Table for 4 ~ Dinner for 2

A pause, not an end

2007-10-11T23:13:00.000-05:00

Ack. I can't believe it's been since July that I last posted. And a dramatic post at that. Friends, those two of you still reading this, I have to take - continue? - a hiatus to earn some of the greenback stuff. Pay the bills. Satisfy da man. I will continue this blog at a future date (as opposed to a past date).

I leave you with this: Mario and I continue to thrive as a couple although he tells me he goes numb in the ears when I talk about yoga or my cats. Yoga is my solace; he says, "Tried it, don't like it." As for my cats, I feed ferals one night a week at a local university, and on one of those nights had to rescue a kitten, who somehow has grown to six months old and wormed his way into my household. (He's soooo cute.) Mario, he wants to be catless for a while, although he's all too happy to sit with the grand-cat that is his son's. Actually, Mario loves cats. He just hates to admit it.

So I am officially going to sign off for a while. There is still much to tell, about Gregory's amazing hidden compartments, the little girl he loved and lost (which broke my heart all over again when I learned about it). But also of Gregory's redemption. He was a troubled, perhaps even tortured, soul. I like to think I helped him find his way, just as his love opened me. May he rest in a vigorous spirit world.

Love - being in love - is such an important, potent bond. I still struggle with whether it, whether we, transcend death. I honestly do not know. I do know that I still want to share this story. And that the story isn't finished.

Au revoir, mes amies.

31. One Angel in Another's Hell

2007-07-20T22:14:00.000-05:00

I remember with a kind of illness the day I uncovered among Gregory’s few effects the remnants of a relationship with a girl who had been slightly older than Helena. Gregory’s genuine caring for Helena, his patience with her and the way he sought out a relationship with her touched me: Here was a man for whom children did not appear to be baggage.

Strictly speaking, the other little girl was not Gregory’s daughter, although you could say he loved Gretel like his own flesh and blood. He had moved in with her mother before the two were married. How strange that he never uttered a word about his stepdaughter during our six years together. Not a word? Not a hint of a word.

This was all the more perplexing as I pored over the childish drawings, the “I love yous,” the poems. Gregory kept few mementos of his past. He gave all the pictures from his marriage to his second wife. He held onto only about a few photos of himself and his dad. None of his mother. None of his brother. None of Gretel.

But these drawings he kept, along with a few of Helena’s. Here I was, peering into one of Gregory’s compartments after his death.

I would learn about Gretel from her mother, a woman whom Gregory disparaged but who still loved him after all the time they’d been divorced, loved him after incidents that would have driven other women to hate, loved him as much as I did.

Her daughter had been a brilliant child with a bright future, good at science and skilled with math, which gave her and Gregory a natural affinity. She attended a program for gifted students, first at a middle school and later at an arts magnet high school. Gretel, whose flowing brown hair and wide, winning smile reminded me of Helena’s, also played the flute.

She was 14 when Gregory moved in, and she was dying. Doctors suggested that she had inhaled asbestos while playing the instrument, which had contributed to an adrenal carcinoma. Afflicted with this rarest of cancers, Gretel would develop a tumor the size of a baseball on her adrenal glands.

Gregory loved Gretel, and Gretel loved Gregory. She called him “my angel” and wrote him little notes and poems. When she was feeling good, he took her anyplace she wanted to go. She would lie in the sun with him, chaise beside chaise, when the weather was warm. He helped her with her studies. And when her disease progressed to the point that she no longer felt well enough go out, he brought things to her in her room.

He would buy her dresses at Neiman’s, knowing she would never be well enough to wear them. He would bring them home and put them on her bed. He bought her jewelry and trinkets.

In the final months of her life, he rigged up a speaker system not unlike later baby-crib monitors so that he and her mother could hear her breathe from their bedroom. And when Gretel would awaken in the night crying in pain, Gregory would go to her. He learned how to give shots so that he could gently inject the pain medicine that eased her discomfort. Then he would lie beside her and hold her in his arms until she fell back asleep.

As happened with increasing frequency toward the end of her life, Gretel was in the hospital on the hot July day when her mother got the news that Gregory had been shot at the liquor store. One of them was would never leave the hospital.

Image by Vladimir Kush

30. Anger: Tempest or a time bomb?

2007-07-04T16:43:00.000-05:00

Mario had quite an outburst on Father’s Day. Not at me or his son, who’d come over for dinner. But at an inanimate object: his air conditioner. Or was it the hardware stores that weren’t open for the part he needed? Or himself, for not being able to fix the thing as heat shimmied outside into the 80s? Or the expectation – evaporated – that Father’s Day would be a kinder, gentler day.

Mario and I have now been together longer than Gregory and I were. It hardly seems possible. But I guess that’s the consequence of time flying as you get older, whether you’re having fun or not. We do have a lot of fun, but so also are we revealing more of our true selves.

Mario’s outbursts don’t have the sting of Gregory’s, although they do annihilate any sense of order the evening might have had. Dinner goes to hell. The evening goes to hell. Mario must scurry to fix, curse the screwdriver, yell for others to make calls to find parts. Locating the right part brings some relief, but then frustration wells up again as he still can’t get the thing working. At length, he reaches a sort of exhaustion before he surrenders and gives up, leaving those around him likewise spent.

But I wonder which is worse: the outburst you see or the outburst you don’t? Gregory’s outbursts in the beginning of our relationship would include scathing attacks on something or somebody – a white-hot tirade, a poison rant.

He learned quickly not to turn these on me. It was simple: I told him I could not keep my heart open if it were the object of senseless marauding. But did I achieve some improvement in his character? Or did I just reinforce the message that it’s better to hold certain feelings inside, where, like IEDs, they explode and do irreparable damage?

I’ve never had the sense that Mario and I would wake up some morning and he would reveal some startling, hidden aspect of his life: He had a love child in Sicily. He was really a spy. Someone had shot him during a robbery.

The latter actually happened to Gregory. He told me about it when I noticed his scar. Did I say noticed? You could not miss the jagged line that wound around his ribcage on the left side from the front to the back. He had been shot at near-point-blank range. He was standing behind the counter of the liquor store he and his mother owned. Gregory slid down the wall, coming to a stop on his bottom and sort of hunching over. That probably helped staunch the bleeding. The bullet had pierced his liver.

Now you would think that when someone shares a traumatic episode, they would share everything that happened. But this was not the case. Gregory omitted crucial details. Details! It’s as if he told me only half the story. When, I wondered after he died, was he intending to tell me the rest? When was he going to open that compartment all the way for me to see?

As it turned out, the answer was never. Maybe it was too painful. Maybe he was ashamed he could not have done more. Maybe it was his way of armoring the bottom of the vehicle. I would find out the rest of the story from his second wife after he died.

Image by Vladimir Kush

29. 'I am so sorry for your loss'

2007-05-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

People who have never suffered the loss of a loved one are often at a loss in the face of those who have. What do you say? What do you do? You don’t want to say the wrong thing. You don’t want to make them cry.

But if you have never suffered a loss, you don’t understand. Sometimes crying is healing. And "making someone cry"” shouldn’t be something you fear. The reality is that you can’t "make someone cry." You can only touch them in a way that tears and sadness are evoked. This is not a bad thing.

But if you have never suffered a loss, you don’t know this.

Years ago, I worked with a woman – knew her professionally, nothing more – who had lost her only daughter in a heinous crime. Murdered.

I had never experienced loss beyond a beloved pet. My reaction to her loss? I avoided her if I saw her coming my way. Avoided looking at her. Avoided being where she was. Avoided contact. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing.

But after I lost Gregory, everything changed. I sought her out. Sat down and had a conversation with her. Suddenly, I knew what to say. And the first thing I said was, “I am so sorry for your loss.” I apologized for my lack of contact. God bless her, she understood and accepted my apology so gracefully. We talked our about mutual losses, and the air was clean between us.

So let’s say you are that person who has never experienced a loss and doesn’t know what to say.

Here is "What to Say 101."

Whether you know a person well or are just an acquaintance, I am here to tell you that the seven most powerful words in the English language are these: “I am so sorry for your loss.” Period.

When a person has suffered the loss of a loved one – a truly loved one, a child, a close parent, a spouse, a life partner, even, yes, a beloved pet – those are the most powerful words you can speak.

Did I say speak? You must do more than speak them. You must mean them. From the bottom of your heart.

It becomes easier with time.

Not long ago, my car inspection was due. I pulled into a service station where I’d had a good experience with a flat tire back when Gregory was alive. The owner and I got to talking. He was a gentleman about my age. He explained that he had been an executive in a restaurant chain California, but that a divorce had wiped him out. He came to Dallas to start a new life. Oh, and he had lost his only son in Iraq the summer before.

He wasn’t mope-y or maudlin. He was just sharing the circumstances of his life. I looked at him and said, “I am so sorry for your loss.” And I was. How terrible to lose your only son. He looked at me, and he said, “Thank you.”

And that was it. Just like the Christmas dinner, where we “widows” dipped into our mutual grief, this man and I shared a moment. Connected for a moment. This is grief as its most powerful and basic: connecting with another human, understanding a loss.

Then, my inspection was done. And I was on my way.

Image by Vladimir Kush

28. Life After Life?

2007-04-23T15:18:00.000-05:00

Let me take this question of life after life vs. road kill back to about a month after Gregory died for yet another conundrum.

Through a person I trusted deeply, I contacted a medium. Arlene (the medium) lived in another part of the country, was in fact traveling in an RV, and the person I had contacted had to call one person, then the person that person told her to call, then another, through about five layers of connections. This person I trusted did not know a lot about Gregory, and Arlene could not possibly link me to him or him to me, not with the best search engine on the planet.

The “meeting” was set: I would call Arlene at a specific time on a specific day. I had it in my mind that I would be super sharp, super skeptical and give this person no feedback whatsoever about what she was saying. My plan was to listen, listen, listen and see whether anything came through or not. She would get no verbal prompts from me.

At this same time, I worked for a publication, and as you probably know, they are bombarded with samples and review copies of everything. Our department pooled these odd bits together in early December and held a sale with bargain pricing. It’s not like you’re going to pick up a Danielle Steel novel or Bruce Springsteen CDs. Most of it is offbeat stuff. All the proceeds go to a local charity.

As it happened, this sale took place the Friday before my Sunday call with Arlene. I was back at work, barely. The sale was a nice diversion, and it was fun to get caught up as we flooded in from the hall and began swarming the tables. After 45 minutes, my booty consisted of a handful of Celtic CDs, a Dixie Chicks video and an obscure animated short.

Sometime later that day, my boss said, “Let’s go see what’s left,” and so we did. The room had really been worked over. I decided to concentrate on the stacks of books that still lined the walls, maybe to find a horse book for Helena.

I made it only a little way around the perimeter when I came upon a small paperback about communication with dead. Hmmm. I put it in my bag. A little farther along, there was a copy of John Edward’s first book, One Last Time. This was before he was famous. I had no idea who he was or precisely what he did, but at the top of the book was a quote from Raymond Moody that said, “Astonishing.” Having followed Dr. Moody since his Life After Life days, that made an impression. The tagline on the book said, “A psychic medium speaks to those we have loved and lost.”

