#eohl

This morning I sat in front of a cup of coffee, thinking.

It was a quiet morning in the house. The pot of coffee had stopped gurgling and bubbling, and the steam from my cup rose in the still air. It was springtime and the morning dew shone in the grass outside the window. The dog was still sleeping. It was barely 6:30.

My mind opened and I recalled the room I had been in before. I was standing in a modest foyer with a short bench and coat hooks. Two coats hung side-by-side, a man and a woman’s, with many other empty hooks beside them. The man who stood in the foyer with me was darkly colored with dark olive skin; there was a warmth to his face and, even though I didn’t recognize his face, I still felt as if I knew him. 

He embraced me as an old friend. “It’s so good to see you,” he said warmly. “Let’s go in.”

I followed him into the next room, which seemed vaguely familiar. It resembled the living room at my parents’ house. A maroon couch sat against one wall and a fireplace stood opposite. Hanging on the walls were framed portraits of generations of people. The TV was on, but no one was watching it. Looking closely at the portraits, I noticed familiar faces: my own parents! This was my parents’ living room!

“How did we get here?” I asked bewildered. 

“What do you remember about this place?” he asked me.

It took a moment to gather my bearings. "This is the living room at my parents’ house. This is where I grew up. But that foyer wasn’t their foyer. How did we get...?”

“You spent a lot of time here, didn’t you?” he affirmed.

A wave of memories flooded the forefront of my mind. In that corner we used to set up the Christmas tree. My parents would often argue for how it should be decorated. Mom and I used to watch television on Thursday nights in this room while I was in high school. I had sat on that couch and kissed my first boyfriend. I had also taken many naps on that couch, sometimes from the sorrow of losing that boyfriend. My brother and I used to sit and watch the fire in the fireplace when the power went out. 

Small memories, long since forgotten, returned to me. 

“Come with me,” he said as he took my hand and we continued into the next room.

We entered what should have been my parents’ kitchen, but it was something else; it was the kitchen in my old apartment. 

“Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes,” I said, bewildered. “This is where I lived before I was married.” The ceiling was twelve feet tall and the old, solid wood cabinets reached the ceiling. They’d been painted over so many times that some of them did not close all the way. A wooden butcherblock table served as most of the counterspace where it sat under the window. Underneath it sat a stack of cookbooks. 

“What do you remember about this kitchen?” he asked.

A smile immediately crossed my face. “This is where I fell in love with cooking,” I said. I recalled learning how to make beer in this kitchen. I prepared many cupcakes, many pizzas, many casseroles, and many pancakes. I made food for friends here. My family visited one holiday and Thanksgiving dinner was prepared here. I spent countless hours chopping vegetables at the butcherblock table, many nights standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I had a few dates in this kitchen, preparing a dinner together as a way to discern compatibility. Many friends stood in this kitchen with me, beer in hand, laughing with me, and sometimes laughing at me, and sometimes crying.

“This is where you fell in love with cooking,” he said. “All the things you love about food are here. Mostly its in sharing it with others.” 

It felt comfortable to be back in my old kitchen, but I noticed that he had started to walk towards the door the led into the backyard of that house. When I followed him, I stepped through the doorway and into-- 

“Where is this?” I asked.

It was a bedroom. The shades were pulled low, and it was dark. There was a dusty, old smell. The furniture was wooden, modern, but the room was overfull with art and furniture. “You don’t recognize this room?” he asked.

“Is this...? But how...?”

“There’s something of yours in here,” he said, pointing to a stack of papers on the corner of the dresser. I drew closer to look, and noticed they were greeting cards: some for Christmas, some for birthday, some just because: all addressed to my brother, Tom. This was his bedroom in his adult life. 

“Why is it so dark in here?” I asked.

“You didn’t come in here much, but your brother never married and he lived a lonely life. He saved all the things you ever sent to him. To you they were unimportant, but to him they were valuable.” 

I stood in the room and felt sorrow for how we had grown apart. We lived in different states and had different interests, and of course I loved him because he was my brother, but I never really knew how he had felt about me. 

