Wife Died

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Wife Died
More than anything, Diana had wanted to be a mother. Now my three-year-old daughter and I had to find a way to live without her.
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A dusting of frost coated Fourteenth Street; the taxi continued driving away from the hospital, crossing the line dividing downtown from the rest of this dark and morbid city. December 8, 2011. Not a word from the driver. I was tired beyond words. Throbbing, from behind my eye sockets, extended into my molars.
Logistics swam through my head. Lily was staying with her grandmother Peg, who was in town from Memphis; I’d have to talk with Peg in the morning, make sure Lily’s day was occupied, maybe some kind of day trip or museum. I’d have to work on funeral arrangements for Diana.
I vaguely remember getting out of the taxi, the pricks of cold like needles on my face. Suitcases and overstuffed trash bags filled the trunk and back seat—Diana’s clothes and underwear, her laptop and pill regimen, her prayer journals, motivational posters, family photos. I struggled to unload everything onto the street outside our apartment on Twenty-second. A neighbor saw me. He was a gay-night-life promoter, coming back from an event. Did I need help? I started to answer then broke down, sobbing onto his shoulder.
Diana had moved into my one-bedroom apartment after we’d married, but she’d been adamant that the place was too small for two adults, let alone with a baby. She’d been anxious to find somewhere better, and, though I maintained an unhealthy attachment to my pad—I’d lived here for a decade, it was rent-stabilized, convenient—I agreed to search. We’d almost moved to a place in Harlem, but the owners hadn’t wanted dogs, and I couldn’t abandon my aged Shih Tzu. Instead, a friend helped me repaint, sand down rough surfaces. My dog had to be put down months later. Even with newly painted walls and smooth floors, our apartment remained tawdry. Now I stepped back inside. Darkness shadowed our overstuffed and unkempt belongings, everything just like when we’d left—the metal walker still next to Diana’s desk, the schedule for the visiting nurse taped to the bedroom door. Silence like a crypt. I accidentally kicked at some colored wooden blocks scattered along the throw rug.
My God. The weight of this universe.
Lily was focussed on one thing, the event that Diana had been determined to stay alive for, but had missed by three scant days: party party party . Three years old. Daddy’s big girl didn’t come up to my waist, wasn’t close to looking above the bathroom sink and seeing her reflection. Couldn’t have weighed thirty pounds. This was going to be her first real birthday party.
It would have been cruel to ruin the festivities for her. Instead, I concentrated on tasks at hand: making calls to a woman who ran a funeral home out of what seemed to be her Brooklyn apartment (for a reasonable price, she handled the cremation), following up with a Ninth Avenue bakery (confirming the color of the iced letters, as well as the message on the double-chocolate cake). Peg, who was Diana’s mother, was still in shock, numb with grief, exhausted by bearing witness to what her only child had been through after she’d been diagnosed with leukemia, two and a half years earlier. The chance to be with Lily—to help her granddaughter—was the only thing keeping her in one piece. She and Diana’s friend Susannah helped Lily into a sleeveless formal dress. Lily preened in the midnight-blue gown. It was a little too big for her, its hem grazing the floor. Lily twisted in place, swishing the tulle back and forth, giggling at the little rustling sounds. Her face glowed; her eyes sizzled gray, their green flecks shining.
My sister, Crystal, lived nearby and supplemented an acting career by planning children’s birthday parties; her West Village apartment was converted to a wonderland of toys, the perfect celebration spot. When Lily arrived, toddlers were already high on sugar, running around and flapping their arms, wrestling on mats, crawling their way through the extensive, circular, brightly colored tunnel. Guests had congregated: a few of my friends grouping off to commiserate, Diana’s people from Narcotics Anonymous nursing cups of punch, talking with her friends from graduate school, everyone staring at one another, trying to figure out what to say. Diana had been through chemo, radiation, two bone-marrow transplants, and for what? I remember a pair of long-arguing lovers making out in my sister’s closet.
