she was eventually felled by the cure - the radiation that knocked out the cancer caused irreversible damage to her heart. She died in 2001.
She never smoked, but both her parents did, heavily. "Alice thought that anybody who made smoking seem appealing was doing something that bordered on the criminal," Trillin writes.
In contemplating the distinct possibility that she might not have survived the first appearance of the cancer, when their girls were 4 and 7, Trillin writes, "The real problem would have been that I couldn't imagine trusting anyone else to be involved in raising our girls. I not only thought they needed to know everything of importance that Alice knew, I also thought, I suppose, that she was the only person who knew it."
He clearly still thinks that. Although all along, it was not only their daughters who needed to know "everything of importance," it was him as well. And he still does.
As poignant as these two books are, there is a piece of them that does not resonate with me. In both, the deaths are lengthy affairs. Alice suffered from a failing heart for months, getting off her sickbed for their younger daughter's wedding. She was waiting to see whether she qualified for a heart transplant when she died at 63.
In The Goldfish Went on Vacation, Willem's descent is steady and uninterrupted. When death comes, it is far from welcome, but its inevitability has long been clear.
Dann writes about the day, not long after the diagnosis, that Willem decided to pick out a plot in the cemetery where her grandparents were buried. Willem was a terrible driver, but, she writes, "We arrived safely at the cemetery, and a gentle man listening to the Mets/Cardinals game held to his ear showed us around.
" 'Now do you want to be buried foot to foot or head to head?' he asked, taking the radio from his ear for the briefest possible moment and pointing out where other members of my family lay.
"After we mumbled something about 'head to head' we took the proper papers to fill out, and my head spun wondering when my time would be. Afterwards we went out for cheeseburgers and milk shakes, then drove back to the city, went home and made love."
Though it probably does not to you, that sounds wonderful to me. We had no goodbyes. On Wednesday, Nancy had a sore throat. On Thursday, a cough. On Friday, the flu, but not too bad, still thinking about the two of us doing an indoor cycling class the next day. "I'll just keep the tension on low," she said.
But a night of vomiting led to a trip to the emergency room on Saturday morning. It was too late. The meningococcal bacteria - the same one that causes meningitis - had invaded her bloodstream, gone septic. Within 20 hours, this completely healthy 54-year-old woman was dead.
I am still haunted by her last words. An emergency room doctor at St. Joseph's Medical Center - a wonderful doctor, just the type you would want in a situation like this - had recognized the seriousness of her condition immediately. As she was about to be transferred to intensive care, he leaned over her and said, "I'll be praying for you." Nancy looked at him and at me and said, "Is something the matter?"
Then the oxygen mask went on and she was on her way to the ICU and sedation. She never spoke again. There were no goodbyes.
And when I picked out our gravesite, I was all alone on a chilly December day, deciding to purchase one of the last plots available in Green Mount Cemetery. It has room enough for two urns.
For this reason, the most affecting of these books for me is Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Published in 2005, it won the National Book Award for nonfiction.
It deals with the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, who died even more quickly than Nancy, in an instant, of a heart attack, on Dec. 30, 2003. Her description of experiencing the hours that followed, how at once everything is intensely real and completely unreal, is spot on.
And few people have such an ability to observe the subjective experience of grief. "People who have recently lost someone have a certain look recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces," she writes.
"These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved."
Dunne died just after he and Didion had returned to their New York apartment from a hospital where their daughter, Quintana, was seriously ill. One thing that makes this book particularly haunting for me is that Quintana was suffering from sepsis. The symptoms - apparently mild, then suddenly serious - were the same, as were the grim expressions on the faces of the doctors. As one of the St. Joseph's doctors told me, "Nothing we did made any difference. We might just as well have been in the Middle Ages."
But Quintana hung in there, came back to life, learned of her father's death, attended his memorial service delayed three months until she was healthy enough. But that was not the end of her health problems. The book tells of another, a cerebral hemorrhage. But it does not deal with the last one, acute pancreatitis, that killed her. That is unfathomable. As a reader, you are glad to be spared it.
For the most part, The Year of Magical Thinking is about Didion's reaction to her husband's death. "Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it," she writes, saying that we cannot "know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself."
