Before we got married, during our year-and-a-half-long courtship, the majority of time I spent with Marcus was when he was on vacation. Europeans get six weeks of holidays, which meant six weeks with Marcus in laid-back mode, Marcus wearing jeans and reading books, not donning a suit, not checking his email, not coming home late. He cooked for me. He grilled steaks and shucked oysters. He did my laundry. He washed the dishes. And he made love to me for hours. It’s no wonder I wanted to marry him!
But that was on my home turf. When I moved to Germany, everything changed—Marcus changed. When he put on his suit and tie, he became a different person.
“What about me?” I pleaded time and again. “Our marriage centers only on you and your job, your promotion, your schedule. What about my career and my happiness? What about where I want to live? Why can’t we pick a place we both want to live, a place where I can speak the language and not feel so lonely, and just move there and we can both get jobs?”
We eventually moved to Portland and that helped for the year and a half we lived there. But then Marcus, thanks to his steady corporate executive career climb, got transferred to Mexico and we were right back where we started. My unanswered questions inevitably escalated into louder cries, harsher words. “I want to be in an equal partnership. Instead I feel like you just expect me to serve you!” I shouted. “I have a life, too!”
I had a life, all right. And now he didn’t.
Joan Didion’s suggestion that “life changes in the instant” might have been true for her. She was physically there in the room when her husband’s heart stopped and caused him to fall out of the chair and hit his head on the corner of the table on the way down. She saw him lying on the floor, unresponsive, his head bleeding. She had proof, evidence, visual aids. She could put her fingers on his pulse and feel he didn’t have one. She could blow air into his lungs and watch his chest rise. She could call 911 and watch the paramedics as they stormed into her apartment and hooked up their electrodes and squeezed their syringes. Being there, in person, absorbing the immediacy of the action, then yes, time must have felt compressed into an instant.
News—specifically bad news—when delivered over the phone causes time to take on a different dimension. With no visual cues, there is nothing for the mind to grasp but whatever is imagined—drama, gore, violence, struggle, pain—combined with fleeting, movie-clip-like flashes of memory. There is no proof. There is only the voice of a stranger on the other end of the line. Someone you don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t want to believe. Someone in a government building 2,000 miles away. Someone who has never met your husband, who sees the man you loved only as a corpse lying on the examination table, waiting for an autopsy.
With this one phone call, life as I knew it ended.
“Your husband is deceased,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. He had the air of a military officer, serious, official, no emotion, detached. I could just picture the man sporting a crew cut, fleshy jowl, perfectly starched shirt, maybe even khaki in color, with the buttons pulling tightly across his ample belly. Deceased. The word didn’t register at first. Deceased? No, that can’t be. Injured is what I had expected him to say. Hurt in a car accident or from a fall off his bike, just out of surgery but recovering nicely. Not deceased. Not Marcus. Not healthy, robust, sexy, stubborn Marcus.
I would sell my soul to turn back the clock, to never get a call from a medical examiner and continue living in my happy oblivion to never even know what one was. I wish with every cell in my body to go back three and a half months earlier to May 5, the day Marcus dropped me off at the Portland airport. I wouldn’t get on the plane to L.A. I would fly to Germany with him instead, and worry about getting my belongings there later. Or I would turn the clock back even earlier. Five years, five months, it doesn’t matter. I’d settle for turning the clock back five hours. Maybe that way I could have saved him. I still want to save him. I still want him to be alive. Seven hours before Marcus was supposed to sign his half of the divorce papers, I killed him. I asked him for a divorce neither of us wanted and I killed him. To verify this, I asked Mr. Chapelle in a meek tone that didn’t sound anything like me, “Was it suicide?” The words snuck past my vocal cords and tiptoed out of my throat, which tightened with each passing second. It was the worst thing I could have asked; I was ashamed for asking it, but I had to know.
“No,” he answered quickly. “It was something with his heart.”
Of course, it was his heart. I broke it. He wanted to stay married and this was his way of making that happen. This was the second time we tried to divorce, and the second time we didn’t sign the papers. We were still married. And now we would be married forever. That’s a hell of a way to avoid divorce.
“The divorce almost killed both of you,” my sister said later. It hadn’t occurred to me, but she was right. During the hour he was struggling to stay alive after collapsing from a ruptured aorta, I felt my heart about to give out, thinking I would collapse in the middle of the Chihuahua Desert. I turned to go back home at 8:36 a.m.—that was 6:36 a.m. in Portland, the exact time Marcus was pronounced dead. Is it possible we were that connected? Were our bodies functioning in unison, joined by some inexplicable force? Was I feeling what he was feeling, the struggle of his heart to keep beating? While he was hit with defibrillator paddles and receiving epinephrine injections, I was enduring my own struggle, staggering with weakness back to my miner’s cabin with my dogs—our dogs.
I had a few hours to contemplate my death, but did he know he was dying? The details that were parceled out over the next few days concluded no, he could not have known. It was instant. He felt a cramp in his neck, got out of bed, took a few steps and collapsed on the hardwood floor of a friend’s house.
I imagined him having one of those out-of-body experiences, floating above his body, looking down and seeing himself lying unconscious on the floor, and saying, “What the fuck just happened?” This is a man who wanted to live. He had just invested in a new MacBook Pro and an iPhone. He had a pile of new books including The Passion Test, What Color is Your Parachute and What Should I Do With My Life? And he had bookmarked his favorite new website, “Zen Habits,” which was all about doing less to accomplish more. After years of my incessant nagging, he was actually exploring ways to trade in his corporate life for something more balanced. Back in Germany, he had also just bought a new road bike, a sleek and fast-looking LaPierre, which he had shown me via Skype. He sent me emails from his weekend bike rides in France, Italy and even Slovenia. This was a man with a lot of life left to live and big plans for the future. He was only getting started.
The autopsy determined he died from a hemopericardium (blood flooding the heart sack until the heart cannot pump any longer) due to a ruptured aorta. Marcus had a heart condition from birth, a bicuspid aortic valve, which means he had only two flaps to allow oxygenated blood to flow out from the aorta instead of the normal three. Blood pumping through the aorta is under high pressure. Having only two flaps creates a bottleneck and puts added pressure on the aortic wall. The wall had a weakening that eventually tore. Unless it happens when you are already in a hospital, a ruptured aorta is always deadly. There is no grace period. The blood moves too fast. The heart suffocates. And bam! Just like that. The man you love is gone.
His German doctors had always maintained his heart condition would never be a problem. Had Marcus known how endangered his life was, he would have taken precautions. He was that kind of guy: disciplined in everything he did, especially when it came to his diet (only the highest quality, organic, wild-caught everything for him). He didn’t smoke, he exercised regularly, doing yoga, biking and running, and he loved being outside in the sun breathing fresh air. This was a guy who was so health-conscious, he flossed his teeth three times