“This room could have been bigger. It could have had more light. It could have had rooms branching off. But this is all the space you had for your brother.”

“Where are we?” I asked. We had been walking through a labyrinth of time in a house that shouldn’t make sense. How could three different rooms from three different houses all connect? 

“We’re in your brother’s room,” he said simply, “and it contains what you remember from it. But this isn’t what I wanted to show you.” He stepped around my brother’s oversized bed frame toward his closet door. “You’ll be really happy with this one,” he said, opening the door to the closet. 

Radiant light shone through as the door swing wide, and I had to set aside my disbelief to follow my curiosity with him into the next room. When I crossed the threshold, I was stunned. The room was fifteen feet tall and incredibly long. Floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves lined the walls, and they were lined with more books than I could count. A wide fireplace with an ornate hearth sat in the center of one wall. Plush leather chairs fanned around the fireplace, and a rich crimson carpet covered the floor. We were in a personal library!

“You wouldn’t recognize this room,” he said, “but I knew you’d love it.” He approached one of the shelves and pulled a book from it. He handed it to me. “Look,” he said with a smile.

The book was leather-bound and old-fashioned, but had a crisp newness to it. The title printed on the cover was embossed in gold.

“Look at the author,” he prodded.

I gasped in surprise. “That’s me!” I exclaimed. “That’s my name!”

“This is the first book you publish,” he said.

“I haven’t published a book,” I corrected him.

He gently took the book back from me. “You will. One day you’ll publish quite a few.” Turning back toward the room, he said, “These are all your stories: all the books you’ve ever read, and all the stories you will ever write. You haven’t written them yet, but this is your library.”

The words sunk deeply into me. My heart was light. “This is your library,” I repeated his words in a whisper. I was stunned at the sheer volume of books in the room. I’d always knew I had read a lot, but I never imagined that it could be reflected in such volume. “All of them?” I asked.

“Over the course of your entire life, yes,” he said. “Not everyone’s library is like this. Many are modest. Some are grand. Everyone is different.” 

My eyes scanned the room. Among all the books, I noticed several doorways across all of the walls. 

“We’re not in a real place, are we?” I asked.

“It is real,” he said. “All of these rooms are yours. Do you want to see more?”

I hesitated. There had been many rooms in my life, but not all of them were lovely. I knew that. Any person knows there are some rooms that are hidden, and some rooms that just shouldn’t be seen. As if he could see the caution on my face, he reassured me, “Don’t worry. As strange as it sounds, there’s nothing here that would surprise me.” 

Assured of his reserved judgment, I nodded. There was a door to my immediate left, and I motioned toward it. “What’s through there?” I asked.

“Let’s go see.”

I approached the door and reached for the handle. “Do you know what’s behind here?” I asked gingerly. 

He silently nodded and allowed me to take hold of the door knob. 

I opened the door and immediately a thunderstorm and pouring rain hit my face. I jumped back in surprise, letting go of the door knob. Some of the rain started dripping into the library. Quickly I jumped up and slammed the door shut. “What was that?!” I shouted at him. “Why didn’t you tell me there was a thunderstorm outside?”

“Inside,” he corrected.

“What?” I shouted.

“The thunderstorm is inside. That’s your boyfriend’s room.”

My mouth hung open and it took a moment to recover from the surprise. “My who?”

“Well, your ex boyfriend. Before you were married. What do you remember about him?”

My mind drew a blank. I hadn’t thought about him for many years. It had been long ago. “I, um,” I started, “I remember the relationship was good. It was long and it was good. We’d talked about eventually getting married, but it didn’t work out.”

“How did the relationship end?”

I struggled for the memory. It had been a very long time ago. The reason and the story felt just beyond my grasp, somewhere right around the corner. Why couldn’t I remember? 

“How did you feel when it was over?” he asked.

“I felt... It felt...” and suddenly waves of sorrow crashed over me. Things had been going well, and we had been talking about staying together, and then there was a conversation. It wasn’t planned or expected. The conversation turned. I’d said some hurtful things. He’d said some hurtful things back. We never spoke again. The relationship had ended so abruptly. A tear came to my eye remembering being so young and being so dismissive of something that had been really good and could have had the potential to be great. 

