Young Widower Read Free Page B

traded these stories like two kinds of currency: Katie’s childhood for her adult life and ambitions. The gap between us was something to narrow. Already close, we made a new bond of getting to know Katie better through each other’s eyes: the little sister with whom Ed grew up and the wife who had been my best friend.
    There was another side to this proximity. Each time we talked, I stemmed the low-level, persistent guilt for how much I still loved Katie’s family and for how my enjoyment of that connection seemed only to intensify in the days and weeks after her death. We grieved together. We grew closer. If the guilt was tangible, real, and unavoidable, then so too was the affection. I worried what would happen if I ever became, in their eyes, unsympathetic.
    I had wanted to survive Katie’s death in Romania; now, in Indiana, something beyond grief insisted still on survival, as though I were courting some second life, free of the obligations and structures of the first. It might never be so certain and stable, or insulated and naïve, but it would be entirely my own. Anything might happen next. I was grieving but healthy. I had been married before and liked it. A certain undeniable hopefulness twinned with the sense of debt, proportionally, as though each should only magnify the other.
    Perhaps Katie’s death protected me now and made me a kind of talisman to the people I loved. The sheer improbability of the circumstances of her death could make all of us exempt, I thought, by association, from such future calamity. More and more, it seemed, I could hardly remember that night myself. I had gone up one side of the mountain with Katie. I had come down the other side with her body.
    After fights, or to get a rise out of me, Katie was fond of singing the chorus to Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game.” I understood that she meant to explain something about her feelings and also to draw a contrast between the trauma in her life and the absence of trauma in my own. In high school she had rolled a conversion van on a rural highway and walked away with minor injuries. After her parents divorced, she had lived with her grandfather during the end of his life. One brother had died suddenly, while we were in the Peace Corps, from complications following a common illness. Katie’s sister had lost a daughter in childbirth. Loss was, if not an entirely common experience, then something to anticipate and expect. Katie found little to admire in its denial.
    On my desk in Indiana, I arranged a few objects. A roll of candies that Katie liked. A framed photo of us on the ridge. Her St. Christopher medal. At the strip mall one day I purchased a largepumpkin-spice candle. The next time I sat down to write, I arranged the objects into a new order. I lit the candle and moved our photo off to the side. I didn’t like that emphasis. So I switched them. I taped loose photographs on the wall. The metal on a tulip engraving that Katie had given me for a birthday present began to peel. I stacked some pocket texts on top of it. I took rocks from the garden to prop everything in place. Before her last trip to the Republic of Georgia, Katie had left a miniature plush Paddington on my pillow. I turned him so that the tag ( Please look after this bear ) faced toward me. Over time I added to the arrangement. I took to tending it a little each time I sat down to write. A map of Bucharest. Some letters and a bandanna. Individually they were bric-a-brac and hodge-podge. Together they were a place made sacred by association. A shrine.
    Katie is not the intellectual experience of a grieving mind . I wrote this over and over in my journal, but it was not quite right.
    I had no shrine in my home until I built one. For a while I added to it.
    I will not rebuild the shrine. It was a temporary and important place for acknowledgment. I have other places now more permanently sacred to me: Indiana, Katie’s hometown, the nature preserve where we spread her