Making Piece Page 3

  The autopsy determined he died from a hemopericardium (blood flooding the heart sack until the heart cannot pump any longer) due to a ruptured aorta. Marcus had a heart condition from birth, a bicuspid aortic valve, which means he had only two flaps to allow oxygenated blood to flow out from the aorta instead of the normal three. Blood pumping through the aorta is under high pressure. Having only two flaps creates a bottleneck and puts added pressure on the aortic wall. The wall had a weakening that eventually tore. Unless it happens when you are already in a hospital, a ruptured aorta is always deadly. There is no grace period. The blood moves too fast. The heart suffocates. And bam! Just like that. The man you love is gone.

  His German doctors had always maintained his heart condition would never be a problem. Had Marcus known how endangered his life was, he would have taken precautions. He was that kind of guy: disciplined in everything he did, especially when it came to his diet (only the highest quality, organic, wild-caught everything for him). He didn’t smoke, he exercised regularly, doing yoga, biking and running, and he loved being outside in the sun breathing fresh air. This was a guy who was so health-conscious, he flossed his teeth three times a day. Who does that? No, he was not supposed to die. Not like this. Not at forty-three. Not ever.

  My brain spun with centrifugal force after hanging up with Mr. Chapelle. I looked around the living room of my miner’s cabin in a wild panic. My body shook with convulsions. My eyes widened with disbelief. My breathing turned to hyperventilating. I paced back and forth between the desk and the daybed. I had no idea what to do. Did I really just get a phone call telling me that Marcus was deceased? Deceased. I hate that word. What a miserable word. If only I could have taken that word and shoved it through the phone line, stuffed it back into the mouth of the man who uttered it, crammed it all the way down his throat to extinguish it so he could never say it. If he couldn’t say it, then it couldn’t be true.

  My first call was to our divorce mediator in Portland. “He’s in a meeting,” his secretary said.

  “It’s urgent,” I told her. She must have heard the panic in my voice—high-pitched, sharp and forceful. She put me through.

  “Marcus won’t be coming in for his one-o’clock appointment. He died,” I blurted out. “He’s dead. He had a ruptured aorta.” And then my composure crumbled. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do!” I kept repeating myself, practically screaming in hysterics, as I entered into full-blown panic. To say it out loud to someone else, to acknowledge that which I desperately did not want to be true, made it just a little more real. Was it really true?

  I could detect Michael’s shock in spite of his attempt to calm me. He was a Catholic-turned-Zen Buddhist, which he had told us when we interviewed and subsequently hired him to help negotiate our separation. Marcus was in Portland and thus met with him in person several times. I was only connected by conference calls and had never seen him, but based on his gentle voice, relaxed manner of speech and his respect for Marcus’s and my determination to remain amicable, he seemed nice—for a former litigation lawyer. He had changed his career to mediation because it seemed, well, less litigious. “Take a breath,” he said. “Settle down. You’re going to be okay. Here’s what you do.”

  He outlined the next steps for me. Someone had to instruct me, because I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t think past the image of Marcus and his lifeless body lying in a morgue thousands of miles away. No! I could not, would not, picture that. My mind was still insisting he was alive. He had to be alive. This was all a mistake. This wasn’t really happening.

  “Book your flight to Portland,” Michael said, snapping me back to the present. “Call his parents in Germany. And above all, take care of yourself. You need to make sure you are okay. Do you have someone there who can be with you?” I didn’t. Betty, my landlord, was in El Paso for a few days. I had only my dogs and I was already scaring them. Daisy was hiding under the bed and Jack kept trying to lick my face, something he was prone to do when he was insecure.

  I wanted to fly to Portland that evening. There was a flight available, and even with the five-hour drive to the El Paso airport, I could have made it. But when I discussed it with Mr. Chapelle, he said there was no reason to rush. It wasn’t like I needed to get there in case Marcus might take his final breath. He was already gone.

