Two Lucky

Tomorrow I leave for Montreal until the end of the week. It will be nice to see my aunt, and my little cousin, who to be honest isn’t so little anymore.

When I first saw him again after eight long years of separation, he was still a wee, mischievous 10-year-old. Now he’s 15, almost as tall as I am, and filling out his limbs.

He has, however, kept the cheeky glint in his eye. It runs in the family, after all.

I have been avoiding phone calls and e-mails this past week. Deep down I still feel awkward about engaging the world in its regularity, taking part in its prescribed pleasantries when all I really want is to be by myself, or at least, be with someone who understands how it feels to lose a husband. My uncle died of cancer when he was 39. My cousin was only four years old.

I do feel stronger each day. Some days, when I least expect it, I go under for a few minutes, but it passes, and I pull myself together. I take walks. I make dinner. Last weekend I put on a pretty shirt and had a few drinks at the local bar. I was comforted, though I was still uncomfortable, in the company of men again.

Grief to me is still a mystery. Its feelings are so complex, so layered, that I wonder if I will ever come to understand it completely. Part of my brain functions, part of it seems closed. Still I breathe. I am afraid to know its full force, the finality of death.

The service is over and I’ve begun to pack up the apartment. I take my time, as well I should.

There is just too much. Every other hour I find something unexpected that belongs to him. Each piece of him that I uncover - a cup, letter, paintbrush -  holds a narrative I am loathe to put away.

Grief is a long valley. I keep expecting to turn the corner, but I don’t. I am living a strange existence, as if separated from the rest of world by a blanket, or a bubble. 

In my adult life, I have yet to feel so inadequate in my own ability to understand what is happening to me.

I am trying my best to be strong. Friends walk in and out of the apartment. This sense of seclusion. It seems impossible for them to understand, though I can see in their eyes that they are trying.

There’s no denying that some days I “feel better.” Oddly, the nights are easiest to bear. There is some solace in the quiet around me.

In the day, however, I dread this empty apartment. Light casts a pall over activity. I walk with a slight fluttering in my stomach. I feel mildly drunk. There is a familiar swelling in my throat.

I contradict myself incessantly. I want and don’t want to suffer his absence. When the anguish is almost inhuman to endure, I am driven to desperation.

At the same time, I refuse to let our last hours together grow blur for the price of serenity.

This will go on for a long time. I know it. Sometimes, an immense fatigue invades me, and I feel a terrible temptation. I want to rest, to lay down arms. I want to lie next to him, by the headstone, in the earth.

And the idea of falling asleep, half-flesh and half-statue, frightens me not at all.

A poem

In the midst of winter, the last word
falls to the ground. Few flowers bloom,
fewer lovely. There is no rite or ceremony

to know the cycle of heartbreak
and renewal. Grief is not tidy.
I wade in a spiral of mourning, living

yet not living. My name has lost its way;
A new self carries the dead. When
will I be able to look back on my pain

from the vantage point of wisdom?
I locked arms with Death, but his spade
kept lifting. A wind breaks over us.

The orchard is black. How can it be
that a world so full and busy
is suddenly voiceless and absurd.

 
Photo by Yen Feng

Last words

The first sentence Rusty said to me was: ”I’m sorry I didn’t have time to shave, I came straight from the airport. I’m Rusty.” That was how our first date began.

Before Rusty was diagnosed with melanoma, a deadly form of skin cancer, his adult life was a dizzying rush of parties and meetings. He left his size-11 footprint in over 50 countries. He lived in seven of them, among them Germany, Korea and Benin, and he spoke six different languages.

Most of the time, he lived out of a suitcase, packed with plane tickets, appointment books and cell phones. He drank a bottle of red wine every night. “Chilean, cheap and good,” he’d say. He clubbed hopped in Paris, Tokyo, and Sao Paolo; he shopped at Hugo and Paul Smith. He lived life like a meteor. It was dazzling, seductive, and awesome.

And like a meteor, Rusty’s life gave out before we were ready to let go.

In the last three years, Rusty fought a valiant battle against his disease. In the first month of his diagnosis, we consulted five melanoma oncologists, four of whom advised that it was time to “put his affairs in order.”

As partners, we rejected the dispassionate medical opinions and focused our energies on the positive. Hope was always at hand. Passion gave us the muscle to keep fighting. Love was our fuel. Even in our darkest hours, we took comfort in the light that was to be our future at the end of the tunnel. 

His battle was our marathon, and together we strived for the finishing line.

