Illumination

Two years ago today, as dawn was breaking, the light went out in my life. My wife, Amy, died after a short, but intense struggle with Covid. As the days folded into weeks and weeks into months and now months into two years, I have longed for the time when it all gets easier. I’m still waiting. As I wait, I have become more attuned to the snatches of light that briefly illuminate the path and beckon me forward. I’ve come to realize that in the darkest moments, the most minute light casts an outsized glow.

There are blocks of time in those early weeks and months that evade my memory. Many of the vaporous recollections after Amy’s death are reflective of the late night, shadowy world between dreams and consciousness, - difficult to discern what is real or imagined. I sometimes walk through the basement of our home, now just my home, and recall a hazy image of preparing to give her eulogy. Did that really happen?  Or I “see” her standing at the workbench I built, the one she thought was too big and took up too much space, sorting through her quilting cloth and telling me how glad she was that I built that table.

As the months passed, I grew increasingly concerned that I would forget the details of Amy – the texture of her hair or the smell of her lotion – the way she sang all parts of Bohemian Rhapsody gloriously off key. I woke with a start one morning with the realization that I couldn’t remember the sound of her voice. I had saved her voicemail message from her phone, but it sounded too mechanical – almost metallic –familiar, but not her voice. But, when I hear her daughter, Taylor, shouting encouragement and guidance to her son Liam when he is playing ball, I can hear Amy’s voice as clear as spring water. I recently heard Amy’s sister, Dawn, speak a phrase and recalled Amy using those same words. Words that penetrate the darkness.

Central Park, NYC January 2020

Often, I find myself wishing to relive a moment with Amy. Oddly, it is rarely a desire to revisit warm memories. I hold those tightly and can feel all their details. No, the times I want to go back to are those when I disappointed her or let her down in some way – a desire to make amends. Two days before she died, Amy’s condition was worsening, and she was deeply depressed. She asked me sit with her and tell her a story. This was something of a game we played. I love to tell stories and she loved listening to them. But that night, I was so concerned for her that I couldn’t conjure even the simplest story. When I told her I couldn’t think of one to tell, she whispered, “That’s okay.” I realize now that Amy didn’t need to be entertained as much as she needed me to attend to her – to provide a momentary distraction from the fear that she was dying.

When I visit Amy’s grave, I usually carry a small stone from somewhere I’ve been – a hike, a trip, working in the yard - and I tell her the story of finding that stone. Most recently, it was a hen-egg sized, red, rounded stone from a creek bed in southwestern Wyoming. The stone was polished as it rolled about inside a glacier that crept down the valley before being left behind as the glacial ice inched back up the mountain. The stone had laid there in Cottonwood Creek, washed over by thousands of years of pulsing water. As I walked the creek bed, the wet stone reflected a sunbeam from the late summer sun.  In that reflection, as Amy would have said, the stone “spoke to me.” I told Amy that story as I placed it in the center of her tombstone when I returned home.

That is my experience with grief.