The Letter

by Marie Tillman

  Letters like this were like dips in my emotional roller coaster. I’d go weeks without hearing from Pat, then would receive several letters in one group only a couple of days before he got home. I felt terrible about Pat’s guilt, and yet part of me found gratification in his recognition of my sacrifice. I was putting a lot of effort into making things seem okay, and I was grateful that he knew that. Unlike when I’d made sacrifices for his football career, this time he seemed to really grasp his work’s toll on me and understand that the things that I needed to be happy and fulfilled weren’t material at all, but were entirely wrapped up in being near him. But my feelings of gratification quickly led to feelings of guilt. On top of all the other stresses he had, I didn’t want him to worry about me. I did my best to shake the whole mess of emotions off, to regroup, and just when I had, another letter from Pat would arrive.

  I’m sitting in my little fighting position while half my squad leaves for a recon. mission. I’m tired, pretty hungry and incredibly filthy. My surroundings are trees, green, swamp, hills and heavy rucksacks, yet my mind is far from any of this. My mind is on you and the visualization of our children. What will they be like? Who will they look like? Will they be a combination of the two of us or take shape in either of our personalities at all? Perhaps one will look and act just like you while the others me or vice versa. Perhaps they’ll look like your mom or have my grandfather’s demeanor, Kevin’s nose or Paul’s figure. Maybe we’ll have small skinny daughters built lean like our fathers and short legged sons like our moms. I can’t wait to pick out those traits as I stare into their faces. I can’t wait to watch them take shape and grow from aspects of others’ to a whole unique unto itself. I can’t wait to see how excited my mom will look when I tell her you’re pregnant. I can’t wait to sit in Alex and Christine’s living room laughing about all the ridiculous nonsense our kids are up to. I can’t wait to be proud of our daughter when she stars as “Happy Toad” in the school play. I imagine watching Kevin teach our son to hit a baseball, Paul showing him plans for his next big real estate deal, Alex teaching him the stars and of being a good person and man through stories about his grandpa.…I can’t wait to watch you and Christine blow all our money on shopping trips with our spoiled daughters. I look forward to the day your Dad takes our son to a Giants game, or Richard bringing the kids down to show them Hollywood for the weekend.…I see us driving down the road with the kids laughing at me for something stupid I said from the back of our new Volvo. I look forward to watching you breastfeed the little guy.…I can’t wait to see the look in your eyes after your first labor. Everything we’ve done in the past will pale in comparison to the adventure of the family we will soon have. So much to be excited about.…

  Refolding the letter, I was thrown into a negative tailspin, with a power and force I submitted to. Pat was trying to be strong, and hopeful, but his letter just made me regret all the things we were missing out on now. My friends all called with news of their pregnancies, or the trips they were taking with their husbands, and I’d feel sorry for myself that I couldn’t call them with the same news. I was constantly fighting my natural inclination to stay home and wallow. Go out, Marie, I’d tell myself. Go meet people so you have something to write to Pat about; go somewhere to snap yourself out of feeling sorry for yourself. But after this letter, I needed a break from finding something positive in the situation and let myself give in to being depressed. There were days when I wouldn’t leave the house, but I’d never let Pat know. With all he was going through, it didn’t seem fair to put that on him, too.

  As strong as each of us tried to be for the other, stress has a way of spilling over when it’s been contained for too long. A couple of days before Pat’s last deployment, to Afghanistan, he went to the basement to get his stuff together, and I followed him. Our quaint cottage was old and had paper-thin walls, so there was little opportunity for private conversation, and I’d been stewing for hours. Pat’s family was in town, camped out in our living room. They had wanted to see him and Kevin before their deployment, and though they’d been there several days already, they had just decided to extend their trip a few days. While I loved Pat’s family and enjoyed having them around, time alone together had become too precious. Pat was the oldest brother, the first married, so I was also struggling with a tension most new couples experience: establishing that a new family unit had been borne out of those wedding vows. But mostly, I was anxious about this deployment—more so than the last one—because now I knew what lay ahead: the months of constant worry and a silent house. I yearned to have Pat all to myself for a day. I would have even taken a couple of hours. When I walked into the basement, Pat could tell instantly that something was wrong. Tears started spilling down my cheeks, and I was so upset I could barely get the words out.

  “Why can’t they all go home?” I cried. “It’s been several days already!”

  Just two minutes earlier, I’d seemed fine, so Pat looked at me like I’d lost my mind. In some ways, I had. He started to get defensive and argue with me, but then he stopped. He could see my stress and the emotional toll this experience was taking. I was acting clingy and needy, which was in sharp contrast to the independent, stoic nature I’d developed since this adventure had begun. He put his arms around me, realizing that was all I really needed. We sat like that for a while, just a few silent moments, on the cold steps of the basement, a load of laundry at our feet.

  * * *

  The hole left when Pat died took on various forms. He’d been gone for a year, and still I missed the physical being of him, his strong gentle touch and the warmth of his body in bed. I missed his friendship. For over ten years of my life, whenever something would happen, whether it was an unpleasant encounter with a grocery clerk or a major current event, it was Pat who I would think of first and want to call. I trusted his instincts and ability to see the world. I trusted his ability to weigh the pros and cons of a situation. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized that many people never have this, and learned how lonely the world can be when navigated alone.

