Grief's Country Page 2

  On the deck in summer and fall, we were invisible to the kayakers and canoeists floating by, their chatter rising up from the water. Hawks nested overhead. Wild turkey paraded through the yard. On the dock I watched the green-brown water as it snaked around the bend toward me through patches of shadow and sun. I thought of the Au Sable Float and about those canoe trips, when I had wondered about the people who lived on the banks above the river. It was entirely possible that my canoe had passed this way, past this very bank, where our cabin stood. In my fifties now, I had run out of gods; what about a river god? Ever moving, ever in place—a god of paradox and dynamism. I’ll make friends with the river, I thought. One of these days, I’ll go in.

  The sound of water washed through our days. We thought of it as the river’s voice, but in fact it was the rush of water returning to water, through a drainage pipe that stuck out from the bank a few yards upriver. We fell asleep to the sound through the window above our bed, in the darkness that came down after I had the huge safety light removed. It was one of the first changes I made. Safety? From what?

  *

  In December 2004, a year after we bought the cabin, my mother began to die. Over the next two weeks, efforts to stabilize her failed. Crisis to crisis, I shuttled the hundred miles between Kalamazoo, where my fall term classes were ending, and Ann Arbor, where she lived. She was often on morphine, which made her delightful and brought lovely hallucinations. But between doses her pain was terrible and one morning she begged—her voice ravaged from intubation—“Please let me go!”

  So we did.

  At the height of the crisis I had told Bob that Christmas at the cabin was on hold. Now I couldn’t wait to be there. He flew in from where he was working now, at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and we headed north the next day. I asked him to do the driving. I can’t remember ever feeling so depleted. The rolling landscape around the city of Cadillac is imprinted with the memory of that drive. I watched the low hills and sleeping fields, gray-blue, dusted with snow, flowing by as I repeated to myself that it was over, that all was well, that Mom was out of pain and had had the death she wanted. I was with Bob and we were headed to our place, where everything would be warm and quiet, and I could be still.

  *

  I think it was in November of the next year that I drove up late one Friday afternoon, under a low, slate-colored sky. Saturday I woke to the windows white with the fog that had come in overnight and surrounded the cabin. The river was invisible, the trees spectral shadows.

  I set about my day: grading papers, putzing around the place. From room to room something shadowed me. Outside, time seemed to have stopped; there was no change of light from hour to hour. I couldn’t shake it; I felt surrounded, removed from my kind and the life I was living to some other place of silence, isolation, and vague dread.

  Watching a movie didn’t help. Nor did music, scotch, the nightly call from Bob, or sleep. On Sunday morning the air lightened only slightly and the fog was still wrapped tightly around the cabin. Hardly able to breathe, I gave up. I packed hurriedly and drove the five miles to the village. When I turned south onto 131 and picked up speed, the oppressive weight lifted immediately. In the space it left behind, I understood what had held the cabin in its thrall. “Death,” I whispered. I had felt its presence, strong and steady. I had never experienced anything like it.

  I didn’t tell Bob any of this. I banished it to some outer reach. The cabin was our stake in a new life. If the cabin was where I would die, so be it.

  *

  In August 2007, I was heading into a sabbatical and Bob, at last, into retirement, after ten years in Colorado. I rented out my Kalamazoo house so we could spend the year at the cabin. I had a book to write; he had major plans regarding logs and gardens. In that glorious autumn, while I covered the loft in index cards, stacks of paper, sticky notes, and legal pads, he arranged for a truck approximating the size of a T. rex to drag seven cords of wood down our driveway, sinking into the soft, sandy soil. He then proceeded to submit them to his brother’s splitter, a frighteningly powerful and ungodly loud machine. Bob and Brian treated that splitter like it was a ferocious deity. The woodpile grew apace, and despite my testosterone jokes, I recognized a supremely practical, healthy alternative to therapy when I saw one. Not to mention that there was now not the remotest chance that we would be cold that winter.

