One day when the puppy was about six months old she leapt onto on my bed. That was quite a feat—it’s a high mattress—and I had to make a snap judgment about whether to let her stay. I could hear the vet’s stern voice in my ear.
“Don’t let a puppy do anything you don’t want her to do later,” she warned.
I was probably supposed to nip this in the bud. I could picture Elliot’s eyes rolling with dismay, especially when Sadie’s wiggly butt settled on his pillow.
But I had come to like her grassy Milk Bone smell and the carefree way she flopped down wherever she felt like it. Who knew if there would ever be a man in my life who might object and so what if he did? I was tired of subjugating my desires to a husband’s or a child’s. This new stage of life seemed to be a rare time when I had leeway to indulge myself. If I had to put up with the hardships of being a widow at forty-eight, I should at least get to savor its small freedoms too. And so some nights I crawled into bed so exhausted I didn’t bother to take off my work clothes. I made a whole meal out of corn on the cob. I relished eating dinner early with the kids instead of waiting, stomach gurgling, for Elliot’s 7:40 train.
I tried to extend this sense of liberation to the bigger issues too. There were moments when I felt a kind of wonder that for the first time in a very long while I felt no pressure to meet a man or make one happy. Since high school it seemed I was always trying to find a boyfriend or keep him interested. I tried to please my first husband and succeeded in pleasing my second. So, by my count, for more than thirty years I worried, to one degree or another, about what a man wanted. Now, for better or worse, I could focus on pleasing only me.
And so, as I watched Sadie explore the yellow sheets on Elliot’s side of the mattress—a place I have never ventured since he died—it surprised me to realize that I had even envisioned a far-off future with another man who might have an opinion about the rules for the dog. When I try to wrap my mind around that vision it escapes like a firefly. I still wear my wedding ring. I long to have my husband back, to sink into him at the end of the day. Yet as much as I miss Elliot, I do find it a relief to be released from his extreme needs for attention. I don’t have the energy to take on the constraining burdens of anyone else’s moods or schedules or children. So how can I even think, yet, about being part of a couple again? When I have pictured a first timid foray on an old-fashioned date, I have imagined Elliot watching from my shoulder like Jiminy Cricket, looking betrayed. “How can you do this?” he whispers. “What about me?”
That’s my version of magical thinking. Joan Didion kept her late husband’s shoes around because she figured he would need them when he came back to her. I have no delusions that Elliot will walk through our front door. My controlling vision is one of Elliot watching me with possessive eyes, accusing me of disloyalty if I ever find myself interested in anyone new. Then I lash out at myself for suppressing my own needs yet again to please him. Even when he is a ghost.
Once, at one of Alex’s baseball games the spring before Elliot died, I bumped into a man I knew from The Record long ago. He was good-looking, my age, a reporter at The Times who had recently been divorced. We caught up for a few minutes and then I scurried back to my seat, afraid Elliot might think I was flirting, laying the groundwork for some future romance when he was gone. It rattled me to recognize a do-you-think-he-might-be-interested tingle. It seemed there was a tiny voice deep inside, much meeker than Jiminy Cricket’s, suggesting it would be okay to find a man attractive someday.
The possibility of finding love again is something Elliot and I couldn’t talk about when he was sick. I remember it coming up only once. I made it happen. I wanted to elicit his express permission that it would be okay, and understandable, if I ever ended up with someone else. Without such approval I would feel so guilty, so disloyal. It would feel like a betrayal.
“What am I going to do without you?” I asked on a drizzly Sunday afternoon as we walked to the movies. “How am I going to manage on my own?”
“You’ll probably be remarried in six months,” he teased, “and it will probably be to someone in my book group.”
He dismissed the subject with a joking wave of his hand because it was too painful to entertain. It’s impossible to imagine having a connection with any man like the one I had with Elliot. I don’t even want that right now, but I would like to think that someday I would let myself be open to the idea. Who wants to wind up one of those crazy dog ladies who puts her poodle on dialysis and just marks time between bimonthly visits from grandchildren?
I’m a hypocrite, though; if I died before Elliot, it would kill me to picture him touching another woman. (There’s that magical thinking again.) I would want him to put me and our marriage first forever. I would want him to be happy, but I would be jealous if he fell in love.
A friend once laid out the rules for her husband. “If I die you can marry a new wife,” she said sportingly. “You just can’t sleep with her.”
Friends tell me the natural healing power of time will eventually sort all this out. Even Elliot’s heartbroken mother has encouraged me to meet someone new. Six months after he died, I was on my way to a wedding—just to twist the knife deeper, it happened to be at our favorite getaway in the Berkshires, the Old Inn on the Green—when Helen called to wish me well.
“And you know,” she added, “if some nice gentleman should ask you to dance, it wouldn’t be a crime.”
“Thanks, Helen, I’m really not in the mood yet,” I said. “I’m not ready for any of that.”
“You’re young,” she said. “I can’t have another son, but you have to make a life for yourself.”
That was very sweet to say, but please. She lost her husband twenty years ago and still wears his wedding ring.
So how long is long enough? When can you let go? A friend told me that when her mother died at a ripe age, the other women at the retirement community pounced on her father with their casseroles. He was one of the only men left and he still had a precious driver’s license. There was a protocol among those in the brisket brigade: “Two weeks is too early, four weeks is too late.”
Four weeks. Unfathomable.
Sometimes I look for clues in the newspaper. Here’s a clip of an interview with Joyce Carol Oates, who got engaged within a year of losing her husband. That seems awfully fast. Here’s a review of Love Happens, a Jennifer Aniston chick flick. The male lead is called “blocked” because he hasn’t had a relationship since his wife died three years ago. So three years is seen as too long?
One thing is for sure, said a friend’s mother, a reluctant expert after being widowed three times. “As long as you have your husband’s ashes in your bedroom,” she advised with a knowing nod, “you will not go on a date.”
I don’t want another man. I want Elliot back. He is not replaceable. Yet I don’t want to wake up alone for the rest of my life either. Someday I will want to roll over and feel a man’s warm strength. I will want to be spooned. Having tasted the joy of a rich marriage, I can’t help wanting such happiness again. Not yet, but some day.
If I should ever marry again, I have a plan for my vows.
“Till death do us part,” I’ll say. “Me first.”
At least, for now, I have a dog next to me where my husband used to be. I let her stay that day she jumped onto the bed, and she joins me any time she wants. I listen to her breathing, so peacefully. Curled on Elliot’s pillow, she is adorable, unwitting proof of the enormous capacity of the human heart to keep making room for more.