Evan’s Remembrances

In summer 2020, Evan posted a series of images and reflections on grief, on Anne, and their shared life together.

6/30/20.

All our friends and family and Annie’s friends and family—

Annie is now in hospice after fighting the brain cancer for nearly 6 years, and maybe much longer. She is at home in Berkeley with me, our two boys, her sister Cate and dear friend Jen and parents and soon her sister Megan. And my sister and her family about to arrive and my parents here. And family and friends all around, many connecting, by Zoom and other means. She has her people and she is home. And we expect that she will be departing this world within the next few days. Those of you who I haven’t been able to reach out to personally, feel free to connect via FB messenger or my gmail or text.

This was always way too soon. It is so very untimely. We are so very sad for what will never be and for the profundity of the future of which we have been deprived by forces beyond us. And yet she is very calm and in no pain now as she moves through her last hours. Although she is drifting as that deep current pulls her further away from shore, she is still hearing us and feeling us hold her and speaking a few words.

Yesterday, she had a brilliant stretch of lucidity. Speaking so much with her own voice, at the time speaking of her boys but I think also of all of us, she said:

“I want them to feel this.”

Please honor her and yourselves and each other in these terrible times when so much has been sown, not merely of hate, but of disconnection. Stay in the world, stay fully human.

Feel this.

7/3/20 Drawings

Anne Campisi was also gifted with wit and a talent for drawing.

I guess it was in 2005 when a family member, no doubt intending to be reassuring or even complimentary, told me that my life choices had been “appropriate.” At the time, I thought I had done pretty damn well in my life choices (was in a tenure-track teaching position at a good college, publishing steadily, owned a house and was living with a beautiful woman who was the love of my life). So I made some snide comment that my gravestone should just say “Appropriate,” which Annie found hilarious, and so drew this.

7/4/20 Annie Fought

Annie fought the enemy with great bravery and tenacity, as she lived her life. She had begun feeling excessive fatigue in early 2014, while in residence working on her novel at the Hambidge Center. She was diagnosed early in October, 2014, with a stage IV glioma, a glioblastoma (later reclassified as an infiltrating midline glioma). The doctors themselves were a little startled at the diagnosis because Annie did not present clinically as a stage IV brain cancer patient. Indeed, after her second child, she was healthy, slender, robust, absolutely in her prime. The picture here was taken in late 2013; she was 40, and she was beautiful as ever. She looked like she stepped out of a magazine.

And so, one doctor opined that this was an old tumor that had grown very slowly or lain dormant, giving her brain time to adapt. Annie herself was quite taken with this idea and we all began thinking back to her peculiar undiagnosed fatigue syndrome in college. Maybe she has been fighting this monster for a very long time.

She did everything she could to stay with us, to be there to raise her boys, to be a loving force in my life, our lives, the lives of many, many family and friends, to have a full career and to use the gifts she had been given to make more art and to finish great works.

In October 2014, the doctors gave her 6 months. This past January, over 5 YEARS later, doctors again gave her 6 months. At the end of June, as we entered hospice, the nurses gave her days. A week later now, she’s hovering very near, but won’t cross over quite yet. As I keep telling the nurses, I’ve never known my Annie not to be the last to leave a party.

We spent a few days up in Mendocino immediately after the diagnosis, looking out at the sea, re-orienting our understanding of the shape of our lives. She wrote then, in her journal:

“The purpose of prayer is not to change your fate, because acts of God are always beyond your control, the purpose of prayer is to change [and here she archly uses a Greek delta rather than the word “change”] your relationship to that fate.

But I want my life, I love my life, I want to live it to a later end. I’ll fight with whatever we have at our disposal to keep it, to make it a WHOLE life.”

She did fight hard, and she had a damn good run. She feared in 2014 that our children (then 4 and 2) would not only be deprived of her, but wouldn’t even remember her. Now they are 10 and 8, and their mama has been a force in their lives and in getting them through childhood. They will remember; they will know her.

I’m so sorry, my beloved, that I couldn’t give you a whole life, that your wonderful life was cut so short. I am so sorry that we will not raise our children and then grow old together. That we will no longer hold each other, our passion breakneck insatiable through the night of the world. You have been my soulmate, the love of my life and I’m devastated by your loss. My soul has been cut out from under me, and grief pours through me in an uprooting flood. I feel severed from time and history and I stumble on a castaway shore, exiled, nameless, not knowing who I am.

There will be a path up from this beach, and life will go on somehow. I will not surrender to despair, not this time, not ever. But I will not, I cannot leave you. Anymore than I could leave my own flesh and bone. You are in me, you are in your boys, you are in your family and friends, you are in your works which will be made whole and will be known.

7/4/20 Storyteller

From a very early age, Annie fashioned herself a storyteller, and took Scheherazade (Shahrzad) as a pseudonym. By the 1990s, she was cultivating relationships with local Berkeley storytellers. She always had a penchant for drawing people to her with her fearless and penetrating gaze. Combined with a talent for conducting interviews, she was a natural at field research and could have been a great ethnographer or news reporter (she flirted with the second for a while). Here she is in 1993, striking up an easy conversation with a woman on the street.

18 Years old. (7/5/20)

1991. 18 years old. Annie is with Outward Bound in Montana.

She would often describe in later years how revelatory and empowering she found the Outward Bound experience and especially the solo hike for developing resilience and independence. She remained avidly involved in outdoor education throughout her young adult life and across our travels— at Vassar, Cornell, our years in St. Paul (more on the dogsledding later). It’s one of my great sadnesses that she will not be able to impart this enthusiasm to our sons.

During this solo hike in 1991, Annie wrote a letter to her older self, which she found and read after her diagnosis and then reflected upon as follows in a journal:

“Two weekends ago, Ellen dug through the Rose Street basement with me to exhume a letter that I’d written to myself back in 1991.

Talk about proprioception—the perception of ‘one’s own’, the elements of one’s self as they are oriented in time and space.

“I’m at 10 thousand feet right now on the Senia Plateau of Montana,” it begins (I begin). “Had to cross Froze-to-Death Mountain, Breakneck pass, and the Hellroaring river to get here. There’s a lot more in you than I’d thought.”

There’s something undeniably cool, even charming, about a letter in the semi-second person point-of-view, this slippery first. There is a lot more in you than you’d thought. But I have to pause over the page—holy crap, I think, did I just receive a pep talk from the 1990s!? From myself!?

Yes, I did.

I was in the Beartooth mountains, a couple weeks into my first Outward Bound backpacking course, the phenomenal expedition that inspired me to become a wilderness instructor. The plan at the time, on that mountaintop in 1991, was for students to write themselves a letter that the school would then mail back to us in six months. That would make it arrive one semester into my first year of college. A big transition and probably great timing.

But I already knew, even as I agonized over writing it, that in six months I would still remember everything I wrote that day. Six months wasn’t enough time for me to forget. Or to impress me, either; I mean, if you’re going to DO a time capsule, I thought, you’re not just spicing with the Time.

It’s all about the timing.

At the time, in the Montana wilderness, I figured I'd hold onto the letter four years, until the end of college. I expected to have covered some meaningful ground by then, hopefully to have developed a truly different (and better) perspective.

By the end of college, however, I still felt quite close to that experience in the Beartooth mountains, and to that Self as well. So I held onto the letter. I held onto it for over a dozen moves and two decades. I’ve never lost sight of it, or forgotten about it. Over the years I’ve taken it out every so often just to hold it and think, When? It’s not time yet. Not yet…

…Now. After twenty-three years it only took a few moments to find. The letter was in the basement, in a well-labeled box of journals. I have dreaded reading this letter, too. Though I had finally managed to forget its specifics, I was still pretty sure that it was disappointing in all the ways one’s self-conscious youth (especially when put on the spot) can be, filled with vague admonishments and silly judgments, narrow in its imagination and short on the kinds of quotes, illustrations, anecdotes, prognostications and shameless gossip that make any personal journal worth reading.

By and large, these were totally valid fears. So I’ll only subject you to some excerpts.

The envelope’s return address is the “Eye of the Storm,” that exhilarating peace in between the hurricane winds of high school and college. It’s addressed to Eaglefeather, a name that I insisted my family call me as very little girl, my first persona.The letter’s salutation is to “Annie”, the name my family and oldest friends still use. It is signed “Z”, which was what everyone at Outward Bound called me that summer.

I’ve got to love this, how she—the 18 year old writer—distinguished us through time: my fleeting Self in the field (Z) writing personally to my imagined future self (Annie) who would definitely not lose a letter addressed to our childhood name. I cut the envelope.

It’s four pages long. I knew that if I first read it silently to myself I would spend the whole time wincing and winging, apologizing and fiercely redacting. Instead I immediately read the thing aloud to Ellen and Evan, the perfect, game audience, not least for their being the ones who know me, respectively, longest and best.

“The physical strength and endurance alone of your body was very impressive on this trip. It brought out a resilience and a determination that I’d doubted I had. Emotional and mental stress go without saying. But you survived it. Better than most—if I do say so myself. So when the pressure of life begins to build again (or continue, as the case may be), please (no, use the imperative) know this: You CAN take it. You CAN deal. The vital signs are there to prove that nothing can beat you (without cheating).”

I am SO 18. Still, the thing that came across most powerfully, and to all three of us, was that it sounds just like me. A younger me, but totally, recognizably my voice. Strangely, it’s good for me to hear that young voice again, as if it’s truly another Me, each of us occupying an extraordinary point in our joined life.

I’ve had a challenging relationship with my self over the years; I would never have taken it for granted back then that I could hear such a letter read aloud one day and think: I like her, you know? She’s okay. Finally, here is the ‘truly different (and better) perspective’ I was waiting for. That may be the whole point and success of the letter right there.

At one point I politely inquire, “I have a question: Who are your friends? Ellen? Jen? Bill?” Why yes! I further advise myself—“I have a suggestion” to consider doing another three-day Solo, and to write a new short story, because you know ‘it’s about time’. These seem like good, well-timed suggestions. As is, perhaps “Set up a rope swing and go swing your pituitary back into gear. Go for the super-adrenaline rush.”

