15. Confirming the Departure

I’ll tell you right up front: Mario has counseled against writing what I am about to write.

“Too raw,” he says.

It is a delicate topic. And like so many of the things I had to do and he had to do in connection with death and illness, I wish the experience on no one.

Gregory’s mother, you see, his next of kin, was still in the hospital, recovering from hip surgery when Gregory died. The hospital chaplain had told her about the death of her only son, who was the only remaining member of her immediate family. Gregory’s father had died years earlier, which had prompted Gregory to come home to sort out his affairs. And Gregory’s brother had committed suicide in the garage of the family home when the young man was 21.

The uncles and aunts on both sides had all passed. There simply was no other close family till you got to the cousins. So I had gone to the funeral home to start making “the arrangements.” But as awful as this was – making funeral arrangements for the man I loved not a week after last seeing him alive – this isn’t the thing Mario suggested I not write.

Making the arrangements was traumatic enough. But while I was at the funeral home the first time, I was asked to identify Gregory’s body.

You’ve seen this dramatic moment enacted on any number of TV shows. The parent asked to identify the child. The friend of the family asked to identify someone’s wife. The medical examiner or an assistant pulling back the sheet from his or her face, and the one making the identification either grimacing – yes, this is the person – or exhibiting this mosaic of positive and negative facial gestures – no! It’s not the person!

That’s not how it happened for me. For one thing, Gregory was already at the funeral home, so I wasn’t in the stainless-steel-and-tile environs of the morgue. I tried to prepare myself emotionally for what was about to happen. But nothing prepares you. Just as nothing prepares you to hear the stunning news that someone you love has died. Nothing prepares you to look upon the body the first time.

I was escorted to a private viewing room by a funeral director dressed in a tailored suit and “sensible” shoes – quite incongruous, given her youth and demeanor. She looked like she’d be more at home in a bar with friends, sipping margaritas. This was a uniform, as surely as a waitress’ outfit at Denny’s.

As we crossed the large, common anteroom, she showed me the death certificate. I was shocked to see the cause of death in black and white for the first time: cardioatherosclerotic disease. The poster child for health and fitness had died of a massive heart attack. Then I pointed out to the funeral director that Gregory was not “Pakistani” as the medical examiner had written.

She pushed open the door to the viewing room, and I got my first glimpse of the body, swathed in sheets and strapped to a gurney, like a newborn. For just a flash, I had the wild thought that maybe it wouldn’t be him. Maybe it was a real Pakistani, and this would have all been a terrible misunderstanding.

My heart sank as the familiar profile came into view. I stood looking at him – eyes closed, face unshaven, skin flat and waxy – digesting the moment.

Without a doubt, it was one of the most wrenching experiences of my life. Here was visual confirmation of what I had already been told. But the mind is a cunning protector. If you haven’t actually seen the person who has died, some part of you, even if it’s just one teensy corner that you didn’t even know existed, holds out hope that the news will be wrong.

For me, it turned on the word, “Pakistani.” This was a far-fetched and ignorant description of Gregory’s ethnicity. And so there was that brief moment of hope leaping like a solar flare.
But it was true. This indeed was Gregory. And I could feel sweet, protective shock again licking at the edges of my mind.

As for Mario’s admonition not to relay this experience, I wonder. Is he right? Or does this serve to bring the truth of death a little closer to reality in a society that keeps it locked up tight behind the doors of denial?

In every relationship, one of you will leave, or be left – unless it’s like The Unbeaerable Lightness of Being or Thelma and Louise – because none of us gets out of this alive.

14. For Better Or Else

In the months before Gregory’ death, I allowed myself a small luxury. Every so often a feeling would come over me unbidden. Perhaps I would be driving up to a stoplight with the window down, wrapped in the strains of some lovely piece like Pacobel’s Canon or Barber’s Adagio for Strings. I’d feel the sun prickling my arm as I slowed to stop, drinking in the beauty of the sky, unfolding in what seemed to be a limitless vista.

The moment would be perfect. And I could not prevent a smile, an emotional smile, from welling up. At the bottom, the source of that smile would be Gregory’s love, a cradling love in which I at last felt secure, nurtured, cosseted. It was like relaxing into my own breath. It had been years, maybe ages, since I had allowed – yes, this time, allowed – myself to feel immersed in the fullness of another’s love.

I could not help but remember this over the weekend as I attended the wedding of a young cousin. I could not help but think of love – this deep forever, to-the-depth-of-your-soul love – as I watched these two recite their vows. He, a handsome groom. She, a full, ripe beauty. You could read in their bodies, in the kinetic energy that darted between their eyes, how heartfelt their commitment was.

