After a few weeks of realizing hmm, I haven’t cried or felt sad in awhile maybe that part is behind me, and with sleeping through the night again…suddenly this past week sadness is my constant companion. I make strong and true efforts to be happy, and I mostly succeed, but the sadness is just waiting for me to sit down, for my mind to rest, it is coiled in songs. And then I realized the return of the sadness coincides with the anniversary of the devastating news of your impending death, delivered by you, yourself. No wonder I have been swimming in such grief. My body just remembered before I did, is all.
A few months ago your mom texted me after a three day hunting trip, thanking me of all things for the socks I gave her years ago. Best socks I ever got, she texts. So warm! I burst into laughter. She’s had those socks twenty years, and someday she will pass and I wonder what will happen to those socks.
I read a story in the NY Times, scientists took an EKG of a dying man and they found that brain activity at the moment of transition is just like brain activity when a person is consciously remembering something. Our lives really do flash before our eyes when we die, in other words. This made me cry and cry. Because we had so many good memories, so many good times, I can almost know that one of the last things you saw and felt was the real happiness we shared. We were together for two-thirds of our lives, the longest and most significant relationships of both our lives, besides our parents and siblings. We transitioned from college kids to working adults together, we experienced so many experiences together. We learned how to ski, how to scuba, how to travel, how to run marathons, how to be grown ups.
I love thinking that your brain recycled your remarkable life for you, I imagine it like a Ken Burns style montage, and I can picture how many of those early memories contained the threesome that made up your fabled friendship the Gruesome Foursome. And then I come riding into the memories, literally, that summer we met you took me on the back of your sister’s moped down a long country road, then another, and later to the tavern out at the highway so I could meet each of them in succession, P. and J. and R. I saw R. at the funeral home, and P. (M. said they hugged, but they weren’t sitting together at the lunch afterwards and you know I bet that makes you laugh and shake your head because come ON R!). Now just a twosome, I said to P. when we hugged goodbye, and that was maybe not such a good thing to say because we all just fell apart, me and P. and M. standing in a huddle with our foreheads touching together, electric memories of you jumping, I swear, from brain to brain. The four of us scootering along the coastline, dancing in the sand. Me and M. going topless at the topless resort and the two of you trying to take surreptitious pictures which was expressly forbidden and P. kept saying to the management who sternly rebuked him “but they are our wives, our hot wives senhor” not being obnoxious just a bit country boy drunk and hilariously polite. The time M. had many many beers in the hotel swim up bar waiting for us to arrive, and then got lost at dinner going to the restroom.
I imagine your brain showing you that time we were diving and a pod of dolphins swam past us, underwater, looking right at us and smiling as if to say “Yes, this is unbelievably cool, yes indeed, nice to see you”. I remember watching there underwater next to you until their tails slowly merged with the distant blue and wondering, is that the usual thing to see on a dive like this? and even as I thought it the dive master spreading his arms wide and then clasping his hands over his heart, then flinging his arms wide again, and how when we looked at each other your eyes were so big and blue, magnified by the water, the goggles, and our shared delight.
Maybe that memory will connect to the one where you had just bought me a scooter of my own and we were riding merrily around town and at a four way stop encountered some Harley riders, by which I mean more than three dozen, it being the rally weekend. They let us pass through the intersection, me driving in my little green sundress with the skirt flipping in the breeze and you riding behind me and they all hooted and revved and honked and gave you the thumbs up and some even saluting you and when I expressed surprise because we were only on a Honda Elite you said But I’m the one with the girl.
I hope your brain showed you us in Trafalgar Square in London and on Copacabana beach in Rio and at that jazz club in Sao Paulo, I hope it showed you every river float trip you ever took, even the ones before you knew me. I hope it showed you that summer that we met, playing softball and the green corn growing at the edge of right field. I hope it showed you us in Mexico, us in Costa Rica, us in the VFW Hall for your high school class reunion dancing in the parking lot when the smoke machine set the fire alarm off. I hope it showed you our wedding (still in my memory one of the happiest days of my life) and all those Christmases at your grandma’s and my mom’s and those crazy house parties we’d throw with a hundred guests. I hope it showed you soaring above the great piney woods of Houston in the hot air balloon ride I arranged for your thirtieth birthday. I hope it showed you every marathon we ran together, strung together so that you remember us running together through all those cities, St. Louis and Houston and Dallas and Austin and Portland and San Francisco and Chicago and the last and best, Boston. I hope you saw me just smiling at you, a lot. I hope that when your brain revue concluded the parts of your life that included me you felt only joy and, that the parts that came after me - from the coasts of Brazil to the mountains of China to the prairies of home - gave you even greater joy.
I tell myself the best way to honor what we had is to not waste my life, to be happy no matter what. Your mom said that when we divorced, writing me I don’t know what happened, not my business - but I will always love you. You have to be happy. It’s all you ever wanted for me - I’ve always known that. To be happy. There is nothing to regret, you wrote me, no reason to be sorry. We had a great time.
We really did. I look forward to reviewing it all again, one day.