“Cremation,” I told the man at the funeral home. It’s not what Elliot wanted but this was the one gift I allowed myself. I simply could not bear to picture him underground, cold, alone in the dark. This was cleaner, natural, ashes to ashes.
“What would you like us to do with his wedding ring?” the man asked.
“Will the gold melt?” I asked. “If it doesn’t melt and I sprinkle him in the wind, is there a chance the ring will fall into the mud?”
“It’s possible.”
“So how am I supposed to choose?” I wailed. I wanted his ring, our ring, to stay with him, to keep him company, but I didn’t want its molten remains to land in the dirt at my feet.
Okay, I said. I’ll keep it. Someone somewhere would have to ease it off his finger. I hated to think of such an intimate act being done by a stranger who didn’t even care. I didn’t even know where Elliot was at that very moment. I could not believe I would not be the last person to touch him. At least he was still wearing the embroidery thread bracelet that Devon made for him. He never took it off. That bracelet could be with him, could burn with him, for all of us.
I went through that first day in a blur, empty and numb and wondering what to do next. I emailed Elliot’s boss and mine but asked that people not call. I didn’t want to talk. I decided on a small family service on the weekend. That was all I could face. Elliot’s mother, sister and children left the planning up to me. That made it easier, there was nothing to negotiate. I asked my mother to put together a lunch at my house afterwards. She would be good at that.
Devon wanted to go to school that day, Alex didn’t. I let him stay home and watch TV. I started to throw out that medical crap that made it almost impossible to walk through my room. I lugged the forty-pound oxygen machine down the stairs—but lost my balance, hurt my shoulder and gouged a black scrape into the wall. Dragged it outside the front door. Shoved the shower chair out there. And the walker. And that godawful commode he used only once, such an indignity. Called the agency to pick up all that stuff, now. I wanted it gone. Tore through his drawers grabbing pills, vials, syringes. Hurled them into in a white garbage bag. The morphine “emergency kit” I never used, the Haldol, the OxyContin, the amphetamines, all that shit. Started moving faster and faster, like a wild woman, raging through the medicine cabinet, his nightstand, his knapsack, filling up the bag, bigger and bigger, until it was fatter than Santa’s sack. I couldn’t throw it in the trash because somebody might grab it and get high. I couldn’t flush it down the drain because it would poison the water. I could sell it on the street to pay for a college education. But I called a friend married to a doctor to haul it all away.
Maybe Alex should have gone to school so he couldn’t see me in such a frenzy.
At night I couldn’t sleep. I obsessively tried to figure out if Elliot was suffering at the end. He seemed so distraught, confused, restless. His whimpering echoed in my ear. I cursed that godawful hospice, wished I’d found a better one. I tried to forgive myself. For the first time in my life I took Tylenol PM to knock myself out.
“Oh, Leslie, don’t be haunted by this,” the oncologist’s nurse wrote back when I emailed her what happened. “You gave him the best care, love and attention that you could. And it is enough. He knew.”
I tried to believe that doing my best was good enough.
I was alone when the man from the funeral home knocked at the door. He was carrying a translucent white shopping bag. It held a brass box. I carried it up the stairs in one hand. It—he—was heavy. But so much easier than the last time we went up the stairs, when I lifted each impossibly leaden foot onto one step after another, and then had to call 9-1-1.
I didn’t know where to put him. The closet seemed disrespectful. The bookshelf was too public. I settled on his bottom dresser drawer with his favorite sweatshirts, the ones from Ithaca and NYU and Michigan, the ones his children gave him when they went off to college. He loved them so much. It seemed weirdly informal, but that’s where I thought he would be most at home.
I kissed my fingers and touched them to the dresser drawer, even though it felt silly.
I sat down to write a speech for his service and found that it gave me some peace. It felt good to spend time with him that way. It felt good to cry as I typed.
One morning, my friend Mary Jo came to our door with three bags of groceries from Whole Foods. Soups, salads, bread, fruit. She whirled around my kitchen, putting things away, finding a vase for flowers, setting them on the dining room table. She smiled, hugged me and left. Somehow some people know how to help.
I went to see Lissa, the counselor.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m here and I’m showered,” I said. “That’s enough.”
There was a snowstorm right before the Saturday morning service, but our friends and family made it. Just two dozen people, like our wedding, but some of the friends had changed.
I cried through my speech. Our friends told beautiful stories. They cried for him, and they cried for us. I never expected to be an object of pity.
I stayed on my side of the bed. Took more Tylenol PM.
It was Christmastime. The kids and I trimmed a tree, decorated sugar cookies with red sprinkles and M&Ms even though our hearts were nowhere in it. When we opened presents, I pictured Elliot watching from the far side of a glass window, pounding madly on the glass to break through. He looked desperate to join us.
Devon and Alex left for a holiday trip planned long ago with their dad. I had an empty house, with three days free, for the first time in forever. Friends invited me over, but I wanted to be alone. I spent the silent hours sorting through emails, arranging photos and making a binder of condolence notes, obituaries and mementos for Elliot’s mother. She turned that white book into an obsession, memorizing every word and weeping over it every day.
I had time to do what I had longed to do for years. I read over all of Elliot’s love letters—a decade full of them—and put them in order. I luxuriated in them like a hot bath. They had his voice.
There was one card that he bought from a store, maybe because it spoke of a future he couldn’t bear to frame the words for himself.
“Everything will be okay in the end,” it read. “If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
“That sounds about right to me,” he’d written inside. “Love, E.”