That void is so much bigger than I ever imagined it could be. I knew even as I sat by Nancy's bed in the ICU how much I would miss the daily back-and-forth of our marriage. What I did not know was that that was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. When what lay below the surface - complex and textured, developed layer by layer over the years and decades - disappeared, its absence seemed - seems - almost infinite. Each step is off an unseen curb, a potential lurch into an abyss.
Like Didion, I find myself searching for signs, before and after Nancy's death. The Afghan expert I had never met, only talked to on the phone for stories, who got in touch recently after a long absence. It turned out this very young man had nearly died of a stroke. "What I learned is that life throws you curveballs," he told me. Or my healthy first cousin, the minister who married us, stricken in the fall by a mysterious lung ailment, on a respirator in a Norfolk hospital, near death. The doctors finally got the right diagnosis - a fungal infection - and he was recovering as I sat by Nancy's bedside, sheathed in protective garments, as a respirator pumped her chest up and down.
Then there was the song I had been meaning to tell her about, a beautiful and haunting piece by Death Cab for Cutie. It's called I Will Follow You Into the Dark. For weeks after she died, I feared it coming on the radio. But the disc jockeys were kind. When I heard it again, a month and a half later, I could take it.
Love of mine some day you will die.
But I'll be close behind.
I'll follow you into the dark.
Or that morning a few weeks after she died, when I heard a story on NPR about the soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who had died at 52 after a battle with cancer. Her husband, Peter Lieberson, had put five love poems by Pablo Neruda to music for her. They were recorded in concert in Boston in November 2005. She died the next July.
Translated, part of the last of the poems reads:
My love, if you die and I don't -
Let's not give grief an even greater field.
No expanse is greater than where we live.
But nothing spoke to me as clearly as another of these slim volumes, sent to me by a friend. It was written over 45 years ago by C.S. Lewis after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, referred to as H. in the text of A Grief Observed. Lewis is known as a Christian writer, but his text speaks to anyone who thinks there is some reason to get up in the morning beyond biological imperatives.
His description of grief, right off the bat, is pitch perfect. "At ... times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me."
Lewis goes on to write that part of him reassures that, "People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. ... Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."
He even has an answer for that welcomed and dreaded question, "How are you doing?" comparing the loss of H. to the loss of a leg. At a certain point, the stump might heal and the pain lessen. Crutches will be provided. Perhaps an artificial limb. "But I shall never be a biped again."
Lewis grapples with the idea of eternal life, dismissing "all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore' " as "unscriptural, all out of bad hymns and lithographs.
"There is not a word about it in the Bible. And it rings false. We know it couldn't be like that. Reality never repeats. The exact same thing is never taken away and given back."
Lewis says that no matter what your feelings about an afterlife, it is right to grieve the loss of this one. And he grapples, in an intellectually honest way, with the dilemma that such grief casts upon a belief in God and in meaning, the one expressed by Christ on the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
There are other words that occasionally help. Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell of the constancy of death, how it is going on all around us all the time, usually unseen, describing it as "the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with its mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism, the same abundance of genetic information for guidance through its stages, that we have long since become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living."
As for the afterlife, he writes that it would be odd for nature to waste anything as complex as consciousness. "I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for the biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter."
But then, as Lewis writes, "in grief, nothing stays put. One keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
"But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?"
I can still hear Nancy's voice on our answering machine. I can call it when I know no one is home.
But one day, I will walk into the house and all the lights on the machine will be blinking. The electricity will have gone off.
And her voice will be gone.
michael.hill@baltsun.com
BOOKS ON GRIEF
THE GOLDFISH WENT ON VACATION
Patty Dann
Trumpeter / 166 pages / $18
ABOUT ALICE
Calvin Trillin
Random House / 78 pages / $14.95
THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING
Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf / 227 pages / $23.95
A GRIEF OBSERVED
C.S. Lewis
HarperSanFrancisco / 76 pages / $9.95
THE LIVES OF A CELL
Lewis Thomas
Penguin / 153 pages / $13.00
MUSIC:
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE
I Will Follow You Into the Dark
PLANS
[ATLANTIC]
LORRAINE HUNT LIEBERSON SINGS PETER LIEBERSON
NERUDA SONGS
[NONESUCH]