He put a hand on my shoulder. “You pushed this memory aside and never revisited it. Most of it has washed away, but what remains is sorrow.”

“How could I have been so... so... awful to him?” I asked in disbelief.

“We all say and do things that we regret,” he assured me. “This is only one room in the many rooms of your heart.” 

“Show me the rest,” I said.

“You know them better than anyone,” he said. “But there is something you should see.”

As we crossed the library, we passed by many doors. I peeked into some: some were gloomy and dark. One was filled with plants. One opened into a painting, and one was filled with cobwebs. By the time we reached the opposite end of the library, I had seen so many vignettes of memories and experiences--some of which I knew and some of which had yet to happen. 

At the opposite end of the library was an unusual door. All of the other doors were framed and had handles. This door was a piece of plywood. It didn’t have a handle. It wasn’t framed or in any way part of the room. It looked like an accident, and at first I hadn’t quite noticed it. 

“What is this?” I asked.

“This is something that not everyone gets to see,” he said. He reached forward and gently pushed the door inward. He stood in the threshold of the door (or what would have been a threshold if it had been properly finished) and stood beside me as we remained in the library and looked through.

We stared into a hallway. The hallway was about twenty feet long. The walls were white and undecorated, and the doors were unfinished. I started to step through, but his hand caught me before I could enter the hallway.

“You can’t,” he said. 

“Why not?” I asked. “You said these were my rooms.”

“These,” he said, “are doors you will never open in your life. This wing is what could have been.” 

“How can these be here and still be closed?” I asked.

“Because you made plans for them, or perhaps at some point had hoped for them, but they never got built,” he explained. “When you and your boyfriend planned to marry, you would have built a life together, and in these rooms would have been your vacations, your arguments, and your joy. When you decided to leave your job to write full time, it closed the possibility of your promotion and the world travel you would have been asked to do. When your husband told you he didn’t want kids...” he paused solemnly, “children would have opened many new doors in your heart, but those rooms were never built.” 

I stared down the hallway, in awe at the possibility of a life I could have had, but didn’t.

“It’s time to go back,” he said, closing the door to the hallway.

Together we walked back through the library, through my brother’s room, through the many rooms of my heart to the modest foyer at the front of the house. The two coats, side by side on hooks, were the only people who lived in my heart. A pang of loneliness hit me, realizing that though I wanted to share my life with many friends and many people, there were only two whom I let live there. 

“Do you feel regret?” he asked me, helping me put my jacket on.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought I had lived a good life. I tried to be a good person. Tried to help others and be faithful. But when I look in to all the things I built, and said, and did, it really doesn’t seem like much. I could have done so much more. I could have built such a beautiful house.”

He pulled me in close and wrapped his arms around me. “Your house is your own,” he said. “This is where you’ve made your home, and you filled it with love. I have been well-loved here. You’ve done well.” 

“Who are you?” I asked.

One morning in January, I woke up feeling unusually cold. 

Usually in winter things get a little chilly. We live in an older house and the insulation isn’t great, but the steam radiators keep the house comfortable even on cold nights. From under the covers, I could feel the icy atmosphere when I inhaled. As I turned over in bed, I was surprised to discover the dog had climbed on top of my feet during the night, something he distinctly knows he isn’t allowed to do.

“Paul,” I asked my husband, “does it feel cold in here to you?”

The question pulled him out of sleep and it took him a few moments to answer, “It does.” 

“And the dog is in bed with us,” I said.

“I’ll go downstairs and check,” said Paul. As he got out of bed, I could feel his warmth leave with him. “It is chilly,” he said as he put on a sweatshirt. 

I listened to Paul moving around downstairs, softly walking around from room to room, opening doors and clicking lights on. I nestled deeper into the covers, hoping to insulate myself against this very unusual iciness. 

When Paul returned, he reported that the furnace was off and that it was 46 degrees in the house.

I am looking at a photo of Paul and me at our wedding. The photo is in black and white, and a little grainy from the low-light of the venue. We’re each holding on to the handle of a knife, sliding it into the top of a layered cake, both looking at the camera instead of at each other. I look at the photo, focusing on Paul, looking into his eyes, wondering what was behind them.

