OK, stop fighting in my thread!
Jelly, :hugs:. People suck.
This is so sweet and so sad. Sigh.
Dedicated to Two Women, Only One of Them Alive
By BRENDAN HALPIN
Published: December 5, 2004
MY wife is about to die. As I leave the hospice to pick up our daughter at school, I tell Kirsten I love her. She is bald, gaunt, jaundiced and slipping in and out of consciousness. It takes a lot of effort for her to speak. "I love you," I tell her, and she surfaces briefly and croaks, "I love you too." It's the last thing she will ever say to me.
I take our 7-year-old daughter, Rowen, from school to the hospice for a brief visit, and later that night I go back alone and sit by Kirsten's bed with her parents and sister. Kirsten is unconscious, rasping and moaning with every breath. Sometimes there is a long pause between her breaths, and though it has become clear to me that prayer is ineffective, each time this long pause happens I just pray that she's dead because I can't stand for her to be alive like this.
I fall asleep holding her hand, and I wake up at 1 in the morning. I tell Kirsten's family I have to leave, because Kirsten and I agreed in advance that it was important for me to be with Rowen at bedtime and in the morning. I kiss Kirsten goodbye, and five hours later it is Kirsten's parents and sister who are with her, singing, as she dies, and not me. I know I did what Kirsten wanted, but still. We were together for 14 years. I wish I had been there.
Weeks later I have a dream. Kirsten, Rowen and I are in the same mall where Kirsten and I went walking to try to get her contractions restarted on the frigid January day when Rowen was born. There's a bookstore on the third floor, and Kirsten and I take escalators all the way up. Suddenly I realize that I don't know where our daughter is. "Where's Rowen?" I ask Kirsten, beginning to panic. She is unfazed: "I guess she's still down by the bathrooms."
"Well, I have to go get her," I say, and as I get into the elevator, I see Kirsten heading into the bookstore. On the ground floor I get off the elevator and find Rowen. I throw my arms around her and wake up. I'm at home, in my bed, where I need to be, with the living and not the dead. I am annoyed with my subconscious for choosing the mall as a metaphor, though I am comforted by the idea of the afterlife as a bookstore. If that's true, I'm sure Kirsten is content.
Of course I don't really believe that's where she is. But she's certainly not here. Oh, I have some of her ashes with us in Boston, and since I gave out baggies of ashes like party favors at her funeral, she's in the ocean, and in Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. I will never again hear the ZZ Top song "I'm Bad, I'm Nationwide" without thinking of Kirsten.
But while some people talk about feeling the presence of their loved ones after their deaths, that's not the case for me. Kirsten is bad, she's nationwide, and she's completely gone. I can get through the days on automatic pilot. But at night, when I'm not crying, I'm furious: that my daughter will never have anything but a 7-year-old's knowledge of her mother; that so many evil humorless clods are still living while my whip-smart wife with the razor wit is not. My daughter lives in the moment, makes me laugh and gives me a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But now even the most mundane parenting decision becomes fraught with significance, because it reminds me I have to make every decision on my own: nobody else to consult, commiserate with or blame.
I need a distraction, so I fixate on the idea of getting a date. Kirsten half-seriously told me I could start dating after two years, and it has been only five months. But she also told me that the only thing that would make dying unbearable was thinking that Rowen and I would be unhappy forever. "You have to be happy," she told me. "You have to." I think it might make me happy to have a date, so I decide the serious instruction to be happy trumps the half-serious dating timetable.
I spend a week going through the humiliating process of creating an online personal ad. I write a desperate, needy, excessively long response to a woman who has a snarky sense of humor and bears a somewhat disturbing resemblance to Kirsten. Mercifully she doesn't write me back. I then spend a couple of weeks exchanging e-mail messages with an attractive single mom. The e-mail messages lead to a phone call in which she talks about how difficult it is to date, and I get scared and don't ask her out because I realize I don't even really know what dating is. I met Kirsten in college; I've never dated as a real adult. It appears that it's terrifying and stressful. The hell with it.
Another month goes by, making seven since Kirsten died, and I've given up on getting a date anytime soon. I do, however, sometimes have nice conversations with Suzanne, a teacher at Rowen's school — a single parent like me — who is outside doing bus duty at drop off. I think she's cool and smart and sexy, and she confirms all three when she tells me that she is going to a rock 'n' roll camp for women over April vacation.
I am convinced that someone as alluring and joyful as she is could never be interested in anyone as awkward and depressed as I am, but these morning conversations do feel flirtatious. When she comes back from rock camp and gives me the lyrics to the song she wrote, I think, "Am I crazy, or does she like me like me?" I give her a copy of my novel, but I don't inscribe it because I'm paralyzed trying to think of what to write.
She e-mails me to tell me she likes the novel, and then our e-mail messages become phone calls, and we spend hours on the phone every night. I start mixing CD's for her. My friends say that's cute, and aren't we just like a couple of teenagers. I tell them that two single parents trying to date are a lot like two teenagers trying to date, except that the people preventing us from leaving the house at night are much smaller.
Eventually we both get some baby-sitting and we have a date. It's a walk in the park, which quickly turns into sitting in the park, and before long I am kissing a woman other than my wife. It feels good, and I don't feel guilty.
The phone calls continue, and we have a couple of "family dates" where Rowen and I get together with Suzanne and her two kids, and after one of them, Rowen says to me, "Are you going to get married again?"
"Uh, I don't know," I say. "I mean, maybe someday."
"Well, you know," she says, "this business can't go on forever."
"This business with Suzanne?"
"No," she says to me in that you-are-so-dumb-I-can't-believe-it tone with which all parents are familiar. "This business of not having a wife."
Late one night, after agonizing about it for days — Do I really? Yeah. Is it time? Maybe. Will I scare her off? Probably not, but maybe. Am I really sure? Yeah — I tell Suzanne that I love her.
"What did you say? You're mumbling."
I repeat myself, trying my best to articulate and project. "I love you."
I feel relieved and happy, but also guilty. For 14 years those words belonged only to Kirsten. But now they also belong to Suzanne.
And so, for the first time in my life, I find myself in love with two women at the same time. If both were alive, this would constitute a pretty serious problem. But here's the thing: I'm down here in the mall, and Kirsten is up in the bookstore. It would be a stupid waste of time for me to stand here on the ground floor staring longingly at the bookstore when I've found somebody to go to the Orange Julius with.
A month later I am invited to the wedding of a former student. Suzanne agrees to be my date, and we get all dressed up — she looks breathtaking — and we drive to the church. We sit with a group of my former students, and they hug me, they are laughing and joking, and I feel proud to be with Suzanne, proud to be invited to this wedding, and happy to see so many people who have been so important to me.
But when the bride and groom arrive at the altar, I feel my chest tightening, my heart racing, and my tear ducts itching. I feel like jumping out of my skin, running from the church to save myself. I actually don't know why until the bride and groom are saying their vows, and suddenly I am back in a different church 10 years ago, swearing to Kirsten and God and a church full of people that I will love and honor her in sickness and in health until death do us part. I was only 26 and didn't understand, didn't believe that the sickness and death parts of those vows would come true so horribly soon.
The bride and groom walk out arm in arm, the happy music plays, the attendants stream down the aisle with big, goofy smiles on their faces, and I'm lurched back into the present, surrounded again by people I love, holding the hand of one of the women I love, the one who's here and looking at me right now, with concern.
Suzanne gives my hand a squeeze. "Are you O.K., sweetie?"
"Yeah," I say. "I think so."
Brendan Halpin is a writer who lives in Boston. He is the author of "Donorboy," a novel, as well as two memoirs.