When Lisa told me not to worry, I didn’t. At least, not at first. I wasn’t a worrier by nature. Not then. It’s not unusual, she told me, for a mammogram to reveal areas of concern. That was the phrase she used, “areas of concern”. Like parts of her breast were suspects in an unsolved murder. Like cops were combing the streets, looking for discarded bras and other implicating evidence. Excuse me, sir, have you seen this boob?

I tried to put it out of my head, tried not to think about the possibility that my wife might have breast cancer. She isn’t even forty yet, I thought. I had spent the better part of three decades thinking about breasts with a certain gauzy romanticism, idealizing them as sexual peaks to conquer. Now, I wondered if one of them was going to kill my wife.

Modern medicine seduces us all with its veneer of infallible expertise. Don’t fret, sir, this pill will solve your problem. This shot, that procedure. And yet we’re still flawed humans flailing against the chaos of our bodies, bodies that try to kill us from the day we’re born. This humanity, this mortality, it’s a shit prospect. We come screaming into the world, and from that moment on it’s a race against the clock, against a world that comes for us with hurtling traffic and viruses and bacteria and wrathful domestic partners. And here’s the thing – everyone loses. Everyone, soon or late.

Living is a sucker’s bet.

Lisa was thirty-eight when she died.

I have vivid memories of the weeks after she was diagnosed. Of kneeling in Trinity Church, in the same pews we’d occupied together for the better part of fifteen years. Praying, begging, bargaining, wheedling. God, save her. God, please no. God, take me instead.

God doesn’t listen for shit.

I was with Lisa when she died. The chemo had reduced her to seventy-seven pounds. This woman, this fierce woman I watched cycle hundred-mile races and train dogs and bear two children, reduced to a shadow, a slight and eroding shade of a person. I held her hand, and it was like holding a Halloween decoration. Skin and bones, and not that much skin. When I dozed in that chair, I dreamt of Lisa before, of Lisa in her wedding dress, Lisa in biking shorts, Lisa in nothing at all. Lisa holding our children on their first day in the world. How do you say goodbye to all of that?

She’s going soon, the hospice nurse told me. Hours, not days. And so I stayed, and held hands with the skeleton that had been my wife.

“Andy,” she whispered, just before midnight, the dark outside black as a tomb. It was black inside, too, except for the machines that could not have cared less that the love of my life was wasting away under their plastic vigil. It wasn’t anything they hadn’t seen before and wouldn’t see again. They weren’t even there to keep her alive anymore, just to ease her pain. Indifferent to the suffering of the monitored, they glowed and beeped with synthetic regularity.

“Lisa,” I murmured, half-asleep. “Quiet, honey. Save your strength.”

She almost laughed then, a tiny fraction of the laugh that used to shake rafters.

“For what?” she asked, not waiting for an answer. “Andy, please don’t die with me.”

I tried to answer. I tried to squeeze that claw but it was dead, tried to stroke her cheek, to feel her breath against my face. But she was no longer there. Whatever Lisa had been was gone. Some screen over her bed was sounding a single long and uninterrupted tone, an emotionless electronic Shiva. Part of me wanted to scream, to deny it, to demand that she wake up. But most of me, the rational me that inhabits the world, knew it was no good. Most of me had been saying goodbye for weeks, preparing for the unimaginable inevitable. Mainly, I thought about Jay and Emily. Ten and seven, too young to say their own goodbyes. Nobody came rushing in, no heroic doctors with their crash carts, no nurses. Lisa hadn’t wanted any of that. Once, maybe. Not now. She had known she was past saving and wanted to die in peace. And she did.

I don’t remember them coming to take my wife away. I’ve tried to remember it, but I can’t. I know a doctor showed up and said some words, but the details are absent. My brain refuses to pull those memories up out of storage. The last thing I remember is the sound of my name as she said it, the sweetest music I’ve ever heard. Music stolen from me forever. Lisa died, and then I was alone in the hospital, leaning against some inoffensive pale yellow wall, people walking past as though there was still a world to live in. People going to their next thing. I didn’t want to do my next thing. I didn’t want to tell anyone. As soon as I left that wall, as soon as I spoke the words out loud, it would be real. I would move from my life with Lisa to my life without her. I had known it was coming. We’d had time to prepare, to make plans, to “put her affairs in order,” whatever the screaming fuck that meant. How do you prepare your heart to break? They don’t sell grief insurance.

What eventually got me off that wall was our kids. If it hadn’t been for them, I’d probably still be there. I might have crawled into that bed alongside Lisa’s emaciated corpse and starved to death on purpose or bought a gun and blown my head off in the woods so I could go too. “Don’t die with me, Andy,” she’d said. What was I supposed to stay alive for? Jay and Emily. I remember the days when each of them was born, in this same building, ten and seven years before. Now they were at our house. Lisa’s parents were watching them, in from out of town for the last days of their only daughter.

Mitch and Barbara. I’d have to call them. I’d have to tell them their little girl was dead. But when I dialed my phone, it was my big sister Nan’s voice that answered.

