And the past is the past and that is what time means, and time itself is one more name for death…
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed


May

After Yves' death, I searched my body in vain for any marks he might have left on me from our love-making. I wanted to find a scratch on my hip, or a bruise on the inner muscle of my thigh, a love bite on my breast—anything, anything, that would let me hold onto him. If I had found such a mark, I would have photographed it. In my more extreme moments, I wonder if I could have found a way to preserve the bruise in amber, so that some record would exist for all time that I had been loved by that man.

The structure of my memories is an ellipse; one minute, I touch upon something adjacent to those immediate moments when Yves was dying, the next, I am sling-shotted into writing about something that happened days or weeks or months later. The order of days has lost meaning. But grief is shaped that way, I think. It is not straight lines and angles; it bends, and curves, flows forward and back. It is like a woman's body, or a waterspout, or a dust devil in an empty corn field. At the center of each of those things is a place of quiet and stillness.

But quiet and stillness does not mean empty. No, in that place, I am engorged with unshed tears, aborted dreams, unfinished conversations, and now, sense memories that are fading one corpuscle at a time. I can still see his face, his jet black hair, the thatch of fur on his chest that brushed against my breasts. But the sound of his voice is gone. For a couple of weeks after he died, before the phone company got word of his passing, I would call his answering machine trying to imprint his voice, time stamp it somewhere in my head, but the recording didn't take.
And I am sitting here in the stillness and the quiet now, in my room, and my breasts ache for the touch of a mouth that cannot be replaced, no matter how tightly I may close my eyes in another man's bed. And it gets quieter still. There is something on the edge of my consciousness, just there, and I try to slow down my breathing, my heartbeat, so that I can hear what it has to say.


November
The view is not unimpeded. It is refracted off the light of a bathroom mirror and I see myself kneeling beside Yves sitting on the bathroom floor, his back against the wall, the Tylenol he tried to take to relieve his aching head scattered across the tiles.

"Help me stand up," he says. And I see myself, all five-foot nothing of me, attempt to help the six-foot man to stand. I cannot support his weight. We fall, together, he and I, and my body cushions his as we slam into the bathroom vanity before I let him slide back down onto the floor. He had less than a minute of consciousness left then, and I already knew he was leaving me.

For many years, I thought that I could find home in the arms of some man. When I had made love with one, and I was lying in his arms afterward, listening to his heartbeat under my ear, feeling the warmth of his hand on my lower back as he held me, sometimes I'd think, "Oh. I have found him." And when the "relationship" would fizzle, it was more than simply losing the company of a man. It was like losing some part of myself that had been looking for a place to land for a long time.

That night, with Yves, when he whispered in my ear that he had "won the lottery" and when he called me his "petite package" and his "American babe," and he kept wondering out loud how this had happened, how the two of us had found each other, I knew, finally, that I had found the home for which I've longed. I didn't know if it would be in Montreal or whether he would come with me to Upstate New York, or whether we would run off together to some obscure place, but I felt, as I allowed my body to relax into his, that I had found someone who had found in my flesh the same thing that I had found in his. A sense of place. A sense of not being lost. Of not being dislocated. Of home and safety and sanctuary.


Albert Camus asked once in  The Myth of Sisyphus whether it was possible to live without appeal. I read that essay for the first time when I was 17. A friend asks me now what I mean, to live without appeal, and while my 17-year old understanding of it was from a different, more naïve place, my belief in it has not changed. We stand on the edge of an abyss. How easy it would be to appeal to some greater authority, some higher power, and ask that life be made easier. Instead, I have perceived, in ways that have made me both miserable and ecstatic, that what there is is sky above and earth below, just that, and I can try to know those things as best I can.

July
I'm sitting here in friends' cabin, looking out at the Adirondack lake, which is blue this morning, rather than steely gray. The sun is out, and the air is full of the chatter and trill of bird songs. Every now and then, a breeze moves through the trees, and the leaves shake in response.
When I grab my notebook to write down the question: "is it possible to live without appeal?" I hear them. The loons. It is a wild, orgasmic cry, unlike anything I've heard before. It is a laugh and a moan and an aria. Is it an answer?

