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VidhI can’t seem to let you go. Greedily I cling to our love. I buy roses for your grave, pull them apart and scatter the pink petals over the green grass. Look, I say to the world, my husband. I write your name boldly in black on the white paper birch in the garden, hieroglyphs of love to keep you here. I open the black piano and plunk at the keys you used to play. On Valentine’s Day I find two poems – one for you from me, one for myself from you – sign each with love and hide them away. On New Year’s Eve I pour wine into the silver wedding goblets, drink from each, and say your name out loud like a litany to keep you alive. It is the compulsion to have some contact with you that drives me to do these things. So that in losing you I do not lose myself. I am forgetting who I am. Vidh. To be empty. It is as if I have been emptied of myself. What do I look like now? No one sees me anymore. No one leans into me, asks what happened then,or wakens me from sleep to say what were you dreaming.
I have been out in the half-light of morning. It is snowing, a kind of waterlogged snow that sticks to the snow already fallen. Everything that has an edge is holding white. I sit on the bench and look at all this quiet beauty. Suddenly a tree powders down its snow as if some unseen bird had stirred in its branches. The beauty of this unexpected movement in the midst of stillness I accept as a sign that you are here with me in our garden. This is how it is now. All has been infused with your spirit – a falling star, the robin that returns each spring and, as I imagine, cocks his head to look me in the eye, the surprise of blue lobelia late in autumn. You occupy everything. Later I come out to clear the long sidewalk to the back gate. There, under the snow, a small gift awaits me: your name, etched into the concrete long ago. It appears magically in white letters with one push of the shovel. I wear your warm fleece gloves. I went downstairs this morning to find them and put my nose into them hoping to smell your scent. When I put my hands into them, I think of your hands.
The grass is knitting now over your grave, but I can still see the boundaries, the lines where the earth had been cut. I remember that first fall when I would visit here, how I wanted to peel back the sod – it seemed I could lift the edges so easily, like the corner of a blanket – and find you there. A whole year has passed. Still, I must push back the compulsion to get under there. You are under the earth. How to reconcile this reality with my need to see you. I will decorate my hair with blue forget-me-nots. I will wear small stones around my wrists and ankles, fashion a necklace from dried roots and berries. I will find the bloodroot to colour the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet. Like an ancient earth goddess I will chant the charms that take me under the earth. I will lie in your arms in the dark.
I measure my grief carefully. A line I overhear in the café haunts me: she is hopelessly self-absorbed, she is not spending enough time thinking of others. Could this be me? I begin to volunteer my time, sign up for classes, join clubs. But I am a split consciousness. The thought of you, of me without you, is never absent. How do I get out from under this heavy grief, this long history of us? How can it be that every minute of those years can fit into the small space of my body and still leave room for such emptiness? I begin to notice a change in myself. I am becoming increasingly cautious about being truthful. I put on a false gaiety. I avoid mentioning your death, your name, my deep lingering sadness. It is clear that having passed the first anniversary of your death I am expected to have adjusted to the loss of you. The messages we impart in sympathy cards have an expiry date. |
