Heck Of A Guy

Unused Tickets To 1998 Holly Cole Cole Performance

A Moving Discovery

Last night, as part of the seemingly perpetual preparations for our impending move, I was rummaging through a desk, separating items destined for the trash, including four year old Jewel grocery receipts, unlabeled and unrecognized numbers scrawled on the backs of envelopes, and phone books, published in 2002, still in their plastic delivery wrappers, from the pencils, the thirty or forty boxes of paper clips purchased for my business 15 - 20 years ago, and other theoretically useful office supplies which were to be salvaged for transport to the new residence.

In a back corner of a little used drawer were two unused tickets to a Holly Cole performance at Park West in Chicago. Julie¹ and I had been fans of the Canadian singer for years and were excited about the prospect of seeing her perform in person.

A week before the concert, Julie’s cancer exacerbated, making it impossible for her to attend. Julie arranged for a friend to stay with her so I could drive into Chicago for the concert, but as the evening approached, I found it impossible to leave Julie’s side.

Julie’s health problems continued to wax and wane, but from this point onward she would never regain her previous levels of vitality and strength. Her course would continue to deteriorate until her death the next year.

Julie had arranged the logistics for our attendance at the performance, including obtaining the tickets, which I don’t recall seeing before last night. I certainly didn’t realize she had stashed them in her desk drawer.

Whether she simply didn’t bother disposing of the useless tickets or she intentionally kept the tickets as souvenirs of the unattended event, they have become for me an especially poignant memorial to the opportunities missed and the joys left unrealized because Julie died long before she deserved and long before we had explored, let alone exhausted, the exhilarations of being together.

Make It Go Away Or Make It Better

One of Julie’s favorite songs was Make It Go Away or Make It Better, one of the tracks from Holly Cole’s Dear Dark Heart album, released only three months before the Park West date.² The playlist from that album, including Make It Go Away, was heavily featured in that concert series.

The video version of Make It Go Away is a different arrangement than that found on the album but the essential message is unaltered and unmistakable.

Make It Go Away - Holly Cole

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was my fiercely intelligent, wickedly sexy, and much beloved wife with whom I had a outrageously wonderful marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning author. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ.↩
2. Dear Dark Heart was published October 21, 1997↩

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Our household is in full pre-move mode with boxes, tape, magic markers, and multiple lists overflowing every room.

In the process of rummaging through drawers and cabinets to determine which items are move-worthy and which are destined to become an accretion on our local Waste Management landfill, I came upon the cache of Julie’s¹ accessories and the pipe displayed above.

Most of Julie’s clothes, jewelry, and personal objects were given away long ago, and I don’t recall a single instance of her wearing any of the costume jewelry in that tray, some of which looks suspiciously like gifts from the kids during their preschool years. On the other hand, she was using that Coach wallet and the purse-sized day planner, its pockets filled with her then current insurance, social security, and credit cards, on an everyday basis before the final exacerbation of her cancer a few weeks before her death.

The antique pipe and case was her gift to me from the trip she took to England with a friend while I stayed home with the urchins.² Even she admitted the pipe was was an odd choice as “what did you bring me from your trip” present, but that makes it all the more significant to me.

I haven’t done any packing since I ran across this small lode of memories.

You’ve probably heard the bromide that love doesn’t end with the death of the loved one.

In any case, I can testify that it is incredibly, profoundly, intensely, painfully true.

Footnotes

1. Julie Showalter was my fiercely intelligent, wickedly sexy, and much beloved wife with whom I had a outrageously wonderful 20 year marriage that ended with her death in late 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding. She was also a prize-winning author. Many posts on this blog are about her, our unlikely romance, and our life together, and still others consist of her writings. Information can be found at Julie Showalter FAQ.↩
2. Yes, I was indeed once a saint.↩

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When I awoke this morning, I wondered where Julie could be, especially since I’m always the first one up.

After a couple of minutes, I realized that Julie died over eight years ago.

These days, that kind of thing only happens once every three or four months.

Still, it’s a disorienting experience and tends to put me off kilter for a while.

_____________________________


Julie Showalter was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife and a prize-winning writer, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. There are many other posts about her and her writing in this blog. For information, see Julie Showalter FAQ

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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

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.

___________________________________

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