  One afternoon in late November, Bob was at his computer in the sunroom, at the ugly desk I’d dragged out of Goodwill for $15. I was in the kitchen. Suddenly he said, without turning from the screen, “Joe’s dead.”

  The email with the news came to a listserv of Bob’s high-school buddies. The message didn’t say how Joe died, which is how we knew. The last time Bob had spoken with him, Joe confessed to feeling very depressed, unhappy that at sixty-two his life was stuck—no family, no woman, scraping together a living in film and TV as a grip and sometime producer. Behind him trailed a long history of depression, psychotherapy, and drugs—legal, illegal. Bob always urged him to visit, to call. There was no room for shock at the news; everyone who knew Joe had seen this as a possible ending for his story. The first time I met him, I saw it immediately—that gray miasma of persistent depression.

  Bob called Joe’s sister. As they spoke, it grew dark. I lit candles around the living room, a nightly ritual Bob regarded with disapproval, given that we lived in a pile of logs. When he hung up, he wept. “He did it just like Joe,” he said. He had mailed letters to family and friends, saying that he could not face another Thanksgiving, another Christmas, another birthday. He had sent a note to the local police precinct, a block away, so that his body would be found. And he had strung up water bags to keep his cats’ water dishes full for several days. Then he had ended his life.

  I dropped down beside Bob on the sofa. Out the window, I could see our neighbor’s Christmas lights, visible through the trees. As we sat, I made some kind of inchoate, silent prayer for Joe’s wandering soul. We held each other. The light of the candles reflected in the dark windows seemed like a protective ring of fire holding the night at a distance. We’re safe, I said to myself. We’re here together, safe.

  *

  That year’s Christmas tree was our best. After hours of fruitlessly searching for the tree farms I was sure should be ubiquitous in those parts, we found it immediately at a little corner lot in a nearby town. A tall, soft, very fresh Douglas fir it was, reaching up past the beam across the living room ceiling. The day after Christmas we sped down to Kalamazoo, and on New Year’s Eve morning we were married, after eighteen years together (exactly), among a small gaggle of family and friends. We sealed it with two thick gold bands. Bob’s was the ring his father had worn when he married the love of his life, his second wife. I wore my paternal grandmother’s ring, inscribed from her husband on the inside in delicate late Victorian script.

  The wedding felt awkward to me, as if sound and picture were out of sync. I couldn’t quite settle into my body or into the present moment. A blizzard was on the way, so the party dispersed in the early afternoon. We spent the night at an expensive lakefront hotel some thirty minutes north of Kalamazoo. The snow started when we were at dinner, thick and heavy, and kept on all night. New Year’s Day dawned weirdly dark and never brightened. The small naked trees, black against the obliterated lake, looked eerily twisted. In the pictures I took that morning, the air is dark blue, like night. All I wanted was to be back at the cabin, in my sweats, in the ugly, bulbous, off-white leather recliner I’d bought from Norma.

  And there I spent most of the winter, when I was not upstairs in the loft writing. The book came quickly, and most often, when Bob switched on NPR at 4 p.m. to indicate that the workday was over, I closed the computer with satisfaction. When the long winter gave up at last, we would see what the river was like in spring. We would spend a full glorious northern Michigan summer here. Then I would head down to the other life that waited for me, and Bob would toggle between cabin and Kalamazoo. We would investigate
a bigger house there, as we both knew the cabin would never be our permanent residence—too ramshackle, too small, too far from family and friends. I would think about gearing down to part-time at the college, easing toward retirement. The days of pouring my entire life force into the drama of teaching and the intense life of a small college were over. My writing and this person now called my husband: more of my time—my attention, my imagination—now would flow into this life.

  My stepfather, my mother’s husband for nearly forty years, had tipped into decline immediately after her death, and died in mid-January. It felt like a cover closing on a book. I was no one’s child now, for the first time. And I was no one’s mother. I was a free agent, floating through the cosmos at the age of fifty-seven. What a moment to become someone’s wife, to become as connected as I could ever be.