She picked up on the first ring. I imagine she’d been waiting for the call.

“Hi, Andy.”

“Oh, Nan, oh God. What am I going to do?”

“You’re going to go home, Andy. There are people there who love you.”

God bless Nan. If she’d have said “there are people there who need you”, I probably would have thrown myself off the building.

“I’ll fly up in the morning. I’ll stay for as long as you need me.”

Nan lived in San Francisco with her wife Millie and their daughter Yvonne. She managed an art gallery on Eagle Square, one with those paintings everyone praises, nobody likes, and you can take home for the price of a mid-size family sedan. Millie owned a string of high-end wine-and-cheese shops throughout the Bay area. They weren’t exactly rich, but they were affluent enough to live in San Francisco and not across the bridge in Oakland. Yvonne was nine, adopted from Senegal or Rwanda or someplace. It’s not that I don’t care where my niece was born; the truth is that nobody really knows where Yvonne comes from. She was kidnapped or sold three or four times by her second birthday before being rescued and eventually placed with Nan and Millie.

Yvonne lost her mom and dad before she could walk, Nan reminded me one night before Lisa died, when I was feeling particularly sorry for myself. I don’t know if she was trying to give me perspective or suggesting that I moderate my grief because there are worse things in the world. Nobody was raping my seven-year-old daughter or conscripting my preteen son into a guerrilla army, she observed.

 “So, losing my wife is a first world problem? Fuck you, Nan.”

I consider it a measure of the love I bear my sister that I didn’t say more than that. Her love for me is probably why she let it go. We enjoyed a long history of telling each other the truth, pulling no punches, and then moving on. Our relationship relied on long leashes and short memories.

On this night, even Nan didn’t have the heart for hard truths. She just wrapped me in her big-sister arms from 750 miles of Pacific coastline away and told me she loved me and she would be there in the morning.

“See you soon,” I said, and hung up. I didn’t say goodbye. I was never going to say goodbye again if I could help it.

It’s a bizarre, singular feeling, driving your first-born child home from the hospital. The bewilderment that whoever is in charge has actually allowed these new parents to operate a motor vehicle with a level of exhaustion approximating legal intoxication. The knowledge that when you get home it won’t be the same home you left a couple of days before, that things have fundamentally shifted in your life, that your relationship with the world has graduated from child to parent. That’s the same sort of feeling I had driving home after Lisa died, crossing an invisible but crushingly real Rubicon, moving from before to after, from then to now. Part numb haze, part full awareness that the Earth had tilted on its axis. And it was a beautiful morning, one of the exquisite spring mornings the Pacific Northwest gives to the world in return for such frequent rains. It was just after dawn in the middle of May. I’ll never forget the unearthly shade of pink where the wakening sky met the still waters of Budd Inlet. A man of letters might have known the right poem, or written a new one, but I was no writer. A man of faith might have known the right prayer, but whatever faith I might have had was in hibernation, if not lost forever. Off to the east Rainier loomed, colossal and proud, in smudged black-and-white relief against that deep endless purple where the sun had not yet touched. “Mountain’s out,” locals would be saying to each other all day. He sure was. Even though he was young among mountains, he stood stark and eminent, wreathed in stony indifference to human suffering. His feet would be garlanded by alpine wildflowers, a floral blanket of trillium, Calypso orchids, lily of the valley, untended under the spring sky, more ephemeral than their mountain but just as blithe.  

The day we were married, Lisa’s bouquet had lilies of the valley in it.

Stop, my heart cried.

Remember, my head insisted.

Lisa loved bluebird days like this one promised to be, good days for biking or walking the dogs or puttering in the yard with her children and her plants. Yolk-gold sunshine, a prickle of heat, the welcome respite from sogginess. But rainy days were her favorite. She liked to take an umbrella and poncho and take the pups out into the weather, delighting as they splashed through the puddles, rubbing them down with towels when they got home before cuddling on the couch with a soft blanket and a mug of hot chocolate, watching a Disney movie with the kids.

I wished it would rain. I wished Lisa would come home.

I might as well have wished for Rainier to crumble.

We lived in Lacey, a little suburban Washington town outside Olympia. As soon as I turned off Pacific Ave onto Kinwood Street, off the busy thoroughfare into tidy middle-class neighborhoods, everything was an incisive memory. Everything was painful. These were sidewalks we’d pushed baby carriages along. Streets Lisa had pedaled down training for races. Houses we’d been to holiday parties in. This was our life, and it was agony. It got worse as I arrived at our house. Number fifty-six Kinwood Street. The front yard was in bloom, the flowers Lisa had worked so hard on reaching up with their yellow and purple and pink faces, grinning like idiots in that early light. If I’d had a flamethrower just then, I’d have sent them all to join her.