I thought that rather peculiar; it made it sound like a book about relationships. Except, this Edward guy was a psychic medium. I started to put the book in my bag, then thought better of it. I didn’t want the people in my office who were tallying and taking our money to think I was obsessed with the topic of communicating with the dead. I put the book back. Halfway around the room, there was another copy. This time, I put it in my bag for keeps. To hell with what people would think.

When I got home, I put the two books side by side, wondering which to read first. Love Beyond Life by Joel Martin and Patricia Romanowski was “inspiring and thought-provoking,” according to a quote by pediatrician Melvin Morse, author of Closer to the Light, a book about near-death experiences in children.

Ultimately, I picked Edward’s book, and could scarcely put it down long enough to sleep. It told of his own dubiousness at his “skill” and how he put aside a career in public health to work full-time as a medium. The remainder of the book talked about what he does and how he does it, as well as how to spot fake mediums. He mentioned two other books he felt were reputable, and one was the Martin-Romanowski book.

First off, for these two books of all the books at the sale to somehow be overlooked was remarkable. Not only that, the Edward book was like a primer of what happens in a reading of the type I was about to have. My position of not giving any feedback would have ruined the session.

Indeed, Edward explained that he instructs people NOT to lead him with information, but simply to tell him whether or not a name or bit of information has meaning. It allows him to “feel” from the other side whether it’s right. A person might say, “Oh yes, I have a cousin named Harold,” and Edward will say, “That’s not who this is referring to.” (This, as opposed to a fake, who will then try to draw out more information about “cousin Harold.”)

In a personal appearance I later attended, again before he was a psychic superstar, Edward told about the name Orlando coming through for a specific woman. He and she went through every possible permutation of meaning, and both became extremely frustrated when nothing “fit” for the insistent entity coming through. Finally, one of them said, “Disney World?” Jackpot.

So – from the chance second visit to the sale, the chance sighting of two of the best of three books on the subject of this kind of mediumship, the chance of reading the one that would best prepare me for my own reading – what are the odds?

And what a difference it made in the reading.

This is the stuff that makes my brain ache, and sends me running back to the Robert Monroe books.

Image by Vladimir Kush

27. The Yin and Yang of Life After Death

2007-04-07T20:05:00.000-05:00

Only days after posting that dark blog, I went to dinner with Dee. It was as if the universe, in its infinite wisdom and glee, licked its lips, rubbed its palms together and said, “Now, let’s hit her with the yang to her yin. Let’s see how she feels about that.”

How to explain Dee. I’m not sure why I was drawn to her (or her to me). At the time, we worked together, and I could sense tremendous untapped power in her. Not the sort of egotistical gluttony that drives the worst of politicians. Nor the self-absorbed power of a femme fatale. I’m talking about a presence and substance. Something not physical.

Blonde, Nordic, solidly built, Great Plains-born and bred, she was button-down bright. Yet she trembled with fear that she might do something to endanger her salvation. (Some part of me was certain this would not be the case.) She was – and is – a committed student of the Bible.

Over the years, as we spent time together, the strangest thing would happen. Our conversations would invariably turn to spiritual topics, and we would dialogue in such a way that each provided the other with spiritual balm. I can hardly even characterize these conversations. For me, words would just spill out of my mouth, without thinking, from places I couldn't readily source. And from her, I sensed this uplifting radiance, this unfolding expansiveness. It was comforting to be a moth drawn to her flame.

So days after posting that dark blog, Dee and I got together.

We each, as it turned out, had something special to share. She wanted to tell me about something that had recently happened to her, and I wanted to broach the topic of winking on before winking out. I was a little afraid that she might begin to proselytize. Try as I might, I have never been able to embrace the born-again concept. As I told her, I was “born again” at 10 or 12, walked to the front of the church, dropped to my knees and accepted communion. Nothing happened. I’ve spent a lifetime since, seeking the truth about human existence, corporeal and spiritual.

Dee shared first. She began to tell me about her experiences with Margaret, someone she had never spoken of before. I don’t want to trivialize what came next. Dee explained to me how Margaret was her spirit guide, a presence she had experienced since childhood, who manifest as Western Indian in appearance. In her most recent encounter, Dee explained, Margaret had taken her through a spiritual initiation ceremony. I was quite familiar with this in the context of more alternative approaches to spirituality. I never, ever expected to hear of such a thing from my dear friend.

To listen to Dee, who had initially been fearful for her salvation, speak of an experience that can only be described as transcendent, was remarkable. I said to her, “You cannot imagine the appropriateness of your telling me this just now.”

Then I shared with her much of what I wrote in the previous post. She offered no fear, no recrimination, no push to make me be like her. Just openness, acceptance and love.

This is the sort of thing that holds me ‘twixt and ‘tween. Can this have been a coincidence? I did not have a clue Dee had ever had any such experiences. I had no clue that she had a spirit guide. I would never have even raised the topics of spirit guides or initiations with her because they fly so far afield from traditional Christianity. So it’s not like I elicited this, or planted some suggestion, or provoked it. And, she doesn't read the blog.

Yet, it's the sort of maddening thing that happened often immediately after Gregory’s death. Tantalizing, maybe-spiritual messages. Coincidence upon coincidence. Are they just the magical thinking/interpretation of finite creatures?

Dee would say now that she and I entered into a contract before birth to do something specifically together – learn a lesson, perform a service – in this lifetime.

I cannot say this is wrong. Or correct. The stone-cold, sober truth is that we shall only know the truth of all of this upon the event of our own death. Or, perhaps we shall enter eternal slumber and not know at all.

Images by Vladimir Kush

26. The Dark Side of Death and Grief

2007-03-18T21:21:00.000-05:00

It has been a while since I have posted, I know. Life has been getting in the way. There have been the comings and goings of family, the sorrow of break-up and divorce, the joy of discovery with a loved one, the impending death of a mentor. And all the while, menopause courses through my body and rattles my mood.

I don’t mind the hot flashes. Really. I liken them to a wasabi rush: You eat too much, and it storms up your nose toward an explosion you know is coming. You also know you can’t stop it, are powerless to resist and, in an instant, it blows right through. Same with hot flashes. I can deal with that. Keep the covers loose. And absolutely, positively do not wear turtlenecks.

But it’s also allowed the bottom to drop out of my mood from time to time. And when this happens, I step gingerly closer to what I call the dark side. Of late, it’s meant embracing, if just for the moment, the existential concept that this is all there is. No afterlife. No beforelife. No spirit. No continuity beyond the biological rhythms and grit of life as we know them.

I have never allowed myself to entertain this possibility before. It is too dark. Too depressing. Too scary. Too hurtful when I think of Gregory and Izzy, our beloveds. Or of us.

And yet.

What does it mean to touch the concept with mental flickers, the way you touch salt with your tongue and fell a shiver of excitement?

Is it because I’m menopausal? Is it because the end of my life is undeniably closer than its beginning? Does being in this place in time allow me to dip into the possibility that we are but lights that blink on, then blink off, for all eternity?

I find myself rolling this concept around, like caramel. Or a mouthful of voluptuous wine.

That makes it sound pleasant, but the comparisons are more about nuance. I do not wish this to be the case. But I can seize it, touch it, feel it just now without screaming.

And the great conundrum is all this evidence that points flirtingly toward there being more, no matter what the hard scientists say. I am speaking beyond the religious and spiritual texts, beyond the mantras and Hail Marys, to an isness that transcends faith.

But if you entertain the thought for even a fleeting moment that this is all there is, that we are creatures biologique, it opens up a different appreciation for life. By some fluke of chance, we become the candle. We become the flame. We wink on. And before we wink off, what do we do with our tiny window of light?

We can be gangstas and bling-queens. We can surf the drug culture till we are senseless. We can steal and cheat and lie and grab for ourselves and our tribe. We can kill and die for Allah and God. Or, we can sort of hold our lives in our hands and say, “What do we do here? The clock is ticking. What can we do in our brief time that pays something forward to unborn generations who may never know we existed?”

I don’t have the answer. I’m not even sure I understand the question. But these are matters we all must contemplate, whether they are truth or not. For in the end, none of us gets out of this alive. And in the end, none of us knows the answer to the question – whether there will be 72 virgins waiting for our sacrifice, or deep, soundless, timeless repose – until we die. Oh, to retreat into the familiar feminine flow once again.

25. Of Things Unseen

2007-02-11T20:57:00.000-06:00

Once again I drove to the car wash today. Once more to have the mud and grime cleansed from the surface of this car, which was Gregory’s car before it was my car. I’m sure people look at me sideways as I pull in; the little Celica surely looks battered for its 13 years, like a car most people wouldn’t bother to clean.

It has what I euphemistically call “skin cancer.” That is, the clear-coat is peeling off the driver’s side of the trunk and roof, and now is beginning to work its way down the driver’s side.

This is not something that should have happened to Gregory’s car, which he bought new in 1993. For the first five years of its life, the Celica was washed twice a week by hand. If you sat down in the passenger’s seat and perchance a leaf had attached itself to your shoe, Gregory would lean over and pull the detritus off the spotless mats. The Celica was garaged at home as well as at work, contributing further to the riddle of the cancer.

Gregory took the car for service the second he was supposed to. Oil changes on the dot. Tires rotated right on schedule. The car was his pride and joy, and I loved sitting next to him, watching him in profile, feeling him glide smoothly through the gears, the little engine humming through its rpms.

Gregory took the car for service, but he refused to get a physical. Never had an EKG. Never had a blood work-up. He felt he was in control of his body. He ran or walked every morning. He ate the right stuff. He was trim. He looked younger than his 50 years. Who could argue with him?
When we met, Gregory was years past his last encounter with a doctor. He’d had some dental work that had become infected, which he was careful to have treated. And much earlier, he had been shot and nearly died. That’s another story, but it was shocking the first time we made love to see a rough scar running from front to back around the bottom of his left rib-cage. He’d been shot during a robbery and had bled, and when the docs cut into him, niceties like appearance were not on their minds. They were more concerned with saving his life. Which they did.

Also some time earlier, during Gregory’s second marriage, when he was running the liquor store that his dad had left to him and his mom, he had dabbled in cocaine. I would not find this out till after he died and I began peering into some of those compartments he kept discreetly separated from one another.
During one episode, his wife told me later, he had been standing next to the hood of their car and grabbed his chest and crumpled to his knees. He told her that for a moment he thought he was going to die.

So despite Gregory’s intensity about caring for his body and running and eating the right things and having it all under control, there were processes unseen taking place in his body just as there were processes unseen below the surface of his beloved Celica. Who knows what careless hand in the paint booth shortchanged the clear-coat on his/my car? Who knows what was really going on in Gregory’s heart?

Sometimes, it’s just the way the dice tumble.
In the ensuing years since Gregory’s death, I have loved the Celica. Loved the feel. Loved the design. Loved its looks. Loved the fit. Even loved its cranky, unforgiving clutch. But out of nowhere, despite babying, despite keeping it out of the sun far more than letting it sit in the sun, despite coddling it like the creampuff it’s been, the cancer came creeping. The flaw began to show itself.

I suppose the true corollary to a heart attack would be for the engine to blow. But either way, a flaw unseen led to a ruinous outcome. I can’t go back and make Gregory go to the doctor. But now you can see why I push Mario on the point. Fortunately, it doesn’t take much pushing. I still worry.