Rusty may have left the race prematurely, but his love for me lives on, through his family, through his friends, and through me. This is the greatest gift he left me, and it may be the greatest gift anyone can hope to give. His love endures, and as I grieve his death, I am kept afloat by it.

Our love was brief, torrential, steadfast, and tender.

I will always remember the arch of his brow, the same that frowned and delighted at my teasing. I will always remember the color of his hair, the color of sun-soaked wheat in an open field. His eyes, deep pools of forest and earth. His laugh, like a river. His kiss, like a cloud.

Most of all, I will remember his touch. The hands that nestled my hair when we woke in the mornings, the hands that clutched my body in the orchard as we stood in the spring rain, the same hands that would search for mine in bed, even in the deep stupor of sleep.

Rusty’s last words were of love. He told his mother he loved her, and then said to me: “I love you,” and blew me two kisses before falling asleep. He hadn’t shaved, and neither had I.

Good night, my sweet prince. You are my hero, and you will always be loved.

Rusty’s memorial service will be held on Saturday, May 19, at 11am, at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola, in Manhattan.

A reception will be held after the service at 1pm.

Presiding over the service will be Father William Bergen, who had met Rusty and personally received him into the Catholic Church.

Memorial Service

Church of St Ignatius Loyola
980 Park Ave (at 84th St)
Tel: (212) 288-3588

An 18-member professional choir will be performing with live music accompaniment during the service. Mr Kent Tritle, former Music Director of The Dessoff Choirs, will be directing the service’s musical program. His biography can be found here: http://www.dessoff.org/kent.htm.

Please RSVP by Tuesday, May 15, by sending an email to memorialrsvp@gmail.com, with your full name, number of guests, and a contact number.

In lieu of flowers, we will be accepting cash and cheque donations to Rusty’s chosen charities, the Children’s Cancer Research Fund and the Children’s Cancer Home of Samsung Hospital.

More information will be provided at the service.

Funeral Visitation
9 May, Wednesday 7pm - 9pm
Loudoun Funeral Chapel
158 Catoctin Circle SE
Lessburg, Va 20175

Graveside Burial Service
10 May, Thursday 11am - 1pm
Union Cemetery
12942 Lutheran Church Road
Lovettsville, Va 20180

Memorial Service in New York
19 May, Saturday, 11am - 12noon
Church of St Ignatius Loyola, New York
980 Park Avenue, at 84th St
New York, NY 10028

A reception will be held on the same day after the memorial service in New York. Details to come shortly.

For directions, please go to: http://www.mapquest.com/

Rusty died this morning at 1.30am at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York.

He was with me, and his mother, and died peacefully in his sleep.

Rusty has been battling melanoma for the last three years. He was a real fighter. Even at the end, he didn’t want to go home, and instead asked the doctors if he could stay a few more days to get well.

Love kept Rusty going for as long as it could. In these short years, we made the best of it. The more virulent the cancer spread, the stronger we loved.

His last words were: “I love you,” and he blew me two kisses before falling asleep. 

Our love was extraodinary in the face of adversity. He is my hero, and will always be loved.

Two funerals are being planned. The first, a graveside service, will be held in Lovettsville, Va, next Thursday, where he was born.

The second, a memorial service in New York, will be held shortly after.

Details of services to come.

He sits at the top of the stairs, so still he might have been there forever and for always.

The air is capricious, however, taunting him with whispers of dead men’s philosophy. His eyes turn down, and he feels the weight of mortality under his feet. Around him, the hallway seems equally frozen, as if a breathing picture, a fixed fragment of time fallen into itself.

All of this is nevertheless an illusion, a vision he sees where time has forgotten its relevance.

In fact, he doesn’t remember beyond the stairs. The breaths he takes are the same he exhaled only moments before. In the dark, he begins to stale.

But moments later, a gust of wind from below erases this vision. It rises like a clean breeze from under him, and from it, he rediscovers the certainty of movement. He lifts his eyes, and looks around, then, begins to make out a hill in the distance.

The force of its existence strikes him awkwardly, unexpectedly.

He decides the hill must have been there always, as he has. He hunts the horizon for more shapes: a river, trees, but finds nothing, until in a final instant, he sees a bird tracing a wide circle near the hill top.

The trajectory of the bird’s flight, like a cut flag, fills his memory of the sky. The bird descends, then disappears into the hill’s shadow. For a moment, he forgets he is sitting on the stairs. The simultaneity of its movement, with the swelling of his heart, leads him to cry.