As if propelled from a cannon, Lily burst toward the heart of the party. Some of her zags had to be pent-up energy; anywhere she looked brought someone she knew, a loved adult, another child she wanted to play with. Of course, logic suggests she was searching for one person in particular.
The next morning, I watched her, splayed out on Mommy’s side of the bed. The top of her head peeked out from beneath the comforter, her hairline high on her skull, dirty brown hair unkempt and thin, curled in places from how she slept. Some of it was damp.
My therapist had provided the script. He was primarily a couples therapist, whom Diana and I started seeing during her pregnancy. After she’d fallen ill, I’d kept going, alone. I’d stayed up late last night, rehearsing these sentences into the bathroom mirror.
“Your mother is in Heaven,” I began, then paused. Lily was following along. “She was very sick and had to go away.” I kept eye contact. “She loves you very much. Your mom wanted to be here with you. She tried very hard to be here for you. We all tried as hard as we could. Your mom still loves you, Lily. She will always love you. She will always be in your heart, just like you will always be in her heart.”
My daughter’s eyes are unnaturally large, and give her face a particularly moonlike quality. For the rest of my days, I’ll be tortured by how, in these moments, those eyes grew, widening, focussing.
“Mommy’s gone? Where’s Mommy? When is she coming back?”
December 19th. Eleven days after Diana passed—eight days after Lily’s third birthday. The holiday season was heading into overdrive, most everyone hightailing it out of town. The little one and I faced a long stretch with just the two of us—no sitters, not a lot of help—in the frigid and tourist-packed city. It was daunting, sure, but dinner had been painless and unmemorable, and I felt good about the day just behind us, the fun part of the night about to start. In half an hour, we’d Skype with her grandma back in Memphis. Then it would be jammies, teeth-brushing, face-washing, story time; all the rituals of winding down, easing toward bed.
One way of killing time and tiring Lily out involved racing down the hallway outside our apartment. Lily loved sprints along the long corridors and especially lit up when I’d disappear, hide in the stairwell, and surprise her. Tonight, we ended up downstairs, racing down the marble floor in our lobby. I was in my socks, which was against our rules for hallway running, but the game would take only a few minutes, so big whoop. Lily sped right out of the elevator door— game on! I caught up and passed her, stepping up my pace, actually running kind of fast. Then I transitioned into a version of the slide that helped make young Tom Cruise a teen heartthrob, back in his breakthrough film, “Risky Business.” Unlike Tom, I had pants on. Also unlike him, I kept on sliding, with so much momentum that my feet went out from under me, and zoomed right over my head.
The impact was shocking, a wall of force through my lower back. For seconds afterward, I couldn’t believe how much it hurt.
Glee in her face. She started laughing. Daddy and his funny pratfalls.
I’d landed near the Christmas tree that our management company always put out. Hanging from one of the lower branches was an ornament, a red sphere. Lily had persuaded me to purchase it a few days earlier, at a stand on Second Avenue.
I must have put my arm down to cushion the impact, because just below my right elbow swelling had started: a knot already the size of a lemon.
I tried to get to my feet, but, when I pressed down, putting pressure on my right foot, trying to push upward, white-hot pain ran through my right side. Blinding pain.
Lily’s face changed. She looked worried, ready to cry.
Silence through the lobby. No one coming or going.
Lily kept waiting, watching me, those huge, frying-pan eyes. Desperate, like always, to take in every single possible detail.
There’s a long section in “ The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle ” in which a man is forced to jump down a well. The well is impossibly deep. When the man lands, the impact shatters bones in his leg. There is little to no light down there. The stone around him is flat and impossible to climb. No food. Some morning dew he could lick off the stones, but not enough to survive on. He feels around and comes across the bones of all the poor animals who had fallen down this well over the years. Just no possible way to escape. The nightmare of all nightmares. You could not possibly be more fucked than he is. Haruki Murakami allowed this man to escape because his fiction doesn’t abide by the physical laws of our reality. Reader, I was stuck inside the physical laws of our reality. According to these laws, the situation was as follows: I was forty-two, a recent widower, deeply grieving. I had no full-time job, no investments, no retirement account, barely a dented pot to piss in, let alone a cracked window to throw it out of. Until recently, I’d been one of those fathers who sometimes, despite himself, referred to his infant as “it.” Flat on my back in the lobby of our apartment building, it sure looked like I’d just destroyed half of my body in a freak accident, with my right elbow shattered and useless, and some kind of break—Jesus, I hoped it wasn’t a break—through my hip. And I was solely and wholly responsible for the care, feeding, and well-being of this blameless little girl.