Paul started to explain, “The furnace is just off. There isn’t anything coming through the pipes. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. I think it went out during the night.” 

I got out of bed, found my slippers, and moved downstairs. The thermostat is in the dining room, and it is old--like our house. Though it is set to operate at 67 degrees, it was clearly reading the house at 46, just as Paul had said. It seemed to still be on, so the problem must be with the furnace downstairs.

I descended the stairs to our cement slab basement, exposed pipes and wires lining the unfinished ceiling. Even though I’m not a mechanic, I remembered having the furnace serviced earlier in the wintertime, and recalled what the plumber had said. He spent about an hour flushing and cleaning the furnace, replacing steam valves on the radiators, brushing the pilot lights. “Your furnace has seen a lot of abuse,” he explained to me. “It’s old, but it wasn’t taken care of right. I got it to a place where it will safely run for you this winter, but you should really consider replacing this when you’re able to.” He carefully pointed out to me what he was doing, how the water feed worked, how to monitor water levels in the steam furnace, how to backfill when the water was low, how to care for my furnace until a new one could be installed. Not everyone takes the time to explain how to show care, and I wanted to take care of my house as long as I could.

I am thinking of the photo of Paul and me and our wedding cake. Paul’s eyes are completely black in the picture, even though in real life they are blue. In the photo, my eyes are hiding behind darker circles--perhaps the gradual smearing of makeup, but more likely the fatigue of everything that led up to that moment. Paul’s hand is holding the knife confidently, but at an unusual angle. My hand is lightly holding on to his. I am wondering if even from this beginning we could have accomplished anything together.

Standing in front of the furnace, I remembered the plumber’s directions and checked the water level of the furnace. There is a narrow glass tube on the front of the furnace that indicates the water level inside. “You don’t want it too full,” the plumber explained, “because then it’ll flood. But you don’t want it too low because then it’ll burn out. If it goes to either extreme, the furnace will shut itself off to protect itself from malfunctioning.” At first it looked like the glass tube was completely full because I couldn’t distinguish the water line, but as I looked closer it was actually extremely low--almost to the very bottom of the tube.

“Poor furnace,” I thought. It burned itself out. I reached for the handle to the water line to feed more water into the furnace, and then pressed the manual fill button to bring water back into the system.

The furnace needed water to boil into steam. During the night, it had gotten so cold that the furnace had burned through all its water and then had nothing left to give. It did the only thing it could have done in that situation: turned itself off to prevent anything from catching on fire. It wasn’t broken: it did exactly what it was supposed to do.

As I listened to the slow backfilling of water through the pipes, I thought about the furnace alone in the night. I could feel the water getting low, low, lower. I could feel the hot metal grinding on itself and burning out. I could understand how the furnace, bereft of options and no longer able to serve its purpose, began shutting down in the quiet resignation of unfulfilled need.

As I’m waiting for the water level to rise, I’m remembering the wedding photo. I’m thinking about those words, “husband, wife,” and that today they mean something else than what they did before. I am thinking about being filled with love, overflowing. I’m thinking about the water line to the furnace of my love. I’m struggling to remember what a working furnace feels like in the iciness of the basement of my home, when I hear Paul open the door to the top of the basement stairs. 

“Do we need to call someone?” he called to me.

“No, it just needed some water. Do you remember when the plumber explained it to us?” I asked.

“No,” Paul said. “I don’t remember. I don’t know how this works.”

There are so many things I take for granted, but I shouldn’t.

The list is long: running water in my house (100 years ago that would have been less common), something to eat in the refrigerator (even though five times I day I am opening my fridge to announce to no one that milk, applesauce, cheese slices, and salsa is “nothing to eat”), that I am healthy (and, truth be told, the older I get the closer this is to edging off the list). A modern life affords many comforts, even when life is busy, anxious, or frustrated. A modern life has electricity. A modern life has communication. A modern life has music.

And music is the thing that I really take for granted.