What answer is there? Living without appeal is what I have. And I am not unhappy. Even alone in this cabin, I feel such a sense of wonder and awe about me. That quiet sense that while there are things that are out of my reach, that my desires for certain things may never be met, everything I need is right here at my fingertips. And for now, that has to be enough.
I think about Yves, though. Sometimes, when my heart hurts, I imagine these moments in his presence. I imagine what it might feel like to be sitting here writing after having just made love with him, how I would feel his fluids between my legs, or be able to smell his scent on my arms. Maybe he would be sleeping, and I would listen to the easy in-and-out of his breath, let it be the rhythm against which I counterpoise the clicking speed at which I move my fingers across the keyboard. Is there harm in such fantasies? Does it make it more difficult to take comfort in my solitude?

Yves' death was cruel for so many reasons. It's not just that he left a four-year old daughter and a sixteen-year old step-daughter without a father; it's not the devastation that I saw on his parents' faces at the funeral; it's not sheer arbitrariness of a 43-year old man suddenly dropping dead because a blood vessel inside his head exploded. The cruelty was also about me. The cruelty was about allowing me, for those few hours, to finally feel as if I could relax into the warmth of someone's arms and know that I had found my place.


It took me a while to find a love for the Finger Lakes. I couldn't see how it was anything other than slightly raised hills covered with deciduous trees that I couldn't name. Now, I adore the wildflowers, the rolling hills, the gorges and waterfalls. I didn't think that I would come to love this area. I left behind in the Pacific Northwest the sort of grandeur that leaves one speechless, without language. Here, I have had to learn to name the unfamiliar, and in doing so, these hills have given me language that I never had.

It is easy to love the earth when it is spectacular. In those years when I lived in the Pacific Northwest, I knew, always, that being restored was a short drive away. I could drive to a trailhead and lose myself for a few hours in noticing ferns, in feeling the shadow of trees that towered above me, in climbing until I was above a treeline and observing where I had been.


Years ago, shortly after I had left my marriage and was trying to decide whether to stay in the Finger Lakes, I went for a walk to a place in the woods that I considered my "secret place." It was the base of a small cascade of water that trickled slowly over rocks, and then continued down, down until it merged with the lake below. I didn't have any illusions that no one else had been there. It was simply that when I was there, always alone and always undisturbed, I could sit and listen to the gurgle of water, notice the various small stones that had been tumbled down from further upstream, and think. Think about why I had left my marriage; think about how my children were faring; think about what my life was to become, how I could shape it, now that I was alone.

    One day, after one of these hikes, I wrote a long letter.
"I love the Eastern woods. When I'm out West, I marvel at Nature's spectacular displays  of will-the soaring peaks, jagged rocks, enormous Doug Firs and Sitka Spruces. There,  the Muse seems to me to be in her young, nubile phase, bestowing her favors on those hardy enough to make the journey into that challenging country.  Whereas when I'm in the woods around here, I'm always struck by how fecund everything is. It's lush, viridescent, sensual in a way that the west is not. I think the Muse  here is the maternal, plump and rounded and not so rough around the edges, a little  scarred and battered, but worn smooth by experience, and yet incredibly sexual in the  sheer plethora of life that grows along a path through the woods. Today the cicadas and  crickets were competing for airtime, there was a kestrel hunting, I could hear the rustle  of woodchucks and chipmunks in the woods. The squirrels were in the oak trees,  chucking acorns down at me and I just felt so damn happy and grateful to be alive and able to participate in all of this."

    
July    
The hills around here are soft and round, one rolling into the other. The Pacific Northwest, at least on the western side of the mountains, only seems to have two seasons: wet and dry, kinda cold and kinda warm. I have seen these Finger Lakes hills festooned in the drapery of four distinct seasons. When I go for a walk, I have now reached a level of familiarity with the countryside that I can tell what month it is by what is blooming, and the arrival of chicory at the beginning of July is cause for celebration.
Chicory blue, depending on the light, shades toward gray or lavender. Unlike forget-me-nots, which when they pop up at the beginning of spring just seem so damn cheerful with their little golden eyes, I interpret chicory as having more substance. Someone who was struggling with grief, for example, might see in its center a bit of ash. It grows along roads, rooting itself in gritty bits of earth. It blooms from early July until the first frost, and it survives despite blazing heat or the worst of the summer storms. Its beauty, however, lies both in its tenaciousness and its sublime color. I never pick chicory; I have seen it every day this summer as I have walked and walked these hills.  Like most wildflowers, it dies in a vase of water within hours of being pulled from the earth. Some things are meant to stay undisturbed.