Lord, but that sounds like…me.

I want to tell that girl we rode a motorcycle for ten years, in five states, wearing black leathers. I guess she knows.

I also got pretty cheeky with the “Do yourself a favor—“ admonishments and some tedious, righteous hopes that future-I does not smoke or eat meat. I listed out some strengths as I saw them and some things to work on (a long list including brevity, spelling and “not pretending not to be freaked out when I am. Get so you truly, genuinely can deal.” I wonder how she’d think I’m doing.

It's signed off with a rapid download of all my favorite energies--now my own children's energies--one eye left open to See: “Keep a storm of chaos and adventure behind one eye. Mischievous, energy, synergy, WILD, ferocious, gentle, relampago, grab the reins and steer. Green and purple, dream with color and smell. Livid living, Good Journey and Memory, CorMensTerraVox, Whitewater and —

“SO, Nameless Child,” I thunder, so awfully portentous, so excited I can hardly contain it. I can just picture myself leaping solo around the Montana mountaintop up there (good thing there were no walls), music soaring in my head, throwing sparks for having Called Out like this to my future self and fully expecting an answer, “Who are you now?”

I signed it off: “Z”--and leapt to turn the page.“

7/5/20 Beginnings

My relationship with Annie began (sort of... things were complicated in college) towards the end of her Freshman (my Junior) year at Vassar in the Spring of 1992, when Eric Black and I co-directed this compilation of short plays and excerpts about God and the Devil.

Here’s Annie’s copy of the program with her charmingly enthusiastic annotations.

Halfway through rehearsals, we lost our Lucifer, and I stepped into the role with Annie as one of my demons.

Let’s just say that given the fact that Vassar women at that time dressed almost exclusively in de-sexualizing form-obliterating dark baggy layers, Annie (whose figure was quite voluptuous at that point) was rather striking in her demon’s body stocking.

7/5/20 Stew Distraction

This is Stew Distraction, a performance poem Annie kicked around with at Vassar. A daydream, as Annie says, about the density of daydreams. As good a place as any, I suppose, to mention that Annie had a superpower: she dreamt in exquisite detail, and often lucidly. As a consequence, she was deeply fascinated with dream and sleep. Her thesis project in cognitive science related to memory consolidation in sleep.

The attached, I think, was a recording for her own pleasure, made in April or May 1994, according to her notes. She didn’t often turn to poetry, but when she did, of course the result would be an ecstatic incantation about the pleasures of expression itself. She was much the romantic in these days, chasing experience and intensity of feeling by way of language and dream.

Given the doctor’s suggestion that Annie’s glioma may have been an “old tumor,” it’s conceivable that not only the “fatigue syndrome” Annie suffered in college, but also her dreaming superpower had something to do with this intruder.

Go to Audio

7/6/20 Wedding Pics

Our wedding. July 21, 2001. Annie was, of course, breathtaking. And I was a very lucky man.

We had delayed that moment a long time— we dated our relationship to 1994. But we were long distance A LOT through those years— me doing an M.A. in Madison, her finishing college at Vassar and then moving back to the Bay Area, then me starting a Ph.D. at Stanford, then her starting her M.F.A. at Irvine, me doing research in Indonesia. There were tensions from all this separation, indeed there were some doubts— all thankfully buried in time. The truth is that we loved each other deeply, and the fact of how difficult we made it for ourselves only compelled us to actively choose each other again and again.

By 2001, enough was enough and we made vows to what was already true.

Go to A+E pic gallery

7/6/20

So, yes, obviously I’m grieving right now. And I’m grieving hard because it has been pent up over years of keeping calm and carrying on in our struggle against the disease. And allowing her

to die now has just opened the floodgates. And especially

because it is so big and has been building so long, and because of who Annie is, I feel this overwhelming need not to grieve in private, but rather to enter my grief into the public record. Thank you all for bearing witness and adding your love to the enormous love we shared.

7/6/20 What Not to Say to Someone Grieving

In the dark hours of the morning here on July 6, 2020, Annie is sleeping peacefully in the hospital bed that has supplanted the bed of our marriage. Leading up to July 4, her decline had been steady and there was, at one point, an endless moment when the entire family held our own breaths as hers appeared to cease. Then, yesterday morning, a small motion in the right hand that increased through the day, an easing of her breath, articulation in her lips, and a labored limited speech, which she used, with great effort, in the late hours of the night, to whisper in my ear...

Forget me. Move on.

O, my great enduring Love, you are courageous, indomitable, a firebrand to bring forth such thunderclaps on your precious, hard-fought breaths! I know what you meant to say, and that this seemingly callous shorthand was so only because each syllable exhausted you and you couldn’t say more (how frustrating it must be for a wordsmith who has always had more to say!). I know you were telling me to live on, to be happy, for our boys also. You were admonishing me not to allow the death of a mother, a wife, a friend, a soulmate to water our gardens with poison or enshroud all you love in darkness. I thank you and love you so deeply for your defiance in the face of death and its consequences, your sacrifice to say such a thing for the sake of all you love. I swear to you that we will move on and we will thrive and your family will survive.

But no, my precious blossom, I cannot, will not forget you. I have our boys to finish raising; that alone forbids oblivion. They will need their mother’s great legacy. They deserve it; we owe it to them.

And the labor I will and must undertake to preserve that legacy for them, to make it whole and allow it full expression for them is not morbid, is not a clinging to the past. We both know only too well that the Angel of History cannot raise the dead as she is blown backwards into the future. But I cannot fail to remember and honor you, my soulmate. For the sake of our boys, and also for my own sake. Because I cannot be whole to our boys or to myself without bringing you along for the ride, you who have shaped and entwined with my soul. Don’t you know that the story of my life is incoherent without the story of yours; we have been warp and woof for too long, my entire adult life.

There will be no crippling of our memories, no epistemic violence. Resection is not possible without destroying vital surrounding tissue. But the prognosis is good. Your beautiful life will be a temple in our family’s tree.

There may be some among my family and friends already tempted to join in encouraging me to move on, speaking to me of our future, starting to lay plans while my Annie’s pulse is still warm. I ask any such to please do me that small kindness of educating yourself on human grief before injuring me further with callous speech. Here’s a pretty good primer, I’m sure you can find more: https://whatsyourgrief.com/what-not-to-say-after-a-death/?

https://whatsyourgrief.com/what-not-to-say-after-a-death/?fbclid=IwAR18MIHbMkj8nFgChxbGbab0RQd3BiWrrilNCg7Y2pCMnFTF5d6XrKXPO0E

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7/6/20. Love Letter.

And here’s another young love Annie letter, this one from January 1995. It’s certainly a young love letter, except this is Annie, so it incorporates drawings that are a bit better than your average doodle, a dialogue with her grandmother on an imaginary burro-riding venture, and some seriously high caliber love imagery: “When you laugh, I feel sunflowers.”

Speaking of which, Annie acquired the moniker “Delicate Blossom” in college— ironic, of course. She was hardly a shrinking blossom. She did have a penchant for sunflowers, which for quite some time were my love-gifts of choice (preferably with a bit of chocolate). In any case, delicate blossom, DB or just “blossom” she was— the latter being the best choice for sincere love talk.

Such ecstatic proclamations of devotion might seem merely the excess of young love. But Annie maintained such intensity throughout our love. A lucky man was I, and I did my best to match her devotion if not her prose.

“Our ghosts will haunt together.”

7/6/20. Long Distance

An excerpt from a letter Annie wrote to me from Irvine around October 1999, while I was in Jakarta. This was perhaps the hardest stretch in our relationship when the many stresses of being long distance nearly overwhelmed us. In the first part of the letter, which I don’t include here, she expresses her frustration with me and her doubts about our ability to go on. I wince to look back now at that strife, but it really doesn’t matter anymore.

What does matter is that after expressing such frustration, Annie (25 years old at the time) explains why her love nevertheless prevails. Looking back now at this glorious love letter, framed as a rebuttal to Annie’s own doubts, I marvel at how well this wonderful woman knew me, how keenly she saw me. And that was over 20 years ago. I still find so much insight here, lessons I need to keep learning and reassurances I still need to hear.

“I love you because I owe a lot of my life-as-it-is to you, and I love my life. I am a better person for you. You call me to a higher standard. I love you because I always believe that sooner or later you know exactly what I mean. I love you because you've been there all this time, and you still write that you love me back. I love you because you are the kindest person I know. (You feel it in a box sometimes that glows and heats with your kindness, with you somehow, sometimes not confident in showing to other people in the way you feel it. Like: I've rarely seen you confident in the way you touch an animal or a child, even as I know how much you love them). I love you because you are hilariously funny. Because you are clever. I love you because it makes me so proud when you make a crowd laugh. I love you because you shoot high and hit what you aim for. I love you because you flew all that way, right away, and pretended that it was to return a spatula. I love you because I believed I would die while we were driving in Car Bomb -- I mean, I really truly believed we would not make it -- and I didn't care, because I was with you, and if we died then, it wouldn't have been the worst way to go. I love you because you read me stories in bed. I love you because you read my stories (in bed), and because you keep your compliments earned and your criticism honest.

I love you because you recited Shakespeare to me at the door. I love you because you make my food talk. I love that you play endless board games and don't despair of me when my words sometimes leave me. I love you because you sing. To me. You made me that amazing invitation to my 25th birthday. You made me a Valentine. I love you because you always come to me (Come to me!). You came to Poughkeepsie, NY, to Ely, MN, to SF, NoCal, to Orange County, SoCal (THAT's Love!). I love you because you try not to be an old man when some spirit in you would have it that way (you are still younger than you think). I love you because you inspire in me such happiness and highs (could you ever come there with me, Love? I have never seen you as happy as you make me feel; this of all things makes sad: that we can be so self-conscious that we do not get excited Together, don't seem to enjoy thoroughly the same things, or simultaneously. Of all things I return always to this). I love you because you said that if it took longer for me to accomplish what I wanted to get out of that year I quit my job and began to write, that you would help me take as long as I needed to do what I need to do. That faith and love and generosity rings in my ears every day. I love you because you have faith in me (I have such faith in you).

