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?

My husband of 47 years recently died at home after a long illness. Multiple System Atrophy, they call it, a name as horrible as the disease itself.  Though the dying really took place bit by bit over the years as Tony gradually lost the ability to do so many things we tend to take for granted such as dressing, walking, standing, and even moving. The actual day he died, the sun had broken the pattern of cloudy days that we’d benn having. Looking out the windows of our high-rise apartment, Iwould watch the tide of the Hudson River go out with the morning, then returning in the afternoon, as regular and natural as breathing.

But then, the sun had set, producing a deep pink and blue-gray glow over the New Jersey Palisades on the other side of the river.  Our son and I had been sitting on each side of Tony’s hospital bed. He was lying, peacefully with eyes closed, but with breaths getting shallower. The oxygen machine made a soft whir.  His face was turned slightly towards the window. I watched the tiny lights of planes glimmering as they flew over the Palisades, heading for their landing at La Guardia. Tony suddenly opened his eyes, looked directly at our son and took his last breath. It was the most peaceful, beautiful death imaginable. He had been calm and pain-free for two days. One couldn’t hope for a better outcome now that his long suffering was over, but nonetheless, it was heartbreaking. 

Through it all, I thought of the opening lines of John Donne’s poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning:”

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say,

The breath goes now, and some say, No.

Tony, a virtuous, good man, suffered in life, but was ultimately blessed with a good death. His breath went out to the universe the evening of December 12th. I don’t know where souls go, unlike those people who are certain about heaven and hell or that an afterlife exists somewhere else, where all friends and loved ones can be together.

The date seemed so significant, and not just because it was a full moon. The evening of December 12 reminded me of another of Donne’s poems, “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucies Day.” In the early seventeenth century (which used the Julian calendar, not the Gregorian one we’re used to), December 13th, also known as St. Lucy’s day, was considered the winter solstice, the shortest day, the longest night and the turning point of the year. Donne’s poem mourning the death of a beloved person (perhaps his wife, though she died three months earlier) takes place during the evening of December 12th.  To me, there is not a sadder poem. As evening moves towards midnight and the solstice, the speaker gives voice to his immense grief:

For I am every dead thing,

In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

For his art did express

A quintessence even from nothingness,

From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

Though, he says, the year (and life) will renew for others as the sun moves into Capricorn and the days lengthen, the vital spirits of the earth returning, his “sun” will not renew.  In the depths of loss, he feels he is “every dead thing,” as if he (rather than the beloved) has died, and is in the grave.

But death is a strange thing—and the feelings it brings to the survivors are so varied, so complex. Donne’s attempt to express inexpressible grief, a grief that (like God) is beyond words, is stunning, wrenching, though my students have sometimes found the hyperbole comic. But surely such terrible, inconsolable grief is what one might experience with the loss of a child, or the tragic and sudden death of someone young, with so much promise unfulfilled. Is grief ever too much? For me, there is both grief and relief, sadness and liberation. Profound and deeply contradictory feelings. Maybe many people have had this response, even if they may hesitate to admit it, or feel guilty about it.

I feel sadness, but no guilt.

My first reaction when Tony died was, “Thank God.  He is finally at peace—and so am I.”  I was so grateful that his suffering did not last any longer.  Indeed, I had been praying for months, “Please God give me strength, and please give Tony peace”—by which I actually meant, “let him die,” “take him to you if you exist.” When he died, it was such a relief—a relief for him, but yes, also a relief for me.  I would no longer have to run out and get his supplies every day, struggle to take him to so many doctors, tend to his many physical and emotional needs.  I had wonderful aides, but I still was his primary caregiver. I was no saint—sometimes losing my temper, driven by frustration and fear. Still, I was his chauffeur, the nurse dressing his wounds (the diabetic ulcer on his ankle, the wound on the toe that went down to the bone and if I couldn’t get it to heal a doctor threatened amputation), the nutritionist and chef planning and preparing his dinners (always balanced and colorful, the Mediterranean diet, minus the wine, which I drank), and finally the therapist that he talked to as he tried to come to terms with the state of his life. It was so hard helping him do the spiritual work that, I hope, allowed him to die in peace.

I was, also, relieved because, with his death… now I was free! I could live again, having put much of my life on hold for four and a half years, even as I continued to work full time, fulfilling my professional obligations as a teacher.  I would now be able to go to movies, to live music events, even dance again; I could meet friends for dinner rather than having to be home by 6pm. I could freely travel to visit my lovely granddaughters, to conferences and not stress about having to find aides to be with Tony 24/7 for the entire time I’d be away.  But now? Freedom!

I remember our last Passover, the spring of 2019. I had decided to make a simple Seder, a stripped down version, with only the minimal, requisite things on the Seder plate. No elaborate meal.  Just my homemade chicken soup with tasty matzo balls for dinner. That would be it.  But as I started reading the Haggadah, I suddenly said loudly, “I can’t do this! I can’t celebrate the Exodus from Egypt, deliverance from bondage, because WE ARE NOT FREE!”  And closed the Haggadah, moved on to the soup. Tony was trapped in his progressive neurological disease, which he had done nothing to deserve and which also held me in a form of bondage. I just could not do Passover this year.

So Tony’s death feels like a liberation for me. Sometimes during the day I feel good. There are, even, moments of happiness--as when I see the sun rising higher each dawn, now that the solstice has passed.  Once, after an icy snow the night before, I looked at the trees, all sparkly silver in the morning sun, and I felt gratitude to be alive, privileged to witness this beauty, which would soon melt.

But my sense of relief is punctuated by grief, sadness that wells up unpredictably.  The night Tony died, the people from the funeral home came to take away his body. They wrapped it gently in white sheets, covering his body and face. Then they lifted it onto the stretcher, onto a body-bag, which they efficiently zipped up.  The sound was so harsh. I looked at this beloved, brilliant person, who only a few hours before had been alive, and now he was just a thing, hauled away like garbage, or an evil person, even though I knew he would be treated with reverence by the Jewish man who would perform the Jewish ritual (tahara) of washing the body before burial and the people assigned to sit by the body so it would not be left alone.  As soon as the funeral home workers left with my son accompanying them downstairs as they carried the body out, I let loose with the primitive howl I had so long suppressed, having been told that I must keep my spirits “up” when I was with Tony, otherwise I would bring his “down.” 

And so it goes, relief alternating with grief, and will go on for some time, I’m sure.  I am grateful he is no longer suffering. I don’t miss what he had become at the end, especially when I remember the handsome body wasting away into its skeletal frame or the witty, literate man no longer able to read or speak. But I miss what he was at his best; and I cry when I think of the many losses and indignities he suffered, so bravely and nobly, in a way I don’t think I could possibly have.

Those waves of intense sadness and tears come unexpectedly. They come more frequently now that several weeks have passed. So long as I’m busy, so long as it’s daytime and the sun is shining, I’m okay. But when the sun goes down, when night falls and I sit alone, it’s another story. Then I grieve.