Two Years

The darkness came for me a few days ago.

I wondered when it would. Even as I drove our boy to school and squinted against the brilliant September sunrise glinting through my rearview mirror, it settled across my chest, its heaviness cloaking me like something familiar, a shawl of sorrow that I fold into.

It started long before the sunrise, deep in my subconscious, as I’m so used to it doing. When I woke the sky was just lightening with the dawn, and I felt the panicky aftermath of this dream, the one where my resting brain tries to reckon with your death, to make impermanent this most permanent void.

There I am again, in my mind’s eye, bereft and heartsick. You are not dead. You are gone. By choice. You ignore my pleading phone calls. You no longer want this life we built together.

When I finally see you, face to face, my entire being longs to be near you. I want to touch your face and hold your hands and kiss your lips. You want to get away from me. I know I should be angry that you disappeared so long ago, but all I want is to convince you to come home. I tell you I am sorry. For what, I do not know. For any of it, for all of it, for whatever made you leave.

You tell me how much simpler life is without us in it. You look into my eyes and say, “I like my life better now.”

I cannot reconcile this coldness with the warmth of the man I loved. I am nearly manic with confusion and anger and grief and, perhaps more than anything, longing. I want to scream, to pull my hair out. I do not understand.

And then, somewhere, in the distance, an alarm begins to chime. I wake to a heaviness my heart understands before my brain catches up.

That dream again, I think, knowing that now I must sit in its familiar aftermath, that I will pull myself out of bed and slump against this day, that every step will feel like quicksand and every song will make me cry, that my chest will ache dully for the next many hours and so sharply at some points that it will take my breath away.

I get up and brush my teeth. I make my coffee and do my morning reading for work. I wake the kids and wash my face and get dressed and kiss our daughter goodbye. In the car on the drive to school, C looks at me and sees I’m far away. He knows. We both understand, of course, this endless dance with grief.

“You ok?” he asks.

“I’m having one of those mornings,” I say. “But I’ll be ok.”

“I know you will be,” he says.

When he gets out of the car he tells me he loves me and leans in to let me kiss his cheek. He circles to the back to get his hockey bag and looks at me once more through the rearview mirror.

“Love you, Mom,” he says and blows me one more kiss.

The hatch closes, I put the car in gear, and I welcome the tears I have been choking back all morning.

I do not hate my grief. It is my companion and my friend, the expression of my love for you, the medium through which I keep writing our story.

But I do hate this dream. I hate that my subconscious, rather than surrender to your absence, has created this distorted version of you. I hate how viscerally this dream crushes me, how I knew the instant I woke up that I would stumble through this day filled with an ache that is deep and sharp and unrelenting. I hate that the need it triggers in me to hug you, to touch you, to be reassured by you will make me want to crawl out of my skin for an undeterminable number of hours or, even, days. I hate that I will drive home from school drop off and practice drop off and every other drop off this week with my hand stretched across the middle console, remembering so vividly how it felt to rest it on your leg as I drive you to work, and that I will cry buckets of tears over the knowing that I will never, ever get that again.

Today is two years.

Two years since I walked into the living room with the box of groceries in my hand, the front door still open while the delivery driver carried the rest of the order to our porch, looked at you napping on the couch and saw your lips were blue.

Two years since I ran down the stairs to the basement where I had left my phone.

Two years since I pulled you from the couch and started chest compressions while I screamed at the 911 operator that the ambulance was taking too long.

Two years since the ICU doctor told me the CT scan showed no brain activity.

Two years since he said you wouldn’t wake up.

Two years since he told me to call anyone who would want to say goodbye.

Two years since I sat in the waiting room with our children by my side and told them this time you would not get better.

Two years since the end of the life as I knew it.

Two years since I pushed your warm hand against my cheek.

Two years since I ran my fingers through your thick, black hair.

Two years since I kissed your lips and rested my head on your chest.

Two years since you told a stupid joke on our drive to work that made me laugh.

Two years since I rolled my eyes on that same drive when you told me for the hundredth time, “Kels! The right lane is 30 percent slower!”

Two years since you watched Cohen play hockey.

Two years since you danced with Willa in the living room.

Two years since this disease made us the best and worst versions of ourselves.

Two years since you were in pain, since you suffered, since every single moment of your days was an unimaginable struggle.

Two years of navigating this world without you in it.

So much has changed in these two years. We have two dogs. I went back to work. We moved to a different house in our same community. Cohen changed schools and is almost as tall as I am. Last week he wore a pair of your dress shoes to his hockey game and now all of your clothes hang in his closet. Willa doesn’t have braces anymore, and she has grown so tall. She is so smart and so clever. She smiles and laughs now like she never seemed to be able to when her life revolved around her worry over losing you.

They are, as you know, the absolute best of us, and it fills me with joy and shatters me with grief watching them grow up. Joy at watching who they are becoming. Grief that you are not here to see it, too. They are, also, much of the time, truly OK, with problems that are mostly about being 14 and 11.

I am, some of the time, OK as well, and this comes with its own kind of grief. How is this possible, being OK? How have I learned to walk through this life without you? How has the world kept spinning without you here?

Next week I turn 42. The age you were when you died. I think often about that day on the plane ride to Miami, where we knew you’d be diagnosed with ALS, when you held up your phone with the number 16,425 on the calculator screen.

“If you live until you are 80, this is how many days you will live without me,” you said. “I want you to LIVE.”

I am trying, my love, though I often wonder if I am living life to the fullest or just running from my pain. Did I get two dogs because they bring us joy? Or because I am avoiding my grief? Did we move to a new house for a fresh start? Because you never wanted us to write the same story minus you, you wanted us to write a new story? Or because moving was the biggest distraction imaginable? Should I have gone back to work or waited until the kids are older and until my own grief is less raw? (Will my own grief ever be less raw?) Have I been doing exactly what I should be doing or exactly the opposite?

Some days I feel so certain of our forward progress. Other days I feel I have wandered aimlessly through a fog for the last two years. Should I have made all these big life decisions so soon? What will this all look like to me in two more years?

I know this questioning of everything makes sense. Because you are not here. My barometer. My mooring. My guiding light.

Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to survive, and this is the one I tell myself, the one I am willing to be true, the one I need to believe in order to keep going.

It has now been 730 days since you stopped breathing. When you held up that calculator on the plane all those years ago, you assumed you had months to live, not years. In that way, your math was uncharacteristically and miraculously wrong.

I turned 40 the day after we took you off life support, 14,600 days shy of 80 years old.

14,600 minus 730 equals 13,870. Maybe I’ll get all those days on this earth; maybe I’ll get fewer; maybe I’ll get more. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am 730 days closer to seeing you again, to falling into your arms and saying, “You won’t believe the dream I had. You didn’t love me. You left us.”

And you will hold my face in your hands, and you will kiss my forehead, and you will say to me, “Oh, Kels. I never left. I was in the sun glinting through your rearview mirror and the songs that played when you cried in the car. I was next to you in bed when dreamt the worst things. I was on the chair beside you while you typed these words, tears falling onto your keyboard. I was on that big couch in the new house while the three of you watched Modern Family for the millionth time because that’s what we were watching as a family when I died. I was standing at the island while you and the kids talked about your days. I was sitting on the deck while Willa jumped on the trampoline. I was next to you in the rink when Cohen stepped onto the ice at hockey tryouts.

“And every time you looked up into the heavens and whispered or screamed or cried, ‘Chris, where are you?’ I was there, beside you, always.”

This, my love, is the story I’m telling myself in order to survive.

Until we meet again, I will miss you, I will miss you, I will miss you.