I love you because you keep my secrets, and because you can take my secrets. I love you because you write back to me with your heart on the page. You DO tell me what you feel. I love you because you are an enormously talented writer. I love you because you write me transporting love letters, the likes of which would make some women faint or run with the intensity. When you use words, Love, they can physically Strike people however you wish; that is a rare power. I love that you write letters giving what-for to self-righteous, inefficient e-petitioners without being apolitical yourself. I love you because you're fucking smart, too. I love you because you are ambitious but not blinded with it. I love that I can say with a straight face that Evan's in Jakarta right now, avoiding riots and car bombs, and that if he's not kidnapped by the militia men, he'll be back in early November. And I love it that the answer to their next question is: Theatre.

I love you because you make friends where-ever you go (you could be more comfortable with that ability, more open to people who would know you; people gravitate to you). I love you because my close friends all love Us. Because the whole Campisi and Gillick clan likes you. I love you because you understand there are complexities to people, that people have epiphanies, that they see visions, that they can know Truths. I love that you can experience such things and take others seriously, without being gullible or losing yourself in them. As suggestible as you say you are, you have a very strong Ground. (How can we be united without losing your sense of that Self Ground? You must learn the answer to this. You must tell me if it's possible; I believe that it is). I love you because you wanted me in Australia and let me distract you. I love you because you gave me a jade necklace. I love you because you keep those two necklaces, the Star and the Yin Yang. I love you for all this and a thousand other things you are and have done that I keep inside me as the vital core-history of Love. I love you because since I've loved you I've always loved you and how else can I -- being Me -- ever feel for You? The warm, colored cords of my life line are spliced inexorably with yours, Evan. That is a true thing.”

7/7/20 Glory days

For any Victorians, puritans, prudes and digital neo-Platonists, here is your trigger warning: what follows is a celebration that my Annie’s life was luminous not only from her bright spirit and expressive gifts, but that she enjoyed her strong and beautiful body. And that, in our love, we enjoyed it together. Her body was a miraculous gift, even as it ultimately turned against herself, her brain’s own glial cells depriving her (and me) of the use of her body, and cutting her life short. Sex, of course, was part of our love, and thus part of our story. The damage to our physical intimacy caused by the cancer is part of my grief.Annie always told the story of first noticing me on her first day of college as I passed through the corridors of our dorm (Cushing) brandishing a sword that was technically, though a mere souvenir, Toledo steel. My first memory of noticing her was seeing her walk through the dorm commons, a powerful-looking woman with ripped shoulders (she had been a competitive swimmer through high school), raven hair, a confident demeanor, and curves in all the right places. I remember thinking from the start that she was sexy as hell, but well out of my league as a decidedly un-athletic theater nerd. There was a general air of health about her, both physical and mental, that my brooding 19 or 20 year old self found alien.Then she started dating one of my closest friends and became part of my circle. I have no intention of rehashing college dramas which are pretty damn irrelevant 30 years on, but might possibly still have power to sting. Suffice to say that where bodies were concerned, there was near-constant conflict in our circle between traditional relationship norms and sexual freedom and experimentation. Annie was “taken,” which, in our world, rendered her formally unavailable. And this formal unavailability might extend somewhat beyond the formal termination of relationships, though opinions differed on how far.Annie herself at the time was all about having experiences, and the notion that physical intimacy with anyone other than her boyfriend was a form of trespass seemed to her absurdly quaint if not outrightly patriarchal, and in any case, tedious. And so, I got to know Annie, as “just a friend,” [btw, one cannot grasp the habitus of small liberal arts colleges in the early 90s without an understanding of the prolific use of scare quotes, but I digress] with significant recourse to that essential tool of liminal sexuality: the body massage. I would visit Annie in her dorm room and we would decide, in a blur of offer and acceptance, that I would give her a massage. Throughout her life, Annie was prone to neck and back pain and genuinely found relief, though all too briefly, in massage. At Vassar, such massages were ubiquitous and presumed to be within the proper limits of just-friendship.However, we were not content to restrict ourselves to the typical shoulder rub through the t-shirt. I offered to give Annie full body massages. She responded by stripping down to her panties, laying down prone on her bed, and inviting me to work on all surfaces thus exposed. And so, I gave her many a deep tissue massage there in her dorm room, working sandalwood oils or creams into the muscles of her neck, back, arms and calves. Her feet and hands. And lingering on her thighs and butt and her sides at the base of her breasts— not, I admit, particular hot spots of muscle tension. And I let the intention of relieving her tension cross into the intention of arousing her desire and my own. And, as long as I did not stray into that small area she kept covered, this was still something “just friends” might do. And if I happened to kiss her behind the ear while I worked or bit that ear to illicit a gasp, that was still something “just friends” might do. And if I were to draw a feathered touch over her skin to raise the gooseflesh— a treatment not to be found in the deep tissue massage manual— that was still something “just friends” might do.And so I explored her gorgeous, voluptuous, and... healthy 19-year-old body within the admittedly dubious boundaries of just-friendship. And our desires slowly simmered as we made ourselves a Tristan and an Iseult, restrained by the powerful, if ambiguous, understanding that restrictions imposed by her relationship with my friend remained in place, regardless of what exactly the current status of that relationship might be, which itself was subject to differing opinions.And I look back now, from the end of my dear Annie’s life, on those rapturous, ridiculous beginnings. After years of physical intimacy burdened by the cancer, and years before that of all-too-typical strife over our different desires, and the mad wish comes over me that I could go back and repair anything that was hurtful, be a more attentive lover, take hold of her again for each and every day we ever lived and fling ourselves joyfully against the walls of our apartments. These are rabbit holes, I know, but my grief takes me there and I am so sad that we will no longer hold each other, have sex, kiss, enjoy each other’s bodies. My lonely grief-stricken body calls out in praise and joyful memory of glory days.

Vigil 7/7/20 .

It’s mid-afternoon on July 7, 2020, and Annie is still in the world. Her breathing is very shallow now, but she still seems relaxed, her eyes are open and often focused and she raises and gestures her right arm and hand. She can vocalize, but it is so soft and the syllables so slurred that we usually can’t decipher what she’s trying to say, or even if there is coherent intention behind her words. It has been very hard to let go of trying to resolve these faint soundings into communications. But at the same time we feel fairly certain that the important things have all been said. The family is exhausted and living in a strange state on the threshold of her death.

I am touching her as much as I can, holding her hand, resting my head on her chest. She is still warm, still feels essentially like my Annie. Landmarks on the map of her body are largely still there, even though her entire body is occluded by the twilight of consciousness. I struggle to stop trying to resolve the unresolvable or bring clarity to the fundamentally opaque.

I have had a few tentative conversations with old friends in the past day, for which I am very grateful. But it gave me a glimpse of what it will be to be a widower, and I felt such a vulnerability come over me, not knowing how to be myself without Annie to anchor me. I am so desirous of intimacy and Annie has been the focus of that desire since I was a child. And so I feel like a child, suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of wisdom and experience, a stranger to my peers whose lives are still whole. This will be hard, and I’m seeing that it will be especially hard to learn again how to allow myself to be vulnerable again, especially with women, without my long-accustomed protections.

This picture is of a Roman sarcophagus at Palmyra. Annie enthusiastically jumped in to have her picture taken. In the past she had posed gothically along gravesites. It’s an eerie, somewhat unsettling image, except that she is so very self-possessed. I imagine Annie passing with poise and self-possession through the portals to the next world..

7/7/20 Love

Could I even begin to recall the number of times I have fallen in love with you all over again? I can love you madly whether you are here or too distant to even phone. Your breath across my neck is the best of all love songs, your hand on my shoulder the most solid of truths. What you give to me with a single affirmation of love, is enough— in and of itself— to kindle my spirit and quell my storms. When I look at you, into you, I find fields and forests of time unfolding down a common path. (from a letter from Annie to Evan, February 14, 1996)

More on my Annie’s Body, 7/8/20

For it is her miraculous body, which, unbelievably, has reached the end of its journey. It will cease as a living body and be cremated into ash that our family will scatter and celebrate her being taken up into such stuff as this Earth and this Universe are made of. And that will be a fitting taking up of those mortal remains of my Annie, whose body has carried her so far. And her legacy, her children, her family, her works, her spirit, her soul will live on, even as her body is no more.

And my grief, and the grief of my children, and of all of us, her people, must contend above all with the mystery, the uncanniness of a life that has been disembodied. Which is to say a life no longer bound to Time, a life that, being now beyond biology, is also beyond history. A soul. Which is to say the paradox of a life that lives without a body.

To this body whose journey has ended, I give my love, my respect, my awe, and my praise. This miraculous earthly flesh that has housed my Annie and brought her to me and carried her through this life.

That healthy body which arrived at Vassar in 1991, a goddess, mighty and beautiful, with a swimmer’s muscled shoulders and a hiker’s strong legs, with luxuriant long dark hair, all the other places she had hair— unshaven and defiant, round breasts in full bloom, full hips, and her penetrating brown eyes that would look into me and into which I would gaze tirelessly down through the years.

That sexy body which, as a demon, caught me, as Lucifer, which I touched and explored in just-friendship, and made love to in dorm rooms, in cars parked at airports, in woods and fields. That came to me in the booth at Avery Theatre where I was squatting during a Spring Break and made love to me there under the lighting and sound boards. That, as I was sitting in our van, parked near Mt. Rushmore en route to Wisconsin, appeared, like a nymph, at the edge of the woods clad only in Teva’s. And I got out of the fucking van and went into those woods. That made love with me in so very many beds. And other places.

That strong body which walked and hiked and ran and played soccer and rowed and swam and danced and rejoiced in igreat health and good fortune. And traveled with me and carried boxes and backpacks and children and built homes with me.

That fertile body which bore our children. But not before one tender sad morning in our house in St. Paul when a first pregnancy ended after a few weeks. And Annie said it was a faint little emptiness like a butterfly alighting, which had tarried on her shoulder. And she wept and bought a poster with a circus performer on a giraffe and above her the one word: Life. And this sits on our mantle still. But that would go on to bear two strong boys (the first pregnancy scandalously easy and the second with back pains calling for quite a bit of massage) after which Annie looked so good that other women in locker rooms were reduced to invective that this could NOT be the body of a mother after two pregnancies.