  Parts of my brain shut down entirely. Memories became frozen, inaccessible. I panicked at first, though I logically understood there was an inverse relationship between stress and memory. Your brain makes you handle only what you can handle. But I desperately needed to recall things like which eye had the fleck of gold near the pupil, what we had eaten the last time we’d had dinner together, what the warmth of his skin through a thin white T-shirt felt like. I needed to remember that his broken pinky stuck out when he drank coffee, that too much carbonation bothered his stomach. The way his tongue pushed against his teeth when he pronounced certain words, and the way he ordered his lattes extra, extra hot, because adding the second “extra” let them know he was serious. I needed the comfort of these memories, but the more I tried to remember, the less I was able to recall, the more panicked I became, and the vicious cycle began anew.

  Though still young, I became obsessed with my own mortality and—worse yet—with the idea that an accident would leave me incapacitated and dependent on others. What would I do? There was no one around to make me soup if I got sick or take me to the doctor if I needed to go. I knew these thoughts were ridiculous but suddenly, they didn’t seem that way. The worst thing I could ever imagine had happened; it had come true. At first I thought, Well, there you go. This terrible thing has happened to me, so that’s my allotment in life—from here on out, no more bad will come. But then I realized, no, that’s not the way it works. Sometimes people face enormous loss and adversity while others get through life unscathed. I lay awake at night paralyzed by the fear of all the other awful things that potentially lay ahead. Things just happen. Randomly and awfully, they just happen. I wished that I felt otherwise, that I was a religious person who believed that everything happens for a reason. I’d even tried to tap into a spiritual answer and had sat on the porch the night after Pat died, asking for some sort of sign or feeling that there was a heaven and that I’d
see him again. But I’d felt nothing. I didn’t feel that he was in a better place, that this was all part of god’s plan, or that everything happened for a reason. I simply felt nothing.

  I second-guessed everything. One night after walking for hours, I came home with no idea of what to do next. Eat? Watch TV? Even small decisions, like how to fill the time, I couldn’t make on my own. I walked into the bedroom, flipped on the light, and fell back on the bed. On the nightstand sat a few how-to-grieve books, sent by practical people, with tips like finding a new hobby or changing your routine. After reading one particularly unhelpful passage, suggesting if you always ate dinner together at six p.m. in the dining room, try eating at five p.m. in the kitchen, I threw the book across the room. It hit the wall with a thump, landing with its pages splayed out on the floor. I didn’t need a new hobby or a change in dinner schedule; I needed real help. I needed to figure out a way to live again, as Pat had asked me to, but the wisdom of how to do this eluded me.

  Lying faceup, staring at the ceiling, I finally decided I should go get something to eat. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything more substantial than coffee. Some days I forced myself to eat, but just enough so that I wouldn’t pass out and call attention to my shrinking self. I welcomed that empty feeling in my belly. I felt more right as a hollow shell.

  I twisted to get up and something caught my eye. A book had fallen off the nightstand and lay wedged between the bed and wall. I pulled it out and saw it was Pat’s dog-eared copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance. Along with a handful of novels, he had taken this slim book of essays to Iraq. It had touched his soul, and when he returned, he continued to read and reread its contents. One quiet evening, he was lying on the couch reading while I folded laundry in the bedroom. He became excited by what he was reading, and wanting to share, he burst in, quoting passages, as I folded T-shirts.

  His enthusiasm when he found something he loved had been contagious, and tears welled up in my eyes as I held his book and pictured the joy on his face that evening. I flipped through the pages and saw his carefully underlined passages.

  “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” It was like he was speaking to me, lighting the darkness with the marks of his pen and the poetic words of Emerson. A smile began to form, but the pulling of the expression on my face felt strange and stopped me halfway.

  I eagerly scanned the book, underlined passages leaping out at me. “Be not the slave to your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

  After that night, the little book of essays rarely left my side. I would turn to it in my darkest times to find insight, or just to see Pat’s pen drawn across the page. The book allowed me somehow to get inside his head and find a way out of the heaviness that consumed my days and nights.

  Slowly, a shift began. I started to see a small glimmer of faith—not in the mystical, but in myself. I started to see that while I couldn’t control what happened in life, I could control my reaction to it. I saw two roads ahead of me: one of self-pity and destruction, and the other less certain, but more open and light. Maybe I could learn to live. When a friend called not long afterward to see if I wanted to go on a last-minute trip to Hawaii, my immediate reaction was to put up walls. The trip was too soon; the flight was going to be too expensive; I had to work. But I couldn’t help noticing a strange feeling rise to the top of the list. I wanted to go. I wanted to feel the sand in my toes, lounge in the sun, swim in the salty ocean. Two roads, Marie, I thought. Let’s not take the self-pity road for just a little while. I got off the phone, searched online, and booked my ticket.

