About Death and Life
3 years ago, Mike went to see Guardians of the Galaxy 2. He went home, went to bed, and never woke up.
We were living separately at the time, and he had been there alone in his apartment nearly a week before I called to have the police do a welfare check. He’d been angry with me, but when he didn’t message on my birthday, I knew something was wrong.
The pain and grief and regret haunt me a little less these days, as I move through the healing process. After 22 years of marriage, it is a process that will likely last the rest of my life. Writing about the tragic end has helped me to cope and to move forward.
But I realized, I haven’t written much about the start of our life together. I suppose it’s because the bad parts of our story overshadowed the beginning.
Once upon a time,
in a Midwestern town, in a land where smartphones hadn’t been invented and computers were only used in the college library, a twenty year-old girl fell wildly in love.
Mike was a dashing lieutenant with a crooked grin and an intelligent sort of humor. He wrote love letters and mailed me postcards after he returned to Alaska, often doodling a silly dog on them. We spoke on bulky cordless phones with retractable antennas, and he talked about astronomy and trigonometry, while I told him my day-dreamy plans to major in Theater.
He got me plane tickets to Alaska, and as we toasted homemade eggnog by the tiny Christmas tree, he said, “We should get married.” I impetuously agreed. He was my hero. The person who saw who I really was.
I had known him three months.
In Alaska, I was in awe of the emerald dance of the Northern Lights against the night sky and the pink-tangerine sunrises over the steaming, ice-choked Turnagain Arm. He spoke about the earth’s atmosphere and temperature inversions, while I let the colors soak into my soul. We were a good balance: I saw the magic, and he saw the science. I loved him for it.
Mike would later laugh about those early years, recalling how I, dressed as a cat for Halloween, pounced on him from across the room. He was constantly scooping me up in his arms or turning me upside down so my hair dragged on the floor. When we went to visit his family in Ohio, he would carry me piggy-back throughout Cedar Point and make up word games for us to play while we waited hours for a twenty-second rollercoaster ride. At home in Anchorage, we frequented comedy clubs and ordered so many drinks at one, they gave us free tee-shirts as we stumbled our way to a taxi. I wish I had those shirts. I wish I could remember the rules to his game.
Mike had curly copper-brown hair and hazel eyes with glints of green. He was the man who, on our first ‘real’ date, rented a small aircraft and flew me across the inlet so we could have dinner at a restaurant on the other side. He even let me take the controls, albeit briefly (I had a nasty habit of overcorrecting). I learned how to fluidly drive a stick-shift in his purple Toyota pickup. He was a surpsingly patient teacher.
We would go camping, and he would joke about the hordes of giant mosquitos humming on the outside of the tent; and he held me close when the loons startled me with their alien calls in the wee hours of the morning. We would sit for hours on the boulders along the Copper River, toes numb and hands freezing, our long-handled nets plunged into the rushing water, waiting to catch salmon unaware. I don’t remember even tasting salmon before I went to Alaska.
The years went on. His copper hair grew less lustrous. Holes rusted through the floorboards of the purple Toyota. We added baby after baby to our little home, and the wildness of those early years was tamed, as we donned our parental garb. With the waning of adventure, Mike & I grew to be the best of friends, in that familiar, comfortable way. While he never knew exactly what to say when I cried, he knew precisely how to make me laugh. It was a skill that could only develop with the quiet, steady passage of time.
I respected his wit, his intellect, and I made him a sort of god.
And it was good.
For a long time.
It was good.
I have to remind myself of that when the shadows whisper I should’ve done more. Tried harder. Given my life for his. The shadows will never fully go away, though they are slowly receding into their dark corners.
After Mike died, we had to clean out his lonely apartment. There were pictures of us in every room: hiking the mountains in Alaska; wearing matching prints at a luau in Hawaii. We would dress up our little dog (who closely resembled Mike’s earlier doodles) for our Christmas Card photos; and later, we would dress up the babies & toddlers & kids. Everyone had a Santa hat. Mike would painstakingly set up the tripod and sprint back to his place after he pushed the timer. Those framed photos are spliced together with memory to create the highlight reel of our lives. Though scratchy and discolored with age, the images flicker to life, even now as I write.
When the ticket stub for Guardians 2 was discovered, the two kids who were with me decided we should see the film. I’d been surprised that Mike had gone to a movie, but in the months leading to his death, he was trying to recover some part of himself he had lost. A main theme of the film is fatherhood and what it really means. I sobbed uncontrollably, right there in the deluxe cinema, as the story unfolded. It is about love and sacrifice, things which Mike had done.
I am at a point where I can finally look at pictures of us and reminisce without anguish. The stories of our adventures make me laugh. It was a crazy, stupid, foolish thing to do, getting married so young, but I would begin the story exactly the same way again, if I had the chance.
I would only change the ending, so we each could live happily ever after.