That resilient body which was afflicted with stage IV brain cancer, a diagnosis with less than 10% surviving over 3 years, and lived with it for nearly 6 years. That endured radiation and chemo and weight gain and loss from the steroids. That endured the loss of mobility and articulation and muscle control and finally the ability to leave the bed at all and even to speak. And that even now, as I sit by my Annie’s bed hearing the first birds of dawn on the morning of July 8, 2020, a week and a half after entering hospice, still clings to life.

To this magnificent body that has housed and carried my soulmate, my love, my dearest Annie, I give thanks. I bear witness to the poetry of your life, inscribed, thankfully, in ink and word, but also in your warm breath and laying hold of this world. And I promise that the memory of my Annie and her life and her legacy on this Earth shall not be incorporeal..

Tidying Up, 7/9/20

The numbness that was my coping mechanism for much of the past six years is back. I’ve cried a lot this past fortnight as I face her coming death and let myself remember the entirety of our lives together. For now, those tears have dried. I’m cried out. I start to reassert the doing of some chores from the women relatives who have taken charge for me here. Being thus among capable women is a blessing, but so strange and I confront my own fragility. I start to tidy up. I throw away some old papers, not hers but my own, things I’d kept for no good reason from my former academic career. Peripheral rather than poignant clutter.

Annie is still with me, with us in the dark hours crossing into July 9, 2020. It is now 12 days until our 19th wedding anniversary, an occasion I expect to mark alone this year. In the past day, she has crossed into sleep, perhaps for the last time, and we attend no more to opaque murmurings, the raising of her right hand or any other artifact of intention, but only to the quality of her breathing. Our vigil has passed wholly into maintenance, the perpetuation of a bare Now awaiting No Longer. The tide has carried her out.

I have been correcting my grammar to maintain the present tense. I HAVE loved her. And I do so still. She IS my dearest love. Everything, including all our past, is in this present. Which creeps on at this petty pace. There is nothing for it now but to be present to this state of suspension poised at the crossroads, Annie and I, to our respective undiscovered countries. e.

The Lime Tree, 7/9/20

The time has come, in my review of Annie’s works, to address the elephant in the room. In 1999, Annie accompanied me to Canberra where I was on a pre-dissertation fellowship In the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at Australian National University. While there, she explored historic travel journals in the National Library and came upon a provocative record of a convict on a ship in the second prison fleet in 1790 who had somehow managed to forge a coin there in the hold and pass it off to one of the crew. The forgery was eventually discovered, whereupon the convict was admonished and the crewman flogged. This became the kernel of an ambitious historical novel that Annie called The Lime Tree (for reasons unrelated to this inciting incident). It was at this time she set aside The Coiro Sisters and devoted the remainder of the time in her MFA at UC Irvine to workshopping this project. As should be clear from this excerpt, The Lime Tree is a significantly more complex and challenging project than was The Coiro Sisters. Annie, determined to evoke the milieu with meticulous attention to detail, immersed herself in historical research, visiting sites and consulting with experts of all sorts. It was at this time that I gave her a full edition of Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary, which she consulted extensively along with nautical encyclopedias, Patrick O’Brian companions, Hughes’ The Fatal Shores and many other period resources. Unlike Coiro, The Lime Tree has a large cast of characters, all from circumstances radically removed from Annie’s own, and with many interweaving sub-plots. In the following years, The Lime Tree, as a work-in-progress, garnered a variety of prestigious awards, including the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy. It was as a writer in residence at Exeter pursuant to this second honor that Annie gave a reading in May 2002 of a scene from early in the novel, an excerpt of which is attached. All you need to know by way of background is that we are in the hold of a prison ship en route from England to Australia in 1790; Joseph Marlow is a jeweler serving sentence for forging a coin; and the man chained next to him is an unnamed fellow called “M” who we saw earlier arrive at the ship in finery of a gentleman, of which he was stripped and placed in the solitary “cage” from which he has just emerged some weeks out at sea. These are just two characters in the novel’s ensemble cast. The Lime Tree consumed the last two decades of Annie’s life and it is a point of great sorrow that she did not live to see it in print. When she first began to feel the effects of the tumor, she was at The Hambidge Center in early 2014, working on what should have been some of the very last round of revisions before her New York agent would begin shopping the work to major publishers. Annie was robust at that time, healthier than ever in body, mind and spirit. And then the cancer intervened and robbed her of the ability to see her great project through to completion. The incompletion of The Lime Tree is a tragedy within the larger tragedy of Annie’s illness. It is my intention to see that The Lime Tree is completed and published in accordance with Annie’s vision. So that, as one writer friend put it, a work that deserves to be in the world does not, instead, sit in a box. To do honor and bring closure to Annie’s great struggle. And to create a capstone legacy of her brilliant life as an artist.

Over But Not Yet Over, 7/10/20

Annie is, I believe, beyond consciousness now, unresponsive to anything we might say or do beyond the easing of her (thankfully minor) remaining discomforts. Her body still warm, still breathing, still there, we take comfort (to ourselves in any case) in touching and stroking and holding and reminding her we love her. This is a newly difficult stage of Over But Not Yet Over.

And I receive a visit from Despair.

Despite six years of struggle, sobering realization and gradual adjustment followed by ten days of public grieving and laying bare the foundations and fixtures of my life with Annie, I walked shell-shocked through the afternoon and early evening of July 9, 2020, ravaged by the mundane babble of the ordinary, afflicted by cheerful chatter and offended by innocuous irrelevancies. Retreating to quiet spaces, the numbness sets in, the signification of nothing, the void eternal, the deafening roar of the sheltering sky. I feel once again, like so many dark moments in former times of self-doubt, suspended far, far above my life looking down at its smallness. Like that shot in the movie Titanic that cuts for a moment from the clamor and flares fired skyward to the sky’s perspective: the mighty ship as a tiny, silent speck in a vast impassive ocean.

There can be no pre-emptive grief. No amount of early grieving relieves the need for grief at its appointed time. It shall come when it will come. Nothing other than grief can supplant grief. Neither joy nor distraction, neither industry nor sloth. Grief is the Real which, if suppressed, recurs as the Imaginary. Any return from catastrophe to the world, except by way of grief, merely carries grief forward as its own new cancer, undiagnosed and spreading as it will. I know this. I know it because this is not my first rodeo. It’s not the first time my soul has died and risen again in a strange new world, to look in the mirror and not know itself. I have been here once before.

My twin sister Heather died when we were 4. There had been a fever and a stroke and a coma that left her in a grotesque state of Over But Not Yet Over for many months until the final seizure that carried her out of this world. At the time, grief was denied, memory confined to house arrest, and normalcy imposed. Her memory was abducted and disappeared. And precisely because she was nowhere, she was everywhere, and our pleasant, nurturing house became a tomb of the unknown, and I wandered through my happy, jacaranda-scented Pasadena childhood as through asphodel meadows.

And so what remained was not the memory of Heather but rather the hollow, other-worldly echo of her departure. I heard her soft voice in the halls outside my bedroom. I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I held discourse (at the age of 7, 8, 9...) with this reflection of an absence and we came to an understanding: I would not follow her now into the Netherworld (that is, in fact, the word I used), but the portal would remain open. And so Death became my silent twin, like the ancient Egyptian “ka,” that aspect of the manifold soul that follows oneself in life as an external manifestation like a doppelgänger or personal angel. Until I had a vivid dream as a teenager, right around the time I first had a committed relationship with a girl, and in this dream, Heather appeared (as a teenager, of course, having grown up alongside me) in a white gown, shrouded in eternal innocence. She once more offered her hand and waited. I did not take her hand. I have had no sightings or hearings of Heather since. But she remains at the beginning of my origin story, the first ancestor in my genealogy of attachments.

I did not grieve for Heather when it was time to grieve for her. Now, in my maturity, facing my second soul death of this lifetime, I will give grief it’s due.

7/10/20

Our Annie departed this Earth just shy of 4pm, west coast time. She died at home with me holding her hand and her sisters and dear friend, Jen, all around her. There was no pain and she was not conscious, but simply stopped breathing. Annie fought long and hard to stay alive and remain here with me, her boys and everyone who loves her. I love her dearly and will miss her more than I can say. I am thankful only that her struggle has come to an end.

On Grief. 7/11/20

I’m no stranger to grief, but each grief is newly strange, like a new country with strange customs and you see yourself and your companions take on new and unfamiliar voices. And I am here, sitting with the voices of Jen MacKinnon and Adriane Truluck and Cate C Ripjaw who just posted tributes to our Annie, and with Trina Smith and Lethia Nall who shared vivid memories of Annie over the past ten days, and with her cousin Amy Gillick who played oboe for her and Miko Sloper who composed verse for her.

And I see my new grief already inscribed on the walls of other cities and other lands and there are tears for things, and thoughts of mortality compel us to bear witness. Lacrimae rerum sunt et mentem mortalia tangunt.

I sit vigil [I almost said shiva, but not quite yet on that] over Annie’s body in our bedroom going into dawn of the first day after her departure. There are candles burning and a solitary birdsong strikes out a fervent call to prayer. And I am with my love, my Annie, in Jakarta during Muharram in 2007 as prayers of varying skill over loudspeakers from numerous mosques rising up in the air, join in cacophony at our 30th floor apartment, like an acoustic Tower of Babel, and we marvel at the awful, unpleasant beauty before admitting that the racket from this vantage is only awful.

And I’m back in the morning of July 11, 2020, with the sudden swelling of my friend network across my entire life from voices I haven’t heard since high school to voices from our lives at Vassar, in Madison, Stanford, Irvine, Australia, Indonesia, Kansas, Exeter, Ithaca, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, and the past 11 years of our lives in Berkeley.