Mario was there, too. When the betrothed came to the words, “for better or worse,” I looked at the innocence in their eyes and reflected upon how the slow procession toward a death like MS would test those vows. How would this young groom feel about catheterizing his wife to make urination possible? Where would the vow flutter when he found himself performing the most intimate tasks because she, that beautiful body crippled beyond his imagination, could not?

Or what if this strong young man were suddenly made helpless by a random act of nature, like a bad wave body-surfing that wrenches your body into the sand and snaps your neck? You go to the beach for some sun and fun with your wife and children, and leave a paraplegic? What if she – and he – were faced with this?

No one would expect those fresh, young minds and spirits to be thinking such dark and morbid thoughts. But then again, when you are on the other side of such vows, such incidents, when they or similar things have happened, you listen to those vows with different ears and wonder if these two will have the strength of character, the resolve to trend the rough patches, whatever they might be.
I, too, was so in love with Gregory. As Mario was so in love with Izzy. We opened our hearts and our souls, we loved greatly and were hurt mightily.

Then they came to another part of the marriage vows: Till death do us part. I’m here to tell you, that’s a lie. A ruse. I think what it probably does is give the one left in the living body the permission to couple with another. But the truth is, the “marriage” doesn’t end at death. Or more precisely, the love goes on. It goes on for us here, and, if Gregory is to be believed, it goes on beyond death as well. “Tell Ann I love her,” he told my psychic friend. “Tell her now. Death doesn’t change that.” Words to that effect.

So how can I love Mario? How can he love me? How can this be, if each of us were so passionately, so deeply connected to our great, departed loves?

I explain it to people this way: My heart is like a garden. And in that garden, love grows. It grows in many forms. My love for Gregory will always be there, as Mario’s love for Izzy will flower eternally in his heart. But next to that love, there is another love that also grows, like the rose and lily, side by side. Both flourish, neither at the expense of the other.

Will I ever feel that open, free, unbidden sense of wholly love with Mario that swept up my soul with Gregory? I don’t know. I have flashes of it. I’m not sure Mario even knows this. Or perhaps he does. Maybe it is love, not hope, that springs eternal.

And what will happen when we die? If our consciousness does go on, will we revert to our original “loves?” Or our true “loves,” for those of us who have had… more than one relationship? I suspect that what happens is at once both and neither, an expansion of spirit that transcends what we can imagine in our linear, muscle-and-blood bodies.

But as Gregory said to me in his final words, “Flesh and blood needs flesh and blood.” And through whatever quixotic twist of fate, Mario and I have found each other. Till death do us part. Maybe so.

Photograph by Ansel Adams

13. The Shadows of the Past

I'm sitting on a bench in the shade of a sugar maple that’s all leafed out, as fresh and green as the young bodies that saunter, scurry and slouch past me here at Vanderbilt University. Business has brought me to Nashville and the campus, where Gregory got his undergraduate degree. That was so many years ago that these kids weren’t even figments of someone’s imagination.

It’s a perfect 75 degrees, a soft breeze is blowing, and cicadas surge and ebb in the background. Somewhere in the distance, a mower drones. These kids, with their backpacks and cell phones and flip-flops, tread the same ground Gregory did. But theirs is a different world.

This is where Gregory fulfilled an immigrant dream: The great young hope of his family, he was the first to attend and graduate from college. And not just any college, mind you, but a major American university. I try to imagine him here. In fact, I would secretly like to see him pop out from behind some tree for just an instant.

I suppose I would freak out if that actually happened, although it’s possible that he did something like this after the funeral. There was a provocative incident that I didn’t find out about until later, and it involved not one, but two people, who believe they saw him at the memorial party at the same fleeting instant.

Today, Vanderbilt is integrated and multicultural. But when Gregory attended classes, it was wall-to-wall white bread. It’s strange being here, staring out across one of the quads as students take in the season’s waning sun and flip frisbees across the lawn. I’d like to say I feel all tingly and connected with Gregory. But I don’t. I had only one sort of “aha” moment, when I looked across the campus at one of the buildings and felt noticeably drawn to it: Whaddaya know, the library.

I’m much more excited when Mario calls and tells me he’s “tilting at windmills.” Mario’s grandparents were also first-generation immigrants, from Sicily and Calabria, a sunny heritage that still shows itself in Mario’s dark, good looks, his obsession with family, and his love of good food and wine.

Gregory’s heritage involved darker strains, including a hot-blooded legacy of abuse and mercurial tempers. One time while Gregory was growing up, his dad burst through the front door drunk and seething. In a matter of seconds, he was lunging at Gregory’s mother, trying to pull the diamond earrings and bracelet off her ears and arm. Gregory injected himself between the two, looked up at his dad, who was ready to backhand the boy aside, and said, “Stop! Don’t you know you don’t treat lady a like that?” Gregory was 7 years old.

