∞ 

The stages of grief are these:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  How interesting that the human desire to quantify extends to grief as if you could write a primer for it or a “Grieving for Dummies” or design a course in successful grieving so that soon after someone died you climbed aboard the Grief Express and at each depot along the way you dropped off your worked-through emotions and picked up the next group of issues to be wrestled with and then the whistle would blow and the engine would chug and your journey continued smoothly until you ultimately ground down to a halt, your grieving complete, popping out the other end a completely whole, healed, new person.   As though it never happened, as if you could forget. 

I like to think that on the outside I appeared to be passing this course with flying colors and honestly, most days, I think I did pretty well.  But the transitions were not smooth and the stages were not linear.  In fact, you hazily remember certain days, brittle and careening in high gear, when you were stubbornly silent or sulked and sneered from one stage to another.  Sarah jumped out of the past without warning at weird times and she rarely whispered.  I couldn’t predict or prepare for these moments that spiraled up and down my memory like vertigo.  Next thing, you’d be clutching the handle of the shopping cart or touching your forehead to the shower tile trying to get your bearings.  As if you could shake your head and forget.

Pam Beesly helped.  Mostly she helped but sometimes when I was alone I felt guilty for feeling good.  I felt guilty for having feelings for someone again and the feelings weren’t sorrow and the feelings were for Pam.  Then I felt shallow and manipulative, like I was using her, that she was simply the missing female piece I was snapping into the empty space.  Like she was your replacement girl, your power pack of cosmic energy, your soul recharger.  Could new life be as simple as plugging in and letting her bring you back to life?  As if any girl would do, as if you could forget.

But the truth of it was, I was beginning to forget.  Certain details were moving out of focus, certain conversations were blurred in a haze.  Sometimes I couldn’t remember if I’d told Pam a story or if I was remembering telling it to Sarah.  I was terrified of calling Pam Sarah but sometimes the feelings she aroused were the same and they became mixed up in your head.  Sometimes I expected that she knew things she’d have no way of knowing because it had been Sarah at my cousin Michael’s wedding and you’d never been to Philadelphia with Pam.  It all became muddled and blurry and I tried hard to separate them.  That seemed very important to me. 

Forgive me.  I am the unreliable narrator, flipping between you and I.   Understand, there were things I could not accept and that’s where you came in.  Forget talking.  I thought it would help if I could write this story, but not saying ‘I’, not saying ‘me’ because then it’s too close, right?  You know sometimes when you’re telling a story to someone and you’re very keen to have that person tap into your story, very eager to make some connection and suddenly you’re saying ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ - you know how you do that?  That’s what I was doing there in the beginning, just saying you but meaning me, because we’ve all had that loss haven’t we?  I needed you with me on this, I just couldn’t do it alone.  We’ve all had that pain so crushing.  I didn’t think you’d mind and it was so much easier for me.  I stayed on the sidelines, licking my wounds and watching and I would finally like to say ‘thank you’ and ‘well done’ because if it had been left up to me, well, I think we both know this story would have had a lot more Scotch and much less plot.  You were the one who kind of forced me to go to Pam’s for pudding and pizza and look how brilliantly that turned out.   Talk about your soothing tonic, talk about your whole new world.  I don’t mean to leave you behind, but it’s time, isn’t it?  Masks off then, no crutch and no bullshit.

I kept the dry cleaning receipt as a reminder, tacked up on the cork board over my desk at home.  It’s a reminder to stay open, keep the boundaries porous.  She’d done me a favor, picked up a few sweaters at the dry cleaner for me but when she came in through the front door with my dry cleaning over her shoulder and a new tennis ball for Jeeves, I pulled up hard and let her have it.  I didn’t yell, I don’t do that.  I gave her the good old passive-aggressive “I’m fine, nothing’s wrong, I’m just tired” bullshit.  And let me tell you, she did not love that.  And unlike Sarah, she didn’t let me go and stew in silence until I got over it.  She got right up in my face and wanted to have it out right there and then and man, did that make me feel like an ass and very uncomfortable.  I had to hurt her and say that for a moment it felt too familiar.  I had to admit that I was afraid.  She said it was okay, that was fair, but I wasn’t allowed to shut down and lock her out.  She made me agree to talk to her.  Fair enough, I said. 

But I continued to hold back; it seems I did that for a long time.  Maybe consciously because of the guilt, maybe subconsciously because of the fear.  It was so hard to let go of myself and all my precious grief!  Leaving myself open like that felt so dangerous and it felt like betrayal.  I know it’s irrational but it’s not weird; it’s completely normal.  I hadn’t yet reached the point where I realized that my healing didn’t have to hurt anyone, so I was still holding back and she gave no sign she noticed. 

Over breakfast at the Blue Benn diner in Bennington on a steamy Sunday July morning she slid a piece of color-washed paper across the table at me.  She’d written the words in her bold, even script and it seemed to almost sigh in a way I’d never  experienced before and though I knew the words by heart, they’d never come from her and so I read them slowly and carefully, the heat rising to my ears as her fingers pressed firmly on my wrist.

