byChrisWhite – 2019

She called that afternoon with a voice already drowned. Not weeping, but empty in the way a bell sounds once it’s cracked. The sound still rings but doesn’t carry. And though I’d expected it, Hospice does that to you—in the way a distant thunderhead gathers behind the ridge—I still wasn’t ready. You never are, no matter how many dry rehearsals you perform in the recesses of the mind. He was gone, she said. Gone in that final and irreversible way that folds time in half and draws a hard line between the then and now.

His name was Bill. My mother’s second husband. A man who occupied space in our family the way ivy takes root in stone, not unwelcome, but relentless in his slow takeover. Thirty-two years. Not just a lifetime, but the better part of hers.

I will not sanctify him. He is not the subject of this reckoning. He is merely the backdrop, the debris, the spent match still clinging to the sulfur stench of its single use. But he mattered. And now, by virtue of his absence, he matters differently.

This is not about Bill.

This is about the woman left standing in the room after the door closed and the echo stopped reverberating. About what it means to outlive a man who rarely lifted his own weight yet managed to lodge himself into the scaffolding of her life. About the balance of grief and relief, and the strange arithmetic of loss where subtraction sometimes feels like addition. It is about my mother. And, selfishly, it is about me. Because all stories are, when they are told this way. Through the eyes of the one left holding the pen.

My wife, God love her, has already resigned herself to this indulgence. She will read this—if she does read it—with that sideways smirk she reserves for my lesser pontifications, the ones I mistake for profundity. She’ll sigh and say, of course it’s about you. And she will not be wrong. I am a man marooned in his own head, and now I am trying, fitfully, to reinhabit my heart.

The heart is a treacherous tenant. It has no tolerance for clutter, no space for rational filing systems. When it swells, everything else must yield. The breath shortens. The mind slows. The body itself feels undersized. This moment, I am trying to wear a life two sizes too small, cotton dried on high heat. Grief shrinks you. Age shrinks you further.

And yet there are gifts in this. Hidden in folds, like a forgotten Benjamin in an old coat pocket. My mother, now widowed twice, stands at a crossroad not of her own choosing. At seventy-six, she’s been thrust again into a solitude she neither sought nor fully feared. And I—ever the opportunist—feel something shameful in my delight. I have her again. Not fully, not like a boy has his mother, but more than I’ve had in decades. A breath of her, unfiltered by the man who hovered beside her like a barnacle too stubborn to dislodge.

He wasn’t cruel. Not in any easily prosecutable way. But he was a leech, a domestic siphon, a man who coasted through his days on the inertia of her labor. Minimum wage jobs abandoned at the earliest moment, dreams that never reached velocity. He was a man whose most committed ambition was to leisure. And still—this is important—he made her feel lovely. Not just loved, but lovely. Desired. Noticed.

And that is no small currency for a woman twice discarded by time. Even parasites provide warmth.

I think now of the way she carried herself beside him. Regal in her restraint, her sacrifice folded into ritual. She worked far past retirement, her hands cracked from repetition, her back curved from years of never putting herself first. And when asked why, she would say he needed her. As if need was virtue. As if his dependence sanctified her suffering.

This is the part that hurts.

Because love isn’t clean. It isn’t always mutual. It isn’t always wise. Sometimes it is simply there, like mildew in the corners of a room. You learn to live around it. You light candles. You open windows. And on some days, you even forget it was ever there.

I want her to be free now. To breathe air unshared. To walk into rooms without accommodating the weight of another. I want that for her with a ferocity that startles me. And yet. I also want her attention, her time, her affection to bend again in my direction. I have missed being seen by her, fully, in the unmitigated light of mother and child.

What a foolish thing, to be fifty-four and still crave the undivided love of your mother. But I do.

And still. There is sorrow. Not for him, but for her, for what she endures in the echo of his departure. The silence he leaves behind is not quiet. It hums. It accuses. It reminds. And she, who has always been mightier than she appeared, is now tasked again with gathering her pieces and building herself anew.