There were two other cars in the driveway as I pulled in. The immaculate, battleship-gray Range Rover with Idaho plates belonged to Lisa’s parents. The battered sea-green Honda Odyssey minivan next to it was hers. The Manatee, we called it, our slow and docile family bus. I tried to remember the last time she’d driven it and couldn’t. I parked behind it in my pickup and skirted past without touching it, as if it were some sleeping beast. I knew that a day would come when I would have to brave the manatee and endure cleaning out her elastic hair ties on the steering column, her travel mug with an inch of cold coffee in the bottom and the hint of her lipstick on the rim. Every molecule of that car was her, and the thought of that was more than I could bear.

I fumbled my way inside the house. The day was young enough that Jay and Lisa were still in bed, not yet racing through showers and Lucky Charms before the school bus came. I’d have to tell my children. Today, I would have to tell them their mother was gone, just as my own father had told me once. Not yet, I thought. Let them sleep a little longer. Let their mother be alive a little longer in their dreams. Mitch and Barbara were awake, early rising part of their unassailable moral virtue. Mitch was pulling coffee filters apart in his dignified black-and-red flannel bathrobe, tied at the ample waist over navy pajamas, his feet tucked into masculine faux-hide slippers. Barbara was at the sink, rinsing something. Whatever grasp on reality, whatever juice powered my steps forward, all of it was ebbing away from me. They turned and looked at me as I shuffled in, and my face must have said everything I couldn’t put into words.

“Oh,” Barbara said, and folded herself into her husband, his arms wrapped around her the way mine would never wrap around their daughter again.

“Andy,” Mitch said, stroking his wife’s steel-gray hair.

I nodded a little, my eyes closed against it all.

“I’m going to go lie down,” I croaked.

And I did.

“Andy,” my mother-in-law said, gently. Barbara Albertson was a tender creature. Even as she shook me awake, it was a gentle shaking. I wasn’t entirely sure where I was at first. For a heartbeat, I didn’t know whether I inhabited a world that included Lisa or not. Then the room came gradually into focus – books, haphazard on their shelves, curtains drawn over tall windows, my heavy wooden desk gravid with stacks of papers and closed laptop. I was in the downstairs room that served as our den, library, and office, curled up on the leather couch under a patchwork quilt. We didn’t have a guest room at our house, so I’d yielded up our master bedroom to Lisa’s folks. They’d come to town a week or so ago, when Lisa’s oncologist made it pretty clear the time for last goodbyes was at hand. I’d been crashing on the couch down here when I was home, though most of the time I’d been dozing in Lisa’s hospital room. Memory dawned too, grief, crushing and impossible to bear. I pushed it aside. I wasn’t ready to grapple with that yet.

I heard a long yawn and realized one of our dogs had curled up on the floor next to me. Mary. Good girl. I reached down and gave her a light scratch on the snout.

“There’s someone here to see you,” Barbara said. She’d been crying, her eyes rimmed with red though she’d tried to cover it with cosmetics. I hadn’t cried. Just slept.

“What time is it?” I yawned.

“About noon. You’ve been napping for a couple of hours. Mitch and I felt it was a kindness to let you sleep.” She perched next to me on the couch and put a motherly arm around me. As much as Lisa’s father and I struggled to see eye to eye on a lot of things, her mom had never been anything but good to me. She’d probably always been good to everyone, a sort of marital antipode to her irascible husband, going through life with broom and dustpan and apology behind her China-shop bull of a husband.

“Where are the kids?” I asked, still groggy.

“We sent them to school,” she replied. “Let their world fall apart this afternoon. It seemed a kindness,” she repeated. Gentle and kind, that was my mother-in-law.

I nodded, not in agreement but because I didn’t know what else to do. At least it would put that off a few hours. I pictured their tears, felt their pain. No one should have to hurt that much before a day of elementary school.

“Andy,” she said, and there was the impending weight of Something Important about to be said as she spoke. “You know, God loved Lisa so much that he wanted her to be with him.”

“Wow,” I said, still rubbing the half-sleep from my eyes. “What a dick move from a supreme being.”

The Albertsons and I had always borne disparate concepts of the role of an omnipotent deity. This isn’t a story about theology. It’s a story about…what? Love? Grief? Acceptance? At any rate, I’m not here to lecture about the afterlife or even about this life. I’m no expert on either. But I do know that a benevolent God, a loving God, wouldn’t torture one of his children like this. A benevolent God wouldn’t ask this of one of his sons. What kind of Lord lays a burden like this on His children?

“What a thing to say,” Barbara said. I didn’t know whether it was a chide or a stray pearl-clutching comment. I did know I wasn’t in the mood for gentleness or kindness or hollow evangelical platitudes. In the silence that followed, she took my left hand and held it, her fingers brushing the gold band on my ring finger.

“Okay. Thanks Mrs. A.” I pulled my hand away. My wife’s mother communing with her dead daughter through my wedding ring was more pathos than I was ready for. Lisa had been gone less than twelve hours. I wasn’t ready for anything. I slid away from my mother-in-law like a reluctant prom date and headed toward the kitchen.