And I’m in 2009 as we set out for Berkeley from Pittsburgh where my academic career had just come to an end (yet another grief and transformation), and groping for a way up from THAT castaway beach, I had applied to law schools. And my love, my Annie, was struggling in her own darkness, struggling with the demons and depression that kept her from finishing The Lime Tree and burdened in her soul by the rootlessness of our wanderings. And I said to my Annie, o my darling o my love, where shall we go? And Annie, who has never shied from travel or adventure, said she wanted to go home, home to Berkeley, place of her long-braided tie-dyed coming of age. And I brought her home and she was a Berkeley girl again.

And I’m in the summer of 1992, arriving at her family house in Walnut Creek with a peculiar posse of artists, all of us working that summer as counselors at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts. And Annie throws open the door, electric, spinning and leaping like a puppy, in tie-dye and braids, unshaven and primal and given unto me, and I’m wanting her now, as in so many moments to come, more than the stars from the darkest night and the diamonds from the deepest ocean. [and a roguish musician in our group, a DJ from Detroit, would pull me aside to go “So, this Annie...?” Oh, is it obvious? Obviously.]

And Annie would take me into the hills above her house, still my just-friend then and for two more years to come. And we would talk about love and that for her 19-year-old self, love was a sacred word not to be uttered until meant, a blood oath, a Rubicon. And that she and I were not there yet.

And I’m in a constellation of thousands upon thousands of “I love you’s” uttered and meant by her and by me, spreading out across our lives together, a silver thread, o my moon goddess, and carrying us into the half-light as the flames of eternity rise into the day. And carrying me through the cooing of the mourning doves out beyond the brighter bird twitterings as morning light fills the room where my luminous Annie’s cold body lies. The chamber is empty; she is not there.

And carrying me through the final moments, just yesterday, as she breathed and stopped and breathed and stopped. And I wrapped my fingers in her fingers and dabbed a tear or two from the corner of her eye. And I held her fading gaze as much as I could muster, as she would have done, as she would have demanded, to look Death squarely, to make eye contact. And the tears came to her sisters and Jen, sensing the final breath. And it came, and she went. And I had a few moments of choking sobs, but not a good cry, not right then.

Not yet, I expect.

Aftermath, 7/12/20

I’m lying awake in the hospital bed in which my Annie died two days ago. This and the rest of the remaining hospital equipment get picked up on Monday, and I’m having a sofa bed put in rather than putting back the bulky bed of our marriage; I imagine finally being able to cuddle up with the boys and watch tv on a proper couch.Nearly all the left over medical supplies and medicines have already been donated or trashed. Her sisters have already cleaned out most of her clothes, leaving only a few symbolic pieces. These were, by and large, practical clothes of her cancer, and we agreed they didn’t really remind us of Annie anyhow. I’ll settle any remaining business with providers today and then the physical memory of her cancer will have been condensed to an archival box tucked out of sight, and we’ll get back to the work of reconstructing and restoring the memory of our true Annie.Yesterday, July 11, 2020, the first full day of my new life as a widower, I was feeling very little, a sudden reprieve from the raw emotions of the past fortnight. Still in shock, relieved, exhausted, feeling shy of human contact, wary, but outwardly quiet and neutral. I had spent the night of July 10, 2020 in the house alone with her body, and truth be told, at that time I felt very little. I spoke a little with her, but found little comfort or meaning in addressing the body. She was not there. The next morning, I draped her in that same blue-yellow cosmic blanket which had been our rough comforter in the van and in our apartments of the 1990s. And I played a Roy Harper album that she had liked a month ago, one of the last times she expressed liking something of this world. And that first blanket of the love nests of our early passions became her death shroud. And the coroners came and wrapped their plastics and bags around her and her shroud, culminating in a heavy dark green canvas sack that was strapped to the gurney. Well, I thought oddly, she would have liked the color. And looking thus like some big gear bag being loaded in the waiting van for some expedition, Annie’s body left our house for the last time. In a few days, we’ll receive a simple container with her ashes. There will be a ceremony at some point and a dedication of a tree, but until then these ashes too will be archived away.And so our new life has already begun. I know the path will be long. But I will move on. And I will attend to unfinished business. And I will carry the flame of my beautiful Annie, more brilliant now than ever as she has transcended her earthly suffering. And I will never forget.

7/19/20 Costa Rica.

2006, Costa Rica. I had just been denied tenure at Macalester and was, to put it mildly, in a state of existential crisis, facing the likely end of the academic career to which I had devoted the past decade of my life (as it turned out, I was granted a Fulbright, then taught one more year at Pitt, and THEN it was over). At any rate, it was certainly a low time in my life and so I took Annie to this meditation retreat in Costa Rica. She had her own struggles at the time (she was getting to the point when The Lime Tree was starting to take longer than it should), but she rallied to me, and her love and light pulled me through those times. Here she is, having set aside her customary blacks for a bright tropical blouse (ok, she was still wearing a black bra). Being a force of light and love and renewal in my darkest hour.

We had our share of adversity over these 25 years, and the 6 years of her cancer were certainly hard. But she saved me so many times over the years, lightened my burdens and lifted my soul. She is saving me right now, even after her own death. I am filled with her love and light, carrying me through this grief.

7/20/20 The Etching.

This is a laser etching print (on wood) of a piece by British illustrator, Daniel Danger, called “Take your time, try not to forget, we never will.” I acquired it back around 2015, early in the fight against the cancer, and kept it shrouded. It was a secret focal point for the despair that I didn’t allow myself to feel as I kept calm and carried on. In recent days, I’ve taken it out again and it sits in my room. Shrouded, like the mirrors in my personal approach to sitting shiva. Unlike the shrine sitting uncovered in full view, with incense, candles, pictures, an old silver-black necklace, a feather, and sunflowers.

https://www.blackdragonpress.co.uk/collections/sold-out/products/take-your-time-try-not-to-forget-we-never-will

Go to Etching Page

7/21/20 Surprise

Annie and I were married in a beautiful ceremony in Lafayette, California on July 21, 2001. Then, very romantically, we divided our belongings, and I moved to Lawrence, Kansas, to begin my first teaching job at KU while Annie moved to New Hampshire as Bennett Fellow and writer in residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. This was business as usual for us— we had spent the prior 6 years much in love, but with lots and lots of separate travel and adventure.

The following summer, Annie joined me in Ithaca at my next teaching gig at Cornell. And so, on July 21, 2002, we celebrated our first wedding anniversary TOGETHER in gorgeous (yes, I know) Ithaca. That morning, we canoed along Lake Cayuga and moored and had breakfast at the farmer’s market. Then, in the afternoon, giddy with excitement, Annie had me drive out of town to this undisclosed location. I had no clue what was about to transpire. We pulled up at a meadow, where people were unloading an enormous woven basket and... A HOT AIR BALLOON!!!

I took this picture as we drifted silently out over the treetops. Pure Annie, so happy to be flying. I was flying and in the clouds with her, and her joy brings me right back to that happy moment.

We never lived apart again. Ok, there was that time in 2007 when I stayed in Jakarta while she went on to do research in Sydney. And that summer in 2011 when I was working in DC. and Annie’s month at the Hambidge Center in 2014...

7/21/20. Anniversary.

Happy Anniversary, my Love, who is now beyond Time. I hold you to me and whisper love in your ear each and every day of the past nineteen years. I hold you to me and dance through our beautiful wedding under the trees. I whisper my love as I hold you to me back through the years before our wedding and dance our wedding dance into the playful days when you were my girl across our many travels and back into our just-friendship. I hold you to me and whisper our love through the birth of our children and all through their lives to come. And the lives of their children, and their children’s children. The cord of our Love extends out into the mysteries and I hold you to me forever here on this day.

7/22/20. Battle Sail.

In March 2013, Anne E Campisi and I participated in a mock sea battle between tall ships in San Francisco Bay. I took a lot of video on that day, always intending to edit it into something. At the time, I imagined something very stirring, with a lot of fast editing, interpolated see battle paintings, and something like Mahler’s 6th running underneath. I finally got around to it yesterday, but with a much different, simpler sensibility. Annie was ostensibly doing research for her novel, and she did ask a lot of questions. But, being Annie, she also had a great time. That’s her, early in the video, calling out to the other ship, as it slowly drifts by: “We’re coming for you!“ And that’s me calling out “For King and Country!” and humming Holst’s Mars as the ships ever-so-slowly float into range.

7/23. 30th birthday letter.

When Annie would write me love letters— sometimes sent to me across great distances during our many travels, sometimes simply appearing by my desk or the side of our bed— these often included ecstatic streams of imagery. Annie opened her imagination to me in loving, intimate benedictions, poetic blessings. I’m gathering these together as a personal book of hours.

Here’s one she sent to me to light my way on my 30th birthday, on September 28, 2001. I was in Kansas, she in Lawrence. 9/11 had just happened. But we were freshly married, very much in love, and holding fast to each other across distances and through the turbulence. As we had always done. As we do in all moments. These moments, this gentle dew of lived experience collected on a sheaf of paper, moves beyond mortal time and passes back into the grain of her voice and mind. She is here now, breathing these fleeting visions into my eager ear.

7/23/20.

I’m still some distance away from integrating the story of these past six years, the cancer years, into my increasingly fond and comforting narrative of my life with Annie from 1991 onward. That said, I was just scrolling through my text message stream with her and finding as recently as last Fall, communications that were very much in her voice, and moments when, despite the indignities wrought by the cancer, she was quite recognizable. Take, for example, this image from her birthday in April, 2019, just over a year ago. This Annie is Annie, and I can recover her into the continuous, timeless Annie taking shape in my mind, soul and muscle memory.

7/24/20: On script?

In my journey through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, I have now passed from the Erotic/Confessional Euphoria stage (where I’m so filled with intensely embodied memories that I’m overwhelmed by continuous sexual desire for my lost love) to the Metaphysical Rage stage in which I curse human frailty and the f$@!ed up nature of mortal existence itself. Those are the stages, right? I’m on script, right?

