Every year without knowing it / I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out / Tireless traveler / Like the beam of a lightless star
—from “For the Anniversary of My Death” by W. S. Merwin
Now, by which I mean the hazy past, I sit at a fancy bar tucked inside a fancy restaurant, my back turned from the windows and the Willamette River. I can’t afford dinner in a place like this, but there’s a generous, two-dollar happy hour and my friendships with the staff mean half of my cocktails and beers and shots are on the house. It’s rather quiet on this particular afternoon, making it easier to consider the two men, not long out of college, each wearing a loosened tie. They consider me in kind, too much so, and their repeated glances suggest they might know me.
I set down my drink, look their way and ask, “Steve Buscemi?”
This is the third time in as many months that someone has landed on the idea that Buscemi and I might be related. An uneven goatee hangs from my chin, my hair is long enough to push behind either ear, and while the actor is known already for Reservoir Dogs, Fargo, and Con Air, my personal favorite is Trees Lounge, in which Buscemi portrays Tommy Basilio, an alcoholic who can’t find a footing after losing both his job and his pregnant girlfriend. Basilio is very good at drinking—or terrible at drinking, depending how you look at it—and I needn’t work hard to imagine myself, someday, in his shoes. For me, however, that’s where the resemblance ends.
Back at the bar, the pair of future hedge fund managers are convinced otherwise, and they almost celebrate when I acknowledge that, “Yeah, I’ve gotten that before.” But telling a stranger at a bar that they look like someone else—someone more famous and no doubt more intriguing—isn’t a prize-winning recipe for conversation.
An uncomfortable silence follows, that is until the two men talk it over and the nearest one adds, “It’s not a bad thing.”
A few weeks ago, by which I now mean a few weeks ago, I listened to an interview that aired near the anniversary of September 11th. I’d forgotten that, early in the 1980s and before dedicating himself to the career for which he’s known, Steve Buscemi was a New York City firefighter. On the morning of September 12th, 2001, Buscemi retrieved his old coat and helmet and rode the subway to Little Italy, only to find an empty firehouse. He eventually located Engine 55 and volunteered to work twelve-hour shifts, alongside the men with whom he served, at the ruins of the World Trade Center. His was a heroic, selfless act, and afterwards Buscemi suffered the effects of PTSD.
For me, then a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the trauma of that event was collective: I grieved in my immediate community and did so with my nation. But like you, I live most of my life more privately, and so I leave Buscemi’s account of that horrific week and turn to a moment in the interview that I almost missed. Describing his early life and the performance art scene on the Lower East Side, Buscemi says, “Through my late wife, Jo Andres, I got to meet people like Tom Murrin…”
I stop the recording, rewind the conversation, and listen again.
I know that phrase, have heard variations like “late spouse” or “late partner,” but in the months since Valerie died I haven’t considered using these words myself. Not once did they appear on my linguistic radar… Nothing, zero, never a single ping on the empty screen. And while I remember hearing about the death of Buscemi’s wife in early 2019, that news—along with whatever else happened that day—slipped to the bottom of a drawer with other curious details and blurred recollections.
The forecast that morning—or so I’ve recently learned—called for partly sunny skies in Brooklyn, with the high of 48 degrees sinking below freezing just after midnight. On the same day, Bohemian Rhapsody won Best Picture at the 76th Golden Globes, a solar eclipse cast a partial shadow over East Asia and the North Pacific, and on their way home from a vacation in Florida, Isaam and Rima Abbas, along with their three children, were killed near Lexington, Kentucky, when their SUV was struck head-on by a drunk driver. These events happened and even the most tragic news fades quickly for most of the eight billion people crowding our planet. And yet January 6th means everything to the friends and relatives of the Abbas family. And that Jo Andres died on January 6th, 2019, means everything to her husband, Steve Buscemi, and their son.
On the day that Valerie died, nineteen months later on August 9th, 2020, the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States surpassed five million with approximately 163,000 deaths. August 9th happens to be National Book Lovers Day. Although Valerie flew back to Chicago the day before, the largest earthquake in over a century rattled much of North Carolina. Felt as far away as South Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee, those of us on the Outer Banks never felt a thing. One day and a thousand miles later, I arrived home with our children. One day after that, we did not celebrate Valerie’s birthday, which she shared with Alex Haley and Viola Davis, as well as musicians Charlie Sexton and Ben Gibbard.
Despite knowing better, I’m interested in how our lives align with those who are widely recognized and—on the surface at least—lead more glamorous lives. If we share a birthday, might we unwittingly share some of that talent and luck? My own birthday coincides with those of Josh Brolin, Arsenio Hall, and Christina Ricci. Instead of Alex Haley, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln step from the shadows. Yet I think more often of Sal Mineo—best known for his role as “Plato” in Rebel Without a Cause—who was murdered in West Hollywood on the night I was born in Portland, Oregon. I know too well the trap of believing we were exceptional in a previous life—never a bored housewife and never a hedge fund manager—and I generally accept what those smarter than me have been able to prove through science. In other words, I lack any true conviction for what happens to the soul when it’s finished with our bodies.
But what if? What if there’s some significance in the fact that Sal Mineo cried out for help within hours of the breath that first filled my throat and lungs?