Sitting at the table, where he’d sat a million times before, was Buddy Cormier. As always, I was a little surprised the chair was sturdy enough to hold him. Catching sight of me, Buddy popped up with an agility unnatural for such a bulky creature, and without a word strode across the tiled floor and engulfed me in a massive embrace. Now, I’m a normal-sized human. Just over six feet, a Big Mac under two hundred pounds. And yet Buddy’s hug devoured me. It was like being hugged by a king-size pillow-top mattress. I yielded to it, partially because I didn’t have much choice, and partially because he was my best friend and it was good to disappear into his consoling depths.

“Damn, Andy,” he said, letting me go but not letting me go. “I’m so sorry, brother.”

“Thanks,” I managed.

Buddy was a man-mountain closer to seven feet than six, improbably wrapped in a pinstriped suit that was doing its best to contain its cargo. He was a man of improbabilities. His real name was Ebenezer Cormier, like his father, but he’d been called Buddy since he was little. Lucky break for him. He’d grown up in northern Maine, to the extent he’d grown up at all, and he’d never really left the north woods behind. Part French Canadian, part Mik’Maq, and part Sasquatch, he was burly rather than fat. He was the kind of thick-fingered north woods brawler who would play Golden Tee at a dive bar trying to drive the ball as far as possible without regard to tee placement. A graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, he did his best to embody their black bear mascot. When he took his shirt off, he succeeded. He’d come into the store years ago, when I was still just the manager and not yet the owner, telling me his bank was better than the one we were using. I listened to his sales pitch, and to my surprise, he was right. We met for a drink one afternoon, leading to more drinks and afternoons, leading to friendship.

Buddy wasn’t like my other friends, which maybe is why he became my best friend. Most of my other friends weren’t really even friends so much as fellow dads in a shared orbit. When you’re a kid, friendship is a function of proximity. Close enough in age and geography, and all it takes is a basketball hoop or a Nintendo. Later, in high school and college, our friends come from among teammates and classmates and roommates, as we begin to seek out companions who share our interests or characteristics. Once you get married and have children, that process reverts back to the earlier model. We have less agency in the matter, our pool of potential friends limited by time and space to the parents of our kids’ friends. And sure, I’d met some perfectly nice people at school functions. Playdates for the children in manicured backyards while moms and dads sip at a warm beer and push through stilted “so what do you do?” conversations. Not exactly soul-brother material.

Buddy didn’t have kids. In a lot of ways, Buddy was a kid. He was an unapologetic, unvarnished enthusiast. Everything he did, he did with a special kind of verve I envied. Life was a playground to him. In his younger days he’d been a whitewater rafting guide, and every summer he still took two weeks off to go down to Oregon and guide trips. Unmarried, childless, untethered, Buddy was like a Peter Pan in a three-piece. I was glad to see him that morning. There was never a boy more lost than I was in that moment.

Nan must have gotten a hold of him, I thought. I could picture the text. Keep my brother alive until I get there.

“What can I do for you?” he asked. And I knew he meant it. He’d give an arm, a leg, every dime he owned to make it not true. But there weren’t enough arms or dimes in the world.

“I wish I knew.”

We sat there for a few minutes, the kitchen clock ticking softly and without remorse.

“Have you told Jay and Em?” he asked, after a while.

“They’re at school. I’ll tell them when they get home.”

“Want me to stay?” Buddy offered.

“Nah,” I replied. “But thanks.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mitch in the open doorway between the kitchen and the living room. I could feel him watching me, judging me, finding me wanting, always. He was an eroding edifice of a man, his body suggesting former athleticism gone the way of years and beers, but he was freshly showered and shaved, changed from pajamas to high-end golf clothes, the kind you don’t find at Kohl’s. Sage green collared polo, tailored navy slacks. His beard was close-cropped, sideburns to chin and across the upper lip, pepper now more than salt, almost fussy, with a full head of black hair over agile, perceptive pale-blue eyes.

“It’s a big moment for them,” Buddy said, ignoring Mitch with his enviable capacity to ignore things he didn’t care about. “Probably the most important thing that’s ever happened to them. As much as you’re hurting, and I know you are, my brother, they are too. They need their dad.”

The front door banged open, and Nancy Chester barreled into my house. My sister Nan never did anything quietly or gently. As different as they were, she and Buddy had that in common. They were big personalities, accustomed to assuming that the world was theirs for the taking. Not me. I was just a guy. A brother, a dad, a friend. And until last night, a husband.

Nan was heavier than I remembered, just over forty and settling into a staid plump middle age. She’d been attractive as a young woman, more sexy than pretty, the kind of early-90s girl who wore flannel like chiffon, with her share of male attention before she oriented on women in college. Curvy, a body suggestive more of sex than sports. She didn’t rush across the linoleum to embrace me, that wasn’t what we did. Instead she let go of the handle to her travel bag, took a couple of steps forward, and put a hand on one of Buddy’s massive shoulders.

“Thanks Buddy,” she said. They’d met a couple of times, here and there, at parties we’d hosted here. Nan knew he was far and away the best friend I’d ever had, and respected that. My sister was an odd duck. She’d busted my ass from the day I was born, and yet adhered to some kind of code that only she knew, that knew when to give me a hard time and when to take care of me. It was always a surprise which it would be, maybe to her as much as to me.