  *

  One evening a week or so later, I was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my scotch, watching Bob’s preparations for dinner: precise, focused, fussy, timed like a military operation, ingredients measured and arrayed in small bowls, pork roast (his specialty) laid out on a board, ready to roast with rosemary on his small rotisserie grill. I was saying something when Bob turned from the counter and slid slowly to the floor, rolling onto his back. His head didn’t strike the floor—at least, I think it didn’t; this happened in slow motion, soundlessly. His eyes were open, bright as ever, but unseeing. I called his name, shook him by the shoulder, called his name, over and over. My mind raced around the room and out the window: I was alone here, five miles from a tiny town with no medical facilities, twenty miles from a larger town where perhaps there was an emergency vehicle. I was alone. The neighbors in the A-frame next door had moved and left it vacant. I didn’t have a number for the neighbors on the other side, in the big contemporary. I was alone. I couldn’t get Bob to my car by myself.

  And then he was back, seeing me. I kept saying his name. I helped him up, and he asked what had happened. He was fine, he said, bemused. No pain anywhere, nothing. I led him to the living room sofa and sat with him, my heart drumming. He remembered nothing of falling or the preceding moments, and he had no aftereffects.

  He reminded me that this had happened once before, unwitnessed by me—at a guesthouse in Key West. He had come into our room from outside, looking for a Band-Aid. He’d fainted or something, he told me, and struck his forehead on a planter; there was a small cut. He’d sworn he felt fine, not even a headache. Maybe, we’d theorized, he’d gotten out of his chair on the terrace too quickly.

  Now I extracted a promise: the next day he would make an appointment with a doctor in Traverse City. We would get to the bottom of this. He was quizzical, even amused; but I was crying now and couldn’t stop—big, heaving sobs. “I’m fine, hon, really!” he kept saying. He was holding me now, worried. My weeping subsided, but the terror was still in me, unexorcised, rising from some bottomless well, and the sobs rose again. Bob kept slipping away from me, before my eyes.

  *

  It was a running joke between us, my problem with separations. Weirdly, in our long commuter love affair, my leaving him occasioned more grief for me than his leaving me. I think that somehow the image of him alone, left behind, pulled strings strung tighter even than my fear of my own aloneness. I remember driving east out of the Berkshires in our early days, weeping until I was well over the New York border. I recall a fairly embarrassing scene in the airport in Santa Barbara, where his parents lived, when I was flying home by myself. My pièce de résistance, however, came in a hotel lobby in Boulder where we were awaiting the shuttle that would take me to the Denver airport. He told me he needed “to use the restroom,” as he always said in his decorous way, and vanished. The shuttle arrived, and my suitcase was hoisted aboard. A sheer, irrational panic lurched up from nowhere: I would have to board the bus immediately, it would leave momentarily, and Bob was gone. I went to the door of the men’s room and called his name repeatedly. No answer. Finally I opened the door and set one foot inside, calling loudly, imperatively. “Yes?” said his amused voice from one of the stalls. “I’ll be right with you . . . ” By the time he emerged, chuckling and regarding me as if I were deranged, I had realized that the shuttle’s departure was not imminent. We waited at least ten more minutes, which he filled with scatological drollery, riffs on my absurdity. He was already concocting a version of this scene to tell for the rest of our lives. I was suitably humiliated, but I was also taken aback by the intensity of my fear, shooting up from underground like a geyser in the space of a breath.

  *

  In Michigan spring demands faith. It advances, then retreats. It seems to me it came especially slowly that year, though the fact is that I had never watched it come so far north. We both had full-blown cabin fever.

  By the middle of April Bob was well into ongoing medical tests, none of which provided anything close to an answer for the losses of consciousness. By then the last crusty, dirty snow had vanished, and the air softened and freshened. The sunlight was warmer, even if the days stayed chilly. And the birds came back in the wondrous diversity we’d discovered at the cabin. We’d put feeders out and had the bird book handy to identify newcomers. After the first onslaught of raccoons, Bob brought the feeders inside nightly. For Christmas, he had bought me a new industrial-strength, squirrel-proof tube feeder. Where did I want it? I said I wished it could hang from the big old white pine at the edge of the river, about twenty feet from the deck, but the branches were too high. Ever one to rise to a challenge and always one to find the most complicated way to accomplish anything, Bob hooked up a Rube Goldberg rope-and-pulley apparatus by which a bird feeder could be hung on a branch out over the river and hauled back down and in for refilling. I hated the look of it, a fact I didn’t mention, and I also thought it was dangerous, a fact I did. Even to work the contraption one had to lean out over the high bank.

