Signs Of Life

There’s a black scuff mark on the walls of my bedroom that I stare at every day when I sit at my newly placed desk. I oscillate between taking the magic eraser to the wall and making it like new again, or leaving it there. The scuff mark is from years of Jeremy’s (my late husband) chair rubbing against the wall as he twirled his chair from side to side through countless zoom meetings. When he worked from home. When he was alive. 

We move through our days doing things that feel inconsequential most of the time. Leaving a sweater laying across a chair, a set of keys left on your book shelf, texting someone a random fact or question. All these little things have the potential to stay with someone as a last sign of life. 

Listening to people tell stories about Jeremy over the last couple of months, it is amazing to see him through other people's eyes. I was married to someone who left a lasting and positive impression on everyone he knew. Someone who helped a friend by injecting her with meds every day so she could harvest her eggs before getting a hysterectomy to treat her cancer. After he passed she told me about that, and how she feels he’s part of the reason she has her son today. She struggled with the needles. 

He was a wailing wall. Someone people could really go and talk to. He hated talking about himself, he made a great listener. I hope he’s listening now. I’d tell him I haven’t touched the clothes hanging in the closet, the piece of tape he put on the floor to mark a nail that needs to be hammered in, the drawers in his nightstand, his shoes, the scuff marks where his desk was, his hats on the dresser, his small pile of papers in the corner of the closet. I haven’t unpacked his suitcase from Australia. The trip he didn’t return from. Too scared to fade his presence , or disturb anything he touched with his hands.

I have been organizing as many corners of my life as possible since he died. I am sure this is some form of controlling what I can control when everything else has been so starkly out of my control this year. But everytime I touch anything around my house I stumble into something he left somewhere, something he kept a certain way. I wear his shirts, wash them, fold them exactly how he did, and put them back on his side of the dresser as though he’s coming back. It isn’t rational, but it’s my proof. Proof he was here.

It makes me wonder what proof I am leaving behind. I completed my will the other day. This is your reminder to do the same. I had to answer some tough questions about ‘worst case scenarios in a hospital” etc. And the lawyer prefaces these questions with “of course you’re young, so this is just for someday later in life” before he asks these questions. And I want to scream. Everyone says “at least you’re young” or “well you’re young so you don’t have to think about this yet….” and I want to say “have you paused before saying things to me?” My husband was young. These worst case scenarios we are pontificating about HAPPENED to him. They happened to me when I had to make decisions in the hospitals on what to do in case procedures didn’t go his way. “At least you’re young” isn’t a consolation prize. I would give anything for this to have happened when we were “old”, whatever that means these days.

The silence is thick around my house when I look around at these things we’ve collected in our life together. The practical gifts we’ve bought for each other over the years, the thoughtful ones too. The curtains he hung, the couch we used to sit on while we talked about life or fawned over our (foster) baby. The vase he made when we went on a ceramics date and he surprised me with how good he was because he had done ceramics as a kid. Something I didn’t know, because he wasn’t forthcoming. This led to many surprising facts I’d randomly learn over the years. 

A phantom limb. A missing piece. Noone can feel this loss the same as me. It is my island to live on, and every day I am reminded that I am destined to know the corners of it on my own. It is so isolating this business of grief. I am at the largest crossroads I have ever been at, and the one person I want to discuss my options with isn’t here. 

I keep bargaining with a ghost. “Tell me if I should do this thing by giving me a sign”. I have this belief that once you reach the other side you have an all knowing of what comes next for all those you love. I beg for guidance, talk to myself, talk to the empty seat next to me in the car. Am I crazy? Or is this just my year of magical thinking? The parallels between my tragedy and Joan Didions are not lost on me. Her book suddenly a deep knowing for me. 

Signs. They come in all shapes and forms these days. Am I reading into things or is he leaving clues? Is the universe conspiring for me or is it raging against me? The broken washer and dryer, car riddled with problems, random roadblocks that pop up daily since my husband passed just weeks ago, all point to the latter. But the black scuff marks on the wall, the sweaters that still smell like him, his house keys on the shelf, are proof he was here. Signs of life. A life fully lived.