Mitch came forward, like an advancing formation on a battlefield.

“Hello, Nancy,” he said. Always Nancy, never Nan. If Mitch disapproved of anything more than his daughter’s marriage to me, it was my sister’s marriage to another woman. Disapproval was Mitchell Albertson’s native soil.

“Mitch.” In her mouth, it sounded like Bitch.

Lisa’s father turned to Buddy.

“Mr. Cormier, thank you for coming by. You’ll understand that it’s just family right now.”

The spring sun was warm as it cascaded through the windows over the kitchen sink, but the temperature dropped twenty degrees. I was barely aware of the world around me, but even I noticed the chill that had descended. Buddy stood, and it was like one of the Easter Island heads had clambered up out of the ground. His dark eyes glittered with hurt. He seemed about to speak when Nan cut in.

“Buddy’s as much family as any of us,” she said.

I loved my sister in that moment as much as any in our lives, for speaking my mind when I couldn’t. For basically telling Mitch to shove it up his tailored navy ass.

Then they were arguing. My sister and Lisa’s father, quarrelling over my grief like hyenas over a dead antelope. Buddy stood there, stunned and stoic as angry words washed over me, rain on rocks, rain on the ocean, rain where it couldn’t be felt. It wasn’t even words, just rancor, just hurt given breath. I sat for half a minute as it raged, maybe a full minute, maybe five, washing over me. I wanted to melt into the chair, the floor, the ground, I wanted none of it to be real. I wanted it to be a year earlier, before the word cancer became part of our daily lives. When Lisa would have been standing there, knowing how to manage the moment, knowing what everyone needed to hear. But she was gone.

Finally, out of exhaustion more than anger, I stood up.

“My children will be home soon,” I said, affecting a firmness I didn’t feel. “And I’ll tell them their mother is gone.” I wasn’t looking at anyone. I stared out at the lavender and the useless day. I turned and hugged Buddy. “You’re my brother. You know that. Go on. Check on the store for me? See how Esther is doing. I’ll call you later.”

He looked at me, then patted my cheek with the indelible patience he never seemed to exhaust. He nodded at Nan, ignored Mitch, and left.

“Nan,” I said, “go ahead and get settled. You can have Emily’s room and she’ll bunk with Jay. Go on.” Wordlessly, she took her wheeled suitcase and left. It might have been the first time she ever did what I asked.

“Mitch.” I looked at Lisa’s father. There was no shame in his face, no remorse, no apology. He was as implacable and righteous as the day we met, years before. I sighed. “I don’t want you here when Jay and Emily come home, okay? This is something I need to do.” His eyes bored into me, searching for something they’d never found.

“Don’t fuck it up,” he said, before walking into the other room.

Not long after, the squeal and huff of air brakes told me that the bus had arrived. It was all I could do not to burst into tears.

That afternoon, I told Jay and Emily about their mom. They cried, we hugged. I’m not going to describe it. Some things are too personal, too intimate. I’ll tell you about the first time I kissed Lisa, about my fights with her dad, about the depths of my pain. But they’re kids. And some things are private. Use your imagination. And leave them alone with their grief.  

Trinity Church was full the day we buried Lisa. She was young, too young, and well-liked by other parents from the kids’ school, people in the community, former co-workers, old friends of ours in from out of town. The gathered throng barely registered with me. They might have been cardboard cutouts or computer-generated images. As Reverend Tom spoke and as the hymns were read, I stared at the casket on the dais. The numbness, the daze, was still with me. Part of me hoped it would continue. It seemed preferable to grappling with the reality that everything I had ever wanted in life was in a box and would never come out. I sat there, next to my children and Lisa’s parents in the front row, Buddy looming in the pew behind me like some massive bodyguard, feeling the warming air of May hang stagnant in the nave, bearing the scent of new hyacinths from the churchyard and new sweat from the dearly beloved gathered to pay their final respects. It was hot but overcast, and the clouds above gathered too, pregnant with tears of their own. I realized then that Emily’s father was speaking.

I didn’t hate Mitch Albertson. We didn’t love each other, we never would. There was too much disagreement between us for love. All we had in common was our fathomless love for Lisa, and on that rock we had built our fragile mutual tolerance. I wondered vaguely how much longer it could last without her. 

“Lisa Albertson was perfect,” he said, and I envied his firm voice. I knew I would have to deliver my own eulogy shortly, and I knew it was a coin flip whether I’d be able to speak at all. “Then she met Andy and made her only mistake in life.” Guffaws from the handful of Idaho country club buddies who had made the trip west to help Mitch to say goodbye to his daughter. He was looking right at me, and his smile said I’m joking while his eyes said not really. “It wasn’t Andy’s fault. Any boy would have been a mistake. The dads out there with daughters know what I’m talking about. Even Andy.” More guffaws. I glanced at Emily, who had taken my hand without me noticing it. I hope you meet someone who will love you as much as I love your mom, I thought. Mitch was plowing on in his confident Rotarian baritone, telling stories about Lisa as a little girl, Lisa as an angel. He kept using words like perfect and pure, like she was unspoiled snow. Maybe she was. But I was still tempted to get up and talk about the time we had eaten watermelon and strawberries off each other’s naked bodies, if only to wipe that smirk off his face.

