Mary lost both of her breasts and perky nipples. We had a good laugh. After all, it was still possible we’d both catch up with them in heaven.
Our gallows humor was reminiscent, of when Bart Simpson asked the Sunday School Teacher, “Ah, ma’am, what if you’re in a really bad fight, but you’re a good person, and you lose your leg to gangrene and it needs to be amputated, will it be waiting for you up there?” Up there, at the ceiling, is where Bart pointed.
We were a few Rosary Beads short of ungodly, atheists really. We regularly shared a laugh or two about an imaginary afterlife. Our playfulness was just one of the acquired bitters that zested our wry banter.
Before we could discuss purchasing them, Mary died. There was nothing funny at all about that.
~~~
My lovely Mary and I met at Stanford, “Creative Writing, I would like you to meet Levi, pre-med.” After graduation and my residency, we were off to the races: heavy dating, a short engagement, marriage, followed by a promising future together.
We remained in the Bay Area and bought an income expected home in the suburbs, began working on the 2010 Census, the ubiquitous 2.5 children. Somehow we ended up with just two. We truly lived each day together as if there was no tomorrow, and as is often the case, surprise, there wasn’t one.
~~~
Right until that grey Monday, the day when Mary abruptly ended, we were supportive of each other’s loves, hopes, and careers. Mary was a terrific human being, a wonderful author, and highly read. I’ll be honest. I’m an average orthopedic surgeon, a decent bone mechanic. On my best days, I’m very good at cutting, drilling and cinching ligaments and tendons to bones. Everything at work has gotten so routine. There have been times, I wished I’d specializing in a more humanistic form of medicine, like repairing or replacing the pathos valves in weak hearts. I’ve been conscientious and overprotective of mine, unnecessarily so, for the longest time. Mary took very good care of it. And Mary was very quick to tell just about anyone, how well I cared for hers. But I didn’t show it enough.
Ok, our marriage wasn’t perfect by any means. In fact, we broke our wedding vows, once. We each experienced a quintessential midlife affair, exactly on time per Gail Sheehy’s book Passages. Our feet got dirty, feet of Clay as they say.
It was Mary who told me about the meaning of, ‘feet of clay.” As it turns out, the phrase was coined by a bygone king named Nebuchadnezzar, a shrewd and imperfect ruler of Babylon. What the phraseology means is that we all make mistakes, I think. I know we admitted to ours, one each, short affairs, hot, so not worth the price of betrayal. Yet our mutual infidelity was nonlethal poison. All it left was a bad aftertaste. Trust was tarnished but never lost.
Mary and I were very honest about most things, brutally real. And before we married, we promised we would always keep our word. Our affairs eventually developed enough distance to become part of our repartee. It’s because we both knew love was never part of our infidelities. We agreed, we’d even forgotten the color of their eyes, if not their names, if they had children, or if they had any interesting hopes and dreams. It became obvious over time, the later areas of interest were constructs singularly meant for us.
We were horn-dogs, Mary and I. We couldn’t keep our dirty hands off of each other, as we would tease. Hell, we did it a time or two after her Taxol treatments, in the tidy and antiseptic assigned recovery room at Mercy Hospital. Now that’s radioactive love. What love can’t fix it can mend. I admit our sex wasn’t as vigorous as home. And honestly, we’d spent most of the downtime behind the curtains holding on each other tightly. After all, closeness was what we were really looking for all along.
There are times the acidity of cancer can eat holes in a marriage. It can metastasize quickly, so much so, you can fracture and splinter along known fault lines. One can only bare sadness for so long, before it takes your mind somewhere else. We’d seen this happen to others. There’s often a high tide of sorrow before it demolishes a relationship. We defined this as martial urban decay. We were fortunate, this never happened to us.
Oh sure, at first, there’s support and new found affection. There’s directed attention, roses he’s never bought you before. And with successful treatment and time, there may be cancer-free trips to Europe, or Puerto Vallarta, if just to bleach in the sun and celebrate.
Then, it’s back to sex every two weeks or so, the waiting mortgage and the ever demanding children. Back to the collective 401-k’s, and of course the predictable spike in divorces. Yes, divorce, because the couples aren’t whole, either together or apart. The important things we keep hidden deep inside turn up missing or worse, they became forgotten. The whole damned family develops PTSD.
At a bar once, during a break at a knee replacement seminar, in Santa Clara, a physician friend of mine spoke about empathizing with a loved one, “Jesus, I can’t explain it. It’s not something I signed up for, that’s for sure. Nothing is ever the same.”
“Ted,” I said. “Each day, nothing is ever the same. Signed up for? What the hell, its marriage, not the damned P.T.A.?”
“You know what I mean Levi, even with newer and bigger breasts, it’s different.”
I haven’t seen Ted since that day. I don’t do objectification. Oh, well, he was a damned cheat at handball anyway.