  The comfort and calm I’d found in Emerson’s words led me to seek out other great thinkers for insight. To the endless hours of aimless walking that occupied my weekends, I added hours in the bookstore searching for books I would take home by the armful. I read volumes from Thoreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Viktor Frankl, absorbing the parts that spoke to me, dismissing the rest, and piecing together my own framework to build from. It wasn’t only philosophy that gave me comfort, but also stories of tragedy and triumph over adversity. These dark tales seemed more true to my own life than the stories of people I encountered every day. I was looking for connection in the similar arc of one human life to another, a clue for how to get through, or just comfort in knowing I was not alone in my suffering.

  One of the books I found solace in was Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the year her husband suddenly died and her daughter became critically ill. With elegance and artistry, she captured the ups, downs, and sideways moves that characterize those first twelve months of loss. But what happens then? I wondered as I finished it. For Pat had been gone more than a year, and a time had come that was as scary as any before it. It was time for me to make decisions bigger than how to fill a free hour.

  Namely, the end of Kevin’s enlistment was in sight, and I needed to decide whether to stay in Washington or leave. And if the answer was leave, where would I go? Though there were many things I loved about the Seattle area, I couldn’t imagine staying. I had family and roots in San Jose, friends in Arizona, but neither felt right. Because of an instinct that I’d first had in high school, while fantasizing about faraway schools, and that had peeped up again after college graduation, New York City felt right. “Be not the slave to your own past.” I had always wanted to live in New York, and it was different from anything I’d ever known. My defenses were kicking in; my natural survival mode was taking over and taking care of everything. New York was many miles away from anyone I knew, and I could heal in my own way—no intrusions, no dropping by, no inquisitive eyes wondering How’s Marie today? Just me and a city full of strangers. I could wander the streets for hours and see hundreds of people but no one would know my past or care. It was just what I needed. I arranged to transfer to the New York office of my company, because I knew I’d need an anchor in New York.

  With the biggest decision made, I made another: to get the most out of my last few months in Washington. I hadn’t taken a road trip since Pat had died, and I wanted to get out on the open highway again and really see the Northwest. I read an article in a magazine about kitesurfers on Hood River in Oregon, a mere three-and-a-half-hour drive away. Why not go check it out for myself? With Kevin out of town for the weekend, unfilled hours stretching ahead of me, and weather that was starting to warm, it made good sense.

  Traveling solo was a new experience. There was no one to help navigate while I drove, and often I had to pull over to look at the map. But driving along with the windows down made me feel freer than I had in the confinement of the house. I loved our little house, but I was starting to feel the walls caving in; the once comfortable cocoon was beginning to feel suffocating. On the open highway, I already felt better and was applauding myself for the decision to get out. As the pine trees and billboards whizzed by and southern Washington gave way to northern Oregon, I was reminded how satisfying it was to log miles, to cover ground.

  It took longer than it should have, but I got where I wanted to go. I pulled over in the little town and bought a cup of coffee from a shop that sold muffins and surf gear alongside espresso. Then I found a spot at the area’s central park to watch the kitesurfers do their thing. The wind whipped my hair around my face, and I tucked it back behind my ears so I could see the large colorful kites dotting the skyline, the snowcapped peak of Mount Hood visible behind them. The riders stood up on small surfboards, maneuvering the kites as they propelled the riders along the waves. I watched for a few minutes, fascinated by the skill of the riders, then thought, Now what? If Pat had been there, he would have tried it out, and I would have cheered, snapped photos, and laughed at him from shore. We would have listened to music during the entire drive, instead of the silence I now preferred. Maybe we would have had dinner in the little town; maybe we would have spent the
night at one of the small inns or bed-and-breakfasts dotting the shoreline. But at least I was there. At least I’d gotten there. I finished what was left of my coffee, and just thirty minutes after arriving, I got back in the car for the long drive home.

  Part 2: 2005–2007

  The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.

  —John Jay Chapman

  Chapter Six

  On a lazy Saturday afternoon after I arrived in New York, I made my way through the stalls of the Union Square farmer’s market to Fifth Avenue. I was just window-shopping, but something caught my eye and I ducked into the store to take a closer look. The front table was piled with cashmere sweaters in the most beautiful colors I’d ever seen—bright peacock blue, purple, lemon yellow. I ran my hand across the soft piles, landing on a cardigan that was a shade somewhere between bubble gum and hot pink. I’m strictly a black, white, brown, navy kind of girl. I don’t wear color—never have—and certainly not pink, but I picked it up and walked over to the mirror. I slipped it over my T-shirt, and suddenly my cheeks seemed rosier. For an instant, I glimpsed the younger, more carefree version of myself I had almost forgotten. Pink or not, I had to have it.

  The vibrancy of the city was rubbing off on me, just as I knew it would. I hadn’t come for the Carrie Bradshaw experience; I had come for an energy transfusion in the deep privacy of the anonymous city. And it seemed to be working. In Washington I had walked my pain through the sleepy, winding roads above the narrows; here I walked it through the city’s chaotic flow, but the flow alone made me feel more alive. One of my favorite writers, Pico Iyer, wrote that “our highest moments come when we are not stationary,” and I hoped that if I just kept moving, internal transition would follow my external one.