Lindsey Markel Writes About True Things

I guess I have always been afraid of Larry dying.

Of course I fear the death of anyone I love, but the roads of my life converged as such that I met Larry on the first summer after my first big death. Not “my” death, but our death—my family’s, our baby’s. Before the winter of Macey’s death, I had known the sudden deaths of high school classmates in speeding cars and the slow, confusing letting go of some older relatives. I had gone through adolescence, I had trudged my way through the swamp of my first broken heart, but I had never experienced grief. I was twenty when Macey was killed at ten months old and, like an animal knows how to fight or fly, I had never known grief but I knew how to shut down my body, how to mourn for months.

I met Larry the summer that I was still lost.

This evening I finished re-reading The Year of Magical Thinking, the memoir written by Joan Didion in the year following the sudden death of her husband, John Dunne, after a cardiac arrest at the kitchen table. It is a study of her own grieving—and all grief—as she moves her way through it. I first read it when it was released in 2005, during the few regrettable months I worked in a bookstore one town over. The owners were passive-aggressive and were in a Christian rock band, but I got a 20% employee discount, and I bought my first Didion hardback with part of my first paycheck. 

I remember feeling understood on a complete, near-molecular level with anything approximating the reality of grief for the first year or so after Macey’s death. C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” he writes in the opening line. He’s talking about mourning the death of his wife. But I felt like I knew the feeling.

It was the first time someone who I had loved intimately and protectively had died. A ten-month-old girl who had just learned to wave, albeit backwards, joyfully. The fact that our whole family was raising her, our beautiful, hilarious motley crew, had been taking turns with her since Jessi had her as a teenager. That was what we had promised them. And even we couldn’t prevent her death. She had been hurt, and scared, and had died, and we weren’t even there.

I was very sad and very angry for a long time. I was mean to people. I couldn’t write. I was trying to shed my whole life, the one I had loved and the one that had betrayed me.

Eventually, I was able to write again. I started drinking, convincing my two older boy housemates to drive my girlfriends and me to Shop-Ko and buy us bottled malted drinks. I broke up with my boyfriend. I wrote poems about Macey and e-mailed them to my advisor with the note “I don’t know if this is any good, I don’t even know what it is, but I wrote it” and he wouldn’t reply, because they weren’t very good, and because he knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t sending them to receive a reply. I was writing, and sending things out into the universe, and I was healing myself, slowly and clumsily.

I was not healed by the time I met Larry. I was not healed when we started to date, or the first time we kissed, or the first time I wrote about him, or even the first time he laid his head on my belly in the dark, against the buttons of my dress, and told me that he loved me. The first time he said it, I said, I know. I didn’t mean it as a rejection, and he didn’t take it as one. I think we both knew that I had loved him for a long time already.

Later that week, there was one night in his room when I said, “I love you too, but I’m scared.” That was the first time I said I love you in return. I was crying.

I fear the deaths of people I love intimately and protectively. I fear cars clipping the sidewalk while we’re walking to dinner. I fear choking on dinner, dying on a bite of bar food. I fear heart attacks. I fear not hearing him laugh again. I fear losing my closest friend. I fear forgetting. The people I love are too good to die in any way other than peacefully and happily. And the people I love are too good for me to forget.

We went back and forth from our apartments on the same block, fixing meals together and filling up the ugly, small kitchens with smoke from oil on the stove. He would always bring a bottle of wine in his coat pocket in winter. When I asked about the gesture once, he shrugged and said, I’m just trying to be a gentleman. We would argue like enemies and still do, sometimes, but back then we would panic, we would try to break up and cry into each other’s shoulders, separating our belongings into paper grocery bags, e-mail each other I’m sad the next day. What I felt then felt very much like fear. I wanted to finish the story we’d tried to start.

Now we have dated each other for over four years, and lived together for over two, although those numbers seem very humble next to the relationships of some couples we love and look up to. They seem very humble next to the marriage of Joan Didion and John Dunne.

Toward the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion looks objectively at the vacation she and John took to Hawaii under the guise of figuring out their money problems: “What had encouraged us to think that a resort hotel in Honolulu was the place to solve a cash shortfall? What lesson did we take from the fact that it worked?” She repeats several times how “it worked,” these sprawling, messy actions they take and lessons they stumble through together, how she wore sunglasses through their wedding service.

She writes:

Somehow it had all worked.

Why did I think that this improvisation could never end?

If I had seen that it could, what would I have done differently?
What would he?

I had wondered if my reading of Magical Thinking now, four years after my first reading and nearly five years after Macey’s death, would be less intimate than my last. It was not.

Tonight, when Larry walked into our bedroom after dinner, I had just read that passage and I was crying. Have we not been executing the most brilliant improvisation ourselves? We were so rough-and-tumble, so cruel at times, but we kept holding our out hands, kept working on the balance, wanting it for each other. We still do. And now I read about Didion and her husband of so many decades, the father of her daughter, her closest friend, and the fire pits in their old houses, their stock petty arguments, how he saw her on their wedding day, how he held her hand on flights until he died while her back was turned. She had been making dinner.

The improvisation is everything, and it will continue through and after grief.

Once, in my old basement apartment, I told Larry about my anxiety about the randomness of death. It was something I had just discovered and could not get over. We were still getting to know each other, and I remember him not being sure what to say at first, what level of comfort to offer. He could not, for instance, promise to never leave me or to protect me always. Instead he held me, and thought, and said, You can’t let fear get the best of you. That’s no way to live.

To fight against fear is to work to love, and to love is to improvise. We laugh every day. He lets me put my cold feet on him when we’re in our bed, trying to fall asleep in our bedroom with walls half-full of windows. We love each other, and we say goodnights, and then we meet in a spontaneous slow-dance to the radio in the morning, while the coffee machine chortles and drips.

(Originally published on youareamongfriends.com)