24. Angelo’s Ashes

2007-01-22T22:22:00.000-06:00

{ Mario writes this time }

I had been out of town when Violet had the memorial for Angelo. Traveling for business and the holiday season had kept me from being there. When I settled back in, I called Violet up and asked her out to lunch.

She had recently returned from China, a trip she had planned some time before Angelo’s death. Violet decided it would be a good thing to go on a journey.

After Isabel had passed away, I took a trip to Italy. It was our last trip together. I had obtained a heart- shaped urn made from a biodegradable paper, so that when we finally parted and she remained in the earth, her ashes to go back into the ground after a short time.

I chose Assisi. We had been there and loved it together. Years before with my baby son, I had spent many weeks there. He had taken his first steps in Assisi. It was a place I would return to over the years.

With the help of a friend, we obtained the consent to have Isabel’s ashes buried in a holy spot, a place where Francis of Assisi had gone to meditate and pray, the Eremo delle Carceri. Near his cave, there was a tree up on the hillside.

Some time before, I had struggled with the reality of her ashes. I couldn’t bear to take them out of the plastic container and put them into the cotton sack and then into the urn. I had to ask my son to help me with it.

So when Violet asked me at lunch to help her divide Angelo’s ashes in two, I had to take a step into an unknown room that I had avoided. I still have my cat’s ashes in the closet and cannot bear to deal with even those.

But I could understand Violet’s grief and told her not to worry. She wanted to divide them, one part for his golfing buddies to take to the golf course, and the other to their old neighborhood in the Hudson Valley in New York.

I know the spirit is gone and the flesh and bones have been made as safe and as neutral as can be. And as I opened the box to split Angelo’s ashes, it couldn’t have been easier. It was as if something that I had dreaded for all these years was suddenly rendered without the charge I had assigned to it. I felt freed, and it was soothing to be able to help a friend who was still in the darkness of the tunnel of grief. Even if I dropped a little of the dust around the kitchen, accidentally, it didn't seem to upset the cosmic order of things.

I’m not going anywhere else with this; Ann has been asking me to write something about the experience.

I don’t have a lot of feeling for the body after life has left it. I don’t need to wash it or caress it or kiss it. What I am connected to isn’t the flesh as much as the spirit that embodies the flesh. And once it has passed over, to continue to try and connect with a lifeless corporeal object is, to me, a disregard for the person and their energy. I am fine with talking to them inside my mind and dreaming about them and being reached out to by them for our future communications. That’s just the way it has to be.

Now I just have to decide which kind of urn they’ll maybe put my ashes in someday. Right now I have my eyes on a biodegradable one that you can throw into the ocean like a Frisbee.

Or maybe just a simple recycled bag, from say, In-N-Out?

Ann adds: See why I love this guy so much?

23. The Ghosts of Christmas Past

2006-12-27T10:40:00.000-06:00

For Mario and I, Christmas sort of died along with our great loves.

Gregory and I used to take Helena out to a Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree.

Gregory didn’t participate in the decorating, but Helena and I would hang upon the boughs first lights, then the ornaments and all the memories locked inside them: A wooden lighthouse from a New England friend. A tiny Noah’s ark leftover from my marriage to Helena’s dad. A miniature sleigh full of miniature foodstuffs from a foodie at work. A pine cone that Helena had decorated with ribbons and spangles.

For the most part, these have sat, undisturbed, in a box year after year since Gregory died. It wasn’t that Helena and I made less out of Christmas. It’s just that it didn’t feel the same. We didn’t want to go Christmas tree hunting by ourselves, and it wasn’t as much fun to hang the stockings with everyone’s names, including the cats, down the banister. And, anyway, when Helena entered her militant environmental stage, live trees were out of the question.

It was only a couple of years ago that some of the decorations came out of their tissue cocoons. The occasion was the first time Mario and I hosted a Christmas Eve get-together with blended family and friends. We couldn’t have them over without a Christmas tree, could we?

So, for the first time since Izzy died, Mario rooted around in the attic for their sturdy artificial tree. We combined our ornaments, and the tree came to life, complete with an angel. I can’t say we did this with a lot of joy. But it has gotten easier, as we have gently coaxed the ritual from the shadows of loss.

Christmas Eve 2006, we again created a feast: Mario’s exquisite Calabrian eggplant parmesan, which starts with slicing and grilling eight eggplant. A “happy” pastured turkey cooked according to Martha Stewart’s cheesecloth-draped method. Rich, brown gravy made from drippings (an art I have finally mastered). Yukon Gold potatoes not mashed, but riced to ethereal lightness, with melted butter and milk gently folded in. Izzy’s sister brought broccoli salad with almonds, grapes and bacon, as well as a modern squash casserole. And a new friend, who’s in her second holiday season in the “tunnel,” brought chocolate-chip-laced brandy balls for dessert. Her soulmate, like Gregory and Izzy, was far too young when he died just over a year ago.

Whether by design or accident at this year’s dinner – Mario made the place cards – Violet, who lost her husband of 53 years to Alzheimer’s earlier this year, sat directly across from the new friend, next to another new friend, and with Izzy’s sister and Mario’s 90-plus aunt. I, too, was at this table.

A lively conversation covered a landscape of topics: from missing New York City, to whiches and thats (‘happens when writers and editors talk), to expectations of an art museum, to the lamentable dearth of walking in our city and the urine-tainted cars of our mass public transit. And then, the conversation turned to loss.

Perhaps it was the wine. Or the Christmas tree angel, perched above our heads. Perhaps it was the comfort of connections discovered and discourse made easy. Whatever the reason, we dipped collectively into the intimacy of shared loss, if only for a moment, as we exchanged parts of our stories.

Honestly, I think this is how we’re supposed to grieve. To share a moment, or a reflection, and just be heard and understood. It’s not as if you have to dissect the whole process. It’s just making connections. But in our culture, if you haven’t experienced loss, you don’t know how to react. And so what could become an opportunity for healing instead becomes just awkward. So we who have been through it have learned not to bring loss up, or to apologize when we do.

For this group, that wasn’t the case. We raised our glasses filled with wine from the common decanter of grief, sisters in the communion of love found and forever lost.

And then, with kaleidoscopic perfection, the conversation morphed again, swirling naturally away from the topic, our hearts warmed and faces aglow.

22. Glimpsing the Love - and Secret Compartments

2006-12-20T22:52:00.000-06:00

Mario keeps prodding me to talk more about our respective mates and food. After all, the title of this blog is, “Table for Four, Dinner for Two.” And there are many food moments still to share. For, indeed, while eating and dining and gathering 'round a table are central to everyone’s lives, they are the heart and soul of existence for foodies like us.

I, on the other hand, am pulled toward telling you more of the back story, of who Gregory was and the twist and turns of his life and death. So the food will have to simmer for the moment on the back burner (but of course, not too long).

Let’s go back to the memorial service. Here we were in this stark, funeral-home chapel as the pews filled with Gregory’s friends and family, mine, and his business associates. It was a service that almost didn’t happen. At one point, Gregory’s cousin and his wife (who had taken over the “arrangements”), the funeral-director chick, and I had gathered around Aurora’s bed in the hospital, where she was recovering from hip surgery.

When I mentioned doing a memorial service, the cousin and his wife seemed surprised. “Who would come?” they asked. I told them a lot of his friends were asking about one. Skeptical, they allowed me to put the service together.

So there we were in the chapel. I sat between my psychic friend, who whispered to me that Gregory was there, and Gregory’s best friend, DeWayne, who had collected tributes. Aurora insisted that her priest, Father Franks, preside. DeWayne and I just wanted to make sure the tributes got read.

At length, it was my turn, and while many of the other remembrances had made me cry, I also felt shimmering inside at the outpouring of love.

I slid down the pew toward the center aisle and climbed up to the pulpit, there to see for the first time how full the chapel was, how many people were there for him and me. I took a deep breath and began: “More than anything, I am thankful that Gregory and I had five wonderful years together, years made sweet with simple pleasures – doing laundry before a morning walk, cooking together, sitting on the couch and reading the paper....” I told about our first date and Gregory wiggling his toes in the grass (at the restaurant, no less). I told about a playful incident at the drugstore scarcely a week before with Helena and a hand cart. I told how Gregory had held me the day of the Oklahoma City bombing memorial, and of looking up to see tears in his eyes, too. I closed with a colleague’s line about Gregory’s purpose in my life being to make me “be a good dresser!”

I returned to my seat, and Father Franks reclaimed the pulpit, commending Gregory’s soul to God. But before the postlude could begin, a handsomely dressed, young African-American man bounded up to the pulpit and said into the microphone, “Wait. Please, wait. I wasn’t able to get my tribute to Gregory in on time, and I’d like to offer it now.”

There was a pause. I thought he was going to take a piece of paper from his breast pocket and read. Instead, a sonorous baritone rose up out of that slender body, expanding to fill the entire chapel with “Amazing Grace.”

One by one, the members of the congregation joined in, following the lead of this huge voice and heart. When he had finished, the room felt so light. We even managed to smile though our tears as the organist played a tortured postlude of “Forever Young” and “Against the Wind,” Gregory’s anthems.

The swell of emotion did not escape Gregory’s cousin and his wife, the ones who had wondered who might attend such a service. They had glimpsed a side of Gregory they’d never known, that he had never shown them.

But then, Gregory was skilled at sealing off different compartments of his life from one another. After he died, the compartments started falling open to reveal the startling contents inside.

21. Tending the Garden

2006-11-28T08:49:00.000-06:00

I was working in the office the other day when a coworker/friend popped his head over my cubicle wall and said, “Do you have a minute?” His eyes were twinkly as he swung around the corner and knelt next to my chair.

“Do you remember what you told me that night we went to dinner after John died? How your heart is like a garden? How new love can grow next to the love for the one who’s gone? Well, you were right.”

Tom was describing an analogy I use when talking about grief and recovery and, yes, new love after you’ve lost the most precious love of your life. In Tom’s case, he and John had been partners for something like 20 years. In fact, when John, whom I met first, initially described Tom, it was so long ago that he referred to Tom as “my girlfriend.” We were co-workers, and he was leery of exposing his homosexuality.

It was something that always gave me a chuckle after John finally introduced Tom. No matter how you feel about it, I can tell you that this was a long-term, committed relationship built upon mutual love and respect. Two people could not have cared more for each other.

So it was a shock when John went into the hospital for exploratory surgery for some unexplained symptoms and the stunning outcome was to learn that his body was riddled with cancer. The lymphoma was so severe and widespread that he would not leave the hospital, not even for hospice care.

John was 50. There began in those final days a parade of family members and coworkers to keep vigil and to share their feelings and support with Tom and one another. Even as John lay dying, he mustered the strength to spend a few final moments with each of us. Even people like me, who were not part of his inner circle of friends, but who cared deeply for him as a coworker. John was this great, big, sunny Italian guy, and it was so shocking to think that we were losing him like this.

In contrast, Tom was more the quiet type, at least when I was around. He seemed the button-down counterweight to John’s exuberance. I was frankly concerned about him. I wasn’t sure he’d find the wherewithal to recover, to work through his grief, much less to love again.

But here he was, kneeling next to me and talking about the new man in his life. Or more precisely, how the new man was sympathetic and understanding of Tom’s need to talk about John and to celebrate certain occasions. Tom held out his hand to show me a ring that had been John’s.