If it was possible to be under the bottom of the well, that’s where I was. Where we were. Fucked. We were deeply and irrevocably fucked.
This is the starting point. How did I get here?
Diana and I met at a mutual friend’s party in Williamsburg, just as that neighborhood was getting gentrified. The woman throwing the party wanted us to meet, actually, and made a point of introducing us. Diana: this pale and freckled and curvy lady in form-fitting leather pants. A bit of her midriff visible, spilling over. Streaks of blond amid thick brown hair that fell down to her shoulders. Oddly open face. I am six feet tall, and she looked at me square, maintaining eye contact as I worked my particular brand of charm on her, meaning that she bore with me as I mansplained the difference between two prog-rock bands that, to be honest, have little difference between them. Diana’s eyes were big and trusting. She handed me one of the business cards she’d just had printed up; the cards represented her move to get clients as a massage therapist, which, she explained, would allow her to quit being a receptionist. We stayed side by side, talking, until she told me she had another friend’s party to attend that night. I volunteered to tag along. She did not drink at either function; neither did I.
No irony to her. Even less guile. Once, I found a note that she’d written to herself. It described the importance of wishing “for others to be happy,” but also endeavoring toward “unlimited, unconditional friendliness toward oneself, which naturally radiates outward to others.” That twisting message, I think, captured a part of her: a probing, New Agey, people-pleasing aspect, yes, but also an intelligence that was deep and intricate, although, oftentimes, people who conducted themselves in a manner that others might consider urbane (or shrewd ) used this as an excuse to ignore her, dismiss her, or just take her for granted. Early in our dating life, I did it myself: one afternoon, we had left her Prospect Place apartment, and were halfway down the street when she stopped and hugged a tree. “What the hell?” I asked. Her answer: “Oh, I just like to hug this tree. I don’t know. It brings me comfort.” I likely made a face. How much of the tree-hugging was performative? How much did she want to show herself as heartfelt?
What was undeniable: every day she hauled her massage table—twenty, thirty pounds?—on her back and went on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan and her private clients. She’d borrowed the money for massage school from her stepmother and was determined to pay back every cent. She was less determined about the money she owed to N.Y.U. for an education she’d compromised by rolling too many blunts. Our first date, I’d picked her up after her twelve-step meeting. One of her diets had her counting out Fritos. She’d also walk a mile uphill, into the wind, deep in snow, singing the whole way if, at the end of the trek, there was a slice of Key-lime pie.
An only child. A child of divorce. A polite Southern girl. She’d adored the cousins she’d grown up with in suburban Memphis; some of her happiest times had been spent in her aunt and uncle’s house when all the relatives were over, celebrating Thanksgiving. That was what she’d idealized: a house full of joyous children. It was what she’d wanted more than anything. To be a mother.
A man’s capacity to feel sorry for himself is bottomless: once you take that first step, it’s an easy slide down.
Reconstructive surgery on my elbow left my right arm immobile and in a soft cast. In fact, there also was a hairline fracture across my hip, which meant at least a month being laid up. If I moved around too much and the fracture deepened, that would put me out of commission for half a year. To try and help, the industrious folks at Bellevue had rigged up a specialized, double-decker walker. I had to put all my weight on its bars instead of on my arm or hip, so just getting from my desk across our small living room meant lurching around on it, looking like some kind of fifties movie monster.
But that was not all. If I so much as glanced at the lamp on my bureau, I was transported back to New Orleans just after Katrina, when Diana and I had built houses with Habitat for Humanity—sitting together in a small antique shop, we’d needed to check out of our room and get to the airport, but had waited for that lamp to get bubble-wrapped.