When I was a kid, like most, I listened to what my parents listened to. My mother spent many long road trips discipling me in the school of Queen and the Proclaimers (and David Allan Coe, for some reason). For Christmas in 1997, I received my first boom box, and on Christmas Day in 1997 I listened to the Village People’s Macho Man EP in it. A small CD collection started to grow on my shelf that started mostly with what I was borrowing from my parents’ existing CD collection, but which--in 2002 when I started high school--grew exponentially with slightly more updated flavors. 

One evening in 2002, I called in to a local radio station, which is a very old-fashioned sentence these days. The deejay on the line asked what I wanted to hear, and I requested the then-overplayed R&B hit “It Wasn’t Me,” by Shaggy (a song definitively about being caught cheating on a relationship and lying about it, which completely unfazed every other 13-year-old I knew at the time). There wasn’t, it seemed to me, any other way to hear a song I really wanted to hear unless I bought the full album or happened to catch it on the radio.

I soon learned I could borrow CD’s from the public library, and my computer’s hard drives quickly began to fill with ripped copies of borrowed albums. (Unless you are the FCC, in which case that is definitively not what happened.) Borrowing CDs from friends had the same result. The slow method of finding, ripping, and storing full albums was the long way to get around the expeditious method to really get to a song you wanted to hear: the pirated download.

I challenge you to find a teenager from 1999-2005 who did not once pirate a single song. Go on, I’ll wait.

Through the depths of the internet, I truly began my music education. It was a new era. Gone were the days of hearing only what my parents owned or only what radio deejays put on (and only when you tuned in). Gone were the days of seeking out the friend who owned a Linkin Park album to copy. Gone were the days of swapping mixed CDs (and their legendary predecessor: mixed tapes) to have individual copies of special songs. Those days were over. The sun now rose in the dawn of BitTorrent.

In 2007, I climbed into a car with friends to drive four hours across the state to visit another college. I brought with us what would be the last mixed CD I would ever burn.

In 2008, I tenderly accepted a burned copy of a Weepies album with “For Laura” written in sharpie on the front--the last burned album copy I would receive.

In 2009, I made a long playlist on my computer to celebrate my 21st birthday, but never actually transferred it off my computer, and instead allowed the melodic favorites to play out through my laptop in my apartment.

In 2010, while driving, I heard the radio deejay announce that, through the iHeartRadio network, you could text in song requests to the station directly, and I thought, “Who would request songs from a radio station? Don’t you know you can hear any song you want online?”

After I graduated college, but before I moved to New York, my nana came to visit us. I was living at home in a temporary few months, ambiently working a mindless temporary desk job, thoughtlessly daydreaming about men. My father was my nana’s youngest child, and she always bore this special affinity for my brother and me. Her cheerful warmth inspired my creativity as a kid, encouraged me to explore, and always had a hug ready. She was a wonder. I was so happy to have her visit.

One afternoon, she sat in my bedroom while I sat at my desk. She noticed my CD collection and asked, “Do you have any Frank Sinatra in there?”

Between the origins of Queen, the growth of Linkin Park, and the recent discovery of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I was a little embarrassed to confess to her that I didn’t have a lot of jazz singers.

“’Ol Blue Eyes’ they called him,” nana explained. “But he was such a womanizer. So popular, but so selfish.”

I’d never heard Frank Sinatra described this way. “Really? Do you like Frank Sinatra’s music?” I asked.

“No,” she said simply, as if it was obvious.

“Whose music do you like?” I asked, surprised I had never thought to ask before.

“You know who I love?” she smiled mischievously. “Bobby Darin.”

“I’ve never heard of Bobby Darin,” I admitted.

“Oh he is wonderful!” she exclaimed. “He has one song, ‘Mack the Knife.’ It is a wonderful song.”

“You know, nana,” I said, turning toward my computer, “we could listen to that song right now.” I quickly started to type ‘Mack the Knife’ on my computer.

The look on my nana’s face cannot be explained. Her naturally cheerful and warm disposition held back the longing of her love for Bobby Darin, but even her controlled demeanor could not contain the curiosity and possible disappointment at the prospect. “But,” she said, “you don’t have any Bobby Darin records.”

