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“I ’m sorry, Mr. Geary. We couldn ’t save her. ”
Everything for about a month after I heard that sentence faded into a sifting gray fog, through which I caught mere glimpses of life going on around me: the drive home from the hospital, my wife ’s funeral, the helpless looks and vague, sympathetic comments from my co-workers – “She ’s in a better place now ” and “Everything happens for a reason ” and the even less sincere “Let me know if you need anything ” – not to mention my own ghostly existence in a house that was suddenly too big for me. I could hardly reconcile the events I barely registered with reality, since I could no longer pinpoint exactly what reality was.
I avoided the garage altogether for that first month, as I had no desire to inhabit the space where my wife committed suicide by overdose after the cancer she kept secret from me for a full year was diagnosed as terminal. We shared everything, or so I thought, until I found the documents from her doctor ’s office and insurance company detailing the treatments she had undertaken without breathing a single word about her condition to me, her husband of nearly twelve years. By that time, it was too late, of course; Bethany was already eight days dead by the time I found the file folder containing those documents, an innocuous manila file in a filing cabinet drawer full of the same, this one marked simply “Beth ” in black Sharpie, the B slightly lopsided and the t crossed with her usual short, girlish double-curve.
She never told me she was dying.
I was grateful for the fog for those first five weeks, during which it camouflaged any emotion I may have felt. I had an idea that anything I might feel during that time was probably too much for my fragile heart to bear. In my thirty-five years, I had never lost anyone close to me, and I had certainly never fathomed that my beloved wife, just ten months my junior, would come to the end of her life any time before we reached our eighties, least of all by her own hand.
When the fog began to seep away and emotions began to trickle back into my life, I found myself first harboring a vague sense of betrayal – how could she keep such a thing from me? How could she kill herself without first telling me what was going on? – underscored by a feeling of emptiness so deep it might as well be bottomless. Beth and I had been trying for at least three years to get pregnant, and nothing she said or did in the year prior to her death indicated anything to the contrary. For all I knew, we had simply been unlucky – missing the fertility window each month, or however they explained the inability of two seemingly healthy thirty-somethings to conceive. I had no idea Beth had been rendered sterile by the cancer and the treatments that did nothing to slow its savage growth inside her. Now that she was gone, I would never know if our children would have her dark, wavy hair, my blue eyes, her perfect, creamy skin, or the dimple in my left cheek.
After several months of alternating anger and depression, I discovered a new emotion within myself. I probably should have expected it as the next logical step beyond that vast, howling emptiness I felt, but its presence never occurred to me until the twenty-seventh Friday evening I spent without her, watching a psychological thriller Beth would have loved – would, most likely, have watched curled up beneath my arm with her spine straight as a board as she shoveled popcorn into her mouth from the bowl resting on my lap, looking away from the movie only long enough to pop a few kernels into my mouth, too.
I was lonely.
Not lonely for female companionship, necessarily; at that point in my life, I simply couldn ’t imagine myself remarrying or even casually dating. I was merely lonely for human connection, something I hadn ’t allowed myself to feel since the moment that fateful sentence was uttered at the hospital. I had closed myself off completely, refusing to see my friends, my family, anyone outside of my normal working hours, and even then, I had nothing to say beyond work-related topics. I had almost begun to feel inhuman, at least until the revelation of my loneliness struck me partway through the movie that Friday night, when my only companions were a beer in one hand and the remote control in the other.
It took me a few more weeks to dig myself out of my hole of self-imposed seclusion, but I spent those few weeks actively searching the internet for others like myself, who, I felt, would be much better equipped to provide the support and companionship I needed than even my most well-intentioned friends or family members. I finally convinced myself to get out of the house for a non-work related purpose when I discovered a local group called the Widowers of Suicide, a name that sounded a bit heavy-handed even to me, but the description of which seemed to suit my purposes nicely.
I attended my first W.O.S. gathering on a cold, drizzly mid-October evening. Unlike my confident, easy-going former self, the Jason Geary who walked into the downtown library ’s conference room was timid and unsure of himself; I had second thoughts all the way there, and stepping into that room to find a small, ragtag group of mostly middle-aged or elderly men with the same slumped shoulders and sad eyes I bore was strangely more discouraging than comforting. The promise of free coffee – and surprisingly good free coffee, at that – kept me there, however, and once the meeting hit its stride, I forgot about my misgivings and immersed myself in the company of these men so very much like myself.
Abandonment... betrayal... grief... anger... loss. The same emotions were present in each of these men, whether they had been married to their dearly departed wives for three years or forty-three. Whether these men had children or not, whether their wives had been ill, stress-laden, depressed, or all – or none – of the above, the common thread of bereavement ran through us all, and I began to feel a certain kinship with several of the men in the first hour-long meeting alone.
The group met once every two weeks, always in the same place, and I was the youngest member by a good ten years until about two months after I started attending the meetings. That night, as several of us waited for the rest to arrive, I was talking about the weather with an eighty-six-year-old man whose wife hung herself a dozen or more years before, when a man I hadn ’t seen before entered the room with his hands stuffed uncomfortably into his pockets and his eyes nervously scanning our faces as if expecting to find hostility there. When I nodded welcomingly in his direction, he offered a relieved smile and took a seat next to me.
