Essay

Island

By: Mary Pacifico Curtis, 4/16/2012 9:39:54 PM

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    I wake these days of winter feeling like a thick cloud has hold of me, or like I could sleep more. My bed belongs to two people.
    Julia sleeps on her dad’s side of the bed sometimes when she’s home now. She slept there for months after he died. Last night, the night before she returns to college, she slept in our bed.
    I have been emotional about her leaving on the day that would have been our twenty-ninth wedding anniversary- as if the abandonment of death is being replayed in yet another chapter. Lingering in all of us are the anniversary reactions, though the girls don’t verbalize or even seem to notice them. I am careful, knowing the feelings that can find me on a certain day or in a certain place.
    I mark days and hours. Our anniversary was on the second. Doug died on the tenth, his funeral service was on the fifteenth. For each of these days, I recorded the details that have become memories, now less sharp at the edges of my mind. This is a time of heaviness, thoughts about how life has changed, remembering feeling so loved and in love, a part of the best man for me, a man whose strength settled our world.
    My thoughts now are about living as a single woman with children that have become young adults, going into a crazy world. The oldest took three years through community college and is readying for a finish as UC. Julia came through high school with honors and went away this fall.
    In my singleness, I navigate couples. I love each of my friends and they are gracious to me, but it’s lonely in the way of not having someone to turn to saying “hey….”, and of not feeling the touch to the shoulder, arm, and breath on my neck.
    Singleness is cold air, closing the door, returning home to the artifacts of life that remain there, hearing the echoes between walls and the ragged breathing of my sleeping dogs. I turn in without saying good night, remembering the days of not going straight to bed.
    We would go to the couch, turn on the TV and Doug would stretch a soft blanket over us as he folded into our warmth.
    Now sleep finds me, marooned on my side of our king-sized island. And then tomorrow comes.

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