~~~
The thing of it is, nothing is ever the same when you love someone. Thank goodness for that. We are built to evolve and move forward in life, not dwell in stasis, or worse, move in reverse. Sure, love needs a tune-up once in a while, in any relationship, really. And certainly, we need our separate space, our private thoughts, even away time from each other. Something Ted never understood was how Mary and I had actually grown closer, since…
Ok, we didn’t use the term a lot, breast cancer. Why? It scared the hell out of both of us, the possibility of losing what we had, each other, our future.
But somehow, we came to terms with it all, shared love right up to the end, and beyond really, though of course, it’s different now. I miss her mind and her great ass. I miss the infinity of her natural perfume, the real essence of who she was.
So now it’s time I explain our agreed promises. When we married, we promised to be honest, just short of the occasional white lie: the length of the German Brown I caught on a fly-fishing trip with some buddies. Mary, she’ll be home in just under an hour. It was always more like two or three.
Sure she came home, after shopping the mall for those important things, new shoes, a fresh novel, that surprise birthday cake, I told her I never wanted again. The one I loved and thanked her for. The years do that to you. Ten years of marriage make you enjoy each other’s harmless crazies. But we kept our promises. We were sublimely and brutally honest.
The second promise was that if something ever happened to the either of, whomever survived would somehow, someday move on, and be open to another love. If love is goodness, we agreed to be open to finding it again.
It’s been two years now, who the hell is searching, not me. I just started titrating from 100 mg. of Zoloft last week. I’m jittery as hell about the possibility of any new love.
The third thing we promised each other, or rather, I promised her occurred right before she died. She made me promise that I would take her wedding dress into the deepest part of the forest somewhere in the Sierra’s and burn it in a white funeral pyre.
“Yes, Levi, I’m dead serious.”
“But why?”
“Some crazy bitch is going to try on my wedding dress, I just know it. You won’t even know Levi. It’ll be her dark little secret. I exist, there is only one of me, you have to promise”
It’s then our eyes crash and freeze. I let it all sink in.
“Understood,” I say.
And now I’ll explain our final and fourth promise that we made to each other. This one we made before we got married. We agreed to keep each other’s secrets to our mutual graves.
She did that, the better half of ‘us.’ She was the brilliant and the delicate sadness part of us. I’m certain she died with no secrets.
As for me, the clumsy, aloof and arrogant one, I’ll die with kept secrets.
When she developed post partum depression from her two miscarriages, I lied and told her I understood how bad she felt. I really didn’t, even though it comforted her.
And there was the time, I surprised her with the good news of my vasectomy. That was the day she’d broken all the plates in the China cabinet. She eventually forgave me. I never regretted what I did and never asked for forgiveness although I received it. This I kept to myself. Two children were never enough in perpetuity.
This guilt is on me and my own anxieties about my version of what it’s like to be a man, with all my weaknesses and feelings of insecurity. I barely felt competent and responsible enough to raise the children we had.
~~~
Mary’s in a custome cherry-wood box now. The box sits on our redwood mantle. I burned her wedding dress a week after the funeral and burial. Hell, I burned up all her clothing. Grief has a way of giving you what you’re expected to able to handle, and then some. It allows for the most exquisite creativity.
A month later, I paid a Craigslist masseuse. Just to show Mary how much I missed her, and how quickly I’d moved on, exactly as we’d promised each other. Somehow, I get the feeling she was aware of my struggle. It was that painful.
It wasn’t long after I ripped a few kitchen cabinet doors off their noisy hinges. A week later, I broke our widescreen T.V., I never watch it much anyway, too much violence. It was seismic, a rolling earthquake. I miss her, it felt good.
I even tried church one Sunday and yes, the damn rafters shook. And after, I drove the long way home and threw up, out the window. I cursed myself as a damned bigot and pounded the steering wheel. The next week, before surgery, in a bathroom at the main hospital, I carved on the stall, ‘Mary loves, Levi.’
Shortly after, I asked another surgeon to cover my scheduled 2:P.M. surgery.
~~~
So let me bring you up to speed. Five years have passed. Five years after the loss of a loved one feels like an eternity. There have been a few changes though. I live in a high rise condo now, in San Francisco. I’ve dated a time or two, but I’m still single. At this stage in my life, it’s not about being rusty, or someone not being good enough, it’s more about making promises I won’t be able to keep.
Dan’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared or will soon appear in Apple in the Dark, Aphelion, BlazeVOX, Bull, Cleaver, Coffin Bell, Entropy, Gravel, O: JA&L/Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Lowestoft Chronicles, Mystery Tribune, New Flash Fiction Review, Poetry Northwest, Running Wild Press, Spelk and Your Impossible Voice. Coffin Bell has nominated Dan for the Best of the Net Anthology, 2020.