‘Mack the Knife’ had returned some results. “Just you wait,” I said, and hit “play.”

A big band and a swing tap of the drum preceded the velvet voice of Bobby Darin in my computer speakers. I watched my nana close her eyes, smile coyly, and tap her toe. She was in her mid-eighties. Her thin, white hair piled on top of her head. She was filled with joy. Listening to Bobby Darin, she was no older than thirty. The song filled her and her smile made her young again.

For three minutes, nana had absorbed a piece of her past that had long been embedded in memory. She had listened attentively the entire time; there was no chatting over the music. The music wasn’t background. The music was the main event. It had held her full attention. After a grand brass ending, the song was over. She opened her eyes.

“I haven’t heard that song in forty years,” she said softly.

It had not occurred to me that a person could go so long without something they truly loved.

“Nana,” I said, “I’ve never heard that song before.” 

Late one Friday night, I sent a text message. 

That is an innocuous way to begin a story. The fact is inherently ubiquitous; many texts are sent on a Friday night. This text was to my best friend, and she returned with a phone call. That response is inherently uncommon, especially on Fridays.

She sounded a little out of breath, very scattered, and highly disoriented. “I’m driving home to mom,” she explained.

“Is she okay?” I asked. 

“My dad died.”

Those words lingered in the air. 

The stillness of the moment reverberated to my bones.

“What?” was all I could manage to muster in the midst of our shared silence.

“My dad died. Mom found him in the lawn. He was doing yard work.”

“Oh my god,” was all I could say. 

In my mind, I kept impulsively wanting to ask, “Are you okay?” but everyone knows the answer to that question. It is a common, ridiculous, oversaturated question. When someone isn’t well, but we care for their wellbeing, it is in our nature to want to make sure they are okay. So we ask if they are okay. Things were clearly not okay, though. It doesn’t make sense to ask if someone is okay when they clearly are not, but sometimes it is the only question that ever seems to come to mind.

“Yeah,” was all she could say. The tone of her voice fought back all the waves of new, unexpected emotion.

Don’t ask, ‘Are you okay,’ was the thought that kept reeling through my mind. “When did you find out?” I asked.

“About half an hour ago. Mom called me after the paramedics pronounced him dead. So I packed up and left.”

Don’t ask, ‘Are you okay.’ “What... happened?” I asked, tenuously.

“I don’t know.” With this, the emotional wave overtook her self-restraint and invaded the conversation like the Nazis entering Paris. 

Do not ask, ‘Are you okay.’ “Do you want to talk while you drive?” I asked.

“No,” she said, “but can you come next weekend? To mom’s house.”

“Of course,” I promised.

Suddenly my mind filled with thoughts of Gerry, her father. Gerry had been a tall man, even in his retirement when age diminishes the body. He had been active, healthy, involved in the community, regularly going to the beach. Decades of summer sun had tanned and hardened his skin, but the warmth and kindness of his disposition was irresistible. Once he had baked an apple pie for me, and I remembered him bringing a slice on a plate to me while I reclined at his house. He had helped us decorate a car for a holiday parade, proudly posing for a photo with our prize creation. He had held his grandchildren close, been kind to animals, and taken his wife of thirty years dancing on Friday nights. He was retired, but wasn’t old. What had happened to Gerry?

On this Friday night, I thought of Christy home alone, without Gerry, not dancing.

I announced to Paul without explanation that I would be driving to Virginia Beach to visit Jess and her mom. 

“Where’s her dad?” Paul asked.

“He died. That’s why I’m going to Virginia.”

The following Friday, I packed my car with frozen meals and books on loss and board games, and I drove eight hours to arrive in the late afternoon to Jess’ mother’s house in Virginia Beach. Virginia’s afternoon sun is golden. New York’s autumn weather is unparalleled, but Virginia any time of year is warm.

Jess met me at the front door. Immediately I wrapped her in my arms. We stood in the open doorway in silence. The soft autumn wind met us in the doorway and comforted us. Softly, she whispered, “Hi.”

Don’t ask ‘Are you okay,’ I thought. “Where’s mom?” I asked.

