He still wanted to come to Texas. He said, “I’ll come there and we’ll talk through our issues.”
“If you come here,” I replied, “we’ll have a good time like we always do. We’ll drink lattes and wine, we’ll go hiking with Team Terrier, we’ll make love and then we’ll be right back to where we were.”
“Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”
Why, oh, why, OH, WHY didn’t I let him come? Why did I have to be such a hard-nosed bitch? “But what if he would have died in Texas?” friends argued. “It’s so remote, you couldn’t have even called an ambulance. You would have never forgiven yourself.” Forgiveness? I couldn’t forgive myself for any of this. I killed my husband. It was my fault. If only I had let him come to Texas, he would still be alive.
I don’t know what normal grief is like, but complicated grief? Complicated grief must be grief on steroids.
The physician’s assistant of Terlingua didn’t give me an appointment to check my racing heart—my heart which was also now broken, shattered beyond repair. Instead, he gave me a ride to the El Paso airport. We didn’t speak for the duration of the five-hour pre-dawn drive. He left me to my silence as I stared numbly out the open window, feeling the hot Texas wind in my face. I flew from Texas to Portland into the arms of my best friend from childhood. Everyone needs a friend like Nan. Nan is the friend who, when you tell her the news—the Very Bad News that you’re still having a hard time believing is true, but since Marcus didn’t call the entire day after Mr. Chapelle’s call, and he never went a day without at least sending an email, I was beginning to believe could be true—well, Nan takes charge.
“You don’t have to come to Portland,” I told Nan. She didn’t listen. Not only did she book a flight from New York, a rental car and a Portland hotel, she made sure her flight arrived before mine, so she could scrape me off the airport floor and carry me to the car.
Marcus and I had three weddings, so it seemed fitting that we had three funerals. We first got married at a German civil service in the picturesque village of Tiefenbronn, where we signed our international marriage certificate with Marcus’s parents as our witnesses. Next, we got married on a farm outside Seattle, Washington, not only to accommodate my friends and family, but also because I had been freelancing for the past year at Microsoft and therefore Seattle was my most recent U.S. base.
We saved the best for last and returned to Germany, where we took over the tiny Black Forest hamlet of Alpirsbach, booking rooms for our guests in all the charming inns, hosting dinners at cozy Bierstubes and walking down the aisle in a thousand-year-old cathedral, a towering beauty built of pink stone. Three weddings, three different styles, from basic to rustic to elegant. His funerals mirrored our weddings, albeit with a lot more tears—and definitely no champagne.
I didn’t see his body until I had been in Portland for five days. I was still going on trust to accept that he was actually dead and hadn’t instead plotted his disappearance to some tax haven where he was now living on a yacht with a supermodel. It wasn’t until the day of the Portland funeral that I laid eyes on him. I had already picked out clothes for him to wear—a black linen shirt, his favorite wool bicycle jersey tied around his shoulders, Diesel jeans and his clogs. He had to wear his clogs.
And then, there on Broadway and 20th, in the understated pink-and-beige-toned parlor of the Zeller Chapel of the Roses, two hours before the Portland service was to begin, I saw him. It was him, strikingly handsome and healthy looking, even when filled with embalming fluid. It was the man I had fallen in love with, was still in love with, the man I had married, was still married to. I saw him. I talked to him, begged him to wake up. I held his hands, bluish and hard. I ran my fingers along his forehead, bruised from his collapse. I leaned down into his casket and kissed his cold lips that didn’t kiss me back. Now I knew it was true. He was dead.
My tears cascaded down like Multnomah Falls and they didn’t stop for ten months. They ran and ran, creating permanent puffy eyes and altering my face with so much stress old friends no longer recognized me. The tears ran the entire flight to Germany, while I sat in business class and Marcus flew in a metal box in cargo. The tears flowed all through the week I spent in Germany, from the moment his grief-stricken, ashen-faced parents picked me up at the Stuttgart airport, to when they took me to the guest apartment where Marcus’s suits were hanging in the closet.
My tears kept on flowing through the German funeral, a formal and elegant church service, packed with Marcus’s coworkers, accompanied by a quartet of French horns playing Dvorak’s “From the New World” and presided over by the same pastor who’d married us. The tears gushed through the informal and quiet burial of Marcus’s ashes, and through the final meeting at the Tiefenbronn Rathaus, the place where we had signed our marriage certificate, and where I was required to sign his death certificate.
The tears came in endless waves. They came by day, by night. My tears did not discriminate in their time or place. From Germany, my tears followed me back to Portland, and then back to Texas, where I collected my dogs, packed up my MINI Cooper, said goodbye to Betty, goodbye to my miner’s cabin, goodbye to the desert that had nurtured my creativity all summer, goodbye to life as I had known it. The tears were ever-present, ever-flowing. It was a wonder I wasn’t completely dehydrated. There was only one thing that defined me now: grief. Complicated grief. Grief on steroids. It was something I was going to have to get used to.
CHAPTER 3
What I thought was a heart attack, or a cosmic connection to Marcus as his heart struggled to keep beating and then stopped, turned out to be a hyperthyroid. I had struggled with this autoimmune condition for a few years, it was the culprit that kept me from getting pregnant, but I had finally gotten it in check. (Marcus and I had accepted that having kids wouldn’t fit our lifestyle anyway. While we were in Germany, we got a dog, Jack, instead. Jack’s Mexican stepsister came later when Daisy followed me home one afternoon during Marcus’s assignment in Saltillo.) A simple blood test—along with the goiter in my neck that had exploded to the size of a grapefruit—indicated the hyperactivity had returned with a vengeance. My T-levels were off the charts.
Without any other purpose or sense of clarity to guide me, I let my medical problem determine where to go next. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in my miner’s cabin in Texas. I spent two weeks back in Terlingua, recovering from the three weeks of funeral-related travel. Everything I had loved about the place before—the isolation, the vastness and emptiness of the desert wilderness—now threatened to consume me, and draw me further into a new world of quiet madness. I maintained just enough sanity to know I needed to be somewhere else, somewhere I could be around people. Normally I would have returned to L.A. That’s where my parents and two out of my four siblings lived; it’s where I had spent the bulk of my adult life, and it’s where I always fled to when Marcus and I hit a rough patch. But this time, in this new, debilitating, fragile, uncertain state of being, and because I didn’t have Marcus to run back to, I ran to the next closest thing: a place filled with memories of him.
Portland made sense for many reasons. First of all, I had no home anywhere else. Portland was affordable. Portland was where my trusted endocrinologist practiced and he could treat my over-active gland. Portland may have been the place where Marcus died, but it was still the place where we had lived and loved. And Portland was where our—er, my—furniture was stored.
Portland was where we—I—had friends, friends who knew both of us, knew us as a couple, friends who could lend support as I searched for meaning in life. Because so far, I couldn’t find any meaning left at all. I was so down on life, so lacking in any enthusiasm to face each new day as it dawned, I couldn’t even get excited about my morning coffee. Portland was where my memories of Marcus could help me feel more connected to him. In Portland, I would also attend a grief support group. I had already done my homework and found a free program. I couldn’t wait to get started. I couldn’t wait to stop feeling pain. Because if I continued feeling the way I was—which is to say lost, confused, angry and sad, oh, so very, very sad—I was going to