“Can you believe it’s been three years?” he said, looking vibrant and healthy. I was surprised. It hadn’t seemed that long. “For the three-year anniversary, my friend and I are going out to dinner, and I decided to wear John’s ring today in remembrance.” Not only that, he told me, he was taking the new friend to his and Tom’s favorite vacation spot in Hawaii. In fact, Tom had spread John’s ashes there in accordance with his final wishes.

On that occasion, one of those “is it mystical, or is it a coincidence?” moments occurred. You can drive yourself crazy trying to discover whether the consciousness of those have passed lives on, whether they can influence the material world. I’ve certainly had my moments with Gregory, and Mario has had his with Izzy. But when you try to scrutinize them with a cold, scientific eye, they become ephemeral and like a riddle in a riddle in a riddle.

John had requested that his ashes be released into the ocean. As Tom stood at the water’s edge and let them fly, he looked out on the horizon to see three whales jumping up out of the waves in unison. It gave him chills. He’s never seen anything like it before or since.

Mario was able to take Izzy’s ashes to Assisi in Italy. I had wanted, along with Gregory’s cousins, to spread Gregory’s ashes at places that were important to him. In my case, it was an accomplishment just to get Gregory cremated. Aurora was Catholic. She had a family plot in a prestigious cemetery. (Yes, status can extend beyond the grave.) Although the thought of that beautiful body consumed in flames was not a pleasant one, I knew it was what Gregory would have wanted. “I don’t want to be buried,” he said, “all dressed up with no place to go.”

Having succeeded with the cremation (my daughter would say that Gregory went to the “creamery”), Gregory’s ashes had come to rest on Aurora’s fireplace mantle. Finally, her neighbor pulled me aside and begged me to let Aurora “bury” Gregory in the family plot. It was killing her to stare at the box and contemplate Gregory’s remains inside.

I agreed. For that matter, I could not have stopped her. One of the lessons of death is that much of what we do in its wake is for the living. If Aurora could rest better with the box of ashes in the ground, well, so be it.

All of this came stirring up as Tom talked effusively of his new relationship and his ability to hold his new love side-by-side in his heart with the old. Love doesn’t die. And love need never be crowded out to make room for another.

Tulips and Forget-Me-Nots

20. They call the wind Aurora

2006-11-16T18:31:00.000-06:00

There was another woman in Gregory’s life. But you would never know this from Aurora’s obituary. She died eight years after Gregory, but her obit ran without reference to either her husband or her two sons, one of whom was Gregory.

No mention! Despite the fact that Gregory came back home to help her after his dad died. Despite the fact that Gregory’s brother committed suicide. What was this young man’s sin against her?

While Gregory was growing up, Aurora was alternately his savior and tormentor. Mother and son were locked in a dance that began when he was a small child. By the time Gregory was born, Aurora understood that her husband’s anger could translate into slaps or degrading diatribes instantly, especially if his gambling weren’t going well. And Gregory was such bright, intense boy.

“I used to tell him that he was my eyes when we drove down to South Texas,” Aurora told me dreamily one time. And I can see the boy-child, alert and watching out the windshield with meerkat vigilance. Taking full responsibility.

And the incident that I wrote about earlier where Gregory intervened between his mother and father at the age of 7? That was emblematic of the relationships churning in that household.

When Gregory’s father courted her, Aurora could not have guessed that such a vile temper lie beneath his charming exterior. She could not have guessed that she was marrying not just into a family, but into a tribe. And she certainly could not have guessed that the tribe treated women little better than furniture.

These dark women were not quick to embrace Aurora, who was seen as an outsider. And although Gregory’s young cousins adored her, she was never fully accepted by the rest of the family. Her husband even forbade her to raise their boys as Catholics, according to her faith. “Take ‘em to the Baptist church,” he declared.

Yet Aurora was expected to learn to prepare his favorite Lebanese dishes. Since there were no cookbooks to reference then, she would stand patiently in the kitchen as the other women cooked, watching, listening, learning. By the time I came into Gregory’s life, she made possibly the best dolmas I’ve ever tasted, rich and juicy, and a tabbouleh so good it was adapted for a cookbook.

When Gregory and I first ate at a tiny Middle Eastern café not far from where we lived, he remarked that the food was just like his mother made at home: the tabbouleh, kibbe, hummus, baba ghanouj…. This was another one of those places Mario and Izzy frequented. But it would have been just two tables for two, with no connection, except a future one.

Gregory and I even took Aurora there once, but she embarrassed him by asking for – no, demanding – a recipe. Instead of saying something about it to her, Gregory just smoldered, his face, eyes and body betraying no clue to how he felt. Yet every Mother’s Day, every Christmas, every Easter and Thanksgiving, he took Aurora out.

Wrapped into the father’s tribal culture was an attitude about mothers and sons that was different from what we know in the West. No matter how much Gregory disliked the way she was, he felt duty-bound (and gagged) to care for her. Paradoxically, wives were second-class citizens, but mothers were revered.

When Gregory had come back after his father’s death, just as he was beginning a career as a USDA economist, his father’s business and finances were in disarray.

Not only had his father left no will, he had left no money. By law in the state of their residence, mother and son shared equally in the father’s estate. Gregory immediately signed his portion of the house over to his mother. "It will be mine someday," he said. Nearly as quickly, he plunged into reviving the retail liquor store that had been his dad’s retirement hobby.

His goal was to create a sustainable income for Aurora as she entered old age. Gregory was, after all, the only family she had left. So they owned the liquor store together. Gregory knew something about business, how to make a business work, and how to skim, but he would be doing it hands-on for the first time.

Aurora had worked before she was married. She had been a World War II defense worker and a hat model, among other things.

But there is a reason why co-ownership of a business by two people – or any even number, really – is a bad idea. Gregory would learn this hands-on, too. But not for a while. Despite circumstances completely thwarting his life and career plans, he was determined to make the best of it. If he was going to run a liquor store, then he was going to run the best, most successful liquor store on the block.

19. The Intuitive Nature of Grief

2006-10-27T20:37:00.000-05:00

Mario has just returned from a two-week trip to Italy – business, but hey, how bad can ANY business trip to Italy be? – and something has shifted. Instead of flooding into his space with my needs, I have felt compelled to just enjoy his company and do whatever I can to make his landing in the home time-zone soft and comfortable.

Mario dislikes those posts on touching Gregory’s body. Creeps him out, he says. It's too personal to share, he says.

I can see how it would be inappropriate for him. Although outgoing, Mario’s also a very private person and even now shares only glimpses of the day-to-day challenges of dealing with Isabel’s illness.

Grieving isn’t and shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gives insight into this in her final book, On Grief and Grieving, co-written with David Kessler. She talks about the need to share grief, the sometimes surprising ways it manifests – a man who lost his son wanted to immediately make love to his wife, not out of carnal escape but to reaffirm life – and the necessity of surrendering to it.

Not long before Mario left for Italy, a dear friend of his, now a friend of mine, lost her husband of 53 years to Alzheimer’s. Violet worked with Isabel, and when Isabel was ill, Violet was there to help, most memorably, I’m told, by reading to Isabel when she could no longer read for herself.

Violet’s husband Angelo had been a graphic designer in New York City during the 1950s and ‘60s, a golden age of creativity in that field. New York was the nerve center. By the time Angelo died earlier this year, the memory of his heyday, his later work with shadow boxes, his love of Mexican art, indeed of Violet and all they had lived through together, had been scrubbed from his mind.

During the later throes of the disease, when he and Violet were at home, he once looked at her said, “Do you work here?” Violet answered, “Yes, I do.” He thought about this for a moment, then said, “Do you think you could get me a job here, too?” Funny, yes. But funny-sad.

While Mario was in Italy, Violet insisted on hosting a remembrance gathering of friends and family. She both looked forward to the day and dreaded it. She suspected that it would be emotionally exhausting. Yet intuitively, she knew it was a necessary element of her grieving.
Each of their children spoke movingly of their father and mother. Violet read a piece that she had written about him, her voice faltering toward the end.

There was Violet’s sister, who recalled when Violet and Angelo had their first date in 1952. And Angelo’s teary-eyed golf buddies. One said, “We still haven’t replaced him in our foursome.”

And his caregiver for what turned out to be the final year. The young woman marveled at Violet and Angelo’s relationship, at Violet’s caring and insistence that Angelo be washed, groomed and dressed every day and treated with the dignity befitting the man he had been, even when he did not know who he was, where he was or how to dress himself. It was, the young woman said, an inspiration.

There were toasts. And tears. Stories and laughter. And when it was all done, Violet felt complete with another step in her passage.

Grief is like entering into a long, dark tunnel. Dark because it is unspeakably painful. Dark because you don’t know what’s ahead. Dark because it fits your mood. When I first met Mario, I told him that he was in the tunnel. I think he also told Violet this. Grief does feel like a long, black tunnel. And part of the value of sharing with others who have experienced it is their assurance of light up ahead, even if the person who is grieving cannot yet see it.

But like a tunnel, there are no shortcuts. You may spend time groping along the edges for another, shorter way out. But in the end, the quickest way out is still through.

18. The Face of Death: Part II

2006-10-13T17:18:00.000-05:00

Note: This entry contains strong imagery that may make some readers uncomfortable.

This is a continuation of the previous post in which I was talking about spending time with Gregory’s body. This was at the behest of a friend who was a grief counselor. Although I resisted the idea at first, I finally relented, on the strength of my trust in her.

I brought Gregory’s favorite massage oil with me. His body was strapped to a gurney, and he was wrapped tightly in a sheet from the chest down. I had wanted his whole body so that I could anoint it slowly and methodically as I prayed, meditated and said goodbye. In so many traditions – Jewish, Hindu, early Christian – the body is ceremonially cleansed and dressed, often by those closest to the deceased.

I poured a little of the aromatic oil into my cupped hand. The scent of lavender, cypress and patchouli softened Gregory’s plastic odor. I rubbed the cupped hand with my other hand to spread a fine film of oil over my fingers and palms, just as I had done when I had massaged Gregory in life.

At those times, he would lie below me as I balanced lightly on his buttocks and worked the muscles of his back, shoulders and neck. I marveled at how supple his muscles were, even those where most of us hold tension in our backs and shoulders. It was like rubbing a cat, and I surmised then that either he really did easily throw off the stresses that got to the rest of us, or he buried them so deeply within his body that I could not reach them.

Poised again at the top of his head, I started with my thumbs on his forehead and used my thumbs and fingers to trace the outline of his face down to his chin. I caressed the planes of his cheeks, the bones around his eyes, the bridge of his nose, all the time talking softly to him and reciting a prayer we used to say in the church where I had first seen him.

Oh wonderful, beautiful kingdom of light, shed down upon these humble souls thy beam of cosmic consciousness.… I stroked his fine smooth neck, carefully avoiding the autopsy stitches at the back…. Reach down and touch the souls that wait, and stir our minds with thoughts divine…. I smoothed the oil along and under his strong shoulders, the shoulders that had borne so much…. Cast out all evil and all sin, and take unto the world of love our hearts and psychic selves, that thus merged, our selves shall be but self of God….

Gregory had been plunged into the frigid vault so quickly after death that his arms and fingers remained pliable. I drank in those sun-browned arms, the slack muscles, the wrists barely larger than my own…. Oh God, creator of the universe, from Whom all things proceed and to Whom all things return….