  I spent the entire night awake; first tossing and turning in my bed until finally, so disturbed, so much wanting to crawl out of my skin to escape the searing pain, I moved into the living room and lay on the concrete floor in front of the fan. My forehead, pressed into the painted cement, rolled back and forth, practically wearing a groove into the hard floor as I wailed and wailed and wailed. I never heard such loud, guttural cries emitted from so deep within my core, never knew noises such as these were possible. I sounded like a dying animal, moaning like a cow hit by a car and left for dead on the road, wishing for someone to shoot it and put it out of its misery.

  And I did feel like I was dying. I wanted to die. My moaning, my wailing, my cries could have been heard as far away as El Paso. But no matter how much, how long and how hard I cried, I couldn’t get the pain out. This new form of agony—sizzling, burning, tearing at my heart with razor blades—was an alien being that took over my body, infiltrating every cell. I couldn’t hold still. I couldn’t cry hard enough. I couldn’t scream loud enough. I couldn’t get the emotional torture to stop.

  Psychologists call it complicated grief. It was almost a relief, as much as I could fathom any inkling of relief, to learn a few months later that what I was experiencing had a name, a clinical term. I had a condition. I could be placed in a category, given a label. I could wear a sign around my neck that read “Caution: This woman is suffering from complicated grief.”

  Complicated grief is when someone you are close to dies and leaves you with unresolved issues, unanswered questions, unfinished business. And guilt. Lots and lots of guilt. And pain. Bottomless depths of searing pain. Complicated grief is when you ask your husband for a divorce you don’t really want, and he dies seven hours before signing the papers.

  I killed my husband. I was sure of it. It was my fault. I’m the one who pushed for a divorce. He didn’t want it, must not have wanted it, otherwise he wouldn’t have died. He was dead, we were still married, and that told me everything. Before leaving my miner’s cabin for Portland, where my husband was reportedly dead, before putting my dogs in the care of my British neighbor, Ralph, I rummaged through my toiletry bag and found my wedding ring. The ring, an exact match to Marcus’s, was a band of fine gold on the outside, with an inner ring of steel on the inside. The bands were connected, yet separate, and made a jingling sound when they moved against each other. We had our rings designed by a goldsmith friend of Marcus’s in Germany to represent us—our strong bond balanced by our independence—and our lifestyle, the contrast of our love for both backpacking and five-star hotels.

  I slid the ring back onto my finger where my white tan line had turned brown in the Texas sun, and shook my hand until I heard the familiar jingling. The gentle rattle had become a nonverbal communication between Marcus and me. We would shake our rings in each other’s ears as a way to say, “I’m sorry, I still love you” after an argument, when it was too difficult or too soon to utter the words out loud. I had taken the ring off even before I asked Marcus for the divorce. I took it off because I was mad at him. Mad that I couldn’t fly to Germany for my birthday in June to spend it with him. Because the auto industry was forced to make job cuts, Marcus was working two jobs and therefore he was too busy for me to visit. He started his days at 6:30 a.m. and returned home—home, which translated as a guest apartment attached to his parents’ house—no earlier than 9:30 at night, night after night. He was exhausted. I could hear it in the irritable tone of his voice. I could see his fatigue when we talked via Skype. I felt bad for him, but I was also hurt.

  “What about me? I’m your wife. A
m I not a priority?” I continued to plead. I hadn’t seen him since May. June came and went. And then there was July, a month during which he developed a chronic cough. “Don’t be like Jim Henson,” I chided. “You know, the guy who created The Muppets. He was sick but refused to take any time off work. It turned into pneumonia, and look what happened to him.”

  Marcus insisted he was fine. His doctor told him his lungs were clear, it wasn’t bronchitis, gave him an asthma inhaler and sent him home. If only the doctor had checked his heart, had used ultrasound equipment to inspect his aorta, checked the thickness of its wall, had seen that there was a weakening and performed emergency surgery to put in a stent. If only.

  Marcus spent his 43rd birthday on July 2—having no clue it would be his last—buying his new road bike. He still had no time for me to visit. His August vacation was coming up, so we assumed we would just wait and see each other then. I was looking forward to seeing him. I missed him. I missed his body, his shapely soccer-player thighs, his perfect, round ass. I missed his scent, or lack of scent, maybe it was just his presence I longed for. I missed spooning against his smooth skin, his chest hair tickling my back. This was the longest stretch of time we’d spent apart since we met—and, no, Skype sex doesn’t count.

