When she died it was as if his car accelerated
off the pier’s end and zoomed upward over death water
for a year without gaining or losing altitude,
then plunged in a honeycomb of steel, still dreaming
awake, as dead as she was but conscious still.
There is nothing so selfish as misery nor as boring.
And depression is devoted only to its own practice.
Mourning resembles melancholia precisely except
that melancholy adds self-loathing to stuporous sorrow
…
He awakened daily to the prospect of nothingness
in the day’s house that like all houses was mortuary.
He slept on the fornicating bed of the last breath.
He closed her eyes in the noon of her middle life;
he no longer cut and pruned for her admiration;
he worked for praise of women and they died.
…
- From “Kill the Day” by Donald Hall
Julie Was Right - As Usual
Midway through one of Julie’s short stories, The Secret Andrew, she limns the changes in the grief experienced by the protagonist, a woman whose husband had died a year earlier, by noting that she is then (at that point in the story) still unable to bear re-reading the letters the two of them had exchanged when they first met but, as the conveniently omniscient narrator points out, sometime in the future
It wasn’t.
Julie was profoundly, terrifyingly on the mark - a lifetime together was not nearly enough.
___________________________________
Julie Showalter, my much-beloved, fiercely smart, wickedly sexy
wife, died in the bed we shared at 7:00 on the morning of
December 3, 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of
our wedding nearly 20 years earlier.
I miss her every day.
___________________________________