In the end, I don’t remember what I did talk about. Our love, our life, our children. Vague enough that I could get through it without shattering in front of all those people. The rest was a blur, and then people were carrying Lisa out to the cemetery.

Lisa hated cemeteries. Hated endings almost as much as I did. And yet here we were. Reverend Tom was droning on about resurrections and other nonsense while a light drizzle fell from callous heavens. I would have hated him, I would have hated everyone there in their performative black finery, if I had room in my heart for anything other than emptiness. They would go home after this. They’d feel bad, but they’d feel better by bedtime. Reverend Tom would watch his beloved Mariners blow another series to some east coast team. No resurrections for Griffey or Johnson or Rodriguez either, I guess, rain or no. I looked around with an unfeeling eye at the mourners – at the surprising number of them – who had gathered by the gravesite of my beloved. I knew most of them, by name or by face, and I hated them all, unreasoning and unfair hate they didn’t deserve but that I couldn’t stop feeling. The woman they’d known, the woman I’d loved as much as a man could love a woman, would soon be moldering in the ground. I couldn’t reach her, see her, touch her, hear her say my name in that way only she could say it. I held tightly to the hands of my children, one on either side. Jay, ten and determined to be a man in a suit bought for the purpose. I didn’t remember buying it. His Grandma and Grandpa Albertson must have handled it, Lisa’s folks. Of course they had. They were handlers, practical and stolid and insufferable. Emily, seven and sniffling, seven and confused, seven and dressed in new charcoal chiffon under a too-large black raincoat. Seven and motherless.

Reverend Tom kept talking about dust and ashes. All I could smell was mud.

When it was over, when the Albertsons were ushering my children into dry back seats, I stood alone staring at the handsome marble stone marking the final resting place of the person I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with. Except the rest of my life stretched before me like some trackless desert. I wished it would rain harder, that the sky would open up and drench me, would soak that mud beneath my feet, would go deep enough that Lisa would feel it one more time. At home, the dogs would be waiting for their walk, for their towels. For her.

A form loomed up beside me in the insufficient rain. It was Buddy. As much as I wanted to be alone, his presence was comforting. At least it wasn’t fucking Mitch Albertson. The last thing I wanted was Lisa’s father, pretending to hurt as much as I did. Buddy knelt in the new dirt of the grave, heedless of his tailored black slacks. Gently, almost gingerly, he rested a small stuffed dog against her headstone. Usually when someone dies this young, it takes a while to order their marble marker. In this case, we’d had plenty of time. So Buddy had a place to nestle his little Siberian husky, white and gray with black around the eyes and in a streak down its breast. I looked at him under his stylish yet laughably small black umbrella.

“In the tradition of my father’s people,” he said, dripping with rain, “warriors are buried with their dogs, to pull their sled and guard their fire in what comes after.”

“I thought your father was a truck driver from Millinocket,” I said, watching as the raindrops found the little dog like unerring vertical bullets. “And your mom was Mik’maq.”

He ignored that. Buddy had a variety of stories. Some were designed to seduce women, others to seduce customers. This one was inscrutable. I have never been able to tell how much of Buddy was bullshit. He looked at me, and there were tears on his thick ruddy cheeks, or else rain. Tears, I thought.

“I’m sorry, Andy,” he said, and wrapped one of those burly arms around my shoulders. “I love you, brother.”

I couldn’t speak. I was grateful for his fellowship, for his hulking nearness and the almost paternal promise of him. I laid my face into the crook of his jacket, where thick arm met thick chest. And the rain mixed with my tears. I felt the wet bleed through my suit, heavenly water seeping through my cheap black jacket, my off-the-rack white dress shirt, my five-to-a-pack white tee shirt. All bought by Lisa months and months ago. Before.

The rain found my pale skin and soaked it, bathed it, baptized it. It rains a lot in the Pacific Northwest. You get used to watching little league ball in a drizzle, hiking in the raindrops, unloading the groceries in an inconvenient downpour. And yet it rarely lingers. It doesn’t often rain all day out here. It rarely soaks. If you wait for a bit, you can usually earn brighter skies. There was no hint of that kind of transience now. No hint of liberation, of sudden or unlooked-for deliverance. The clouds loitered in their dark, lowering malevolence, weather as judgment.

Even if we had been in the Sahara, it would have rained. A day like this demanded weeping, and the sky obeyed.

“See you soon,” I whispered.

It was the Thursday before Mother’s Day.

