The Second Anniversary

I’m coming up to the second anniversary of my husband’s death. It’s not what I expected, and I don’t know how it is for other people who have experienced the recent death of a loved one. Maybe, in part, it’s the effect of living for a year and nine months under the cloud of a pandemic, which looks like it will be endemic.

This second year has been different than the first.  At first I felt relief—honestly, felt relief, as if a weight had lifted, after some years of watching Tony’s gradual loss of abilities from the steady march of Multiple System Atrophy, and taking care of a sweet man who needed more and more help. I was glad that he died two months before Covid hit. Our aides said they wouldn’t have been able to come and no nursing home would have taken him. I don’t even want to imagine what that would have been like. Maybe neither of us would have survived.

So, I felt relief (and didn’t feel guilty) but I was also very busy, had no empty moments of the day. I was teaching full time and adjusting to teaching on Zoom. I was what they call, “settling his affairs,”— so much paperwork, so many phone calls. All while I was also fighting Social Security, who had mysteriously declared me dead too! They told me I had to come to an office and “prove” I was still alive, but all the offices were shut because of Covid-19. Right out of Kafka.

I “moved on.”  I bought four soft and beautiful wool rugs, a mix of colors that lifted my spirits and calmed me. I bought a fushia cashmere throw, two velvet pillows (different colors on each side), reupholstered the chair the aides had sat in for more than two years and was breaking down. I thought of my apartment as a lovely padded cell, where I could fairly happily endure the isolation of the pandemic. I stocked it with food. I cooked dinner every night. I took care of myself. I got a rowing machine and a couple of weights so I could exercise. I ordered the headstone for Tony’s grave, even a footstone. Evenings were hard, but I started watching Netflix (something I’d never done). I felt good in my apartment. I even slept fairly well. I had gotten stuff done.

This year, however, has been harder. I have found myself missing Tony more. I also realized that I’d been a traumatized witness of what he had gone through. I had felt helpless (you can’t stop a progressive neurological disease) even as I threw myself into being his helper, all the while trying not to be pulled under myself. Now I’ve been grieving for him—very different from just mourning your own loss. It’s a double mourning, the price of empathy.

Last week as cold weather finally started, I thought maybe I should give away more of Tony’s clothes—wool sport coats, a warm winter coat and other similar items. Only recently had I started moving a little of my clothing onto his “side” of the closet, putting a few things in what had always been “his” chest of drawers, and even sitting on “his side” of the sofa. Not that I was expecting him to object from the great beyond, but still, it just seemed a little like I was pushing him out of my life. Now I was recycling some of my clothes and thought I’d donate a few of his that were still left. One of my brothers had already taken a lot that fit him. But should you throw away everything? Everything that bears a trace of the person, their smell, their skin cells? I remember when my aunt Mema died and immediately one of my brothers took everything out in trash bags. How awful the rest of us felt at the desecration, as if everything of hers was simply garbage. What do we keep and how? (Are our memories enough?). Do I just hold on to a few things, the ones that seem most precious, the sheepskin Ugg slippers that still bear Tony’s imprint? Is it right to keep warm clothes that could help someone in need through a cold winter?

I decided that I’d do the good deed, helping the living, on November 2nd, election day. I had the day off and could run errands. But as I carried Tony’s wool sports coats and heavy winter coat down to my car, I suddenly had the strangest feeling. More than any article of his clothing, these coats conjured up in my memory, my imagination, his body, as if they were part of him. Stop it I said to myself. They are just fabric. Yes, but fabric that was shaped to his body, that fit him so elegantly, clothes he loved to wear.

I set off to drive to the nearest Salvation Army—30 minutes away, in New Rochelle. But when I got there, there was a sign on the door: “closed until further notice; flooding due to Ida.”  Sitting in my car, I looked up other locations, called them only to find they too were all closed for the same reason in Westchester. What to do? I didn’t want to bring these coats back home. Maybe I’d been watching too many murder stories on Netflix, but I felt as if I was driving around carrying a body in the back of my Honda, trying to find a place to get rid of the evidence.

Finally, I discovered a place closer to home in the Bronx, the Unique Thrift Shop, which supports multiple charities. As I drove away, the load lightened, I recalled that on the Yahrzeit (the anniversary) of a person’s death, it is a Jewish custom to give tzedakah, contribute to charity, in their name. 

So maybe I have. And maybe next year will be easier.