Annie kept many, many files for her writing, one of which was a fairly compact selection of ur-texts, concepts that she found penetratingly fundamental. One is that famous, admittedly overused but so very, very compelling passage from Benjamin’s Theses, describing the angel of history:

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

I find myself now in the “Angel of History” stage of grief, wishing I could go back, love her even more, find a way to get more involved in her struggles, to battle her demons, to intervene, to rescue her from her own suffering, to finish the goddamn novel, to become a better lover, to make her know in every moment how very beautiful she was, how sexy, how exactly what I always wanted, to live with her forever in an impossible state of grace, loving and enjoying and giving each other exactly what was needed each and every moment, and so to transcend the human comedy, and defy the absurdity of human life.

Background: Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) that he saw as depicting the Angel of History.

7/26

This could have been any autumn day in Exeter or Ithaca (2001-2004)— I think this is Exeter. Sporting her big honkin’ boots, wool cap and that mischievous grin. Although I was, at this moment, 1500 miles away in Lawrence, I feel myself coming out on the patio a few moments before with a cup of coffee and kissing her behind the ear to illicit this grin.

7/28. The Days of Awe.

Post to Caringbridge from Annie on October 5, 2014, as we awaited the results of the biopsy. At the time, the prevailing medical opinion was that it would turn out to be lymphoma, which would have been considerably more treatable. Sadly, the biopsy soon confirmed Dr. Starchey’s diagnosis of a month earlier— an infiltrating midline glioma. I had been attending Jewish high holiday services. Annie wrote:

“L'shana Tovah. The Jewish high holidays feel well-timed for thoughts like these. A time to reflect and atone. The time to be inscribed in the Book of Life or the Book of Death. To compose ourselves for the new year and all that it may bring. These are 'The Days of Awe'. It occurs to me (through the words of far greater thinkers than I) that the purpose of prayer is not to change your fate, because acts of God are always beyond your control. Rather, the purpose of prayer is to change your relationship to that fate, whatever it is.

In facing my own mortality, whenever that may be, it's hard to know how best to prepare. It's not as if I can work really hard and finish parenting. Or rush off and write another book, fulfilling all my best ambitions. I'm not about to set out on some last great adventure, or say everything I ever mean to say, or leave anything like a perfectly edited, packaged life. It's only this: whenever my Dance is called, I hope that I can drop whatever I'm doing at once, stand up and walk towards the Dance floor ready, or ready enough, to face, fight or leap straight into the arms of whatever is waiting for me there. For now, becoming ready for that may be my purpose to prayer.”

Two weeks later, after the diagnosis, she writes:

“ This week's fortune-tellers opine that I have somewhere between, Less than six months and up to five years. How can that window be real? I don’t even have a headache. In fact, at the very moment I don't believe it. Cate asked me how I’m thinking about all this, what I’m thinking about, “What is going through your head?”

So I tell her about our beautiful little boys, of course, who don't know anything yet.

I tell her that Evan and I lay outside together the night before, hand in hand, searching for stars through the bright urban clouds. Evan said that a long happy life together never feels like a long happy life together, because it’s only ever Right Now and a lot of brilliant memories that all feel like Yesterday. That won’t change for us, he said. And I believe that. I believe him. Today, I love everything about my life.”

Annie had many good days, much light and laughter and graced our lives with 5 more years and 9 months. She had a pretty good run.

7/31/20. Exeter.

A picture Annie took of her bedroom at Exeter while she was George Bennett Fellow in 2001-2. It was right after our wedding and she kept the framed invitation and picture of us on the wall (this same frame is still in our hallway) and she kept on that white lace draped table her pretty white wedding boots— the one part of her bridal costume to which she took a particular shine. We often imagined together if that she would only put on those lacey white boots and click her heels together three times, she could be with me in Kansas. In truth, she was always with me in Kansas, much as I missed her.

8/3/20. Under the surface.

Grief is always there under the surface, like tectonic pressure or magma, and we know it will break through but can’t ever tell when or what exactly will be the final trigger. And this trigger doesn’t matter really as it’s only the final influence, not necessarily the most important. Or even important at all. Or even relevant. Case in point. I spent time yesterday, dry-eyed, editing this tender bit of video I took on a trip to the Bay Area Discovery Museum in May, 2013. I had, of course, focused on the kids originally when I took all this video. But I edited it again to capture as much of Annie as I could. She appears with such incredible poise here, pushing the double stroller, attending to the kids, playing with them. But this isn’t high-energy, euphoric Annie. She simply glows with a pervasive confidence and peace. And she is breathtakingly beautiful here at the age of 40. She wore her hair in a becoming short crop, and had on this summer frock that let her show off her strong, shapely legs. And a floppy, draping flower of a sunhat with a sash. My blossom. And it was hard, looking at these images, not to think of all the love that I and our children would not be able to give or receive, all the life, all the passion, all the shared struggle that would not be. Many deep sighs thinking such thoughts, but my eyes remained dry. I extracted the attached still in which Annie, having leaned over to chat with D, who just left the frame, appears to float there on the bench, her face haloed by a purple anemone. I listened to the song from the first dance at our wedding— Billie Holiday’s rendition of Love Is Here to Stay. Heavy though my heart was, my eyes remained dry. Then I let YouTube proceed to its next random selection queued automatically after Billie Holiday, which happened to be Heart (and a massive backup orchestra and choir) performing Stairway to Heaven at a ceremony for the surviving members of Led Zeppelin. And I sobbed uncontrollably for minutes. One can always rationalize such things in hindsight. Ah, it was the emotional intensity of a rock power ballad that finally activated the emotional response, and the critical distance of unrelated art frees us to feel blah blah blah. But the fact remains that outpourings of grief could come at any time, and the trigger could really be anything. What’s Zeppelin to me or me to Zeppelin that I should weep?Forgive me, those of you for whom such things are known to the point of being obvious. I’ve cried more in this past month than in my entire life before— perhaps several times over. Even as a child, I was mostly... docile.

8/6/20

Enjoying this exquisite choral piece, featured today in a NYT article on 21st century classical music. And my phantom self is immediately playing it for Annie, who, as she could not help doing, stops everything to share whatever moment I might offer. And we agree together (the agreement coming instantaneously, of course, seeing as it is in fact only me) that it reminds us somewhat of Meredith Monk and maybe something that might have accompanied something choreographed by Pina Bausch. And there is something feminine about it, and yet brash, cosmopolitan, bold. And our faces are close as we listen, her hair brushing my cheek. And I hold my breath at that electricity. My hands circle her diaphragm as if she might breathe deep and join in singing, not that she would, but the better to feel her mirroring as she listens, the fluctuations of her own intakes of breath as she takes in the complex syncopations. A catching of the breath as of a sudden thrill. And the edge of that phantom breath, that sudden, mildly erotic influx, coming weeks now after the last breath, the parting breath, pulls me again, for the hundredth time, out of this degraded present, this impossible place where she no longer breathes, and into a fragrant eternity..

8/10/20.

I’m awake before dawn again, one month after her death. The boys and I are with her father’s family, the Campisi’s, up in Graeagle in the high Sierras, a bit north of Donner and Truckee. The Campisi’s have been coming up here for 60 years and it was one of Annie’s favorite places in the world, a primeval wellspring for her soul. Everything here— the small town, the trails, the lakes, and the family gathering itself— carries echoes of her.

Standing outside the ice cream stand in town, I see, I feel, I embody— an image, bright as day, of Annie coming around the corner, as if at the end of a 20 mile hike. Inexplicably energetic and joyful rather than exhausted, she flings her body against me in a bear hug, wraps her arms around me tight. And it’s only as I’m returning the embrace, feeling her strong back and shoulders in my hands, breathing in deep the strong scent of her carried on her own sweat and the dust of the trail, an incense of raw life, a prayer of her vitality, that I realize I’ve gone back in time, and this is my Annie before the cancer, every bit as lithe and limber and energetic as here in the present I find her cousins and their wives and her sister Cate— all these ringing examples of robust middle age. The Annie who goaded one of these same relatives to join her in a strenuous (and, no doubt, inadvisable) hike up here back in 2011, when they were both 6 months pregnant. The Annie who carried all of us on her mighty back.

“Come! Run! Let’s break the dams and rush together! It’s the only way to quell this monsoon!” she writes to me in Wisconsin in 1995 from her senior year at Vassar.

And there in broad daylight in this summer vacation town in August 2020, as the vacations of others and the gentle, well-worn choreographies of the family drift along on all sides, as I stand in line to get ice cream for my kids at the age of 48, I’m vividly, viscerally caught up in that swoon from a quarter century ago. My body and soul anchored in my timeless reverie, burying my face in her trail musk, kissing her as I would in this imaginary scene, as in so many real hearty embraces when we would come back into one body again. But it is also this degraded present and I know I am desperately clutching a phantom.

This “crumpled life,” a phrase she used in one of her last pieces of crafted prose, a rueful, parodic entry she snuck into the caregiver’s notebook on August 29, 2019.

In my heart, I wish that such visions would become even more real to me. I wish that I would hear her soft voice beckoning to me, speaking my name, as Heather did years after her death, in the dark hallways of our childhood home. I wish that I would catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I wish that I could shake off prudent remonstrance and follow her shade out over the ramparts of Elsinore. That these imaginings would overwhelm my senses and make bloom the desert of the real.

In short, I wish I could go mad.

“Our ghosts will haunt together,” she writes to me in 1995.

But dawn has already broken and bright light has already filled all the shadows where such fantasies might take root. I’m only too sane, I’m afraid, and I’ll soon organize the kids into a hike and be with the relatives. I’ll make do with my daydreams and with such obscure echoes of my Annie as may be heard in the morning trumpeting of the geese, like a Gabrieli fanfare. (Is it possible that I didn’t yet know Annie in 1984 when I sang Gabrieli with the Pasadena Boy’s Choir?) And I’ll take a deep breath before I return to being a lawyer and a solo father navigating the train wreck of the new school year under Covid. And I’ll do my best to refashion our crumpled lives into some kind of origami.

Back in 1995, putting a brave face on our itinerant lives, she writes, “May wandering souls keep wandering, with the knowledge that somewhere they share a home together.”

Terus, my love.

8/31/20

This picture is from a set of tasteful nude photos I recently discovered. I learned from friends that Annie had them taken of herself on Thanksgiving, 1992. She is wild and breathtakingly beautiful. This is what she looked like in the days I was first falling head over heels for her.