  “Let’s make a plan,” I suggested.

  “No,” he said. “Every minute of my life is planned out for work. I don’t want to make any plans right now. I’m too tired.” And that was it. That was my breaking point. He didn’t want to make plans for his August vacation—our vacation. I felt cast aside, not important enough for him to pencil me into his calendar. Work always came first. So I asked for a divorce. “You don’t want to make plans? I’ll make them for you. Instead of coming to Texas, you can spend the three weeks in Portland filing the papers.”

  He still wanted to come to Texas. He said, “I’ll come there and we’ll talk through our issues.”

  “If you come here,” I replied, “we’ll have a good time like we always do. We’ll drink lattes and wine, we’ll go hiking with Team Terrier, we’ll make love and then we’ll be right back to where we were.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re right.”

  Why, oh, why, OH, WHY didn’t I let him come? Why did I have to be such a hard-nosed bitch? “But what if he would have died in Texas?” friends argued. “It’s so remote, you couldn’t have even called an ambulance. You would have never forgiven yourself.” Forgiveness? I couldn’t forgive myself for any of this. I killed my husband. It was my fault. If only I had let him come to Texas, he would still be alive.

  I don’t know what normal grief is like, but complicated grief? Complicated grief must be grief on steroids.

  The physician’s assistant of Terlingua didn’t give me an appointment to check my racing heart—my heart which was also now broken, shattered beyond repair. Instead, he gave me a ride to the El Paso airport. We didn’t speak for the duration of the five-hour pre-dawn drive. He left me to my silence as I stared numbly out the open window, feeling the hot Texas wind in my face. I flew from Texas to Portland into the arms of my best friend from childhood. Everyone needs a friend like Nan. Nan is the friend who, when you tell her the news—the Very Bad News that you’re still having a hard time believing is true, but since Marcus didn’t call the entire day after Mr. Chapelle’s call, and he never went a day without at least sending an email, I was beginning to believe could be true—well, Nan takes charge.

  “You don’t have to come to Portland,” I told Nan. She didn’t listen. Not only did she book a flight from New York, a rental car and a Portland hotel, she made sure her flight arrived before mine, so she could scrape me off the airport floor and carry me to the car.

  Marcus and I had three weddings, so it seemed fitting that we had three funerals. We first got married at a German civil service in the picturesque village of Tiefenbronn, where we signed our international marriage certificate with Marcus’s parents as our witnesses. Next, we got married on a farm outside Seattle, Washington, not only to accommodate my friends and family, but also because I had been freelancing for the past year at Microsoft and therefore Seattle was my most recent U.S. base.

  We saved the best for last and returned to Germany, where we took over the tiny Black Forest hamlet of Alpirsbach, booking rooms for our guests in all the charming inns, hosting dinners at cozy Bierstubes and walking down the aisle in a thousand-year-old cathedral, a towering beauty built of pink stone. Three weddings, three different styles, from basic to rustic to elegant. His funerals mirrored our weddings, albeit with a lot more tears—and definitely no champagne.

  I didn’t see his body until I had been in Portland for five days. I was still going on trust to accept that he was actually dead and hadn’t instead plotted his disappearance to some tax haven where he was now living on a yacht with a supermodel. It wasn’t until the day of the Portland funeral that I laid eyes on him. I had already picked out clothes for him to wear—a black linen shirt, his favorite wool bicycle jersey tied around his shoulders, Diesel jeans and his clogs. He had to wear his clogs.

  And then, there on Broadway and 20th, in the understated pink-and-beige-toned parlor of the Zeller Chapel of the Roses, two hours before the Portland service was to begin, I saw him. It was him, strikingly handsome and healthy looking, even when filled with embalming fluid. It was the man I had fallen in love with, was still in love with, the man I had married, was still married to. I saw him. I talked to him, begged him to wake up. I held his hands, bluish and hard. I ran my fingers along his forehead, bruised from his collapse. I leaned down into his casket and kissed his cold lips that didn’t kiss me back. Now I knew it was true. He was dead.

