Greg confessed that he never believed he’d have anything in life. His father had died when he was five and his mother died shortly after we married. He had no brothers or sisters. He always believed he’d go through life alone, struggling the way his mother had. She had made ends meet, but not without worry and not with any joy, just fighting the demands and strain of everyday life. He confessed everything he’d ever feared: that he wouldn’t marry, and then when he did, that he would fail as a husband, as a provider. I came to understand that the need to provide for his family was his sole driving purpose, and so ingrained in him, it trumped all else. We talked for hours, like newlyweds, and I promised we wouldn’t fail, that together, failing wasn’t a possibility. I tried to make him understand that there was more than one meter stick to measure success—happiness, fulfillment, laughter, joy—and that simply making a mortgage payment every month shouldn’t be a life goal. To Greg, providing was all that mattered. Wherever Greg had gone, what was his meter stick? Did he think of himself as a failure? I couldn’t reconcile the image of Greg as I remembered him with Missing Greg, lounging on an island with another woman.
I wore Greg’s sweatshirts every day; only wrapped in Greg could I function again. Before, I would dress with care. I would take time with my hair, even apply some makeup, just to go to the library or the toddler gym. It used to be important that I looked composed, envied by other, more frazzled moms. But because coiffed hair and makeup looked clownish with oversized sweatshirts and yoga pants, I quit bothering. Since I also wouldn’t wash them, they took on an odd odor after the first month. I didn’t care. I felt swallowed by sadness.
Behind the sadness was a simmering anger. The anger would boil over unexpectedly. I must have started cursing more without realizing it because I would hear Hannah in the playroom, trying to put together a puzzle, and frustrated with the pieces, she’d say, “Oh, shit,” or “Damn it.” I made a mental note to watch my mouth, but since I had no control over my verbal tirades, either the language I used or who I directed it at, my efforts were kind of useless. Everything felt useless.
Mom brought me a book titled On Grief and Grieving that was about grief having five stages. I started to read it, hoping that once I understood my emotions, I would be able to resolve them, or at least work toward pretending to be normal again. But the book talked about death, divorce, and infertility. There was no chapter on lost husbands. Everyone in the book had a label: a widower, a divorcee, an orphan. I was label-less.
The book explained the stages of grief, but my heartache was more than building blocks to be piled one on top of the other until I could bridge the gap between my two lives. My existence was a complicated tapestry: red for anger, blue for intense sadness, green for happiness. Yes, happiness existed, not much, but some, particularly in the early morning, in the place between sleep and awake when I’d think Greg was lying next to me in bed, and imagine us talking softly, deciding who would get up first and who should get coffee in bed on Sundays. Then Leah would cry, awake and wanting out of her crib. When I opened my eyes to the bare sheets, cool in the early morning light, I’d weave a thick, ugly braid of red and blue into my blanket of sorrow.
I searched each memory for signs. Was Greg unhappy? Did he really up and leave us? That one day a few months ago, he had said he didn’t mind if I took the day off and went shopping while he stayed with the girls; was he really angry instead? How about the time I washed a few of his white work shirts with one of Hannah’s red Tshirts and turned his pink? Had that been the final straw? For his birthday last year, I’d gotten him an expensive watch he claimed to want. When he opened it, he looked almost disappointed. Why?