Beth Howard - Making Piece

I killed my husband. I was sure of it. It was my fault. I’m the one who pushed for a divorce. He didn’t want it, must not have wanted it, otherwise he wouldn’t have died. He was dead, we were still married, and that told me everything. Before leaving my miner’s cabin for Portland, where my husband was reportedly dead, before putting my dogs in the care of my British neighbor, Ralph, I rummaged through my toiletry bag and found my wedding ring. The ring, an exact match to Marcus’s, was a band of fine gold on the outside, with an inner ring of steel on the inside. The bands were connected, yet separate, and made a jingling sound when they moved against each other. We had our rings designed by a goldsmith friend of Marcus’s in Germany to represent us—our strong bond balanced by our independence—and our lifestyle, the contrast of our love for both backpacking and five-star hotels.

I slid the ring back onto my finger where my white tan line had turned brown in the Texas sun, and shook my hand until I heard the familiar jingling. The gentle rattle had become a nonverbal communication between Marcus and me. We would shake our rings in each other’s ears as a way to say, “I’m sorry, I still love you” after an argument, when it was too difficult or too soon to utter the words out loud. I had taken the ring off even before I asked Marcus for the divorce. I took it off because I was mad at him. Mad that I couldn’t fly to Germany for my birthday in June to spend it with him. Because the auto industry was forced to make job cuts, Marcus was working two jobs and therefore he was too busy for me to visit. He started his days at 6:30 a.m. and returned home—home, which translated as a guest apartment attached to his parents’ house—no earlier than 9:30 at night, night after night. He was exhausted. I could hear it in the irritable tone of his voice. I could see his fatigue when we talked via Skype. I felt bad for him, but I was also hurt.

“What about me? I’m your wife. Am I not a priority?” I continued to plead. I hadn’t seen him since May. June came and went. And then there was July, a month during which he developed a chronic cough. “Don’t be like Jim Henson,” I chided. “You know, the guy who created The Muppets. He was sick but refused to take any time off work. It turned into pneumonia, and look what happened to him.”

Marcus insisted he was fine. His doctor told him his lungs were clear, it wasn’t bronchitis, gave him an asthma inhaler and sent him home. If only the doctor had checked his heart, had used ultrasound equipment to inspect his aorta, checked the thickness of its wall, had seen that there was a weakening and performed emergency surgery to put in a stent. If only.

Marcus spent his 43rd birthday on July 2—having no clue it would be his last—buying his new road bike. He still had no time for me to visit. His August vacation was coming up, so we assumed we would just wait and see each other then. I was looking forward to seeing him. I missed him. I missed his body, his shapely soccer-player thighs, his perfect, round ass. I missed his scent, or lack of scent, maybe it was just his presence I longed for. I missed spooning against his smooth skin, his chest hair tickling my back. This was the longest stretch of time we’d spent apart since we met—and, no, Skype sex doesn’t count.

“Let’s make a plan,” I suggested.

“No,” he said. “Every minute of my life is planned out for work. I don’t want to make any plans right now. I’m too tired.” And that was it. That was my breaking point. He didn’t want to make plans for his August vacation— our vacation. I felt cast aside, not important enough for him to pencil me into his calendar. Work always came first. So I asked for a divorce. “You don’t want to make plans? I’ll make them for you. Instead of coming to Texas, you can spend the three weeks in Portland filing the papers.”

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.