"All that is solid melts into air," Marx said. I know that I will leave this place, this earth that I love, and there will be nothing else afterward. I will simply be dead.


I took a break from writing to go for another walk. It took me past a plethora of mid-summer wildflowers. The orange day lilies lined the road, as did the daisies, the  black-eyed (really chocolate brown) susans. Golden alexander seems to have replaced Queen Anne's lace this year. Hop clover, nicotina, harebells, wild geranium, and the fuchsia-pink sweet peas accentuated the green of the various grasses, and my favorite—the chicory—bent toward me.
The walk felt good: the sun warmed my skin, and after three days of rain, the verdancy of the hills felt refreshing. A hawk circled above my head, and it occurred to me that the raptor's presence explained why no chipmunks or squirrels crossed my path. It was therapeutic to walk, too. I've felt uneasy in myself, shaky, unsure what I was doing.

November
The last time I had that sensation was the night that Yves went to the hospital, when I went back to his apartment, alone, and lay in his bed, alone, and wondered what was happening and what I was going to do. And yet, it was nearly two a.m., and I was so, so tired. The hospital staff had sent me home—explained to me that there were hours of tests awaiting Yves and I should go get some rest—and so I had gone back to his apartment and crawled into his bed. I clutched his pillow against me, burying my nose in it to retrieve his scent. I had stripped off my pants and shoes and socks, and lay there in a camisole and panties. It was warm in the bedroom, and despite the November chill outside, I kicked off the blankets. There was a table lamp on the floor next to my side of the bed, something that Yves had rigged up for me so that I might read while he slept off his headache, and I kept the light on. I didn't know what to do. I should have felt sad or frightened, but all I remember of that sensation was just this bone-weary numbness. I took a tranquilizer, thinking it would send me off to sleep. When a half-hour later, I was still awake, I took another one. The phone rang in the apartment, my cell phone—the number I had given the hospital staff—and when I saw the area code, I knew that it wasn't a friend who was calling me at 2:30 in the morning.
"Is this Lorraine?"
"Yes." I said.
"And you were the one who brought in Yves?"
"Yes."
"I'm afraid I have some bad news. The MRI revealed a massive brain bleed. We are transferring him to St. Luke's. Do you know how we may contact his family?"
"Um. If you can give me a minute, I may be able to find their information." The outline of Yves' cell phone sitting on top of his kitchen table flashed into my brain. "I'll be right back; I'm just going to grab his cell phone."
What was his ex-wife's name? He had mentioned it when we bumped into her on the street on our way to dinner. It …. was … Heidi. I pressed the button that I assumed opened his address book. The names were alphabetical by first name, and I scrolled through the list—which seemed huge. Who is this organized? I thought as dozens of names went by even before I got to the "H's." There it was. "Heidi."
"I can give you the phone number for his ex-wife," I said. "I assume she'll know how to reach his parents."
"Thank you," the woman on the other end of the line said.
I had no idea where the other hospital was, and I knew that I wasn't going to be allowed to go down there anyway. "Can I ask you a question? Is Yves going to die?"
"Well, the surgeons at St. Luke's are going to try to go in and clean up the bleed, but I'm afraid it doesn't look good. I'm sorry."
And I thanked her, said good-bye. I still had Yves' phone in my hand. I hit the "dial" command for Heidi's number, heard it ring a few times, and then hung up.

July
Yesterday, I went for a hike with my eldest daughter. She has her learner's permit, and so I let her drive the 25 miles or so over to the town of Watkins Glen. The town contains within it a national treasure of a gorge walk. The park was established a hundred years ago, but its latest incarnation—the stone steps cut into the side of the gorge, over 800 of them that take you along rock pools and water falls and sluices and natural bridges—were part of the great WPA and CCC projects of the 1930s. It's 1.5 miles from the bottom of the gorge to the top, and it's all steps leading upward, except for the occasional trail leading beside some of the pools.