Looking through Annie’s journals of 1992, I read a few entries that hit me hard. A few from late October of that year, in which 19-year-old Annie wrestles with her own lack of focus and discipline—themes that would continue to plague her all through her life. She writes:

“Me. I am flopped on a floor cluttered with greying bits of myself. A rumpled cluster of talent and potential. A wire bramble of fears and ineptitudes. Absolutely SWARMS of interests & curiosities. [….] Sometimes I feel myself—get an outside glimpse & tactile sense of my SELF & sometimes it feels really SOLID. Really GOOD. Other times it’s like filo dough in there. Damn it! How, what’s going to pull me together? I can feel & imagine myself just not doing much with myself. That possibility—of un-lived potential—has taken on a new possibility that scares the shit out of me with its simplicity and comfort. How easy it would be. It would be like sleeping in through a class. A bullshit rationale for staying in a very comfortable, warm bed.

Keep your eyes open, Anne E. I don’t want to hear your whines when you’re middle-aged. I want to feel your pride—your justified pride. Build it up solid. Build it up sound. Create your foundations solidly so that it will never crash or collapse or say you must stop building so high.”

At this same time, Annie was beside herself with indecision regarding a lingering relationship with our mutual friend that she could not bring herself to end in a decisive way. This situation cast a continuous shadow over the beginnings of our love, which she describes throughout these journal entries as a “muzzled” passion. On November 19, I visited her in her dorm room and we talked about this predicament and our mutual frustration, but to no avail. The next day, I flew to Prague to visit Adriane. When I came back, I kept my distance from Annie, waiting for her to do something. It didn’t happen and wouldn’t happen until the summer of 1994.

Today, I fantasized about that night on November 19, 1992 going quite differently, imbuing my own youthful self (then 21) with my current perspective and knowledge of what would come to pass.

In this fantasy, the night begins by ripping to shreds that “muzzle” over our attraction to each other. (I won’t share the details on FB) And after, I look across at her, looking like in this photo. And I bring my mouth close, looking into her eyes, and begin at a whisper…

“Now that I have your full attention, there are two things you need to hear, and you need to hear them from me, and you need to know that I’m in earnest and I am not screwing around. And that I know you and see you and I’m trying to save you.”

She meets me with her stare and full attention. I’ve never spoken quite like this.

“The first thing is that I love you. I love you, not only as a good friend who will always be your good friend. I love you as the man who sees you and will always see you; who knows you and will always know you; who believes in you and will always believe in you. You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen and I am overwhelmed by your beauty. You are a fantastic person, a brilliant soul, a radiant and luminous human being, an artist with massive potential demanding to be fulfilled. I want to bask in your light and make the world see how amazing you are.

I am the one who’s going to travel through life with you, be your soulmate, join you on your adventures, marry you, have children with you, share friendships and communities with you, laugh and cry with you, have a brilliant happy life with you the envy of our closest friends. And I will be the one holding your hand some day when death comes.

This is true. Our life together will come to pass. Even if it takes years. I’ll wait because what else can I do? We’re meant for each other. But I’m calling on you not to let it take years, to release all three of us from this terrible limbo. Only you can do it. Don’t make us wait until we’ve all graduated. Let our friend get on with finding whoever he’s really supposed to be with. You know and I know that it is NOT you.”

We’re kissing each other again hard now, like it can’t be hard enough, both flushed with my declarations of love, but I sit her down on her bed and sit at her feet, re-establishing a little distance. I take hold of her left foot and warm it in my hands. Still touching now, but with a little space, I begin again:

“The second thing is that you need to get serious about your own life, and there’s no time to lose. I know that cognitive science is cool and that’s fine for that to be what you’re doing right now. You’re doing lots of things you enjoy right now and having lots of experiences, and yes, that’s what college is for. That’s what youth is for.

But you are a writer. Never, ever forget that. You need to write. You need to write, not just for your own entertainment or the entertainment of your family and friends. You need to write serious, polished works, and then you need to get them published. You need to be getting your work out there in places that matter. You need to stop being satisfied impressing all your math and science friends with the fact you can do something they find miraculous.

You need to get over your obsession with approval. Impressing those closest to you doesn’t matter. Winning awards doesn’t matter. All that matters is building your career, finishing good work and getting it out into the world. So that your success can create more opportunities for even better success. That’s the only way to thrive and really have a life as an artist.

In order to have the career you’re supposed to have, that you are meant to have, that is your best destiny in this life, that is what the world is calling on you to do—you need to find a way past the demons that keep you from finishing things. You need to gather around you other artists who understand how to get work done and out there and how to advance their careers. You need to acknowledge and address the problems that are keeping you from thriving. You need to learn how to make strong, good choices and then never look back. If you have impediments or obstacles—physical or mental—you need to acknowledge them. If you need help with any of this, you need to swallow your pride, and ask for the help you need.

I’m not saying this because I’m so much better than you at any of these things. On the contrary, I have lots of the same problems and need much of the same help. I’m saying this, because you’re brilliant, and I love you, and I cannot stand by and watch you fail to do what you’re supposed to do.

This needs to happen now. It needed to happen yesterday. If you put it off, the consequences will be catastrophic. I will do everything I can to help you. Because I believe in you. And because I love you. And because I want nothing more than to see you thrive and to share in the glory of your success.

Life is shorter than you think.”

I’m stifling my own tears at this point, as, I expect, is she. But I let her choose what happens next. Shall I get dressed right now and leave her to continue her balancing act? Or shall I get back in bed with her and hold her through the dawn, and then get on that plane to Czechoslovakia, and then come back so we can get to work?

9/1/20

This brought the tears today. I found scattered pages she journaled in the summer of 1992, when we drove together from California to Vassar. The journal is full of impressions and perhaps the most full inklings she allowed herself to express in those years of what would become our love. As we sat together, both facing forward, rocketing through America, sparking wild talk on philosophy, politics, religion, everything, there was no thought of possession. Only journeying and freedom. We slept in fields, gazed at stars, held hands, feather-touched each others’ arms and shoulders, riding the line between platonic and erotic. It was the beauty of a love growing casually between friends with no thought of the future. A passion without need swelling between us.

9/3/20

Thanksgiving, 2014. Just weeks after the brain cancer diagnosis. We did what we always do. We held on to each other. We have always been lucky in love.

9/6/20

Picking little bits from a Blog Annie kept in the late 2000s, “Tales From the Citradel”. There is SO much she has written, which is truly wonderful because I look forward to snippets of her voice, many forgotten, many that I’m hearing for the first time. I so dearly love being touched by her in this way. I love her voice.

This one is from 2007. End of my Fulbright in Indonesia. Annie met me at Soekarno-Hatta Airport outside Jakarta, having spent the previous 5 weeks in Australia researching her novel. Although the early years of our relationship were filled with separations as we boldly followed our hearts on separate adventures, by now we were not happy being without each other this much. I believe this would be the longest stretch of time we would ever be physically separated again. Until now, when I have been without her for nearly two months.

***

Looking Forward

29 June 2007

Door to door, it took me 40 hours to get from Sydney to St. Paul. I had to fly back to Indonesia first. Not because it was sane, but to pick up the other half of my original ticket.

Near the local midnight I met Evan in the airy aisles of the Jakarta airport, the humid air a gentle déjà vu...back in Indonesia. I was glad for this last glimpse of it. Evan was standing between a public telephone decorated with carved demons & a shop selling nothing but dried shark fin.

We hadn’t seen each other in 5 weeks. During his last month in Indonesia he’d acted in a play, interviewed a dozen people, wrote a chapter & traveled far & wide. He’d also lost 20 pounds to Inside-Out Fever. But he’d recovered by now & looked good: sleepy but exhilarated. It's been a great month for both of us. We were so happy to see each other again.

9/6/20.

Earlier in June 2007, while still in Sydney, Annie had one of her incredible dreams. This one gives me considerable pause. She dreamed that she was passing out of life and being confronted with the prospect of leaving this world and being reincarnated in another. Within the dream, my Annie, astonishingly, PONDERS THE OFFER.

Why would she go willingly into death? Because, of course, it would be a new experience. She is tempted. But then, as Annie would, she has doubts, and her deep love for her life, for her beloved family and friends, for me, rise up to tip the scales.

And what happens next is strange, mystical and unclear. As in her actual life, Annie never sees the path clearly. And yet, she chooses. She tries to explain herself to the death and reincarnation official, with the hilarious effect of putting the official to sleep. And her choice, her refusal of the unknown, does not calm the waters. On the contrary, she sets out on a long journey, leaving us with a stunning uncertainty— did she actually go back home? Or did she begin a new life in a brave new world?

***

“Last night I dreamed of leaving this world for the next. [...] With some sense of imminent doom to this world, now seemed the time to go. I made my good-byes, walked across a field to a little white annex room with a door, & shut it behind me.

The world was gone.

Inside I found a small office with a slightly alien woman behind the desk. What was it, her mouth? Its cut across her face unnaturally large? She was a bureaucrat but friendly enough. A little frumpy. She pulled out a series of forms & began an interview to see if in fact I was serious & willing to make this transition.

For awhile, I believed that I was. I started to sign things.

Then it became clear that what was going to happen was that I would literally be reincarnated as a newborn infant on a new world, a journey that seemed less & less like a true evolution of spirit, than simply starting over in a different, more alien society. Yet this society had some wholly familiar & mundane appetites. The secretary couldn't promise who my parents would be, she explained, but all the candidates had applied for a baby & had been vetted as truly wanting one.

For the first time I began to think about what my interviewer's motives really were.

There was a current fashion, she felt it fair to warn me, all the rage, really, but nothing to fear, of some (but not all!) parents using hormone technology to keep their children's bodies around 18 to 24 months of age until they were ready to leave home, at which point they'd be rapidly grown, straight through puberty & to adulthood, which sometimes had its complications.

She handed me a set of worn, soft-bound notebooks. They were unfamiliar. I flipped through them. They contained pasted-in photos, drawings & handwritten journal entries that were my own, as well as many pages of photos & journals interleaved by someone else. Someone who liked to keep rather anal lists of unimportant things. The blending begins. I was going to be the different-than-we-expected part of someone's made-to-order baby.

