You see old couples everywhere you look, couples whose marriages have lasted longer than Kait’s life, and who flaunt their good fortune by strolling hand-in-hand along sidewalks and in shopping centers and in airports. They don’t have the decency to be considerate toward people like you, who can’t help parsing their relationships, seeing what they’ve done to deserve a literal lifetime of happiness, why they’re so worthy while you’re not. You compare visions of your unlived future with these people you’re seeing, wondering, would your love have lasted? It takes forty or fifty years for most people to finally become the person they want to be, and Kait never got that chance. Over time, would she still have laughed at your jokes, and would you still be able to see in her eyes the glistening girl you met on that rooftop? What happens when the joy of discovery gives way to comfortable complacency? Would you still share a bed and watch movies together and have things to discuss? How do people never run out of things to say to each other?
YOU WORRY YOU WOULDN’T have been as selfless as the old man you see pushing his wheelchair-bound wife through the airport, his back permanently humped from a decade of leaning down to serve her. At some point, many years ago, his presumably fulfilling life was wrested from him and replaced with this one. You would have panicked and put her in a nursing home. Would have found a way to rationalize it and told her it’s for the best, I don’t know how to take care of people anyway, and you would have had to find a way to ignore the look of betrayal in her eyes during your thrice weekly visits, and you would have had to explain to everyone that yes, you’re still married but she’s living in the nursing home now because she needs that kind of care, and they would treat you with a mixture of pity and admiration for at least sticking with your invalid wife, but the reality is you would be looking forward to your time away from her, free from the pressure and expectations, those quiet nights at home when you could get high and watch comedies on TV and forget all about her miserable fate. Because what she would be is an inconvenience. Some people get off on that suffering-servant routine, demanding that others see them tending to their disabled loved ones so that others can say you’re such a good person, I could never handle that, and then the suffering servant can respond if you really love someone, it’s not a chore at all, it’s a privilege. Is it too cynical for you to say that’s probably a façade, to suspect that some mornings those people must wake up resenting their disabled loved one for taking everything away but still hanging on, half wishing they will find their partner dead just for the relief? Roles reversed, Kait would have cared for you to her detriment, would have sacrificed everything to ensure you had something resembling a quality life, and while she changed your diapers and bathed you and spoon-fed you and wiped the mess from your face and smiled sweetly through your memory lapses, you would be consumed with guilt for ruining her life by having had a stroke, but you would be rendered unable to apologize because you would have lost your ability to speak. And she would not complain. She would take her responsibilities seriously and somehow find reasons to love you more. And so maybe, knowing how she would have sacrificed for you, you would have discovered depths of resolve and compassion that you didn’t know you had, would have happily cared for her for another seventy years. What’s not fair is that you never even got the opportunity to find out. You never got to prove yourself to her. You find yourself sometimes wishing for the withering old age, the mutual degradation of your bodies and minds, the immobility and dementia. In a just world, couples would all have the opportunity to break down together.
HOW MANY THINGS ARE there that you’ve left undone? How many old to-do lists will you find in your pockets and in your house? How else to describe your life but as incomplete? Is life supposed to be about completing a long series of tasks, or is the whole point that no matter what you do, there will be things you’ve only partly finished?
WHEN YOU COLLECT SOMEONE’S ashes, you’re supposed to spread them somewhere. Ritual, the social contract. You’re supposed to do something poetic and moving. You’ve never understood any of this, the expectation that you should be so willing to send her soaring away from you. Even eight hours after emptying the urn on the beach, now flying east toward Philadelphia, you feel piercing regret at having left her behind, terror at the thought that you let go too soon, a magnetic attraction that tugs you back toward her at an atomic level. But sitting on the beach with her, it occurred to you that it’s selfish to keep holding on forever. It is detrimental to both of your spirits if you refuse to move on. You need to liberate yourself from the burden of her death and you need to allow her the freedom to go where she wants to go. If she wants to come back to you, she will. You can’t force it on her. Her soul has to choose you.
THERE ARE NO FAIRY tales. No looking over in your bed and seeing her lying there again. No magic potions to bring her back to life. No spells you can cast or prayers you can recite that will solve this problem. No dreams in which her spirit appears and comforts you. No speaking to the dead through psychics and Ouija boards. No meeting another woman whose body has been inhabited by Kait’s soul. There is only a hole where a life used to be, and there is you sitting beside the hole, looking in and hoping to see something you cannot, will not ever, see.
Like most people, Kait believed in some version of heaven. Not necessarily the clouds and harps and wings and the reunion with her beloved pets, and maybe not even the promise of enlightenment, but some amalgam of various popular visions of the afterlife. She believed she would still exist after death, believed that, wherever she would be, it would be a fine place, and she would still be able to interact with the material world on some level. You’ve never been able to conjure a vision of an afterlife that makes any sense, never been able to reconcile yourself to this idea that somehow everyone gets a life on earth, and then for some reason they’re also rewarded for simply existing by getting to enjoy themselves for eternity. When you die, you do not expect to go anywhere. There will be no reunion where you and Kait get to clink champagne glasses and rekindle your love affair while observing Earth’s dramas from afar. You will be dead and you will be ashes and someone will toss you somewhere too, and that’s the end. But wouldn’t it be nice if there was a reunion? Wouldn’t it feel good to believe?