The newcomer was Oliver Edgerton – Olli for short, he informed us during his uncomfortable introduction – and his wife had been gone for almost a year. I was startled at how similar his story was to my own; his wife had kept a brain tumor secret from him until he found out about it in the suicide note she left next to the bathtub, where he found her after an overdose of pain medication. They, too, had been planning to have children, he told us, choking up a little, and my heart surged with sympathy for the man, who looked to be about a year younger than I was, although it was hard to tell through the drawn expression he wore and the longish black hair that covered his eyes as he spoke.
After the meeting, I caught up with Olli as he headed slowly down the library ’s front steps. “Hey, ” I said, glancing over at him, and he looked up from his feet and offered me a wary smile.
“Hey. Jason, right? ”
“Right. ” Surprised at the question that was about to come out of my mouth, as it was a question the Jason of before would have had no problem asking, I managed it anyway. “Want to grab a beer across the street? ”
Olli looked at me strangely for a second before nodding, his smile reappearing, more natural this time. “Yeah, actually, I do. ”
So grab a beer we did, and then another beer and another, talking about our loves lost until our server had to chase us out. As I drove the short distance home, I marveled at how easy it was to talk to someone who had gone through an experience so much like my own, and how good it felt to spend time with someone other than myself.
Olli and I met for beers again after the next meeting, and again after the next, making somewhat of a small tradition out of it. Our conversations gradually moved from our wives to other, less depressing topics, and that turned out to be even more healing than the endless rehashing of our losses. One night, when the bar closed down for the night, Olli followed me home, where most of a case of beer waited in the fridge.
When the beer was gone, our conversation was anything but over, although by that time, I doubted either of us would remember in the morning much of what we talked about. It was nearly four in the morning by the time Olli finally stood up from his chair and tottered toward the door, but I blocked his progress with a hand on his shoulder, turning him back in my direction.
“You can ’t drive like this, ” I said, somewhat amused at the way my words fumbled drunkenly over each other as if my tongue had become partially paralyzed. “C ’mon, I ’ll pull out the couch for you. ”
“Aw, ” Olli replied, possibly a weak attempt to argue with my logic, but he didn ’t get much farther than that, because suddenly, somehow, our lips were mashed together and I was pinned against the wall by a body not much smaller than my own. Part of me cried out to stop it, to push him away, maybe even to punch him in the face and knock him onto the floor, but some other part merely let it continue, simultaneously the driest and the most emotive kiss I had ever been a part of.
It lasted mere seconds, and when Olli pulled back, he wouldn ’t meet my startled stare. “I better get home, ” he mumbled, ignoring the fact that I knew no one was there waiting for him, and before I could formulate any kind of argument against his driving home clearly drunk, he was already gone.
Olli did not attend the next W.O.S. meeting, or the one after that. It may have been a good thing he didn ’t, since I had no idea how I could ever face him again after what happened, but on the other hand, I found myself missing our post-meeting conversations, which flowed as easily as the beer that accompanied them. For that reason, I was glad to see him walk into the third meeting after the drunken kiss incident, even if he did drop into a chair a few seats down from mine with his eyes pointed directly at the table in front of him. He didn ’t have much to say during the meeting, but at least he was present, and because he made a quick escape when the gathering adjourned, I was surprised to find him waiting on the library steps when I left the building.
“Hey, ” Olli said, his eyes still averted and his tone more sullen than I was accustomed to hearing from him.
A more eloquent response eluded me. “Hey. ”
“Have time for a beer? ”
I nodded slowly. “Sure; why not? ”
We didn ’t speak of the awkwardness between us or the reason behind it as we sipped our beers on our customary barstools at Abby ’s that evening. Neither did we speak of it as we drove back to my house, or as I led Olli into the kitchen and handed him a beer, which he placed, unopened, on the counter before turning back to me and kissing me again.
This time, I kissed him back.
An hour later, we continued to avoid the subject at hand as we sat side by side, naked, in my bed with the sheet draped across our lower halves, unable to look at each other, the only sound in the room my soft intake and exhale of smoke from the stale cigarette I found in the drawer of Beth ’s nightstand. She never told me she smoked, either.
Olli left soon after calling a taxi to take him back to his car, and I wondered if I would ever see him again – wondered, in fact, if I ever wanted to – but for all my needless wonder, I was both pleased and chagrined to watch him walk into the next W.O.S. meeting and take his seat next to me, even going so far as to glance my way, the corner of his mouth flicking briefly upward in an uncomfortable little smile. We didn ’t even bother meeting for beers afterward that night, opting instead to head directly back to my house, where we repeated the events of two weeks prior, with one small variation: this time, Olli spent the night.
Further breaking tradition, we didn ’t wait for the next W.O.S. gathering to meet again; Olli showed up at my front door a few evenings later, and this time, there was no awkwardness when he kissed me, no unspoken discomfort as I led him to my bedroom, and no undefined uneasiness as he settled into my arms afterward, his body melding against mine as we drifted into sleep.
Maybe Beth wasn ’t the only one in our marriage hiding something from me.
