Life After Death

After the recent death of my husband, I am unsure what the future holds for me. I’d been with Tony for so much of my life. Sometimes our marriage was very good; sometimes, especially in the last four years, it felt like something weighing me down. His death has released me from the burden of caregiving, as well as watching someone I loved suffer. It has liberated me, but for what? I don’t know. What will my next steps be? The political climate of America, indeed the world—including the obvious disaster of climate change—fills me with anxiety. I feel the intersection of multiple losses. I’ve lost a life-companion and dear friend, but also am witnessing what seems the slow dying of an America I’d taken for granted, now characterized by various forms of hate, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, racism and ethno-nationalism. Will democracy too die? My ideal America? Even if that ideal was never fully realized or truly inclusive? 

It’s odd, but all that time I was taking care of my husband in his inexorable decline, I thought of his mortality… but not mine. I was just too busy. Sometimes, I felt guilty that I was alive and thriving, with an appetite for good food, wine and work, all while he was going downhill, his body shedding weight, the fine bone structure of his face becoming ever more pronounced, even as I couldn’t lose five pounds. But suddenly my mortality has hit me now that I’m living alone in my apartment, undistracted by caretaking duties, though I do have supportive friends.

Funny how people avoid the word “death,” for when I made my necessary phone calls after, I would say “my husband died” or “Tony is dead,” as if to challenge those who prefer a gentler expression. I hate those other expressions, which always seem slightly comic to me. “He passed,” reminds me of passing gas. Or “I lost my husband,” as if I’d been careless, not paying attention and lost him as one might lose glasses or car keys. No, he’s dead. The finality of death is driven home in my Jewish burial tradition, where the mourners shovel the dirt into the grave, listening to the thuds it makes as it falls on the unvarnished pine coffin. Death is similarly unvarnished. Yet, the dead remain strangely present to us at moments. Just the sight of Tony’s empty slippers sticking out from our dresser is enough to make me break down into tears.

I have to do things to the apartment to somehow make it feel new, a place I want to be. I loved our apartment, with its new Persian rugs, crystal chandelier and furniture from my old childhood home that I brought in from storage to refurbish. The strange carved oriental rosewood table and the large reading chair that I reupholstered in magenta velvet. I like to be surrounded by color and beauty. But over the course of Tony’s illness, my beautiful apartment had been gradually filled with the things of disease and impending death—two walkers, two wheelchairs, a hospital bed—basically enough medical supplies to fill a small pharmacy. I had to clear these reminders out in order to go on and donated everything to help others in need. I had all the rugs and the sofa Tony sat on for fifteen years cleaned. But I had to do something more, to make the apartment a place of life, not death. I had to bring more color and softness into my life.

Tony had only been buried a week when I ordered bright velvet decorative pillows (one aqua and emerald green, the other purple and fuschia) to enliven the dark sage sofa, which reminded me of the color of grass in the winter. It was a good start, but not enough. I then bought a soft wool blue-green Persian runner, picking up the colors of my celestial crystalline lamp, my light in the dark that I had bought a few months before Tony died. (The lampshade has never been right, but I keep it as a symbol that nothing in life is perfect). Then, a week ago, I had an epiphany: every room must have something that’s new and colorful-- a rug, something not just to look at but to feel! I spent hours online, and ordered a small coral-colored Moroccan rug (aptly named “vibrance”) for the second bedroom. The color of a glorious sunrise. A happy color. But what about my bedroom? I have trouble sleeping there, next to where the hospital bed stood. For more than a year, Tony lay in that bed, every night calling out for help. It is where he died. I can’t erase the image of his body wasting away. At night, I turn, facing the opposite corner of the room. 

I must have another rug to cover the space where the hospital bed stood, the impressions of its heavy feet still visible on the beige rug of the room. I stayed up for hours one night, measuring the space, seeing how big a rug I could get. I trolled the online retailers. Finally, I ordered a light blue Persian wool rug with pale lavender markings, that will, I hope, transform that room into a serene place where I can sleep. All the things we do to trick ourselves into thinking that death can be covered over, and yet such things are somehow necessary and life-affirming.

People ask me, “What are you going to do now?” (other than decorating). “Your life will really change. Have you thought about that?” Maybe I’d prefer not to right now. I am going to do what I have been doing for a long time: teach; read, think and write. I’m exercising, going to see movies and hear music, spending time with friends. I might even go back to dancing. But it’s going to take time. The great relief that I initially felt after my husband died is more muted now.

People ask me, “Where will you live? Are you going to move back to Illinois?” I have no idea where I will eventually end up, except where we all do (in the earth) but I hope that won’t be for a long time. A young friend told me, “you will reinvent yourself.”  Why would I want to do that, I thought, but didn’t say.

Instead, I recalled my husband’s father Sam’s third wife, who he married in his mid-seventies. She was twenty-five years younger than Sam and a year younger than Tony (“do I have to call her mom?” he quipped). She made Sam happy, but he died quite unexpectedly, and his newly-widowed wife called to tell us, “The butterfly has flown!” She scattered him in the Arizona desert. At the “shiva” she held a week or so later (it was more like a cocktail party), her curly long grey hair was suddenly short and blond, and a black mini-skirt replaced her customary long hippy-style Indian skirts. Tony’s comment when he returned was, “she’s gone quite gold with grief.”

Well that’s not me. Yes, my life will change in ways I can’t predict, but I don’t feel any need to reinvent myself. A slight redecorating of my apartment is enough. It’s taken me a lifetime to come into my own, to feel comfortable with myself and to find my voice. Why would I want to change all that?