If I opened a drawer, if any random object came into my line of vision, some version of this memory hole opened: a deck of cards connected me to poker nights in Memphis with Diana’s family; a Buddhist tchotchke reminded me, for whatever reason, of the time my Shih Tzu went missing, and Diana paid for a phone session with a pet psychic to try to find him, and I’d heard this news, and got confused, and a little mad, and then suddenly, also, I’d had my long-overdue verdict—finally I’d understood just how much of her tree-hugging had been heartfelt.
We had a decade together, courtship and marriage. Our one serious disagreement had been about having a kid. I’d refused to do it, needed to finish my book first. No negotiating on this. I’d been banging on this pipe dream of a novel since the tail end of my twenties, eating loads of shit along the way: third-shift legal proofreader, tabloid-rewrite guy, filcher of reams of typing paper from office-supply closets, that long-haired dude who was too old to be hoarding chicken wings from off the cater-waiter tray. That was me, a decade of fielding six-in-the-morning calls from my mom about when I was going to apply to law school. Even my best friends assumed I’d never finish the thing. Maybe Diana hadn’t believed, either, but too bad; she’d chosen her horse, and so got dragged along for the ride. This had meant waiting through what had turned into the heart of her thirties. Waiting also had meant she’d put together a complicated, fifty-guest wedding, with true D.I.Y. ingenuity, for a whopping seven grand, that she’d voluntarily taken classes and converted to Judaism just so my mom would be happy at the wedding, that she’d come up with a honeymoon where we drove around Vermont in an old Volvo, stopping at roadside vistas and feeding each other the last layer of our wedding cake. (It had been the best, the best .) And, too, Diana had recognized that her body could take only so much of the grind of being a massage therapist. She decided to go back to school. Earning a scholarship, she pursued a master’s in English lit, at UMass Amherst, our first married year passing with us in different states, juggling a long-distance relationship. Then finally, finally, finally , I finished my book. Got the damn thing published. And I still put her off.
She set a date of April 1st. On that day, without telling me, Diana stopped taking birth control.
She was diagnosed with leukemia when Lily was six months old. Diana had wanted to check herself out of that hospital and drive herself and the baby straight to a Buddhist monastery. Lily was with us in the hospital room at the time, playing with a plastic glove that had been blown up into a five-fingered balloon. Diana and I had looked at each other, no clue, nowhere to begin, certainly no answers, other than the largest answer, that is, the answer that emerged in how, despite or maybe in lieu of the terror of the situation, our bodies had involuntarily gravitated toward each other, how our petty grudges and growing disagreements—all the fissures and loggerheads that had been emerging in our marriage—had given way. Surrendering to the wishes of her many loved ones, Diana did not go into a monastery. Instead, she’d given herself to science: more chemotherapy than any sane person could imagine; enough radiation to make her body visible from Jupiter; days at a time beneath a futuristic, space-age medical breathing tent. All that plus two full bone-marrow transplants. She’d let her physical self be attacked and diminished. I’d like to think it was so the two of us freaks could grow old and soft together. Maybe that was part of it. But there was another reason, one far more important, playing with that five-fingered balloon.
My fearless charmer, so determined to go down the big kids’ slide, to reach up toward the monkey bars! My unabashed little clomper, springing forward, sticking out her chin, clamping down on her jaw, clomping those unsteady toddler clomps, that impossible spring to her step! Little hell on tiny wheels, only not wheels, pink sneakers that lit up in the soles, also wearing one of those taffeta princess skirts, the outline of her diaper ballooning from the back of her tights (pink, thick stripes). Lily Starr Colbert-Bock, Silly Lily, Señorita Lilisita Mon Amita . Prone to shouting, “Watch me, Daddy,” at the playground and following up with an epic face-plant, after which would come ambulance-siren screams, which themselves tended to fade as suddenly as they arrived. A shameless flirter. Once in a while shy with new people—especially if she liked or felt curious about them. But mostly open—those wide gray eyes fixing on you, inviting: Dive in, the temperature’s perfect . My Tomato Torna
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