36 questions

Rebecca's husband died on the day she turned 40 years old.

By the time I found out, it was Saturday morning, and I stayed in bed almost the whole day. I left only once, to pick up a pizza I'd been dreaming up since before I heard the news, and to grab a movie from the library. I saw Meredith Gadsby when I walked in, standing between the New Releases and the Circulation Desk. I told her that Jesse was dead; something had happened while he was hiking in Canada. And she responded with almost exactly the same words that had been looping through my mind: I just saw him the other day.

When I think about it, that's what sets Jesse apart from other people I know who've died. It's not that it was unexpected; most of the deaths I've known have been that way. I grew up in an immigrant family, far away in distance and emotion from the older people who died when I was young, as older people do. Meredith Whalen, Electra Bynum, Susan Peterson-Pace – for a long time, every memorial service I went to was pulled together by survivors of tragedy, who'd had no time to prepare.

But Susan was still in Philadelphia when I had already moved back to Michigan. Electra died a year or two after we'd stopped living in the same dorm. Meredith, I hadn't seen in years by the time the plane crashed through her floor in the World Trade Center. But Jesse had just sat to my left at a table at the Black River Café two weeks before he died. He'd gotten really excited about my radical ideas for diversifying the institution. He'd responded skeptically to my and Greggor's retelling of the story floating around the internet, about the study that found that you could create the feeling of being in love by asking 36 questions. He'd agreed wholeheartedly when Rebecca said it was no wonder that he'd never heard of Annie, because he harbored a grave distaste for musicals. He'd listened encouragingly as I had talked about someone new I had recently been on a couple dates with. I'd given Jesse some of my ribs special to try when he commented on how good it looked. He'd shared some of his fish special with me in exchange.

There's something hard to comprehend about an event that ruptures, so abruptly, the seam between just-saw-him and never-see-him-again. My mind keeps calling up his face, at the left of my field of vision, peering over his glasses in a way that always made him look older and more curmudgeonly than he ever really was. I can hear his quick succession of "yeah-yeah, um hms" that always told me he was listening and understanding what I'd said, whether the next thing that came from his mouth was in doubt or in agreement. 

Other people had died after I hadn't been around them for so long that not seeing or hearing from them was more a continuation than a change. But I had just seen Jesse, sitting to my left at Black River, on the evening after we had run into each other on Professor Street and he'd invited me to happy hour with him and Rebecca and Greggor. I had told him that I was supposed to drive up to Michigan after work that day, to see my father off before he moved to Ghana. But if, for any reason, I didn't get on the road in time, I'd come out for a drink instead. That was the same day my friends' attic burned down, and I stopped by after work to visit them at their next-door-neighbors' house. It was just enough to justify not driving home two and a half hours in the dark. I got to Black River after Rebecca and Greggor had been there awhile, and Jesse walked in five minutes later. When we closed down the restaurant, I joked about how I am not good at leaving on a road trip the day I planned to leave. And now, that deficiency seems like as much of a gift as the piece of fish that I can still picture Jesse leaning over and putting on my plate. There's one really fine last evening that we all spent together. If I had been any good at driving home on schedule, I never would have seen Jesse again.

As I moved through the day after Marcelo's phone call that morning – when the words "did you hear about Jesse?" made all the blood drop to my feet – things kept popping into my mind. Like how Jesse and I had both had pieces a couple years ago in the faculty art exhibition, but Jesse was out of town that weekend, so he'd asked me to take a photograph of his work. Like so many other photographs, I'd sat on it, waiting for the magical 'extra time' that I'd have to edit it someday. He'd never gotten to see it, that photograph.

I thought about the way I had felt the week after my last break-up, how I'd woken up each morning unable to imagine getting through the day in this new reality, stripped of one of the things that had been such a great source of joy. But the ex and I were not married. We hadn't been together for ten years. And that person was still alive. It was absolutely unfathomable to me what it would feel like to be Rebecca, on that day when every year, as she marked getting older, it would also be the anniversary of the day when this man she loved would never grow older again.

But mostly I thought about Jesse's face, at the left of my field of vision, and of how lucky we are to get to have anyone in our lives to old age. Suddenly, loss seemed like the natural way of things, and all the people I knew and cared about who were older than Jesse — my parents, my teachers, my friends — they seemed like these inexplicable wonders, who had beaten all the odds...

...to stay in my life long enough for me to understand just what a gift it is to have them here.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015