Using my thumbs, I first stroked the top, then the palm, of each hand, those gentle, sweet hands whose touch had thrilled, protected and comforted me. I slid my fingers down to the end of his fingertips…. Reveal to us now the face of the true spiritual sun, hid by the disk of golden light….

I lingered over each line, each delicate and hard-earned wrinkle. Then I moved my hands over the sheets, as if I were caressing the rest of his body…. That we may know the Truth and do our whole duty in the One work as we journey to Thy sacred feet….

Because Gregory was tightly covered, I would miss being able to touch his feet and his long, slender toes with their long, slender nails. One time we had gone to an Assyrian art exhibit and peered up at a massive wall relief of soldiers frozen in some forgotten battle thousands of years ago. There were dozens of toes just like Gregory’s.

The truth is, when you love someone, you do love their body. The body is the expression of the inner being, whether it’s the pillowlike comfort of a mother’s breasts or the sun-leathered creases of an old man’s smile. In my private farewell, I realized just how deeply I loved this body – its shape, its smell, the form of it – and how difficult it was to separate the body from what had once been the spirit within. I loved the way the man moved and animated this body. The two, body and spirit, blurred as one.

As I snapped the lid shut on the oil, lingering at Gregory’s side one last time, I was struck by the thought: The man I love is gone. Joy was right. Without his essence inside, the body is truly a shell. And strangely, this comforted me.

17. The Face of Death: Part I

2006-10-13T17:17:00.000-05:00

Note: This entry contains strong imagery that may make some readers uncomfortable.

When a counselor friend suggested, in the week following Gregory’s death, that I might want to spend some time alone with his body, my first reaction was one of revulsion and fear. Like most people, my initial thought was to remember Gregory as I had known him in life, as the vital man I had loved.

Joy gently persisted. She suggested that spending time with his body might allow me to find some closure and understand that the man I loved was no longer in the body.

Joy was a wise counselor, whom I respected. Her suggestion reminded me of the time as child when my favorite cat was killed. Though Tiger bore no outward signs of trauma, my overprotective mother refused to let me see him. In retrospect, I always wished I had been able to look at him one more time. Perhaps I knew something intuitively then about what Joy was suggesting now.

Going mostly on faith and not much else, I arranged with the funeral director to spend some time with the body. And once more, I found myself being ushered to a viewing room by the young woman. Closing the door behind me, I asked that I not be disturbed.

Death is not pretty. Whether a person is pumped full of embalming fluid or dolled up with makeup, neither can hide the absence of animation and the flat, lifeless translucence of a corpse. Gregory was neither embalmed nor made up. He was wrapped tightly in sheets and again strapped to a gurney, this time draped with a quilt. His hair was clumsily combed back so as to emphasize his receding hairline. He would not have liked that.

Left alone with the body, I gingerly began to touch the face, Gregory’s face. It was cold, like the inside of the refrigerated facility where he had lain for nearly a week. An opaque waxiness replaced his true coloring. His eyes appeared to be glued shut. There were bits of sticky stuff caught in his eyelashes. With no circulation to support the tissue, his features were slightly flattened and the crook of his nose, sharpened.

Standing at his head, I leaned down so that I might smell his forehead and remember his scent. But I was disappointed: There was only an unfamiliar plastic odor. His scent had vanished in the icy vault. Tentatively I traced the outline of his ear with my finger and followed the crest of his brow and the line of his chin. I was not repulsed.

I tried to push his hair into place. I was struck by the weight of Gregory’s head as I rolled it gently between my hands; it had never seemed so heavy when the life of muscles had supported it. I ran my hand down his neck, his shoulder, his arms to his hands.

I had requested that his whole body be accessible. But instead he was tightly bound from the chest down. I had only his arms and hands and the top of his chest, where little tufts of black hair curled. I drank him in with my hands as well as my eyes.

You can love someone for years and be hazy on the fine details of their features. Now I was intent on incising the memory of every line, every crevasse, the faint mole on his upper lip, the shape of his fingers. I noticed a bruise on the top of his right hand. Is this where he tried to catch himself as he fell? Otherwise he was unscathed, perfect and unscathed, save for the thick black thread where the autopsy incisions were sewn closed. And of course his heart. His heart was broken.

To be continued…

Sat Oct 7, 2006

2006-10-08T12:06:00.000-05:00

Blog of the Day Award

"They like it, they really like it!"

16. The Language of the Sandbox

2006-10-03T20:13:00.000-05:00

Mario and I were getting on a plane the other day, in our typical Italian-Teutonic fashion. He ambled up into line before our group was called. I waited farther back. He motioned me to come forward. I didn’t want to “cut” in front of the people I was behind.

Mario strode down the walkway ahead of me, while I, somewhat disheveled, juggled a cellphone I’d just hung up, my purse and a bag. A man nearby, having observed our interaction, said to me, “You guys look like you’ve been together a long time.”

The comment made me smile. In a way, it was true. I’ve been in relationship with Mario longer now than I was with Phillip, long enough for us to develop a couple culture, which is a kind of shorthand that develops over time between two people.

I think, without stating it in so many words, the loss of couple culture is one of the things we mourn deeply when we lose a love, whether by death, divorce, or some other separation. And no wonder we mourn losing it. That person, with whom we feel seen and acknowledged and connected, suddenly is not there.

Couple culture is a state of understanding and being understood; you don’t have to explain everything in every conversation from scratch. A lot of times, it’s a basis for play and how you relate to each other in your own private sandbox.

It’s also probably fair to say that “bad” couple cultures are at the root of a lot of divorces. (“He always does THIS.” “She always does THAT.”) But “good” couple cultures help solidify relationships. You create a common language of mind, body and spirit with all the complexity and nuance that implies.

So this gig I’ve been doing lately that had Mario and I boarding a plane together (sort of) requires me to record sound snapshots of things like restaurant service. When Mario and I aren’t interacting with staff, the recorder continues, and our personal conversations invariably wind up on the tape, too. Couple culture. In your face.

I am what Mario (and a lot of other people) call bossy. I come from a family of bossy women. I’m a know-it-all, whether I really “know” something or not. Mario, on the other hand, is a force of nature. I like to call him a big tree because his is a formidable presence. Safe to say, whatever I dish out, he can take. Or put up with. There are no withering violets in this match-up.

This exchange occurred after a server brought us some cracked, fresh coconut. Imagine comedian Dane Cook doing this dialogue. That’s what it sounded like.

I should also point out that Mario runs circles around me intellectually. He is a renaissance man, educated by Jesuits, who has poked his nose into more books on more subjects than I will ever hope to. It’s just that, I’ve read more books on nutrition.

The other thing is: We’re not angry in this exchange. We’re having fun, playing a little relationship ping-pong.

Anyway, here goes:

Mario: Coconut is good for you!
Ann: No, it’s not.
M: Wuh?
A: It’s got saturated fat in it.
M: It’s water soluble.
A: No, it’s not.
M: How can something that grows on a tree be bad for you?
A: Well…. Is there fat in avocado?
M: Um-hum.
A: There’s fat in coconut.
M: It’s water soluble.
A: Fat is not water soluble.
M: Yes, it is. The fat in avocado is water soluble.
A: It’s completely impossible.
M: Are you sure?
A: Yeah. Fats are fat-soluble. Water-soluble things are water-soluble. Fat can’t be water-soluble.
M: Well, why do “they” always say that the fat in avocado is water-soluble?
A: “They” never say that.
M: I’ve heard it said a million times.
A: You have not.
M: Yes, I have.
A: Avocado is not water-soluble.
M: The fat in avocado is water-soluble.
A: No, it’s not.
M: That’s what I’ve been told.
A: I don’t know where you heard that.
M: You better check it out.
A: It’s wrong.
M: You may think it’s wrong. But you may not be right.
A: On this one, I am right.
M: You may think on this one, you’re right. But you may not be. You may not be right.
A: But I am right.
M: You don’t know that.
A: But I do, without a doubt. Without a question of a doubt. If you don’t think so, make a wager.
M: Are you ready to go?

Talk about savoring every morsel. Later that night at an Italian dinner, Mario baits me with the statement that the fat in olive oil is water soluble. He's got a twinkle in his eye. I snap at the bait, we laugh, and our journey of parallel souls continues.

15. Confirming the Departure

2006-09-26T20:50:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-18T22:35:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-10T13:17:00.000-05:00

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

2006-09-04T10:52:00.000-05:00

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.

11. Life and Death Lessons

2006-08-26T14:18:00.000-05:00

What an interesting turn of phrase Mario chooses, describing me as fearing his death, while I write in less straightforward terms: being obsessed with his health. Either way, both are correct. And it’s difficult to understand unless you’ve been there. Or at least, had someone close to you die.

I could play out either of those threads to their neurotic conclusion: become so obsessed with Mario’s death that I fail to fully live and appreciate him in the time we have. But I refuse.

So while I do concern myself with what he eats, and occasionally lapse into telling him what he “needs” to do, I try to keep my fear/obsession on a short leash and concede that Mario’s pretty good at watching out for himself.

The subtext to this is an uncomfortable truth for every relationship, for everything and everyone you love or will love: Sooner or later, one of you will say goodbye and one of you will be left alone. Many people have simply never contemplated this, especially young lovers, who can’t bear the thought of losing their beloved. (Ask a 9-11 widow or the mate of a fallen solider from the Iraq war whether it’s possible.) It doesn’t mean every relationship will end in death, but it’s true that every relationship will end. Each ending becomes a “little death” that must be mourned. (If you don't, you're just building a time bomb.)

So it helps to focus on what’s important and let go of what’s not. I think of my dad, who’s 91 and still chugging right along, like the model T’s he restores. Not too long after my mother died, he remarried, to a woman he has known since the second grade. She also had lost her mate after 50 years of marriage. They've been together 10 years and grab a hold of every minute they can.

They know: Life is too short to spend on petty squabbles. In five years, Mario and I have had maybe two serious arguments. It doesn’t mean we don’t have differences. It just means we don’t get too torqued about little stuff. It also doesn’t that mean people don’t have serious differences, serious enough to cause a split. Just that you develop the wisdom to recognize which is which.

My favorite example of this involves barking spiders. These little creatures have been known to skitter around so wildly some nights that the bedcovers luff like sails in a wind. Now I’ve known men who would be (a) genuinely offended or (b) horribly embarrassed in the same situation. But barking spiders are not a big deal once you’ve struggled alongside someone, like Izzy, who at times could not even eliminate, much less pass gas.

You learn to get over it and focus on what’s important.

My daughter, who has just bid her teen years farewell, gets the appreciation thing. You’ll remember I wrote about her and her boyfriend moving to another city to a house big enough for two cats and a bunny. Well, just a few days ago the bunny died at my house the morning they were leaving.

All of us cried. For all her pooping and peeing inappropriately (and appropriately, too), this little creature had a way that just melted your heart. ‘Seems that one of my cats, the scaredy one, scratched her, which led quickly to an infection. Chaco was gone before we could get her to the vet. Kinda like a guy who has a heart attack when you least expect it.

“It’s so weird, Mom,” Helena said through her snuffling. “I can handle death.” We talked a bit about that. “It gives you an appreciation of the now,” she said. “It teaches you about not taking life for granted, and how it’s spent.”