Yes, there were issues in Mario’s family, but let’s just say his Mediterranean heritage flowed from gentler stock. Yet however they might be different, Gregory and Mario had the same good looks and love of food and wine.

There was this Italian restaurant – gone, now – where Gregory and I used to go for dinner. It was our favorite spot. We’d sit outside on the patio, just above the valet stand, and watch the parade of people coming and going. You can tell a lot about people by how they get in and out of cars.

We became quite attached to a red Italian wine here, Illuminati Riparosso. Rich, mouth-filling and complex, it was reasonably priced and still somehow agreeable with a lot of Italian foods. I always thought that Illuminati was a great, made-up name for an Italian wine, only to find out later that it is the surname of the producer.

The rolling, shimmering hills of the vineyard are just about as beautiful as Italy gets. I know, because this is a place Mario took me to several years ago. ‘Turns out that Mario had a connection to this particular wine and winemaker.

It’s also very likely that on some of those nights at the restaurant back home, when Gregory and I were on the patio dipping fresh bread in olive oil and sipping Riparosso, Mario was rolling Izzy’s wheelchair in through the back door and up to a table, where they might be ordering a little Riparosso of their own.

This restaurant was a favorite place of theirs, too. And Riparosso was one of their favorite wines. So here we were in the same place, drinking from the same grapes that had been touched by the same hands, grown in the same vineyard, and fermented in the same cellar thousands of miles away under the Adriatic sun. Interesting, the way unseen threads bind us. Different worlds. Same world.

Only then, it was 2 tables for 2, dinner for 4.

12. Nachos and Next of Kin

After Gregory died, the police could not locate his next of kin from the clues inside his condominium. They talked to Gregory’s landlord, but this was no help. In desperation, they began showing Gregory’s picture around our complex, and a friend of mine recognized him. Darlene told them I was his girlfriend.

But no one was home at my condominium until Monday afternoon, when Helena walked home from the middle school, as she always did. She let herself in, fed our cats, started some nachos and settled in to watch TV.

Gregory, she knew, would be stopping by later so they could go to the airport and pick me up.

Helena had a love-hate relationship with Gregory. On the plus side, he wrestled with her, carried her around on his shoulders (at least, when she was 10 pounds lighter) and helped her with homework in ways neither of her parents could.

But he also competed for my time, got in her face and, when she was smaller, rough-housed too hard and made her cry. Helena expected adults to read her boundaries and got upset when they did not.

When their childish wrestling careened out of control, she would pout and Gregory would apologize in his way, explaining that playing on the edge always held the possibility of slipping over the edge.

But these occasional transgressions never stopped Helena from coming back for more. Anytime he came over, from the moment he stepped through the door to final lights out, she would be after him, baiting him, trying to engage him. She wanted it both ways.

Helena even gave him a nickname, spat out when she was little and he played rough one time too many. She called him “Puke.” The name stuck.

Gregory seemed genuinely to love Helena. Unlike the cross impatience he showed with some people, he put up with Helena the way a cat tolerates the maulings of its young. He almost never got mad, enduring her antics long after someone else would have become fed up.
Only after he died did I come to understand the deeper, softer currents that shaped his feelings toward her.

Just as Helena was about to pull her nachos from the microwave, she noticed a police car parked out front. Curious, she peeked through the curtains, then gingerly pushed open the mail slot to listen. She couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Somewhere inside, she was thinking, “Don’t come here.” But they did. She let them in, shutting the door behind them to keep the cats from escaping, and they explained to her, in as gentle a manner as possible, that Gregory had had a heart attack and died. Her first thought, she told me later, was that it had to be a joke.

“And then I remembered,” she said, “policemen don’t joke.”

She was standing next to the stairs when they broke the news, and she simply sank into the steps. Her heart, she said, “dropped like an elevator.”

All the years of preparing her to be competent and independent coalesced in that moment. Helena didn’t break down. She didn’t cry. Not then. She held like a rock long enough to tell them how to find Gregory’s mother – where she lived and that she was in the hospital for a hip replacement. Helena didn’t know which hospital, but it was a solid lead. It got them started.

The officers apologized to me later for having to tell Helena so bluntly: “We were desperate,” they said. “We had nowhere else to go.” They were surprised to learn she was only 12.

Before the night was over, Gregory’s mother would learn that her only living child, the only remaining member of her immediate family, was dead. And Helena would tell the policemen that I was expecting Gregory to pick me up at the airport in a few hours. But she didn’t know when, the airline or the flight number.

Now the policemen asked her if there was somewhere she could go – a neighbor’s, perhaps – since “Puke” wouldn’t be coming, after all. Considering for a moment, she thought of Darlene. The policemen offered to walk her to our friend’s condo. Before leaving, Helena grabbed her nachos.