I take a one-a-day vitamin, a statin, and a Tylenol, each morning. Oh, yes, and a blood cleanse pill. As I held them in my palm this morning, I thought of my mum, who took twice as many pills when she was in her eighties. Once, she held them out for me to see, and said, “How do they all know where to go?” I have Cream of Wheat most every morning. Not that there’s any nutritional value in it, but it’s a taste I like and it’s something hot. It’s what you put in that makes it good. I put in raisins, a spoonful of peanut butter, and one of ghee. I was just finishing my Cream of Wheat when a strong emotion came over me. I cried. Stood there and blubbered, tears rolling down my face. I am here, standing by the river watching rumpled grey clouds, listening to a riffle just down the way, a strong, dark taste of coffee in my mouth, holding a spoon in one hand and the small, empty Cream of Wheat pot. I am grateful I am here. And I remembered what it was like after Claire died.
You go a little mad inside grief. Not angry, although that, too. I became unbalanced, unhinged, not rational, dull and manic (sometimes, one right on the heels of the other). I puzzled people in ways that disturbed them. I slowly lost my vitality. Sanity seemed a performance. Hag-ridden, my best hope was to consider myself eccentric. Being whipped by my emotions and memories seemed real. The question was simple: what do I do with what I don’t understand? I didn’t understand people. My dilemma wasn’t how to relate, it was whether to relate. The idea was to remain recognizable as human, but slowly the death in life that is depression moved in.
It was fall. Back from Kenya in Utah, I lived one day at a time, often slipping between realities, half in this world, the other half tensely internal. I live too remotely for people to stop by. I’d see friends at the post office, and they’d say, “I was going to call, but didn’t know what to say.” Or, “I wanted to write…” and their voice would trail off. I craved connection, the one thing I could not ask for. Numb and vacant, I sat in the house. Days passed without speaking to anyone. I slid more and more easily away from this reality into negative thoughts. Eventually, these two worlds touched like the panels of a curtain drawn together. I felt guilty. I had not been on the plane. If only this….If only that…As if trying to remember something, I’d stand still in the driveway, listening to my thoughts, wondering, looking for a meaning as elusive as having her back. I began to think no life would be better than this life. Nature began to oppress me. I didn’t call anyone. I felt sorry for myself. I faded more and more into a darker world. I didn’t notice the wind. I didn’t hear the birds, or care about anything beyond my loss. My, my, my,,,
I’ve packed up camp. Carried the wannigan down to the canoe, placing it against the mid-thwart in front of where I sit. Ahead of it, I placed two packs, side by side. On top goes a third. Another pack stows behind me and my small personal pack I either put behind me, or on top of the forward packs.
Starting to paddle, I re-entered my memory. The nights were the worst. I no longer went outside, but let Orion cross heaven without a thought. I’d fall asleep in a chair, or on the sofa, not bothering to go to bed. I’d read but had little concentration. I felt nothing. I read and read, looking for a pain killer in other people’s words. I read wise books. Earlier in life I thought I understood them, but the wisdom I read now was a high speed train headed to a destination other than my soul.
I drove down the mountain to buy food. Otherwise, I barely left the house. Indian summer lasted a long time. On the drive to Virgin, beside the little river, the cottonwood leaves sparkled golden yellow. At higher elevation, near the reservoir, the aspens shimmered a different, lighter yellow. Their octagonal stems made the leaves waggle. The Utes called them ‘women’s tongues.’ In the field around the house, when a strong wind blew, the dry grass resembled ocean waves. On those days, I felt the house a ship anchored in a sea of sorrow.
Hot afternoons I drove up the mountain to swim in the reservoir. I dove off the boat ramp into chill water. A few feeble strokes exhausted me. I’d float face down holding my breath, my rounded back bobbing above the surface, legs and arms dangling as if I were a jellyfish.
I met a fisherman. He was pulling his boat out at the ramp. His vest was populated with gaudy flies, a large net dangled at his side. He had a fly rod with yellow, floating line. He wore camouflage pants, and a camouflage baseball cap. I asked him about the pants. He said they helped disguise him from the trout. Had he caught any? No, but at least twice a week he came up after work to be in nature. He had a tan, thick blonde hair, and blue eyes. He said the State of Utah put some whoopers in the reservoir, and he would catch one.
I’d drive downhill in wet swim trunks, cool for the first mile. The nights passed slowly, often in silence. Half-heartedly, I’d cook a meal and share it with our cat, Lala, even letting her eat from my plate. We’d sit on the sofa in the breeze of the fan. She’d hold her head in the stream of cool air, letting it tickle her whiskers. Bugs crawling out of the sofa made me anxious. Black stinkbugs crawling over the kitchen floor, going nowhere, made me furious. I’d suck them up in the vacuum cleaner, running the nozzle over and over the cracks between the sofa cushions.