She says this was not necessarily learned through Gregory. And I can’t dispute her. One of her high school friend’s dad committed suicide. Another friend died of cancer. Helena doesn’t shrink from these events and has often been able to offer meaningful support. But I wonder: She and Gregory were so close, and the way she learned of his death was almost as upsetting as his death itself.

10a. From Mario ... "On The Run"

2006-08-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve been on the run. For 5 years. So long, I’ve now run across the width of this here United States. Ann seems to be worried that I'm going to die soon. But with her experience, one can only understand her worry.

But let me tell you why she needn't worry about that.

To live through what I did with Isabel was a lesson in living and dying. But to not take care of myself would be to disrespect the battle she fought and ultimately succumbed to.

So while Ann fears my death, I fear not living, with respect to the battle one dear to me fought, to honor life.

Recently on a trip, a friend of ours lost her husband of 50 years. Our friendship started with her friendship with Isabel. They were colleagues, fellow writers.
When my wife was too incapacitated to hold a book or read the print, this friend would come over to the house and read every week. It was wonderful seeing them there sharing someone’s thoughts in print. It really was healing. Now our friend has lost her man of her lifetime. Now she starts her new life, again.

My aunt, who is approaching 90 years, lost her husband of 60 plus years not too long ago. She is missing his company; she is lonely for her mate. Everywhere you turn, if you choose to see it, there are people dealing with this basic fact of life.

Is loneliness the real issue here? Is there something about not wanting to be lost among one’s belongings without someone there to help navigate life?

I see it with my son, still so young but really having to deal with the hard reality of a solitary existence, and not liking it.

All these jets roaring above our heads, all this distraction, time slipping into the stream of their trails and getting sucked out of our life accounts. I’m not liking it, either. This isn’t easy. This is relentless.

So I eat well, and I exercise, and I shift over from farm-raised to wild and from gas-fired to charcoal. I do what I think is right. But they’re still going to get me, eventually. Ann hopes later, and I hope she is right. In the meantime, what we do with our time and our resources, those are the places at the table I need help setting. Don’t we all?

I will run my run, day by day, step by step, tear by tear. It’s a race I know I’ll never win. But run I will. For Izzy. For Ann. For my mom and for my son, with memories and hopes as my backwind, along the sandy shores, with the sun in my face.

-Mario

10. "You are not the boss of me"

2006-08-07T22:12:00.000-05:00

Although I got to know Mario three years after Gregory’s death, the impact of losing a love who seemed so vigorous and vital has probably made me a little obsessive about Mario’s heart and health.

Aside from that single McDonald’s indulgence, Gregory ate such a healthy diet that one of his best friends remarked at the memorial service, “When we’d go out to eat, everyone else would order enchiladas and beer, and Gregory would get a salad and water.”

But because Gregory steadfastly refused to go for a physical, I’ll never know if medication – or some sort of intervention – would have lengthened his life. Like so many men, Gregory took better care of his car than himself. (That’s another story.)

So it is refreshing that Mario is almost girlish in his attentiveness to his body, making sure to get regular physicals and going to the doctor if anything seems amiss.

Mario cuts a leaner profile that many men half his age. Yet he is a little overweight. He is a committed runner. But work and knees sometimes conspire to prevent his doing this regularly. He eats better than 90 percent of Americans, with an affinity for salmon and spinach. But he has a weakness for cheese, in particular Upland Pleasant Ridge Reserve, which won Best of Show at the 2005 American Cheese Society conference.

In addition, Mario can get passionately, exquisitely angry. He hates stupid drivers (see “idiot-watching with Mario” in No. 5). He hates hot weather. He hates his pool, declaring yesterday, as he toiled beneath the unrelenting sun, “I’ll never own another pool again!” He rails against politicians he believes are wrecking the country and bemoans how greed has replaced relationship-building in business.

The thing is, Mario expresses this, rather than holding it in, as Gregory did. More accurately, Gregory learned to do what his father did: withhold, withhold, withhold, then explode in a violent rage. By the time Gregory met me, this had been largely tamped down, one of those things he shoehorned into his heart-as-vessel.
Despite Mario’s obvious attention to his own wellness, I still want to give him “advice” about his health. Sometimes he welcomes this, as when I helped devise a plan where he lost about 10 pounds. (Of course, he’s lost 10 pounds in Italy before, just by walking.) More often, when I mindlessly say something like, “No. You’ve had enough of that,” he comes back with some defensive retort, such as: “You are not the boss of me!”

But Mario is no 3-year-old. He means it. Yet he is happy for me to cook on weekends, a way I can covertly, creatively control some of what he eats. He’s got a well-equipped kitchen, too, remodeled about a year ago. So I cook at his house a lot.

Shortly before Gregory died, he had begun to provision his own kitchen. After living with and taking care of his mother for about four years, he had moved to my condominium complex. For reasons that I’ll explain in a future posting, it fell to me to pack his things and close the place up.

His dishes, flatware, knives and pots and pans were all new. Yet I was reluctant to give them to charity. Sometime during the dull throb that follows a death, I hit upon an idea: I would pack them away for my daughter, Helena, for when she left home. Even though she was only 12 at the time, I knew the day would come. Gregory would have approved, and Helena would appreciate that the things had been his.

In fact, in less than a month Helena is moving with her boyfriend to a new city to start her third year of college. The two have rented a house. Just enough space for them, their two cats and the rabbit. Already, Helena cooks. She is 20, beautiful, and full of herself – which Gregory would have loved.
She may not know it, but when she sets her table with his dishes and cooks for the boyfriend and others with his pots and pans, she will be setting the table for her own party of two, or four. Only, being so young and full of the potential of life, she will not have to make places for those who have left. At least, not yet.

Next time: Mario speaks.

9. The Heart: Muscle vs. Vessel

2006-08-01T11:38:00.000-05:00

Gregory died on a Saturday. Here is what I have been able to reconstruct about his final hours.

We started that day early. I had to catch a plane. I was going to a convention to promote my new book. A lot of mornings, Gregory and I unwound from our entwined sleep and made love. Not this morning. It was so early that the backs of my eyes felt gritty and grainy. We were doing well to stir.

We showered, and drank a little coffee. Gregory spent the usual time on his hair, progressing through different size picks in front of the mirror to get the right balance of kink and curls. He brought his car around to the front of my condo and loaded my luggage. As I was preparing to lock the door, he said, “Leave your keys here. You won’t need them.” And so I did.

We didn’t talk much on the ride to the airport. That was OK. I was so deeply happy and fulfilled in this relationship. We didn’t need to talk, to fill every void with a rush of words. We could ride in comfortable silence. But at some level, Gregory had felt bad about this, as I would learn later.

Stopping curbside at the airport, Gregory got my luggage from the trunk and placed it on the curb. He pulled me close and kissed me, and wished me a good trip. I remember watching him get back in the car and pull away, always looking forward, never looking back. It was the last time I would see him alive.

That day, as I moved through the convention, Gregory did what he always did on Saturdays, starting this one with breakfast at McDonald’s. I know. Don’t wince. He’d get the scrambled eggs and pancakes and sausage. It was his one junk-food indulgence, and he didn’t do it every week.

From there, he would go to his mother’s house and work most of the day in the yard. There were towering oaks that he would trim and pamper, a lawn to mow and edge, a border of other plants to tend, including grape leaves and the crape myrtle where Mr. and Mrs. Cardinal, as he always called the pairs, had had a nest.

Sometime later in the afternoon, he had stopped in at my condominium to feed the cats. He still had on his yard clothes – he hadn’t yet shaved and dressed for the party he was expecting to attend that evening for a client who was a photographer. He locked my unit and walked toward his own in the same complex. He crossed the courtyard and began to half-walk, half-run up the stairs to his own unit.

He made it just to the top, where he gasped, grabbed his chest, and fell. Two co-eds and a neighbor from nearby units saw him fall. One went to his side; the others called an ambulance. It got there quickly. Gregory was hustled away to the hospital, where they worked on him for several hours. To no avail. They could not revive him.

I believe Gregory died at the top of those stairs. He had one thing in his hand as stumbled and fell: the key to my unit. It was on a Perrier-Jouet Champagne keychain we had gotten at a wine event.

How do I know he was coming from my unit that day, and not just going to it? Because on the following Monday night when I came home and first found out that he had died, at the end of the evening spent huddled with a close friend and my son, when I finally said goodbye and dragged myself alone up the stairs to my bedroom, to the bed where I had last slept next to Gregory's warm, living flesh, I looked up to see on my chest of drawers an envelope addressed to me in his handwriting.

I slid the card out. It was a fool-the-eye image from Claude Monet of two men in a gondola in Venice. Inside, Gregory had written: “…flesh and blood needs flesh and blood and you’re the one I need.* …I apologize for slugging you with my frustrations. Hopefully, it won’t happen again. Love, G. *Johnny Cash and me.”

Well. He was right about one thing. It didn’t happen again.

A heart attack may seem like a sudden event. But it is not. When coronary arteries narrow and clog to the point of choking off their own life-giving blood, it is merely the climax of a slow-motion drama that has been shaped atom by atom and cell upon cell for years.

The heart may be strong muscle, but it is also a tender place – a place where many of us hold ourselves and our hurts away from the world as if, by shielding them from all eyes (including our own), our hurts will somehow evaporate and disappear.

I used to place my head on Gregory’s chest and listen to the slow, steady tha-tump, tha-tump of his heart, secure in its strong, unceasing rhythm. I thought I knew what that heart held, thought I had some sense of the wear and tear it had endured, both as muscle and vessel.

But this precious heart held vastly more than I had supposed.

8. Quest for Fire

2006-07-20T23:16:00.000-05:00

We are in the season of grilling. Like watching football, burping, and working on cars, grilling is primarily a man thing. Ask a man if he cooks, and, more often than not, if he answers yes, he’ll mean that he grills.

I won’t even get into the fact that in some parts of the country, “barbecue” and “grill” are interchangeable verbs. Not here. Not where I live. Barbecuing is a process of cooking dry-rubbed meat over indirect fire in a long, languid interplay of heat and smoke. Maybe late in the process, a liquid baste is mopped on. Grilling is raw meat (and other things) placed squarely on an oiled grate over raw fire, charcoal- or gas-driven.

The latter issue divides grillers. My Gregory was a charcoal man. He was about gathering twigs, scrunching up newspaper, and lighting a starter fire with a single match. He’d blow and poke and stand back and contemplate and poke again until he had a healthy flame churning. With this, he’d ignite charcoal briquettes. Chemical starters were unacceptable.

When he lived in Salt Lake City – when his career as an economist was just beginning and before the death of his father would call him home – he used to grill all the time. Even in the howling depths of winter. He didn’t care if there was snow on the ground and it was 20 degrees outside. “It’s never too cold to grill,” he declared.

Mario, on the other hand, is a gas man. He fires up the grill with the turn of a knob and the flick of a lighter. He turns out some good grilled food. He is a consummate cook. But – how shall I say? – his grill lacks the smoky nuance that a charcoal fire, with its wood-chip variations and dance of direct-indirect heat, provides. No. Let me go farther. It is a nasty grill. Its grate is caked with char, and the gas flames flare at one end, sputter at the other. Yet Mario, like a surgeon forced to use a Swiss army knife, manages. He even defends his grill.