I lost my conviction—a dropped rag. Thin rationalizations sprouted up in its place. Well, I can't see the whole picture from here, I reasoned, best not to judge it yet. Well, this is all just to test my resolve. Well, who's to say the soul's greatest work isn't there, & achieved through that very suffering? Which made me wonder why that wasn't just as easily achieved here.

Turning the pages, I found myself looking at old photos from my childhood, photos I've never seen. Candid, wonderful snapshots of family, of Yosemite gatherings, of Girl Scouts, of good friends, of Evan—I began to feel a powerful, visceral love lift off the pages from my life in this world.

I saw my family in intricate detail from above, watched families I'd grown up with laughing together, overhearing years of verbatim conversations, which passed in split seconds like birds past a window. I saw E and E and E again, & felt this great love grow like a tree through my body & limbs & through my head. I glimpsed the true form of my love, more whole & real than anything else I knew. The gift of it was so patent, so beautiful & rare, that all at once I could not bear to leave it. I doubted I would ever find this much again by rolling the dice like this. To give up on any of it, on any person or part of this world, or on this great, lucky true love before my life had run its full course was utterly unbearable.

Without realizing it, I'd begun to talk. I was telling the secretary anecdotes of the people I was seeing in the journals & in my mind's wide-open eye. I was telling her in that urgent way I have, when I really want someone to understand exactly as I understand it. But these were not good stories of the sort I'd tell to engage a group for fun. These were details that only meant things to me, not stories at all but human instants, emotional touchstones, & I had literally bored the secretary to sleep.

She was slumped in her chair, blouse rumpled & glasses crooked, her froggy mouth open & drooling a little. I didn't know how much time had passed. I had my doubts still. I wasn't convinced how useful I'd been with my life. Or whether these feelings were simply self-indulgent, delaying greater works. But I didn't care so much about that anymore. I knew truth when I saw it & I knew what I believed in. Whether she was faking the sleep for my benefit or if she was really out, I took my chance & slipped back out through the door.

It opened to a different place than where I'd left.

So I began to make my way back Home—to the people & grounds that had seeded that love—through an Odyssey of new dreams & chains of events, hundreds of new people, wild sexual encounters, of battles that passed in instants, & one expansive moment comforting a lost childhood friend, removing her shoes & stroking her back, herself curled on a bench at some lonely train station, sad for reasons beyond my understanding. Of long voyages.

When I woke at last, surfacing to that still pond of the morning mind, it was with the pleasure of a choice rightly made. Maybe I did it after all, I thought. Maybe I did leave this world for the next: the same world but awake. The same world more clearly seen & better chosen, steadily seeking my way back to you.”

9/10/20

Summer of 2007, California. Very shortly after we got back to the United States from 6 months in Indonesia and Australia. Annie casts a spell on some toddlers at a birthday party.

We didn’t have kids yet, but it was coming pretty soon. This was an enormously transitional time. I was nearly at the end of the road in my academic career and didn’t know what was coming next. Annie had been struggling with her book and felt justified stress at how little control she had over what would happen next in our lives. And yet, she was SO full of life and SO beautiful.

This was just weeks after she had that dream I described earlier in which she passed out of life, but then chose to journey back to life.

Somehow, she drew on her extraordinary capacities for joy and beauty and sustained me, inspired me, taught me how to live and how to love. Our lives were so clouded and yet loving her brought me into being in the world. Her strength gave me strength, her faith gave me faith, her hope gave me hope, her love gave me love.

10/10/20.

And so it comes, three months to the day, and I am once again with the echo of my Annie’s last breath on this earth. Our lives have returned to bill-paying, house-cleaning, workaday normal. As normal as moving back into a soak-sagged house after the hurricane floods or a scoured timber-frame after a purging fire. “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself.” (Elie Wiesel) Return, I will.

I still wear our wedding ring—not yet, Death; not today. And each night, the boys and I light a candle and incense at her shrine in my room with pictures and certain things that connect us to her, and we say “we love you, Annie, thank you for all the love you’ve given us, which we carry forward into our lives.” And our lives are sedimented with her memory and ingrained with her mark. She has written on us and we see her indelible scrawl in the mirror, and we are her people and we are her, but never distinctly, and never enough.

And today, we take a well-formed, ripe lime from her lime tree, and drink its bittersweet juice

Annie’s novel began, as she loved to relate, with an anecdote from the Australia-bound prison ship’s journal in 1790 about a convict who managed to pass off a coin somehow forged from the handle of a spoon. Being Annie, she expanded this kernel into myriad sub-plots such that the organizing image of the work became not the coin, but a grove of lime trees brought aboard the ship by an eccentric doctor with the intent of demonstrating the efficacy of citrus as anti-scorbutic.

And it was in 2003, in Ithaca, New York, a place not particularly hospitable to citrus trees, that I had delivered to our apartment two wondrous dwarf lime trees, pretty little grafted things in large plastic pots. And those little trees persevered as living symbols of the life of that novel, and Annie’s struggle to complete this great work. And she cared for those trees in a sunroom through the cold winters. And then we moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2004, and the trees lived on, as houseplants, through more cold winters. And the years went by, and it became increasingly clear that there was something wrong, something keeping Annie from finishing the novel, and we didn’t understand what it could possibly be. And the two of us, together, threw enormous will and effort at the problem. And still she could not finish the novel. And my contract at Macalester was not renewed. And in 2008 we moved to Pittsburgh. And in 2009 we left Pittsburgh. And still, after 10 years, the novel was not done.

And there, in the moving truck in Pittsburgh, with Annie three month pregnant, we were so loaded up with all our stuff, all the hoarded detritus collected over our many wanderings, that we could not for the life of us figure out how to take more than one of the two little trees. And so, Annie left one of them there for the neighbors to take, and with mad tears of anger and frustration and despair streaming down her face—a pain that cuts me to this day, she demanded I just fucking drive away. And that absurd moment haunted me down through the years, encapsulating all the helplessness we felt, in that moment and at so many other times, in the face of our inability to make good on all the gifts we had been given, all that potential.

And we drove to Berkeley, California. And we built a new life. And there was sorrow, and frustration and despair. And Annie never did finish the novel. But there was also SO much joy, and fulfillment and so very, very much love.

And that one little remaining lime tree sat in our backyard over the next decade. Sometimes looking not so healthy, sometimes taking on growths or losing its leaves, but surviving. And yet, through all those years, as had been the case since we got the trees in 2003, not a single lime ever grew to ripeness.

Until now. As I sit here today, three months after Annie’s death, there are about two dozen limes ripe or ripening on this little tree

11/10/20

Four months ago today, my Annie drew her last breath.

As I wrote recently, thinking about Joan Didion’s Year of Magical Thinking, I’m already passing out of Grief. But in no way, shape or form does this mean that I’m “getting over it” or “moving on.” The lessening of Grief is a lessening of pain. But one realizes then that the pain was a comfort. Because it was an enveloping in greater forces, being caught up in the waves of involuntary sorrow. One gives in to Grief as to the tides, like the force of mortality that carried my Annie finally out from these shores into that undiscovered vastness. There was a tethering to awe in the experience of Grief, and an umbilical tarrying with my Love, my Annie, a suspension of the time and a fleeting reprieve from oblivion, a being present to the mystery of my beloved’s death.

What comes next though is not release but the far more difficult experience of Mourning. For Mourning, after the waning of Grief, is a wasteland, a confrontation with the permanence of the absence of the beloved. We must step out in these waters, arduously, persistently, to nurture memories after the tide of Grief recedes.

There was a moment a few weeks ago, when, ill-advisedly, I ran with my delicate folding Oru kayak (not rated to venture beyond still waters) out into the sea at Jalama Beach, hoping to make it past the breakers so I could paddle out from shore a bit. A wave broke over me, ripped the fragile craft from my grasp, bursting a few of its seams in the process, and threw me down into the surf. I regained myself in a few moments, recovered my broken craft and made it back to shore, exhausted but laughing at my own foolishness.

That being thrown back into the surf, my little craft torn from my hands. That’s Grief.

I experienced Mourning earlier this week when I sat with D, who has not been speaking about his Mama, but has been lamenting that he doesn’t love his stuffies as much as he used to. And on this occasion, he related this feeling, what he castigates himself for as a failing of his own love, to a failure of his own memory. He says he can’t remember much of his childhood. And I tell him that one of the tools adults use when memory fails are pictures and especially albums that group pictures into zeitgeists and stories. And so, for the first time ever, I think, I sat with him and began to look through a series of incredibly wonderful albums that Annie created (using Shutterfly and later other such services). Filled with pictures and Annie’s anecdotes. And tears filled D’s eyes as he saw images of his stuffies attending him as a baby and as a toddler. And as the pictures spurred memories, I read Annie’s extensive accompanying narratives, so many anecdotes, often passing into dialogues and sequences of flashing imagery, as she heightened our baby’s childhood into a constellation of wonders.

And I brought her back. And she was there in that aspect of her that I’ve had so little heart to face in these past months, as the mother of my children. And I mourned her. And I sat in awe of the humble beauty of the love encased in these amazing picture albums on which she lavished so very much care and every ounce of her attention and insight and genius. And that she gave all she had in these extravagant gestures. And that we were so very fortunate, and that we had no idea how little time we had left.

And she had created one of these glorious albums for the first year of Hg’s life. And this one was not quite so literary— Hg being a child of action, not wordplay— but on the last page, she had printed lyrics to a kind of lullaby that Annie said came to her when Hg was around 3 weeks old, and she sang again and again, and it was his favorite lullaby. And, not surprisingly for Annie, it was about flying. And it had this simple, lilting repetition, like being carried out over wispy clouds, out to the middle distance and beyond the horizons.

And the chorus went:

My goodness, my gracious, my heavens, my word

H——g——, he thinks he’s a bird

And it’s—loop like the raven and zoom like a bee

Gust like the wind through the tops of the trees

And I’m fly-y-y-y-ing, Mama, I’m flying!