I’d like to share with you a moment from those first hours after Valerie died, when I waited for the sun to rise on the Outer Banks and I noticed a woman who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. She had dark hair and wore a long black dress as though in mourning, or so I allowed myself to think. Like me, she stared out across the crest and curl of the ocean waves. What history and circumstance, I wondered, brought her to this narrow stretch of sand? Was it possible that she too felt the beauty and deep splintering in those first rays of sunlight? I’d like to remember that I believed, just maybe, that the solitary figure was Valerie’s spirit and that she was there to comfort me.
When I looked again, the woman was gone.
That mystery—and its consoling potential—might’ve remained intact, but I caught sight of the woman a second time, maybe thirty minutes later, as she walked south on Ocean View Drive. Her slow, shortened stride made it clear she was older than I’d initially thought. I was close enough to smell the smoke from her cigarette and to know, without doubt, that the stranger was exactly that: no one I knew and no one I’d ever know.
The details of that morning already belong to someone else. The bed in which I woke to a ringing phone—and really each bed in when I’ve opened my eyes—feels only as real as a dream. We’re different people at different times and, in another life, I’m a boy riding my bike around the block in Southeast Portland. On Sundays, the family gathers cherries, apples, or grapes behind my grandparents’ house on Vineyard Road. In another life, a substitute teacher describes a book that changed his life, which in turn adds fuel to my interest in literature, which in turn leads toward my first attempts at writing poems.
In another life, after an injury ends her dream of opening her own ballet studio, Valerie moves to Chicago, adopts a dog, and begins work on a novel. We meet in a bookstore, exchange a flurry of emails and then, nine days later, a flood of kisses after tapas and many glasses of wine. In another life, August 9th comes and goes on the calendar hanging in our kitchen, and the next year it comes and goes again. We likely write the date in our notebooks, brush our teeth in the morning and then before bed, all without knowing Valerie will die on that day somewhere in the unknown future.
In another life, that future is known and I’m still alive, unable to shake the sentences that include some version of “my late wife…”
“Late” is rarely good. You hurry for an appointment that started ten minutes ago, or maybe the month flew past and now a payment is overdue. A chapter closes, opportunities disappear, the ferryboat pulls away from the dock. “Late,” as in “recently deceased,” has been used since at least the fifteenth century and, among its examples, the Oxford English Dictionary cites William Caxton’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Her swete and late amyable husbonde.” Similar usage is found in the works of William Shakespeare.
It’s said that Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words, or at least he was among the first to write them down. In case there’s doubt how swiftly language can evolve, the poet and playwright changed nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, added prefixes and suffixes both, and fused separate words to make new ones. Some of his creations—the gold, for example, “That makes the wappen’d widow wed again”—abruptly sank in the river of language.
Four hundred years later, far from the River Thames and Shakespeare’s London, I stand in my basement with Matthew, the service technician who’s just asked a question about our aging furnace. My answer comes without deliberation or forethought, yet I realize even as I’m speaking what I do not say… I do not say, “My wife, who died last year, kept a humidifier running in the winter.” In how many awkward instances have I framed this terrible fact between two commas? Death demands attention, and the pauses give the listener an opening to absorb the weight of what’s been shared. Adding to that, the arrangement of the sentence centers Valerie’s passing and not what’s actually most relevant in a conversation about solenoids and saddle valves.
So, here’s what I actually say: “My late wife kept a humidifier running in the winter.”
Having heard Steve Buscemi use the phrase, I attempt it here and for the first time, with my own voice and breath. Valerie’s death drops seamlessly into the sentence and, without commas, there’s no unnecessary emphasis. I do not say “died” or “passed away” and the statement doesn’t solicit or require a response. “My late wife” is ultimately less imposing but, to be honest, it feels wrong, somehow careless, and much too casual for the loss and ongoing grief experienced by those closest to Valerie. There’s comfort, perhaps, in the fact that the phrase is meant to be temporary, typically abandoned after a few years. I don’t know what might serve in its place in a decade, nor do I know how the language works when a widow or widower remarries. What’s apparent, for better or worse, is that now is the window when I can choose to use—or not to use—these strange and powerful words.
In another life, in that very brief life, a half dozen strangers suggest I look like a famous actor. The comparisons vanish as abruptly as they begin and, moving forward, my friends will be perplexed how anyone could suggest such a thing. But let’s face it: Steve Buscemi and I are more alike today, twenty-five years later, than I would have imagined. We married remarkable, exceedingly strong women, each of whom lived four years after being diagnosed with cancer. Both of our wives died on a Sunday, and they died in our homes. Together, and with so many others, we carry forward a sorrow and empathy unique to those who’ve lost their partners.
Thank you for sharing this with us, Michael. I wish I could have known Valerie.
When my parents and sister come up in conversation, I encounter a similar tension. "You have a sister? Where does she live?" someone might ask. I often say "Oh, she's no longer living," or "she died several years ago," and I feel like I've just placed a heavy weight on the conversation, something I need to alleviate by smiling, in order to reassure my conversational partner. I'm attempting to speak about a reality I'm now familiar with, but it feels like I'm delivering bad news every time it comes up.
Which, in a way, we are.