Lala slept on the bed. I felt she wondered where Claire was. I wondered where Claire was. Other mornings, I cleaned up the guts of the mouse, sometime a bird, and once a small king snake from Lala’s night hunt. Nights we’d sit together on the sofa while I watched Braveheart over and over again. I watched Ben Hur and Spartacus, all the films Claire and I enjoyed. Before they were spoken, she would quote the lines. She loved the prison scene near the end of Braveheart when William Wallace says to the woman:
All men die, but not every man truly lives
I’ve been paddling for a few hours. I’ve stopped and poured a coffee from my small thermos. The sky is so prevalent. In the desert I feel the sky the same way I do here. The cloud bank stretches miles ahead, along its edge to the north is blue sky as though the lid of the cloud cover has been lifted, just a little, to tantalize me with blue sky. No other blue is as fragile as the sky’s blue here. I coil a lot of rope. Rather I coil the same rope a lot of times, especially the bow and stern lines. I couldn’t keep myself from returning to my memories.
Fall deepened in Cave Valley. The oak leaves turned brown. An angry fury of fallen leaves blew against the door. I kept a fire burning all day. In the field the rye grass no longer waved in the wind, but was knocked flat by the rain. Deer drifted through the field, twenty or thirty at a time, arriving from higher up the mountain, a sign of winter coming. I checked the outbuildings, looked into Claire’s closet. I touched her dresses. I pulled one out to hold against my body. She would never spin around in a dress. She would never walk into the house, or call to Lala. Never boil a kettle.
In the bedroom, I tried not to look at the .22 propped in a corner. I’d surprise myself realizing I was debating whether a shotgun, or the .22 would be better. The shotgun would do the job, but make a mess. The .22 would be less intrusive, but what if I didn’t die? I found pleasure wondering these things, and whether I would shoot myself in the head, or the heart. The pain was in my heart, but the thoughts were in my head. I researched suicide. More men shot themselves in the head rather than the heart. Women rarely shot themselves because it was disfiguring. Women preferred overdosing on pills, or dying from the exhaust of a car, the way Anne Sexton killed herself.
One morning I’d had enough. Making a clear decision calmed me. My purpose: the end of pain. My bare feet felt cold on the kitchen tiles. I picked up the .22 and carried it outside. I loaded three bullets, just in case one was not enough. My friend, Dale, lived down the hill in LaVerkin. He had fought in Desert Storm. I felt his finding me wouldn’t upset him. Would I call and tell him what to expect? Or just ask him to come up? I couldn’t decide.
In front of the house, I kneeled on the gravel and put the gun barrel in my mouth. The barrel had a metallic taste, and felt cold against my lips. All I had to do was pull the trigger. I’d be out of this life, and closer to Claire. Kneeling on the gravel hurt my knees. I stood up and tried leaning over with the barrel still in my mouth, the gun’s stock resting on the ground.
Lala appeared. She stood to the side; sat there looking. I shooed her away with my free hand. She backed off. I kneeled again. She came back. She started walking around me at a distance, meowing. She made me self-conscious. I shooed her away. I got ready, again. But she returned, this time closer. She kept meowing, and walking around me.
I took the barrel out of my mouth. Something like an electric shock rushed up my body. I looked curiously at the gun. I threw the gun aside where it clattered on the gravel. I saw stars behind my eyes. I became vividly aware of the cool, fall morning. The trunks of the oaks became sharp edged. I smelled rotting leaves. Lala jumped on a fencepost, and disappeared into the dull-colored grass in the oak grove. I stood up.
I went in the house. I called Dr. Ackerly, the therapist I’d seen for years back in Boston. We had talked a few times since Claire died. I had wanted him to say something healing that would change the horrid way I felt. But he only mirrored back what I said, adding: keep breathing.
I told him what almost happened. Casually, he commented that he was glad I hadn’t done it. He said he had thought I would consider taking my life, but there had been nothing for him to say. He said he’d held his breath for other patients, too. He’d lost some, and others, like me, called to say how close they came. He felt it was my choice, not his. He said, in his experience, offering an opinion at a vulnerable moment could as easily push a person to take their life as to save it. He understood my desire to end my anguish, but he told me that taking my life wouldn’t be a real solution. It would betray Claire, and cause a lot of people pain. He suggested that I’d feel better later, just stay in the light. He suggested that in the future I call him before I took the gun outside.
He said thank the cat. The cat saved you, Rob. She loves you. She broke the spell your mind had cast, a spell that took you away from life into the barren, mental landscape of no connection. He said again, thank the cat.
In the canoe, I stopped, and rested the paddle across the gunwales. I shook my head. Waking from this revelry, I heard a sandhill crane far downriver. Their call is as haunting as a loon’s: a scratchy, loud, rattling that lasts a few seconds. It’s good luck to hear one. Once, standing by my tent, six of them flew over ten feet above me. I could hear the whoosh of air through their wings. They landed a hundred feet away. That was a lucky day.