Almost every weekend, Gregory would grill at my house, where he kept his Weber “Smokey Joe.” Yes, the company spells “smoky” incorrectly. I called the grill Little Joey. Gregory would hunker over the glowing briquettes and wood chips, tending them like a mama duck with her ducklings. He’d take my daughter out on the patio with him and indoctrinate her into the mysteries of monitoring heat and smoke, or flipping meat with tongs. In a heartbeat – there’s that heartbeat again – they would be transported to the mouth of the cave in who-knows-what millennia.

The amazing thing is, there was a municipal ordinance in my neighborhood against outdoor grills. It was not uncommon for neighbors to call the police if they smelled grill smoke wafting from some clueless newcomer’s patio. It was almost a competition to see who could get to the phone and call the cops on them first. Yet Gregory and I grilled almost every weekend, unimpeded, for five years.

During my time with Mario, I’ve tried to convey the difference a charcoal grill makes. For though I am a woman, I fall squarely in the charcoal camp. I’ve given him wood-chip pans and wood chips, received about as enthusiastically as a do-it-yourself vasectomy kit. I’ve dropped broad hints at restaurants, like, “This mesquite-smoked steak tastes soooo good.” I might as well be petting an armadillo.

After Gregory died, Little Joey was consigned to a box on a shelf. I just couldn’t bring myself to grill on it, even though I knew how. Besides the emptiness of Gregory not being there, I was sure that the first time I lit up, someone would call the cops and I’d be busted.

I accepted Mario’s pathetic gas grill as I accepted other aspects of his character that were different from Gregory’s. And indeed, there’s a Calabrian dish Mario makes that requires grilling many slices of eggplant. I’ve seen him spend hours, sweat dripping off his face and chest, hunkered over that grill, achieving just the right balance of soft flesh and char out of those gassy, fickle flames. He combines this eggplant with layers of marinara, a combination of cheeses, hard-boiled eggs and seasonings to create a rustic eggplant parmesan of ambrosial dimensions. It’s hard to argue with his success, despite his limited tool.

Lately, though, Mario has decided that he needs a new grill. Not only that, he has his eye on a charcoal-fired hottie – a Hasty Bake, which grill cognoscenti will recognize as the Maserati of home units. Am I excited because this will this make him more like Gregory? No! But I am thrilled to see him stretching to explore a new way of playing with fire.

Wait. There’s a post script here. I allowed Mario see this entry up to this point before posting. And he was so taken aback and ashamed at what I had written about his gas grill that he spent an entire afternoon refurbishing it, top to bottom. Fixing the element. Cleaning the grate. Making space for a smoker box. Making sure that I would never use adjectives like “pathetic” and “nasty” again. That's the newly refurbished gas grill, up there with the T-bones on it.

Who knew!? He and Gregory share a near obsession with order and cleanliness. For Gregory, that meant expensive shoes lined up in his closet like spit-and-polished little soldiers, all in a row. For Mario, it means turning into the White Tornado every Saturday morning in an orgy of house cleaning.

Mario's idea of the ultimate grill, designed & built by chef
& owner Victor Arguinzoniz, of the renowned Etxebarri.

I guess Mario found my analysis of his nasty, pathetic grill at odds with his pristine, Mr. Clean self-image. Or maybe, the hair on his legs just got a little thicker. Suddenly, he takes his role as keeper of the flame very seriously. That is good. The torch has passed. Somewhere, Gregory is smiling.

7. Sing Me A Song

2006-07-05T22:40:00.000-05:00

It is difficult to believe that Mario and I have been friends, a couple, almost as long as Gregory and I were together. And it is now going on – what? – eight years since Gregory’s death.

Helena, who was 12 then, has turned 20. Gregory completely missed her teen-age years, her blossoming into womanhood, which he would have enjoyed. My two boy cats, which he lovingly tormented, are now stiff, old men.

But Gregory is “forever young.”

That was one of his favorite songs. An anthem, really. It underscored his commitment to fitness, eating well and taking care of oneself. When we first began going out, his skin was so luminous, his body so lithe, that I was concerned that he might be too young for me. Only later did I learn he was two years older than I.

Once, he was grilling outside on my patio as I was preparing the “inside” food.

Gregory hears Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” playing on the radio and impulsively grabs me from the kitchen and starts twirling me around in an impromptu dance. This, from someone who would rather sit on a fire ant mound than dance. What a wonderful moment it was, our bodies bending and swaying as one.

“Forever Young” was a song we would play at the memorial service, a wretched organ rendition by a musician who “wasn’t familiar” with the tune. The memorial service consisted mostly of tributes to Gregory and memories of him, from his Little League teammates who marveled at his intensity even at an early age, to those, like me, who were close to him on the eve of his death.

Some of us read our own, and some were read by a priest that Gregory’s mother insisted participate in the service. I remember this one from a business client: “Gregory’s passion was helping others help themselves. Gregory had vision that was clearer than most people. He had the ability to look at chaos, real or apparent, and see a path to order.” Little did this man know – little did I know – that Gregory had spent a lifetime honing that skill.

But the moment that took everyone aback occurred after we thought the remembrances were over. Out of nowhere, this lean, handsome black man in a neatly tailored suit bounded up to the pulpit and begged our indulgence. “Please,” he said, waving a crumbled piece of paper from his pocket. “I didn’t have time to write what I wanted to write.” We had asked people to submit remembrances in writing so that we might not only read them, but print them in the program.

“Please,” he said. “I would like to offer this tribute to Gregory for all he did for me.”

The chapel fell silent.

And then, out of one soul’s depths arose this sonorous baritone: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me….” A capella. Like a river of music, bubbling up from an ancient spring in an aching heart, and gathering strength before erupting into a full-blown torrent of raw emotion.

Without prompting, other voices began to chime in. Until the chapel was filled with soaring, keening voices, melding as one. Undulating, rising and falling in waves of hope and love and grief and despair.

When he was done, the man bowed his head and walked silently back to his seat, soft tears at the corner of his eyes. In that moment, there could not have been a more perfect gift – to Gregory, to all of us.

6. “Tell her NOW”

2006-07-04T11:18:00.000-05:00

Mario and I went to dinner at some friends’ recently. This couple had just gotten back from Italy, and oh, the meal was fantastic: an ambrosial fresh tomato soup with ricotta and basil, al dente pasta with wild mushrooms and olive oil, arugula salad, a mixed grill, grape compote on baked ricotta, and more. With, of course, wines to match.

Somehow the conversation turned in such a way that he was relating a story and she was rolling her eyes. Seriously rolling her eyes. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but in retrospect I wanted to sit them both down like little children and say to them: “Do you not appreciate what you have? Why are you being careless with your most cherished companion? You must never take him or her for granted.” And to the eye-roller: “Tell him NOW how much you love him.”

But this is the chasm. It is impossible to understand how death changes your life, and changes your appreciation of a life, until it happens to someone you love. Mario and I are not perfect together. But our appreciation for one another runs deep. When our differences grate upon each other, we find a way to laugh and move through the moment. We have had some disagreements. But they flare like sheet lightning, and then we find our center again.

I do not mean that to sound boastful or prideful, like we are so perfect. We’re not. Let me share a little more of my back story to give this context.

When Helena’s father decided that he did not love me (the beginning of the end of what I thought was the “forever” marriage), it was the worst love disappointment I had been through to that point. At times, I wished out loud that her father would die so I could extinguish my irrational hope for reconciliation.

After Gregory died, I understood how foolish and shallow that wish was. Death carries with it a finality that most of us are unprepared for. Those songs that talk about loving forever, or loving till you die – you hear them in a completely different way once you actually lose someone.

Maybe the physical, earth relationship ends with death. But the love? The love feels eternal, bridging the gap between life and death.

After Gregory died, we had a memorial service, which I helped to plan. His family was so far out of touch with who he was that when I suggested the need for this, they said, “Who will come? Who will care?”

Well, the people came. They were his people. And my people. And they filled the chapel. Helena’s father came with Helena. I sat between one of Gregory’s lifelong friends and one of my dearest friends, a woman who was a reluctant psychic. By that, I mean B.A. (short for Beatrice Ann) found herself channeling and receiving information quite unbecoming her station as the wife of an oil industry executive.

So we are sitting at this memorial service for Gregory, and it’s a silent, meditative period while soft music is playing. B.A. leans toward me and says, “He says to tell you he loves you, that death doesn’t change that.” She adds, leaning closer: “He says to tell you NOW.” B.A., who had never met Gregory, explained later that she had resisted telling me because it seemed inappropriate to the moment. But Gregory had insisted.

Of course, you can never prove this kind of “communication.” But in the arc of emotion that made up the service, I felt that she was getting something. The urgency rang true.

For all the loss I felt in the suddenness of his death, there was nothing left unsaid between us. Every day that Gregory was in my life, I let him know how precious he was to me. He did the same. That brought me a small measure of comfort.

I wanted to look at the couple who prepared the wonderful dinner for Mario and me and say, “Stop it! Stop it, both of you. Don’t you see what you have together? Appreciate what you have! Tell each other NOW, and get past the petty, superficial static. Appreciate that this could all change in a heartbeat.”

One skipped heartbeat. Leading to another skipped heartbeat…. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the guts to say that to our friends. But Mario and I are clear on the concept of appreciating one another here and now. There’s got to be an easier way to learn this.

Photographs by Ansel Adams

5. "I'll Have Bratwurst With That Spaghetti"

2006-06-28T09:19:00.000-05:00

If you have ever seen the film Mostly Martha, you have a hint of what our life together would be, mine and Mario’s. First, we left that night from the tapas bar, warmed by good wine and good company.

He was taller and younger than I expected. I was smaller and…more brunette. Maybe a better comparison would have been to say that he was of a more Italian temperament, and I was more Teutonic.

We vowed to meet again, as soon as it was convenient. I hoped that he would go away comforted. I liked him.
Our second meeting took us to a local restaurant that was sired upon potential. It was an Italian restaurant that wanted to be truly, madly authentic in a city of meatballs and marinara.

The food we had was good – if esoteric for the community. What I remember is sitting out on the patio, an awning over our heads to keep us dry as a spring storm raged. No one out there but us two, cosseted by the moist air, bathed in candlelight.

More than anything, it was warm and golden. An entwining of spirits as we shared more, bit by bit.

One of the things you lose when the Great Love of your life dies is the couple culture you have nurtured together. It doesn’t matter whether you believe the spirit goes to a better place or becomes a trumped-up version of road kill. The culture that you shared – the patois that defined your special relationship – is gone. No one ever quite gets it in the same way.
Mario and I weren’t intending to start a couple culture of our own. But the passion of our losses propelled us. We began to speak more of “them.” We began to share them. Their habits. Their sense of humor. Their ways of sharing.

I understood why Mario loved Isabel. She adored him. Pure and simple. She accepted him. Without reservation. Her rhythms fit with his.

Take driving. Mario was quite an offensive-defensive driver, seasoned by bouts on the roads of Italy. Back in the States, he would do things like drift over toward the line between lanes on the freeway to “push back” a cell-phone-wielding soccer mom in a bloated SUV who was straying toward his space. He would drive fast, eyes red and flaming, as he passed the incompetent knuckleheads around him. He was a white Volvo with attitude.

Izzy, in her serenity, called it “Idiot-Watching With Mario.”
Gregory just liked to drive fast. Fast and hard. He had a quasi-sports-car 5-speed, nerves of steel, and was Cool Hand Luke under fire.

