Young Widower

Young Widower Read Free Page A

Book: Young Widower Read Free
Author: John W. Evans
Tags: Biography And Autobiography
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the most iconoclastic and antinarrative shows— Seinfeld , The Larry Sanders Show , Lost , The Sopranos —eventually grounded relationships in longevity, delivered moral comeuppances, and established continuities where none seemed to exist. Successful series— X-Files , Battlestar Galactica —generated spinoffs. Writers pursued in new series the subject matter, stylistic flourishes, and ideas that had interested them in previous ones. A habit of continuation had the ironic effect of making it feel like my favorite shows never really went off the air, when in fact it was the stories themselves that repeated and therefore resisted closure.
    Sometimes, after I returned a disc or checked out a new one, I stopped in at the chain bookstore across the street. I poked throughtall displays of bestsellers and new releases, then the poetry and magazine racks, and finally, inevitably, the self-help aisle. It seemed to be the largest section in the store. Personal Growth—Grief targeted a demographic three, four, and five decades older than my own. Wistful elders looked out plaintively from dust jackets; they seemed to reach out to each other, around me, across titles and spines. Sometimes just a hand filled the cover, or a nature scene, a gravesite, a blank white page marked with the singular, patronizing jargon of consolation. Coping . Grieving . Making Sense . I tried to imagine the subsection where I would find some particular instruction after Katie’s death:
    Personal Growth—Grief—Animal Attack—Bear—Coward
    Personal Growth—Grief—Young Widower—Survivor—Hopelessness
    Personal Growth—Grief—Youth—Widowed—Blank Slate—Free
    Personal Growth—Grief—Violence—Witness—Failed Husband
    I bought books and did my best to read them. It was reassuring, even comforting, to see their titles stacked neatly on my bedside table each night. I might glean, without intention, some cumulative wisdom. With enough time I could pursue recovery. For now my room was filled with dubious comforts: sleeping pills, anxiety pills, allergy pills, earplugs, antacids, a humidifier, a white noise machine.
    Ed, ten years Katie’s senior, was nearly her physical twin: slender framed, square jawed, dark features and those same light blue eyes. Friends and neighbors remarked on the resemblance constantly, though at first I didn’t see it. Ed didn’t really look like Katie to me, but he told many of the same family stories. He smiled, paused extra beats for jokes, and shuffled across rooms with Katie’s easy grace. Sometimes, when he did not act like Katie—his voice inflecting in slow turns between words, his sense of humor less sharp—I was surprised to feel disappointment at the divergence.
    Those first weeks in Indiana, Ed and I went everywhere together, out for walks, to movies, to the city park near his house. We drove his truck to new neighborhoods to do advance work for his tuck-pointing business. Everywhere, chimneys stood in disrepair, magnificent houses with satellite dishes and two or three exposed joints worn through. The recession was a boom time for home repairs: people did what they could to stem the loss of their home’s value. On the roofs, Ed explained, he could get a better sense of the damage. We wrote down addresses, so that Ed could return the next morning, or week, to pitch an estimate.
    At night we sat on the back porch smoking clove cigarettes, Katie’s favorite. The sugared filter was sweet on my lips, the nicotine strong and heavy in my lungs. My head seemed to lift a little from my shoulders, and it felt good to say everything I could think to say, to talk about Katie and not hold anything back. I saw no reason to know things about Katie and not share them with the people who had loved her.
    The late-summer Indiana heat relented a little earlier each night. In the dark I could see less and less of Ed, but I heard his voice. Really, we both knew something about Katie that the other person did not. We

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