  My tears cascaded down like Multnomah Falls and they didn’t stop for ten months. They ran and ran, creating permanent puffy eyes and altering my face with so much stress old friends no longer recognized me. The tears ran the entire flight to Germany, while I sat in business class and Marcus flew in a metal box in cargo. The tears flowed all through the week I spent in Germany, from the moment his grief-stricken, ashen-faced parents picked me up at the Stuttgart airport, to when they took me to the guest apartment where Marcus’s suits were hanging in the closet.

  My tears kept on flowing through the German funeral, a formal and elegant church service, packed with Marcus’s coworkers, accompanied by a quartet of French horns playing Dvorak’s “From the New World” and presided over by the same pastor who’d married us. The tears gushed through the informal and quiet burial of Marcus’s ashes, and through the final meeting at the Tiefenbronn Rathaus, the place where we had signed our marriage certificate, and where I was required to sign his death certificate.

  The tears came in endless waves. They came by day, by night. My tears did not discriminate in their time or place. From Germany, my tears followed me back to Portland, and then back to Texas, where I collected my dogs, packed up my MINI Cooper, said goodbye to Betty, goodbye to my miner’s cabin, goodbye to the desert that had nurtured my creativity all summer, goodbye to life as I had known it. The tears were ever-present, ever-flowing. It was a wonder I wasn’t completely dehydrated. There was only one thing that defined me now: grief. Complicated grief. Grief on steroids. It was something I was going to have to get used to.

  CHAPTER

  3

  What I thought was a heart attack, or a cosmic connection to Marcus as his heart struggled to keep beating and then stopped, turned out to be a hyperthyroid. I had struggled with this auto-immune condition for a few years, it was the culprit that kept me from getting pregnant, but I had finally gotten it in check. (Marcus and I had accepted that having kids wouldn’t fit our lifestyle anyway. While we were in Germany, we got a dog, Jack, instead. Jack’s Mexican stepsister came later when Daisy followed me home one afternoon during Marcus’s assignment in Saltillo.) A simple blood test—along with the goiter in my neck that had exploded to the size of a grapefruit—indicated the hyperactivity had returned with a vengeance. My T-levels were off the charts.

&nb
sp; Without any other purpose or sense of clarity to guide me, I let my medical problem determine where to go next. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in my miner’s cabin in Texas. I spent two weeks back in Terlingua, recovering from the three weeks of funeral-related travel. Everything I had loved about the place before—the isolation, the vastness and emptiness of the desert wilderness—now threatened to consume me, and draw me further into a new world of quiet madness. I maintained just enough sanity to know I needed to be somewhere else, somewhere I could be around people. Normally I would have returned to L.A. That’s where my parents and two out of my four siblings lived; it’s where I had spent the bulk of my adult life, and it’s where I always fled to when Marcus and I hit a rough patch. But this time, in this new, debilitating, fragile, uncertain state of being, and because I didn’t have Marcus to run back to, I ran to the next closest thing: a place filled with memories of him.

  Portland made sense for many reasons. First of all, I had no home anywhere else. Portland was affordable. Portland was where my trusted endocrinologist practiced and he could treat my over-active gland. Portland may have been the place where Marcus died, but it was still the place where we had lived and loved. And Portland was where our—er, my—furniture was stored.

  Portland was where we—I—had friends, friends who knew both of us, knew us as a couple, friends who could lend support as I searched for meaning in life. Because so far, I couldn’t find any meaning left at all. I was so down on life, so lacking in any enthusiasm to face each new day as it dawned, I couldn’t even get excited about my morning coffee. Portland was where my memories of Marcus could help me feel more connected to him. In Portland, I would also attend a grief support group. I had already done my homework and found a free program. I couldn’t wait to get started. I couldn’t wait to stop feeling pain. Because if I continued feeling the way I was—which is to say lost, confused, angry and sad, oh, so very, very sad—I was going to be joining Marcus in the afterlife sooner rather than later. Impatient has always been my middle name. I didn’t know if I could ever feel good again, but if it was possible, like I’d heard it was possible from others who had lost someone they loved, I wanted to get going.