My own mother. Man, I loved my mother. But I would never go on about her being a saint the way some guys talk about their moms. For one thing, she was an alcoholic. And not in a glamorous or charismatic way. She wasn’t bourbon-witty, or some white wine spritzer country club bridge player, like you read about in Jodi Picoult novels. She was a quiet drinker, a secret drinker, though neither Nan nor I were fooled. Our dad wasn’t, either. We had a refrigerator in the garage, where we kept meat and sodas and other stuff waiting to graduate to the kitchen fridge, the AAA ballplayers eager for their call up to the majors. This auxiliary fridge had a freezer up above it, with bags of peas and popsicles and mom’s bottle of Smirnoff. After dinner, she’d head out to the garage and come back in with a coffee mug full of Russian patience. After three or four mugs, mom would promptly fall asleep on the couch during The Muppet Show or America’s Funniest Home Videos.

            “Mom’s tired,” Dad would say, apologizing to us and for her in a single breath.

            It was a relief when she did fall asleep. Between the first and fourth mugs, she would shift from sullen to recriminating to vindictive, picking fights with Dad over everyday complaints or long-ago hurts. The violence was always verbal, never physical. I don’t think they ever laid hands on each other anymore, in passions of any kind. And it was never explosive, no yelling or screaming, just veiled barbs, twisting daggers, voiced rancor.

            No marriage is perfect. And I certainly made my share of mistakes in mine. But Lisa and I never intentionally tried to hurt each other, at least that I remember. 

            In some ways, I don’t blame Mom for turning to booze to run away from her life. She’d been in her first year of nursing school when she got pregnant with Nan. Twenty years old, chasing a career, only to find out that 1980 didn’t yet have room for careers and kids for women like her, women from the lower rungs of the middle class. There was room for The Love Boat but not for an ambitious pregnant peasant girl. She kept the baby that would turn into my sister, dropped out of school, and married my dad. And that was it. The rest of her life was runny noses, bake sales, and mugs of Smirnoff. Regret is a hell of an accelerator for alcoholism. I knew she loved us. I also knew she hated her life. I don’t blame her for being bitter about that. I do blame her for taking it out on my father. The one person she could have turned to, she pushed away.

            Mom died when I was in college. I wonder if Dad felt the way I feel. She was only forty-one, not much older than Lisa. I wonder if his heart broke the way mine is breaking, or if he’d had any grief leached out of him over decades of resentment. I wonder if part of him was relieved it was over. She never met Lisa, and that makes me sad. I think she would have liked her. I think it would have made her happy that I was happy. I think she would have liked being a grandmother. I think it might have helped her. But then, children of alcoholics always think something we can do will help. And it never does.

Dad is still alive, if you can call it that. He’s in an assisted living facility in Tacoma. Early-onset dementia found him at sixty-five. He’s in his early seventies now, and he recognizes me sometimes. When Nan visits him, he thinks she’s Mom. He thinks they’re in their thirties. He thinks it’s 1980 and wonders why he can’t find The Dukes of Hazzard on the television.

            Not yet forty years old, and I’m not only a widower. I’m an orphan.

After college, Lisa and I had this little apartment on South J Street in Tacoma, between the hospital and Wright Park. The whole thing was maybe five hundred square feet, a living room and a galley kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. She was working as an insurance adjustor for some company in town, and I was driving the half-hour south to my gig in Olympia. Tacoma had plenty to do for a young couple with no children, no dogs, and a little bit of money. We’d walk down to Boyle’s Public House on Court Street for brined wings or banger poutine, or else to where the Foss Waterway jutted in from Commencement Bay, eating fried steamers at The Salt Marsh. The Museum of Glass, or maybe a minor league baseball game with the Rainiers. Lisa always had her camera with us. The insurance thing was a paying job for Lisa, but it was the photography Lisa loved. Ever since I met her in college, she’d always been taking pictures of her world. Mostly just for her, though as we grew together, she would share her shots with me. A whole half of our finished attic in Lacey would be given over to her avocation, bins and cases and drawers of camera apparatus, of negatives, of developed film. She never quite got deep enough to want her own dark room, but she did show in some galleries in Lacey and Olympia, selling a few pieces a year.

Once the kids came, Lisa quit the insurance thing and became a full-time mom. She adored it in a way my own mother hadn’t. Lisa was like the cover shot of some glossy parenting magazine, raising her kids and riding her bike and taking her pictures. Maybe if mom had had a camera instead of a vodka mug, she might have found a similar kind of joy in her life. Maybe not. Maybe some people are wired for joy and some for grief.

After the kids started school, Lisa went back to work, but not in Tacoma and not adjusting insurance. She found a job in a bakery in Lacey, behind the counter and in the kitchen. Mum’s, it was called, owned and operated by this aging British biddy named Agnes. Agnes could bake, man. Her cookies and cupcakes tasted like someone had poured a game-winning touchdown into an Oscar-winning movie. When Lisa got sick, Agnes made sure the kids had all the cookies they wanted. Sugar hugs, she called them. Diabetes hugs, Lisa called them, and they’d laugh, back when she still laughed. Agnes was a wonderful lady, with kids and grandkids of her own back outside of London. She had one of those faces that always seemed ready to burst open with a smile. Agnes didn’t care that when she smiled, she became a cautionary tale for what English orthodonture and Domino Sugar could do to a set of teeth. She just loved to smile, and to bake. She couldn’t believe she’d outlived Lisa. Neither can I. All the while, the pictures kept piling up. Vacations preserved on matte paper, the weddings of friends, the birthdays and random days of the children. I used to laugh at her, and called her Annie (like Annie Liebowitz, you know?). Someday, she would tell me, we’ll be happy to have these. So laugh all you want, mister.

