I knew I was loved. That gave me a backbone. I had children. They gave me a purpose.
And so I managed. I took a month off of work, took long walks and dealt with the endless paperwork of tying up a life—will, bank accounts, insurance. I buried myself in the distractions of minutia in hopes that by the time I surfaced, my raw wounds would have scabbed over, at least a little. I assigned myself strange, unnecessary chores born of fear, like hiring a man to put locks on our windows.
I checked the mailbox constantly for condolence cards. There were usually quite a few, full of kind words and other people’s recollections, tidbits I’d never heard. When I wrote such cards in the past I’d always thought them trifling, wholly inadequate to the task. Now that I was on the receiving end, I was hooked. They were warm touches of concern. One Record reader sent me wise advice and even made me laugh: “Take things one day at a time, focus on your kids and stay away from country music.”
Elliot’s last night haunted me. I ordered his medical records from the hospice and showed them to a psychiatrist friend to see if they treated him right.
“He had such a bad cancer,” I cried. “He deserved a good death.”
“Why don’t you think he had a good death?” the man asked gently. “He had perhaps some hours when he might have been medicated a little more optimally, but he was probably not aware. A merciful confusion sets in.”
A bad death, he said, was dying alone in a hospital after languishing for months with nobody left who cares enough to visit.
“Elliot embraced his life fully,” he went on. “I saw you two playing tennis not long ago. And he was with his family in the end.”
That made me feel better. I had to cling to the hope that bit by bit, the passage of time would give me more perspective.
I began to say yes to every invitation. I even went to Elliot’s book club. The men were meeting at our favorite cheap Thai restaurant. They had read Philip Roth’s Indignation. It had been Elliot’s suggestion. He would have loved it. It traced a young man, who, like him, was a straight-A student fleeing fiercely protective parents by going to a Midwestern college, desperate to find love and sex and romance. I felt proud, and glad, and grateful that we found that in each other.
“You do what you have to do to,” Roth wrote.
And I did what I had to do. It was that simple.
Sometimes sorrow came down like an anvil. One morning my son came to the breakfast table wearing one of Elliot’s ties. My heart stopped. I had asked Alex, Aaron and Max if they wanted to pick out a few. I didn’t expect to see Alex wearing them to school. It was nice, though, to have those ties back in our lives, hanging on a doorknob at the end of the day.
Out of habit I still tore recipes out of The Times that I wanted to make for him.
It was hard to go to the A & P. I cringed when I passed by all those things I bought in bulk when Elliot could eat nothing else—Pepperidge Farm raisin bread, Nestle strawberry milk, Cranberry Almond Crunch cereal.
One day the paper had a photo of the demolition of Shea Stadium. Elliot was gone, and so was the stadium where he had felt so much excitement, disappointment and wild optimism as a boy and as a father. All that was over.
Yet there were unexpected pleasures. Once, I Googled Elliot’s name. An old Record colleague I’d never met, Robin, had written about him for a blog called The Perfect Moment Project.
“The memory of one afternoon came back sharp and clear,” she wrote. “I was at my desk, Elliot at his, juggling phone calls and people stopping by. The phone rang again and it was Max, Elliot’s young son. Elliot was a little impatient at first but then I could just feel his body relax as he sat back. Elliot had decided to shut out everything else right then and give Max his full attention. I could tell from hearing one side of the conversation that Max had lost his Velociraptor and was pretty upset. Elliot, who took this loss as seriously as Max, talked his son through looking in his room, checking the kitchen and then pulling up the couch cushions where he found the toy. Emergency over. Max was back to playing, Elliot back to work…As sad as I am that Elliot has died, I am also comforted by the memory of that afternoon, happy that I witnessed that pure moment when he decided to cut out the clutter and help his boy, took the time to be a good dad.”
That story was so Elliot. It was heartening to find that there was still more to learn about his life, and that he meant so much to so many.
A month after his death we held a big memorial service at the Montclair Art Museum. Almost two hundred people showed up, despite the snow, a truly lovely snow, gentle and soft. Aaron described their trip to Italy, Max talked about Elliot’s encouragement for his writing. Kate was too shy to speak in front of the crowd but asked Max to read what she wrote about their childhood ritual of packing the Roadmaster for trips out West and detours to find blueberry pie.
Devon recalled how Elliot used to kiss her goodbye on the top of her head. “He gave me the stepbrothers and stepsister and steppeople—though I don’t know technically what to call them now—that I will need to get through his loss.”
You could barely see Alex’s face over the podium. He stood on tiptoes. “Elliot gave me my first baseball glove,” Alex said. “He took me to my first baseball game. He taught me the value of humor and happiness.”
I wished that Elliot could hear them say these things. I wished we could all just be together now, with him, and move on as family from here, feeling so close.
I wished I could find him waiting for me in our bed.