Jess led me inside to the kitchen that was overflowing with casseroles: buckets of chicken, platters of deli sandwiches, boxes of fruit and chocolate, glass pans of pre-made meals, all covering the long island in the kitchen and stacked on top of each other. Mom was at the kitchen sink, doing dishes. “Laura,” she exclaimed, “how was the drive?”

Her tone and her demeanor felt like every time I had visited before. She seemed, for lack of a better word, okay. Don’t ask, ‘Are you okay.’ Where did all this food come from?” I asked instead.

“All the neighbors,” Christy explained, “and the bible study, and the women from church. Everyone just kept bringing food. How am I going to eat all this food?”

Offering a measure of humor, I said, “Well I’d be happy to help you with these,” while fingering open the cardboard lid to the chocolate. 

“Did you hit any traffic?” Christy asked.

It felt as if everything was normal (apart from the counter overflowing with more food than one woman could hope to eat in a reasonable time frame). It felt disorienting. Gerry’s absence was tangible in the house. “Christy, do you want me to do dishes?” I asked.

“No,” said Jess and Christy in unison.

“You just got in,” said Christy. “Have some food.” Southern warmth and hospitality really is something else: there I sat ready to offer a distraction, a comfort, and an assist, but I was the one being attended to. “And I need to putz,” finished Christy.

Finally I saw, with clarity, the process of grief. Sometimes we fool ourselves into distraction or disillusionment from the problem of pain, but sometimes it is just the practice of movement instead of the gravity of stillness that keeps us going forward. Sometimes going forward is all we have. Sometimes staying still is the inevitable end and there’s nowhere left to go. Christy was moving forward in the method left most methodical and familiar: the method of doing dishes and tidying up. As long as she had something to do and someone else to care for, she had a purpose.

As I settled in, I opened the chocolate. I handed one to Jess and relayed the tale of my travels. We joked around as if it were just another visit. I shattered the illusion of normalcy when I asked, “So what happened?”

Jess was first to explain in a rehearsed, matter-of-fact tone. “They think it was a heart attack.” Seeing the look on my face, she detailed, “The doctors and coroner have ruled it as a heart attack, but they aren’t entirely sure. His family history and no other health issues indicate that it was probably a heart attack, so that’s what’s on his death certificate. There was no evidence of foul play. He was doing yard work, and just had a heart attack in the middle of yard work.”

I looked at Christy. She had paused in her work.

“So dad was out during the day: he went on a walk, he’d chatted with the neighbors, he went to the store--”

“--and he bought $40 worth of plants,” interrupted Christy. “$40 in October. Can you believe it? I was so mad at him.” Her controlled visage began to fall. “I was so mad at him when he came home with those plants. And then he went out in the yard to plant them, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. And he was out there for hours, and I didn’t...” 

The humid silence filled the air.

“And when I found him, he wasn’t moving,” explained Christy.

Into my soul seeped the longing of love, the sorrow of loss, the depth of absence. I missed Gerry. I missed his apple pies, his enthusiasm, his warmth. I saw his love written all over Jess and her mother. I saw an absence in the shape of him. This life and their love would never be the same. 

Jess later explained, “I’m glad you came after the waves of everything. All the people and the arrangements and the chaos. It was easy to forget dad was gone when we were busy with people and making plans. I know you would have come to his funeral, but that’s when everyone was in town. Now that everyone is gone and the dust has settled, it’s... really hitting that he is gone.”

“When was the last time you talked to him?” I asked.

Jess’ eyes glinted. She explained that she was in the process of mustering the courage to reconcile with her father. The weight of loss pressed heavily into the room. There will never be an opportunity to reconcile a relationship that abruptly comes to an end when the closing chapter is death. Her father lay warmly in the Earth under the golden Virginia sun while Jess unjustly sat on the cold floor unable to hold him again. I saw in her face that she wasn’t okay. With friends in these moments, silence holds us up until we can begin moving again. And we all know the answer to the inevitable question, Are you okay? The answer is either “No,” (true) or “I’m fine,” (untrue), even though both are incorrect answers.