The rituals begin immediately. Cancel the phone plan. Transfer the utilities. Send the death certificates to this place and that. A thousand tiny deaths nested in the one great death. Bureaucracy has no respect for mourning. It marches on, indifferent and unhurried, demanding proof and signatures and patience.

My siblings and I help her where we can. Sit with her in her kitchen while the kettle hisses and the cat’s scratch their excrements in litter. She moves slowly, not from age but from recalibration. A life lived alongside someone becomes muscle memory. It takes time to reprogram the simplest gestures. To pour one glass of scotch instead of two. To mute the television because there’s no longer anyone to complain about the volume.

We talk around the hard things. She tells me about the neighbor’s cat, about the rude clerk at the pharmacy. And I nod. I listen. I wait for the tremor in her voice, the fissure. It comes eventually. Always does. A phrase will snag. A breath will hitch. And there it is—the grief, dressed as annoyance or weariness or silence.

There is no roadmap for the second widowhood. No greeting cards for the woman who has buried two husbands. Society assumes the first loss cracks you, but the second, if it happens, renders you nearly invisible. As if sorrow has a quota. As if the well can run dry.

But I see her.

I see the tired defiance in her spine. The pride she won’t put down even when no one’s asking her to carry it. I see the cost of her choices. And I see the vast terrain ahead of her, both exhilarating and cruel.

We talk about the future in fragments. Maybe a trip. Maybe a class. Maybe she’ll take up writing a diary, or start ballroom dancing again. She’s never been one for idle hands. She says she needs a project. I suggest herself.

The clock ticks. It always does. But time is not a noose, not yet. There are tocks still waiting to be lived. And she—God willing—has not spent her last summer laughing. There is joy still waiting in the margins.

I want her to write her own story now. Not the wife. Not the caretaker. Not the nursemaid to a man who never once returned the favor. I want her to become, at seventy-six, the boldest version of herself. Wear red. Say fuck. Tell the truth with both hands.

And maybe, in some roundabout way, this is a story about me after all. About how watching someone survive teaches you something about your own fragility. About the ways in which we tether ourselves to people who don’t deserve us. About the ways we finally, eventually, untie the knots.

And while I’m confessing, let me say this: another friend of mine died this week. A man I’d known for most of my life. That one gutted me. Still does. I’ll write about him soon, when the words stop trembling. For now, he is folded in the lining of this story, a secondary ache I am not yet brave enough to assign a simple blog title.

There’s a poem I keep coming back to. Eric Lomax. A man who knew the architecture of pain, who mapped his trauma like cartography. The words don’t change, but they shift. Each time I read them, they meet me in a different place. Some people call that mystery. I call it truth.

Read it if you can. Read it five times. Let it take root. The best words do not explain. They endure. They become part of you.

So where does this leave us? Me, clacking away at a keyboard while my wife in the next room probably rolls her eyes again. You, reader, perhaps wondering why you’re still here, what you’ve gleaned from this wandering elegy.

Here’s what I know: we’re all circling the same drain. The only difference is how loudly we sing while we spin.

So sing.

Live unreasonably. Be the old woman with purple hair and wild jewelry. Be the old man who learns salsa at eighty. Be the child again, if only for a while. Say yes to things that scare you. Say no to things that don’t.

The heart is a tight garment. But it stretches, if you wear it often enough. And time—dear God, time—both has a tick and a tock.

It tocks my friends. And tocks rhymes with rocks.

So let’s rock. Let’s wear out our days with joy and reckless kindness. Let’s tell the truth, even when it’s not asked for. Let’s be here, fully, until we’re not.

Let’s leave something beautiful behind. Not grand. Not perfect. But true.

Because that, in the end, is all we ever had to offer.

The Clock of Man

By Eric Lomax

At the beginning of time, the clock struck one.

Down dropped the dew, and the clock struck two.

From the dew grew a tree, and the clock struck three.

The tree made a door, and the clock struck four.

Man came alive, and the clock struck five.

Count not, waste not, the years on the clock

Behold, I stand at the door and knock.