Sonnet XI[11]

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

And I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue. 

“Okay,” I said.  “Okay.”

Saturday morning on 30 minutes of sleep.  I am not joking thirty minutes.  Justin comes to the door with the paper, the bagel, and the coffee and I’m grabbing the robe around my waist, squinting at him without my glasses and shoving a ten dollar bill at him and saying, “can you get another coffee and another bagel and come back?”  And he laughs at me and says “Holy crap, you finally got laid!”  I tell him to shut up and go to the store and we’ll catch up another time and please can he leave the coffee and bagel and just ring the bell?  And keep the change and shut up!

Pam Beesly’s naked body in my bed causes me to commit at least five of the seven deadly sins and my worst offense is gluttony.  She takes my glasses off of me and I get an erection.  She’s delicious and delightfully filthy in every good way but she refuses to have sex if Jeeves is in the room.  I ask why.  Because, she says, his big old bewildered dog face staring at her will prevent her from having an orgasm and she is definitely there for the orgasm.  Minutes go by and we determine that ‘prevent’ is too strong a word, so on her fingers she ticks off reasons why Jeeves might diminish her enjoyment of her orgasm while she’s sitting on top of me.  These range from ‘he reminds of my father’ to ‘it’s dog abuse – he knows what we’re doing!”  Beyond lust and her deliciously filthy mouth she’s just so funny.  She makes me laugh.  I fix the lock on the bedroom door and I let my dog judge me. 

We drive to Bennington all fluffed up and fancy for a play.  She never makes it to the second act.  She is sound asleep with her head on my shoulder.

She is pretty much useless in the kitchen outside of pudding and scrambled eggs and showing up in only an apron and high heels.  I start shopping and cooking and I develop this weird passion for feeding her.  She keeps the wine glasses filled, plays music, sits on the counter and kisses me every time I’m within range, traps me with her legs and puts her hands down my pants, chops things if I need her to, but mostly she just admires me in her kitchen.  She carries on and on like if she doesn’t I might stop cooking for her and God, she loves to eat and everything I make her is the best she’s ever had.  How did she live so long on pudding and pizza and eggs?  In exchange she does the dishes and I admire her at the sink, with my hands, my lips, my whole body pressed to her back and I want nothing more than to lean into her and close my eyes.

We have plans for next school year.   We want to teach a cross-discipline course that melds writing and art.  We’ve done the instructional design, we’ve done the curriculum, we’ve pitched it to Father Joe.  We’re just waiting to hear if he approves. 

Moments still come, in the morning when she’s still asleep curled under my chin or when we’re sitting quietly on the porch.  I train myself to let them flow across the artificial borders I’ve made.  I take Pam to Scranton and she meets my family, sees the house and after that visit, the moments slow down.  Life merges, the water commingles and I breathe out.

She owns, I rent, and come August, my lease will be up.  We’ve put in a garden at her place, I’m leaving clothes and a toothbrush and there’s room for me there.  She’s hinted and I smile past it, but I’m thinking.  It will be August again so soon and already I’m thinking I love her.  I can feel blood in my veins and steel in my back and I wonder if two years is enough time.

She knows the old tradition and while so many things are new, I’m still as clumsy as ever with words when I try to say them.  I think I’m improving, but I’ll never be as good as I am on paper and on paper, I’m no David Foster Wallace, but then, who is?  There will only ever be one and now he is gone.  I’m no Neruda, either,  but in the fading August light, I find her with her camera in our garden, her autumn-colored curls lit up and glowing, a cotton dress loose around her bare legs.  She looks so beautiful in this light with a smile for me as I hand her the journal.

“I think it’s good timing,” I tell her.  “August.”

SONETO LXXVIII 

I don't have a "never,’ I don't have an "always." 

In the sand 

Victory left its forgotten footprints. 

I'm a poor man ready to love others who are like me. 

I don't know who you are. I love you. I don't give or sell thorns. 

Someone perhaps may know that I didn't weave bloody

Crowns, that I fought against mockery 

And that truly I filled the high tide of my soul. 

I gave doves as repayment for vileness. 

I don't have a "never" because  I was, am, will be unique.

And in the name 

Of my changing love, I proclaim purity. 

Death is only a stone of forgetting. 

I love you, I kiss your mouth of happiness. 

Let's bring the wood and make fire on the mountain.     

Before you can say ‘how predictable’ let me be the first to acknowledge that the love-of-a-good-woman-saving-a-broken-man theme is somewhat overdone, especially in poetry and country songs.  But it is a capital-T Truth that there is no greater earthly reason to allow yourself to be redeemed than to love and be loved.  This is our story.  What more can I tell you?

[11] This is ‘the sex poem’ that I read to my senior writers.  Coming from Pam, it meant more than that and I knew it.  I can’t believe I was foolish enough to think she wouldn’t notice or know, that she would not be hurt and insulted.  How could I think she could be satisfied with being handed an empty glass, with being given only some?