I went ashore and stomped on the ground. It felt good. The fluid water, and my line of memory, made me light headed on the water. I decided to camp. Not a bad spot. Fifty yards from the river was a line of boulders pushed that far from the river by the ice during spring breakup. Good protection, if the wind comes up. Once the tent was set, I felt better. I decided to have a tea ceremony. Usually, I pour for others, but after my memories today, I’ll pour for myself. My table is a lichen covered rock. I boiled water, filled the thermos, and selected a Puerh tea. In a ceremony it’s usual to have an object of beauty…say, flowers or an unusual rock. Mine is a battered red fuel bottle, its underlying silver color appearing through the chipped and rubbed off red coating. Inside, it’s filled with pebbles and small stones. It’s been on every trip. It’s a rattle. Bear protection. It creates an unusual, loud sound. Sound, just plain sound, is a defense. In a city I can’t track the sounds. I tune them out, the same way I can pass a homeless person and suppress my compassion. Sound. I know the sounds around me here: wind, water, bird call, skirrip of a ground squirrel call. I know them and listen, even when I’m not listening, I’m listening for the unusual, always the unusual. The clatter of rocks, the stirring of the willows. I listen hard for anything unusual. If I pay attention and push that circle of listening as far out as possible, sometimes I can hear the laughter, and whispers, of all the souls who’ve lived on this land. Preparing dinner, then eating, I mixed more memories in with the rice and raisins I was chewing.
Two days later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find a friend who wanted permission to cross my land into Zion Park. She took one look at me and said, “You’re coming to dinner.” “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Anything else you’re doing?”
“No.”
“Then you’re coming for dinner tonight. Come at 6pm. Mike and I will expect you. Promise?”
“All right.”
At dinner, Mike and Diane tried to get me to talk about Claire and what had happened, or talk about anything. I had little to say. Frustrated, Mike finally said,
“All right, I am going to be your Keener… for a year and a day.”
“My what?”
“Your Keener.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s Celtic and means to cry, or weep. There was a tradition of older, single, or widowed, women going village to village to ‘keen,’ or grieve, for a family after a death. Often, people are numb and can’t cry. I’ll keen for you and won’t leave you alone.”
“Do I have a say?”
“No.”
Mike didn’t shed a tear, rend his cloths, but true to his word, he kept me moving. They’d invite me to dinner, and to spend the night. He’d call to say he was coming up to take a hike. I’d say, I don’t feel like it. He came anyway. He’d walk out ahead, and call back to me lagging, gesturing for me to catch up. He’d say he was coming up for coffee. I’d say I didn’t have any. He’d say, I’ll bring some. Or he’d just show up. He thought of things to do together. He mentioned that after Christmas he was going to Hawaii on a yoga retreat, something he did every year, and that I should come. I said no. Unknown to me, he called the yoga instructor and said, save a space for my friend. He’ll come.
My keener prevailed. In a daze, I flew to Hawaii. I rented a yurt on Big Island, near the resort where the yoga retreat would be held. Included along with the small round room, for forty dollars a night, was a bed, a table, two chairs, and a one-burner hotplate. Over the bed was a silkscreen fabric picture of fish swimming through a sky-blue ocean. I’d come two weeks ahead of the retreat. I did not want to spend Christmas alone in Utah, or with my family in Boston. It would be too easy to let Cave Valley, or my siblings, keep my sprits down by reminding me of what I’d lost.
There were three yurts on the property. The only other renter left the day I arrived. She went to be with her family for Christmas. As I carried her bag to the taxi, she mentioned a friend, who practiced Lomi-Lomi, an ancient Hawaiian form of massage. Half-heartedly, I called her friend, Sylvia. We agreed to meet the next day at the resort. After that massage, we agreed on another, but this time she invited me to her house. If we used the small cabin near her home, she didn’t have to split the fee with the retreat centre.
The next afternoon, I peddled my bike to her small house hidden in the woods. She offered me a cup of tea. During our first massage, I had avoided her questions, why is your body so tense? What brought you to Hawaii? If she was going to massage me again, she ought to know. To say my wife died seemed to distance me from Claire. To tell Sylvia the story brought Claire back. We had a third cup of tea.
The massage cabin was a short walk through ferns, palms, and grasses. The owners of the large house next to the cabin let Sylvia use it for massage. Inside, there was just enough room for her to move around the table. Screens let the soft sea breeze cross the room. The first tentative croaks of the tiny tree frogs announced night’s arrival. I hoped her hands would make me feel again. I hoped they would stop my racing, repetitive thoughts. I hoped.
