The Light of this Hour
With travels and full-time parenting during the summer months, I’ve taken an unintentional hiatus from my notebooks, not to mention the cursor I can feel blinking even when I’m not in front of a screen. And while the new school year is right around the corner, I’m trying not to slip into the belief that summer is over; instead, I’m taking time to breathe, to recognize there’s still several weeks—several weeks of summer!—with Emerson and Whitman, and to follow the sound advice written several decades ago by the poet Robert Creeley: “Look at the light of this hour.”
Tomorrow, August 9th, marks the second anniversary of Valerie’s passing. In a few days, the kids and I will join a handful of friends at the Outer Banks, in the very town where Valerie last visited the beach and where we, her family, spent our last moments together.
Just last week, among a stack of postcards and paper, I found a small white envelope containing the last Father’s Day card I received from Valerie. Her note begins: “Happy 9th Father’s Day! It seems so long and so short all at the same time. I know it’s not easy taking care of this motley crew, but we appreciate it, I appreciate you…” Near the end, Valerie also writes about her desire to do more for our family, which feels almost laughable—almost—considering her perseverance, her ability to tap into seemingly infinite resources, and of course her love, all of which she continued to demonstrate during the four years after her initial diagnosis.
Anniversaries—joyful or difficult—are an opportunity for reflection, and today I’m looking back to the first week of August, one year after Valerie died. On a warm summer evening, a group of friends gathered in our backyard to admire the garden—planted by many of those same friends a few months earlier—and, most importantly, to grieve and celebrate Valerie’s life. I spent the preceding days writing and revising the paragraphs that follow. I remember making the conscious choice of not attempting to encapsulate Valerie’s life, and so instead I narrowed my focus, remembered that laughter too was part of our life together, and at least tried to interject a few moments of humor and levity among the remembrances shared that night.
Rereading these words, my impulse is to revise, revise, revise… I’ll give it a “once over” and add a few photos, but it’s early here, the sun peeked its light somewhere over Lake Michigan less than an hour ago, and the kids will soon come down the stairs.
I’m looking back but I’m also looking ahead to our day—this summer hour—together.
A Tribute to Valerie, August 2021
Our friends would agree that, with an exception or two, Valerie was much smarter than me. And time has shown that when I occasionally disagreed with an opinion, suggestion, or decision… Well, in these instances I was likely wrong. Time has also proven that I can be as stubborn as the next guy, especially when I’ve thought—by which I mean I’ve known—that I was undeniably right.
Valerie believed, for instance, that putting ketchup on eggs was an act so repulsive it deserved not only admonishment but a dramatic, reflexive cringe as if you’d just stepped where a dog did its business. “How much ketchup did Josh put on his eggs?” she once asked a friend, and I can still see the look on her face turn into a faraway block of ice.
Valerie believed that our children absolutely needed “blackout curtains,” even if they took the form of the black garbage bags that we fixed over the windows in hotels and guest rooms. And when we were exploring options to buy a house in 2013, a separate playroom for the kids was nonnegotiable. I grew up without these luxuries, turned out fine (or mostly fine), but they say you should choose your battles. For me, none of this was worth much more than a sigh of irritation before I rolled another coat of paint on the playroom walls or stood before yet another window, high on an impossible piece of furniture and with a rectangle of plastic stretched between my hands, a roll of masking tape hanging precariously between my teeth.
And every few years, after turning off the television or leaving a movie theater, our opinions would sometimes pose like amateur fighters in opposite corners of the ring. For instance, at the conclusion of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, before I’d the chance to articulate the strength of the acting and the astonishing premise of the plot, Valerie swung viciously with the following sentence: “At least I don’t ever have to see that again.” A similar conviction landed its punch after we watched Lost in Translation, a film Valerie rejected because, well, even the smallest trace of romance between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson is simply ridiculous.
Of course there’s the age difference (36 years, 2 months and 1 day, according to a website that calculates such things), but I contend that the connection shared by the central characters is skillfully fostered by Sofia Coppola (the film’s writer and director) and is clearly rooted as much in loneliness as it is in the characters’ plunge into the language and customs wholly separate from their normal lives. The central characters share just a brief, closed-mouth kiss in the story’s final moments and, come on, my love for Bill Murray is well-documented and I’m going to pretty much enjoy any movie in which the actor appears.
These “arguments” rarely lasted more than an absurd moment or two, but our most consequential and impassioned disagreement stretched into actual minutes—minutes!—and focused on a subject that’s surely debated to this day by those who study music and subculture from the waning decades of the 20th century… Who really killed Kurt Cobain?
As a fifteen-year-old kid, I fell hard for Nirvana’s sophomore album, Nevermind. I’ve since offered little nods to the band’s lyrics and song titles in the poems I’ve published as an adult. But Kurt Cobain’s well-documented depression, overdoses, and stints in rehab (not to mention the fact that he penned an actual suicide note), all lead me to the singular conclusion that the musician took his own life.
End of story.
Period.
Or at least that’s the version of events I’ve carried through the decades while Valerie, there in the courtroom that hands down its judgments based on personal conviction and a unique flavor of common sense, reached a quite different conclusion: in truth, it was Kurt Cobain’s wife who not only bears responsibility but is—without reasonable doubt—guilty of murder. And the strongest piece of evidence, as far as I could ever tell, was that Valerie… didn’t like… Courtney Love.
Our playful banter on the topic reached its apex, its crescendo, its high-water mark during a visit with friends in Missouri. Let me say here that if Valerie could interject, I’m sure she’d recount a slightly more nuanced, persuasive exchange, but my memory shows that we each abandoned everything we might’ve learned about the art of rhetoric and, instead, countered each assertion with increasing annoyance and exasperation. Like a good argument about politics or religion, no one changed their minds after all that was or wasn’t said, and afterwards I told a bystander, who’d witnessed all of our grace, that this was indeed the biggest fight we’d ever had…
It’s all rather silly, isn’t it? There are many trivial memories from my life with Valerie that I’d happily exchange if I could better remember, say, our first date on that cold, February night in Chicago. What was she wearing across our table set for two? Did our hands brush slightly when we stood outside and decided on a nightcap? What happened to the vividness of those moments, and at what exact point in the evening (or was it walking away from her apartment the following morning?) did I first realize I didn’t want to date anyone else?
Once upon a time, there were two voices to make these stories whole, or at least more complete. In my attempt to make a record of these small moments before they vanish, I realize I’m now the keeper, our sole historian for the episodes and instances that comprise the life we shared. Once, two narratives walked first from a restaurant, then from a bar, and then 15 years, 5 months, and 27 more days together. Here, in the house that we made our home, are DVD copies of both Synecdoche, New York and Lost in Translation. The blackout curtains in the kids’ room came down months ago. Soon my books and my bed will take over the playroom so that Emerson and Whitman can, at last, have their separate spaces upstairs. From time to time, I’ll even let the ketchup graze the eggs on my plate and, there in Seattle, Washington, a gentle, tormented artist took his own life.
It’s true I now get the last word on all of this, but let me be the first to acknowledge that I wish I didn’t.