After Lisa died, I began sleeping in the attic, surrounded by those pictures. I’d feed the kids and put them to bed and then I’d go upstairs. I’d pull out a drawer or take out a stack of images and lie down on the beige Berber and stare at the faces until I fell asleep. The smiles were the worst part. Jay and Emily, smiling at their mom. Her parents, smiling at their daughter. Me, smiling at the only woman I ever loved or ever would. All etched in permanent celluloid, eternal reminders of the unique perspective gone from the world, the joy stolen from my heart. I didn’t laugh. Sometimes I cried, but more often I’d just lay there, staring, realizing that all the best parts of my life were in the past. I could look at them, I could remember, but there was nothing left to anticipate. No more vacations, no more weddings, no more love. I would lie there, and I would hate her. Hate her for leaving me, for getting sick. For taking these damn pictures that were all I had left to sleep with at night.

The night after the funeral, I sat alone with those pictures.

Where was Lisa now?

I knew where her body was. Moldering in the ground at the Old Tacoma Cemetery, alongside a cold and sterile granite marker. Here lies worm food. Ashes to ashes and all that.

And her soul? Heaven? Purgatory? Oblivion? Reincarnated as a giraffe or ant or paramecium?

I knew where her soul was. It was in the past. The essence of Lisa resided in days gone by. In my memory. On the walkways of Puget Sound University. Young and taut and hopeful. In the delivery room at St. Francis Hospital, glowing and gravid and grateful. In our house in Lacey, making dinner as the Barenaked Ladies played on the stereo, dancing, sexy and oblivious to it. Cycling somewhere. Taking pictures. In my heart.

And in the hearts of our children, I hope. I pray. Please God, let her live on there.

Please God, let her live on.

A couple of days later, the Albertsons were packing up to leave. It had been a trying time, sharing space, people united by grief but little else. I think my kids were sorry to see their grandparents go. I think they worried about what would happen when it was just the three of us. I did, too. As Barbara was saying her tearful goodbyes to her grandchildren in the driveway, Mitch took me by the arm, just above the elbow and chivvied me into the den.

“Andy, I wanted to ask about the ring.”

“What? The ring? Oh.”

Years before, when I’d gone to Idaho to tell the Albertsons I planned to ask their daughter to marry me, Mitch had sat stone-faced in his big leather recliner while Barbara disappeared. She returned a couple of minutes later with a gold ring, three modest diamonds sparkling in a cluster on one edge.

“This was Lisa’s grandmother’s,” she said. A stray glance at the red creeping up Mitch’s neck told me this was his mother, and not Barbara’s that we were talking about. “She’s been gone a number of years now, but I feel sure she would want you to give it to Lisa.”

Barbara might have felt sure, but the crimson had made it to Mitch’s cheeks. He clearly wasn’t as certain.

“My father bought that ring in Italy during the war,” he said, to his wife more than to me. “And proposed to my mother the day he got home.” He rose from his chair. “They were married for forty-seven years.”

“Then,” she said, pressing the loop of metal into my hand and closing my fingers over it, “it should bring them luck.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Lisa loves you, Andy, and we know you love her. I hope you have forty-seven years of your own.”

During the long drive back to Tacoma, I wondered what kind of argument ensued between Mitch and Barbara after I left. I knew Mitch disapproved. I wasn’t sufficiently ambitious or blue-blooded for his taste. But I’d seen a glimpse of where Lisa had gotten her inner strength, and it hadn’t been from her father.

Lisa said yes, of course, but that’s another story.

In the years since, we never discussed the ring. Once in while I’d see the set stones catch the light on my wife’s finger and there would be a strange look in Mitch’s eye, but that was extent of it. Until the morning after she died.

“The ring. My mother’s ring. I know the timing is difficult, but I’d like it back.”

“You want Lisa’s engagement ring?”

“I want my mother’s engagement ring.”

We stared at each other.

“I’m sorry, Mitch,” I said, as full of shit as he was. “She was buried in it.”

It had been a closed casket, at Lisa’s request. She didn’t want anyone to see what she’d become. It was a safe lie. And one I didn’t feel even slightly guilty about telling.

“Oh,” he said, and his face grew hard. “I wish you’d talked to me first, Andy. I didn’t want you to have it in the first place, you know. You were only borrowing it. The way you borrowed my daughter. I figured it wouldn’t last and Lisa would come home in a year.”

I couldn’t believe what he was saying. Yeah. Yeah, I could.

“Sorry, Mitch. I suppose we could dig her up if it means that much to you.”

We didn’t say anything to each other after that. He walked out of my house, embraced my children, took his living, breathing wife by the hand and drove away.