She lit a candle. I heard the scratch of the match, and the flare of the flame. A whiff of Sulphur tingled in my nose. She asked if I wanted music. I said no. I said, how could music improve this silence? As she poured oil into her hand, I listened to the bottle gurgle. She held her hand under my nose. Strong lavender. She said lavender was healing.
I had forgotten, but remembered the overwhelming lavender smell inside the Rudolf Steiner clinic in Switzerland. After Rene’s first round of Chemo finished, we went to the alternative clinic outside Basil. An early 20th century healer, Rudolf Steiner developed theories about almost everything. For curing certain cancers, he believed in injecting mistletoe. As a parasite, a poison, he believed injections of mistletoe shrank tumors, and killed cancer.
The nursing staff were always willing to give a patient a pure lavender massage. The clinic halls smelled of lavender. I could visit and share meals with Rene, but I had to stay in the town of Dornach, and never spend the night. At lunch, they served soup in white bowls on pure white stiff linen tablecloths. The soupspoons were heavy. During meals, no one spoke. You were supposed to focus on eating. All you heard were the light clinks, and heavier clunks, of spoons hitting the edges of the bowls. Rene and I played footsy, and reached for each other’s hand under the table. Mostly we suppressed our giggles. We tried anything to counteract the oppressive silence of the dining room.
I hoped Sylvia’s hands would break the relentless recycling of memories, and the barrage of negative thoughts.
In the head doctor’s office at the clinic, on the wall behind his desk, hung a painting of a medieval knight fighting a dragon. I asked what it meant for him to have a painting of Saint George fighting the dragon.
“Oh, no,” he said, “that’s not St. George. Look again.” I looked at the horse and rider, and the dragon. The director seemed to appreciate my puzzlement.
“That is Saint Michael. If you were looking at St. George, he would be focused, eye to eye, on the dragon. What do you see here?”
“He’s not looking at the dragon.”
“That’s right. He’s looking off to the distance, and not making such a fuss about slaying the dragon.”
“I see,” I said slowly, not sure I did see. Rene jumped in.
“I see. Don’t let the cancer take over. Remember there’s more in life. Deal with the cancer, but keep focused on your life.” Rene took my hand.
On the massage table in the small cabin, I felt anger, followed by a wave of frustration, and then a weighty tiredness. Sylvia’s hands touched painful places, coaxed out the tiredness, and a fraction of the grief. On its own, grief is a small enough word, especially if you’ve never experienced it, almost a Charlie Brown cliché: good grief. And yet, if you enter its domain, grief is a … what exactly? It’s a category, but each person’s grief comes with its own packaging, its own colour, and its own particular flavor.
That evening, my grief was raw. I couldn’t think of Claire without thinking of the objects that held her spirit, like her worry stone I carried in my pocket. The furniture at home. By the river Etive under the Scots pine. I’d feel I was making progress, then I’d see an object, or be in a place we had shared, and loose it. What did Proust, the consummate chronicler of loss say? I think it is in Swann’s Way? Something about a Celtic myth of a person’s soul being trapped in an object, until they were seen by their beloved, and then they are set free.
On the table, under Sylvia’s hands, I lingered half awake, half asleep. For the first time in months, I felt safe. The silence of a good massage includes the subtle sound of hands moving over skin, the sound of your breathing, and the sound of oil shaking into the masseur’s hand, plus pressure. A good masseur knows where, and how much, pressure to apply. As she worked, a warm breeze blew across my skin as lightly as the tip of a wing. The transition into evening was intensified by the tiny frogs croaking.
When it started, I was asleep. Hearing the first notes, I opened my eyes to the candlelit room. The flickering light elongated Sylvia’s shadow across the wall. I thought of my childhood room with its shadows cast by Bakers island lighthouse. Sylvia stopped moving, and listened, resting her hands on my stomach. A soprano voice carried a strong arrow of feeling, tipped with control and clarity, across the night sounds to enter me with such a voluptuous vengeance goose bumps appeared along the left side of my body. Coming through an open window from the house next door, the voice sang without restraint. It didn’t stop. It sang arias from different operas. I was transported back to hearing the beauty and mystery, and invitation, in the whippoorwill’s call. The soprano’s voice was pure counterpoint to my thick and lumbered grief. Until it stopped, we listened. Then, slowly, Sylvia moved her hands across my body, sealing in the magic of that voice.
Unexpectedly, the voice resumed. Midway through the new aria, the voice reached toward higher notes, adding a flourish of quick rises, and then paused, holding a note until I couldn’t imagine it soaring any higher, but then it did. She hit a cascade of coloratura, holding it one last impossible moment. Afloat on the current of her voice, I held my breath. She let her note stretch out and out and it entered every corner of my being. How could it go on? The note finally ended. Neither Sylvia nor I moved. A deep and abiding silence flooded the room. Even the tiny frogs stopped croaking. For that moment, the tight tangle of my grief budged. I loved that silence; the sound, always listening for the unusual sound.
