…I am living. I remember you.
–from “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe
A boy from the neighborhood stops his bicycle to watch where I wash my car. He can’t be more than eight years old. I’m not yet familiar with the aphorism carpe diem—translated roughly as “seize the day”—but still I try my sense of fleeting time and that we should enjoy this short life while we have it. “In a blink of an eye,” I hear myself say, “you’ll be as old as me.” I’m sixteen, maybe seventeen years old. What do I possibly know? Or a better question: What is it I already know?
His name was Jeffrey and he let his bicycle fall on its side in the grass. My car was red—no, it was maroon—and the driveway angled toward the street, which likewise leaned to carry the soapy water along its curb. But what else? Surely the boy has a last name. And is that my first cheap car, a 1979 Cutlass Supreme? Or is it my second, a two-door Volvo, roughly the same color and from that same year? The day may have been clear or perhaps—like the temper of so many of my memories from Portland, Oregon—the sky was overcast, and our bodies moved without shadows. What else did the boy and I talk about? What detail will vanish next from that flutter of a single afternoon?
# # #
It’s three decades later. We’ve just marked the anniversary of Valerie’s death and those early hours of August 9th, 2020, remain for me both blurred and remarkably vivid. I remember, for instance, standing at the coffee maker in the kitchen of our vacation rental, opening the sliding glass door and finding one of the gray Adirondack chairs that faced a row of tall houses across the street and finally the ocean. There’s the moon, three-quarters full and waning, with Mars glowing at her side. There I am a short walk later, sitting in the sand at sunrise. I write down words like “passing” and “name of the deceased” as I talk by phone with a woman from the answering service for the funeral home. This language, both ordinary and strange to the ear, attaches itself to the end of my partner’s life. I’m in shock—I’m not sure the shock ever goes away—and I’m a thousand miles from our bedroom and the sheet that soon covers Valerie’s body where our friend moved her to the floor.
Like many, I believe I have a lousy memory, though maybe we just compare ourselves to those exceptional few who have no problem recalling names at parties, each subplot from a long-running show, or who ordered what at a restaurant three summers ago. I’ve looked up the phase of the moon for August 9th a half dozen times, as I’m incapable of holding that information on my own. Although I can “see,” perhaps too specifically, the sheet that covered Valerie’s body, I know for a fact I wasn’t there and so I’ve texted a friend to confirm that small, important detail. And just yesterday (or was it the day before?) I gave up and called the local funeral home as I couldn’t locate the phrase “answering service” and nearly settled on “dispatcher” or “operator” in attempting to describe that morning from last August. No, such things do not come easy to me, and there’s also the grievous fact that I’ve lost access to Valerie’s memory—a second, more accurate point of reference—for our life together: our first meeting in a bookstore, the milestones of our children, and those few weeks we didn’t even have time to recognize as the last.
# # #
When we learned that Valerie’s cancer had metastasized to her brain, our conversations became urgent. Valerie shared more of the fear and worry that she’d held in the years since her initial diagnosis. “If I die,” she said on what would be our final trip to the Outer Banks, “Emerson will never forgive me.”
Then she added: “If I die, Whitman won’t remember me.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Valerie replied with a question: “What do you remember from when you were five?”
# # #
When Valerie took her last breath, she was a thousand miles from her children. I cannot tell them their mother died, I remember thinking, and then put them in the backseat to grieve while we drive two days back to Chicago. In our hotel room that first night, I took a picture of Emerson and Whitman where they sat against the white pillows of the bed and watched cartoons. I still haven’t found the words to begin to describe that weight: in a matter of hours, my children would know the memory of the moment when their world shattered. I felt like a poor magician, wishing he could strip the table of its cloth without the plates and wineglasses crashing to the ground. I wanted the impossible, which you might say is another form of denial.
Afterwards, the kids and I shared the same bed in which Valerie died. We told her that we missed her. We cried and thanked her for being such a good Mama. We held each other until we fell asleep. A few nights later, Emerson returned to the room that she normally shares with her brother, while Whitman and I continued to sleep together. Eventually, those roles switched: Whitman found his own bed at night and Emerson took his place beside me, in the space where Valerie once slept. Sometimes, when our daughter tosses and turns or when she sighs, for a haunting and beautiful moment, she becomes her mother.
# # #
“I couldn’t help but notice you writing.”
I’m drinking my first cup of coffee outside our hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina. It’s August 2021 and, later in the day, we’ll once again join our friends along the shores of the Outer Banks. But here in Greensboro, without even breaking her stride, the woman who has noticed my notebook shares a few thoughts on the importance of journaling, that we must keep a record so that we don’t forget.
“It’s important to get it down,” she says, “the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
“Absolutely,” I find myself repeating as she speaks. “Absolutely.”
Beautiful.