Widow

When my husband died, the storm did not come during the funeral. The ceremony of taking in guests, talking to them, reuniting with people who have long been gone from our lives as though they themselves were ghosts summoned by the death of Gregory. My children came home, stayed in our ancestral house where we discussed my having to transfer to a smaller space which I agreed to, as though I were mimicking myself, acting out a self which pre-existed. Behind all these was my true self, withering like autumn leaves parlayed in streams, eddying towards the river.

I could see my Gregory not as he was before his illness, but as he was ill. The unfurling of his condition written all over his physical mien. How he was fast turning into a shadow, always asleep on the hospital bed, the trauma of his asphyxiation, the process of intubation, realizing that those were his last words, never to speak to him again, all became part of my own self, drawing back to the hospital gardens, slowly weeping among the ferns and large cornucopia of plants, a maze designed by a master horticulturist more as a gift than comfort for the companions of the sick and ofcourse, the dying.

And when he died, his brother rushed to meet me in the garden, where instead of kissing each other’s cheek, he kissed me passionately in the mouth, swallowing my grief as though he were hungry to take me in and all of my thin body shaking like the leaves tinkered by fine rain. We went to a hotel across the hospital and he made love to me, even though I knew he was married and that he had small children. Stella. Stephen and Greta were his children.

Ofcourse, after the funeral, the storm gathered and I was pulled in its vortex rather than its path. It did not move past me, us. He left his wife and moved in with me. Stella stupefied, arrogantly ignored our affair and relented, affording the comfort of knowing she had the satisfaction of not loving Michael anymore. Not because of this, but because of years upon years layered with detachment accumulated in a marriage that had no more passion left. She felt it further insulted by the fact that if she risked begging her husband back or raging for what he was doing, she would rather not, cold as fish as she always was. The children were just as cold, like moonstones losing their former gleam the way Gregory ebbed into the shadows of death’s cold grip.

Only Michael and I radiated into a full color spectrum, I raging like a mad woman who grappled unto him to sap the lifeforce in him after Gregory’s leavetakings.

We were all shadows but Michael gave me his everything, cleaning the fish, our bathroom, planting new bulbs of flowers in my new garden in the new apartment I was given by my children who all disappeared after transferring me to this new home and monetizing the ancestral house. He did not look at all like Gregory but he proved himself to be mine. His grief was different, it was transposed to filling my needs first as though I were what’s left of his brother who took care of him through high school when he was bullied the hell out his mind by classmates in the all exclusive boys’ school back when he was young.

I accepted this new fate with a new found delight. I was springing like a new bud that risked everything or nothing at all, because nothing was asked of me but to naturally curl towards the embrace of his flesh.

There was nothing wrong now. Except that he was enough and I felt a certain guilt. Yes, guilt for having something so immediately after the death of Gregory. Do not widows take three years before finding another man. Because this gives enough breathing space between lovers, a certain musing, contemplation, a re-emergence.

He did not give me time to know my silent self and he could sense this. He fell apart. He was shattered like a renegated lover. One day, he said he was to go fishing and did not come back. I looked at the back door where he left, slipped into a chair by the breakfast table and watched the swinging door being slightly shaken by the wind.

My silent self.

***

Years later, I found him reading a book, seated a on a park bench. I sat beside him and together we watched the sunrise over the large lake pond. He said he worked at a bank now. And yes, he looked every bit a banker with his suit and coat. I told him, I lived on what my children gave me, proceeds from an investment where there was the ancestral house.

Things. We remembered the cracked teapot we tried to mend on a weekend. The kayaking we tried to do. Laughter. Everything we tried to do. To forget, yes forget, which was wrong. To forget Gregory. He would haunt us, forever. The eyes floating above the cup of mask he wore in the hospital. How helpless he looked, how I suffered.

We returned home together and had breakfast. I had not yet fixed the back door and he told me he should fix it. And he did. And remained for the remainder of my days.