He refused to wear a seatbelt until my daughter Helena challenged him on it. With the same assertion and directness of character that he displayed, she told him, “I want you to put on your seatbelt. Now.”

She was 7. And, to my amazement, Gregory put on his seatbelt then and there, and put it on ever after, whether she was in the car or not. Something between them connected.

No matter how much Gregory had had to drink (and he drank as hard as he drove), no matter how far we were from home, I always had faith that he would get us back home in one piece.

When I went “Idiot Watching With Mario,” I sometimes cringed and gasped at Mario’s moves. I chewed on him for his seemingly wild antics. My breath would catch, and I’d grab the door-handle when he came close to a car in the next lane.

In time, I came to accept his Italian, quasi-madman ways on the road. But it was never the same as when Gregory was driving.

For whatever reason, I could not make Mario as perfect and right as Izzy had made him. Or as perfect and right as I made Gregory.

But still, it was a beginning. Our beginning.

4. The "Never" Mantra

2006-06-22T22:05:00.000-05:00

It’s funny, but I can’t remember exactly what Mario and I talked about that first night. I know we laughed at our mutual wrong expectations: He thought I was a tall blonde, and I thought he was an older, Ricardo Montalban type. But it seemed clear we would be friends. Or, at least, partners. You know, in the Dead Mates Society.

We were not at a loss for words. But people sometimes wonder: What do you say to a person who’s just lost someone?

I used to be one of those people – before my mother died, the first “major” loss of my life. I avoided and didn’t say anything. This is about as wrongheaded as it gets.

It’s always important to honor where a person is with their grief – they may or may not want to open up or spill their guts to you. But the acknowledgment is important.

I will never forget when I retuned to work after Gregory died and a coworker approached me. Bob was not someone I knew well, but offered simply: “I’m so sorry about your loss.” I cannot tell you how much it meant to hear those words.

As flip as I might have sounded in my first post – I am a smartass at heart – I knew that my meeting with Mario was no date. And I genuinely wanted to reach out to him. I really could feel his pain, especially the way it consumes you in those initial weeks and months.

More than anything, grieving requires the willingness to accept feelings as they surface – whatever they may be, from anger at the person who has died to heightened sexual desire. You have to give yourself room and time to experience and process them all, rational or not.

One of the first ways Mario dealt with the rush of feelings was to jog. He told me that he often worked on his grief when he ran, talking to Isabel and crying along the way. By the time he’d get home, the tears would have blended into sweat.

It can take a while to move from the initial shock to grieving. On the night I learned of Gregory’s death, I don’t remember exactly when I started to cry. But very late, tiny wisps of feeling began to penetrate that fragile feather barrier. Tears began to accumulate and fall, like droplets from melting snow.

In those initial hours, as shock – sweet, protective shock – wears off, the overwhelming feeling is pain. Waves of consuming pain. On the one hand, it permeates every cell. But then it’s as if someone has ripped something out of you – except a physical sensation would be preferable to the psychic agony, which has no finite edges.

To never see Gregory alive again. Never touch him or be touched by him. Never look at him sitting across the couch. Never engage in our repartee. Never share the private jokes and glances. Never see him burst through the door, carrying his laundry to hang on my line. Never smell smoke from the grill in his hair. Never get called away from tossing a salad to come quick and see this sunset. Never feel him entwined with me beneath the covers.

It becomes a mantra of pain: Never. Never. Never. Never.

Whether it happens quickly, as with Gregory, or slowly, the way Isabel just ebbed away, death is the same line of demarcation. Our twin loves. Here, then gone.

Photographs by Paul Caponigro

3. Shock Waves

2006-06-17T11:53:00.000-05:00

So anyway, when Mario and I first met face-to-face, it had been three years since Gregory died. I was emerging from the tunnel of grief that he had just entered. The sheer pain at the beginning of that journey is hard for anyone who hasn’t been there to imagine. Trust me, you really don’t want to.

With physical pain, there’s a parameter. It may not hurt any less, but it’s confined in your being in a different way. With grief, especially over someone you love so deeply and completely, the pain is all-consuming: Your heart aches. You mind can’t stop circling around the memories, the what-ifs, the might-have-beens. Your body is wracked. You just feel ragged and raw, like someone has scraped off the top layer of skin.

Losing a soul mate is the 9-11 of an individual life. Yes, there are other loses that equal and surpass it. But they are few. Like 9-11, you can’t go back. Yet you can’t bear to go forward. Life exists in terms of before the death and after the death. Before they died and after they died.

For me, the agonizing part began that first night, when a friend – not Gregory – met me at the airport. I just assumed that Gregory had gotten tied up in a project. That was so like him.

So when Harry said, “Ann, Gregory had a heart attack Saturday,” I was shocked enough. In a nanosecond, I was already shifting to absorb the information, thinking, “We’ll have to go by the hospital now.” But Harry wasn’t finished. “Ann, he died.”

Died. Died? The towers were coming down.

The only thing I can compare it to is being hit by a huge feather pillow. It breaks, and suddenly it’s like you’re in a snow globe, surrounded by white feathers, swirling between you and the rest of the world. This was shock, throwing up a protective mental barrier between me and what seems like unbearable news. The pain would come later.

Unlike my off-the-precipice plunge, Mario was with his Isabel to the final moment. Holding her hand. She was in a nursing home, where she had been for about a month, finally overwhelmed by the effects of MS.

“They used those words ‘palliative’ and ‘hospice,’” Mario says. They’re code words. “You don’t know what they are till you have to deal with them. The others were ‘Keep them comfortable’ and ‘Keep them as pain-free as possible.’” They are all words that mean a person is dying.

So the morning it happened, Mario got to the nursing home early, and he and Isabel watched the sunrise through her window. “We talked. She had some lucidity.” The doctors had done some tests the night before to determine why her stomach was distended. They told him that her vital organs were beginning to fail. It would not be much longer.

“We gave her a bath,” he says. And when they were done, her breathing started to change. “She said, ‘I’m dying.’” The doctors gave her a shot of morphine to control the pain, something that would likely contribute to her dying more quickly.

“Once they gave her the dose, she spent the next couple of hours breathing heavily. She was not really conscious, but once in a while she would say something from deep inside. Her breathing became slower. And finally, her breathing just went ‘whoosh.’

“That was it. I could see the spirit leaving. I was holding her hand and felt the energy of her body leaving.” As soon as that happened, Mario says, he knew that she was not there anymore. He told the nurses to call the mortuary.

For Mario, the towers had been coming down in slow motion for months. He and Isabel had sprinted down the stairs together - faster, faster - in an attempt to outrun the inevitable. But the towers came down around them anyway. And while Isabel broke for the other side, Mario found himself just beyond the buildings, looking back. For the moment, he was suspended.

"You go through the motions," he says. Make calls. Set things up. Tell friends and family. "That's the shock part." The after-crash would begin soon enough.

2. One Great Love

2006-06-08T21:11:00.000-05:00

I heard a quote on the radio that goes something like this: You may love many times in your life, but there is only one Great Love.

If you’ve ever had your Great Love, you understand. I do, and Mario does. Only, he’s not the Great Love of my life, nor am I the Great Love of his.

Now you might think that would make us sad. But it does not. It has allowed us to appreciate our relationship for what it is. And, in some quirky way, understand what the other lost.

Mario’s Great Love was Izzy – short for Isabel.

Mine was Gregory. Let me tell you something about him.

Gregory – never just Greg – had a Lebanese-American dad. But some of that edge was diluted by his mother, who was Polish-American.

Gregory stood out in a crowd: handsome and dark, impeccably dressed, with an aura of authority. Just to look at him, you might have guessed that he was Italian. Or Jewish. Maybe Middle Eastern. In fact, he was born into one of the richest communities in America.

He wasn’t tall. But he had the stature of someone who was. His was a commanding presence, like an athlete. Had he not stopped growing when he did, he might have gone on to play professional baseball.

All this was attractive, but what captivated me were his eyes: deep, brown, intense. They burned. And, in unguarded moments, they were the saddest eyes. Only after his death did I learn the secrets behind that sadness.

I have come to believe that Gregory didn’t die of a heart attack. I think it was probably a broken heart.

1. Your Table is Ready

2006-05-29T10:03:00.000-05:00

Losing a soulmate may be the toughest death to bear, short of losing a child.

Losing a mate at a relatively young age is even worse: Who the hell do you talk to? What do you say to the kids? How do you “get over it” and get on with your life?

About nine years ago, the great love of my life exited on a staircase outside his condominium. Heart attack. He did literally drop dead. Neighbors rushed to help. An ambulance was called. He never regained consciousness. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, I did not find out for two days. Instead, a mutual friend met me at the airport and told me when I got off the plane. Boy, did that make me wary of air travel.

Five years ago, I got a call from a friend who said, “Ann , you gotta talk to this guy.” She was referring to someone I knew only vaguely through my work. Couldn’t even have told you what he looked like.

“You gotta talk to him,” she said, “‘cuz he just lost his wife, and he’s miserable.”

I knew his wife had been sick, and might have even heard that she’d died. And by that time, I had gotten through the worst of my own “valley of the shadow of death.” With apologies to strict Christians literalists everywhere, that’s what that passage really describes: the months and years after losing someone. Death shadows you 24/7.

By this time, I was starting to be kind of evangelical about talking to other people who were going through what I’d gone through. So I said yes.

This guy and I agreed to meet at a tapas bar. This was a cozy little place with a Mediterranean feel, good inexpensive wines and authentic food. I wasn’t exactly trolling for dates, but let us just say that that side of me had been awakened recently.

Still, this guy had just lost his wife. I knew how that felt. I knew prospecting would be the last thing on his mind.

For his part, Mario was sweet, but in the freshly wounded stage. Soft smile. Sad eyes. Weary eyes. Unlike the instant shock of here/not here, he had experienced the slow drifting away that comes when someone is intensely ill, whose life ebbs a day, a moment, a nanosecond at a time. And all you can do is care and cry and watch.

Our conversation began with comparing notes – and listening. See, once you’ve been through this you don’t mind if a person wants to talk on and on and on about their lost beloved. Or how they feel. Or how unfair it is. You don’t have that shallow perspective of the “new girl,” jealous that he’d still need to talk about the “old girl,” someone he might have even loved better than you. You don’t care because you so understand the urgency of talking. And you don’t get tired of listening. Been there. Done that. Understand. Not threatened.

From this unlikely beginning, Mario and I forged a friendship that eventually deepened into more. But we were both so fresh from losing the “great loves” of our lives – we’ll talk more about great love vs. other love later – that we created our own little Dead Mates Society grief group. Membership: two.

And when we’d go out to dinner – food and drink figure prominently in both our professions and our lives – we got to where we could joke that we needed “a table for four, dinner for two.” ‘Cuz for the longest time, "they" were never far from anything we did.

This blog will take you on my journey and our journey – from the ripped-from-your-chest pain of initial loss to the quieter surrender and acceptance that comes with time. Some of it ain’t pretty. But, you know, we don’t talk much about death in this society. We don’t have a cultural way of dealing with it, except to deny it. Or tart it up with rouge and embalming fluid. Go somewhere else if you’re looking for platitudes. Return here if you’re interested in a grittier view of life – and there is life – after death.