When Things Get Back to Normal Read Free

for measuring pain of the heart. If others could see the extent of your suffering, they wouldn’t be so quick to ply you with platitudes.
DECEMBER 3 –
Tuesday
    They say I’m taking it well. They mean your death, of course, even though they can’t bring themselves to voice the word. I’ve cancelled your credit cards. I even registered the envelopes bulging with chopped-up plastic. I gathered your belongings into piles: to be thrown away, to be given to charity, to be passed on for memories – diamond ring, gold cuff links, new tuxedo, never worn, an anniversary gift from me in October when I still had expectations of a long and full social life. I know what I’m about to say is a cliché, and you know how I hate clichés, but it is so true that old habits hang tough. Before I threw your cast-offs into the green garbage bag, I gotthe scissors to snip the buttons from your shirts. I actually had a couple in my hand before I realized what I was doing. It was a really low moment when I came to grips with the fact that I no longer have any need to save shirt buttons. My sewing box already has a quart bottle filled to the top with small, white pearlized buttons, and, unless I intend to open a button factory, I now have enough shirt buttons to last a lifetime, however long or short that may be.
    But if I’m taking your death so well, why do I feel like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
? I feel as if I’ve been scooped up by a tornado and spiralled into another dimension, where nothing is as it was or as it should be.
    I have taken on the responsibility for the details of your life at a time when I can barely cope with the details of my own. Every day the list lengthens. Get the death certificate. Send in the insurance forms. Cancel memberships here and there. Close out bank accounts. Clear out safety deposit box. Change over Medicare coverage. Change car registration. Let this one and that one know you won’t be chairing a meeting, attending a conference, giving a paper. While I try to get these things looked after, the thank-you notes for mass cards, letters of sympathy, flowers, food and donations to your scholarship fund lie fallow on the coffee table in the front room.
    Then too, the vultures are circling. Will I be selling the house? Lawnmower? Snowblower? Tools? Am I interested in a monument? If I place an order for a monumentbefore Christmas but agree not to have it installed until the frost goes out of the ground, I can take advantage of a special bonus: my name and age engraved for free. Imagine! Me, a chronic falsifier of natal date, making a public proclamation of it on a slab of marble.
    Yesterday I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Only I did. If I will order fifty four-by-five-inch laminated copies of your obituary notice, I can have the lot for the same price as the two-by-two size. Now what use would I have for fifty laminated obituary notices? It isn’t the sort of thing you’d display on your coffee table, is it?
DECEMBER 4 –
Wednesday
    I broke the lease on the Arizona apartment today. Man proposes, God disposes. We had planned our sabbatical year so carefully: a novel for me, a textbook for you, and all of that sunshine, not to mention our first release from domestic responsibility in thirty years. I used to lie in bed and happily anticipate the coming months. On the night of November 21 I told myself that nirvana was only five weeks, two final examinations and seven hockey games away.
    It is difficult to believe that your life petered out while I placidly watched the “doings of the Ewings” on television. Surely the earth should have trembled to presage such a terrible event!
    When the doctor told me you were dead, I didn’t believe him. At any moment I was certain you were going to burst into that room at the hospital they euphemistically call “the quiet room” and announce you were ready to go home. I was even prepared to be