  By the first week in May, the day lilies whose bulbs I’d shoved down into the gravely soil were sending up shoots, and the trees were greening up. Nights were still too cold for open windows, but afternoons were warm enough to sit on the deck. The end of my book was clearly in sight; I would finish a draft in early summer, well before I headed back to my Kalamazoo life.

  My habit that year was to allow several errands to accumulate and then, at a natural pause in my writing, to spend a day getting them done in Traverse City, forty-five minutes away. On May 8, a Thursday, I left in the morning and got home in late afternoon, just in time for cocktails on the deck. We sat at the picnic table Bob had installed, he with his martini, I with a gin and tonic. At the bird feeder closest to us, a big rose-breasted grosbeak appeared, the first either of us had ever seen. The coming summer seemed to hum in the distance.

  We ate dinner and watched Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, all raspberry-colored blood and steampunk melodrama. It ended at about 9:45. Bob said he was going out to bring in the bird feeders. He wore his gray sweats and the L. L. Bean slippers I’d bought him several Christmases ago, now flattened at the back into slides. I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face.

  When I came out, the door from the sunroom to the deck stood wide open. It was a heavy, full-frame glass door with little birds etched on the top. I had come to resent it; it had to be tugged open and pulled shut hard every time one of us went out or came in, as we did constantly. On my list was to arrange to have a screen door installed, one that slammed behind you, as a cabin door should. I glared at the door, wondering why Bob had left it open to admit all manner of nightlife. He was taking a long time, I noted. The night seemed very quiet.

  I sat down to write a quick overdue thank-you note to his sister, but halfway through the first sentence I stopped, rose, turned, and faced the empty doorway again. Deep inside me was an inkling that I had just entered a different world.

  A few seconds later, outside in the dark, first calling his name and then screaming it, I already knew the end of this story. The Christmas bird feeder hung out over the water from the limb of
the white pine. At the foot of the tree lay a slipper. The cosmos roaring up inside me, I went to the brink and looked down, knowing I would see its mate there at the base of the bank, at the edge of the water.

  The next hour was full of sound and motion—my shrieking, lights going on across the river, neighbors’ voices, flashlights, police, tracker dogs. At one point I looked down from the bank again and, knowing it was useless, slid down into the cold tumbling river. The current pulled my feet out from under me and my head went underwater. I grabbed for a thin branch hanging low over the water. I wasn’t going with him. I regained my feet and flailed downstream toward the dock.

  They found him downriver around the horseshoe’s bend by the neighbors’ dock. For the next hour, as they tried to force life back into his body, I waited in the cabin with some neighbors. Shortly after midnight the troopers—young, buzz-cut, stiff, no experience of such duty—came back to the cabin. He’s gone, I said, before they could speak their word, deceased. The rest of my life was already moving in on me.

  This story ends with a river. But, like the river, it doesn’t end. It runs on and on.

  Ghost Town

  Gold Hill is sometimes labeled a ghost town, which is an inaccurate designation.

  —Wikipedia

  There are four ways to get to Gold Hill. You can take CO72, aka the Peak-to-Peak Highway, to Gold Hill Road, which comes into town from the west. It’s a long, dusty few miles that will take you past the Sacred Mountain Ashram, established 1974, and the Colorado Mountain Ranch before curving to the right, down into town. If you decide against turning off, by the way, the Peak-to-Peak will take you to Nederland, a bustling mountain town with amenities like restaurants and a movie theater. Nederland is the home of the excavated frozen body that is celebrated in an annual three-day festival in March called Frozen Dead Guy Days.