My daughter and I climbed to the top of the gorge, and then walked to the graveyard that abuts the park. It's a remarkable cemetery, the land donated by a daughter of the Rothschild family who changed her name and converted to Catholicism. Inside the cemetery is a crypt, and inside that crypt is a gorgeous piece of stained glass. The person entombed within died on April 15, 1912: he went down with the HMS Titanic. It's an odd sensation to feel the closing of distance between ourselves and the past. The sinking of the Titanic is history, and yet, right there before us in a tiny town in the middle of rural New York, was a reminder that the loss was still mourned. On the steps of the crypt were tended, fresh flowers. A further walk through the cemetery takes you into an entire section of Italian graves. The graves not only bear Italian surnames, frequently they have qui riposando and then a name, who was "nata" in some part of Italy,  but who had "morta" thousands of miles away.

I've always had an obsession with cemeteries. In an earlier part of my life, I was an historian, and I frequently looked to graveyards for clues to questions about which families settled here. Since Yves's death, I see cemeteries differently. I look at the information on the gravestones, and I try to imagine what it must have felt like for families to bury their dead. I'm not terribly interested in those who lived long lives. It's the ones who died young that wrench me. My own great-aunt died at an early age when she cut herself on a tin can and developed sepsis. My grandmother was left an orphan when her father died at the Somme in 1917 and her mother followed a few years later of illness.


Yves left behind children, but no marker exists for him. As far as I know, Yves' ashes are still in the urn. The air at his service was thick with the conflict over what was to become of him. He had been claimed by a relative who insisted that Yves' ashes would remain on her mantel. Somehow, as briefly as I knew him, I cannot imagine that that was what he would have wanted. But then again, he's dead. It's not as if he's aware of the fight over where he is right now. And yet, still, thinking of his ashes stuck in that urn on a mantelpiece as if he was a tchotche leaves me sad.
At his services, I approached the table that had been turned into an altar. The urn was silver, and the swirls etched into it looked as if they had been blackened by soot. The urn’s texture invited me to caress it. It would have been easy to do. To rub it, to touch it, to try to bring it to life. I have enough experience with caressing flesh and causing it to change under my hand; I think I was self-conscious enough to know that standing in front of the crowd and stroking Yves’ urn would have been too crude an act. But, in my head, there was nothing crude about it. I wanted to unscrew the lid, plunge my hand into the ashes there, and become sticky with Yves. I wanted to take a handful of those ashes and put them in my pocket, carry him with me for the rest of my life.

August
Gray tends to get a bad rap. Neither black nor white, we use it to describe drabness, or something not easily characterizable, or gloom, even see it as a symbol for aging when canescence begins.

Wednesday, oyster-colored clouds started casting their shadows in the early afternoon. Despite knowing better, I wanted nothing more than to be out in it, to find some relief from the stultifying heat. I set out on one of my familiar paths. Soon, lightning, like a heartbeat rhythm on an EKG, beat across the sky and landed on top of a nearby hill. The thunderclaps were almost immediate, and I felt their jolts within me. It was almost too much sensation, but the wind felt so good against my sweaty skin that I didn't want to seek shelter. The next bolt of lightning looked to me like the crazy pattern made by the stylus on a polygraph, and for a brief moment, I searched my conscience for what might lie beneath.

After Yves died, I thought about his ashes a lot. I wondered if, when parts of him  drafted up the chimney at the crematorium, how long he had remained a part of the atmosphere. How much of his body had escaped into the air?  Did the wind carry him east or south? Has there been a moment when I have breathed him in? Every where I have walked these past months, perhaps some molecule of him has settled. I know he's dead, yet some of his ashes took flight. Where are they?

As the rain moved in, the hills turned soot-colored and fuzzy.  The pelting drops bent the wildflowers forward and it didn't take long for me to become soaked. I let myself believe that he was in the rain. I let him mark me. I let myself get wet with him, as it should be now, as it was then.