After the Fire

by J. A. Jance

  A modicum of grace.

  At last I find a plausible excuse to go inside,

  Placing welcome distance between his rosary of blame

  And me. I will not go again to hear him tell his beads,

  To say a mournful requiem over something

  That has passed beyond all powers of resurrection.

  Why?

  I probably should have named this poem “Collateral Damage” instead of “Why?”

  The kids were little when their father moved out of the house. My daughter was in first grade, my son in kindergarten. Since I was the one who had instigated the divorce, I was the one left to answer the children’s questions, and I did that as best I could. I sat them down and read a book aloud to them, The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce.

  More than thirty years later, the results are mixed. My daughter, seventeen months older than my son, remembers enough of what went on back then that she has been nothing but supportive, both of me and of my second husband. My son, on the other hand, still holds me responsible for what happened. And maybe I am.

  I can see now that it was wrong of me to set out to save someone who wasn’t interested in being saved. Marriage is not an urban renewal project. No one gave me the right to assume the mantle of Rescuer in Chief. But I did, and, in so doing, I reaped a whirlwind of unhappiness for any number of people—for myself and my husband, yes, but most of all, for my children.

  Even after all this time, I still can’t give them an answer any better than the one I gave them back then: because.

  WHY?

  I knew the time would come to give an answer,

  To explain to childish hearts the reasons why.

  No matter what I say I’ll beg the question.

  Part will be the truth and part a lie.

  I hear myself say, “I no longer love him,”

  Words too weak to justify the pain. I say,

  “You know we both will always love you,”

  But I know their lives will never be the same.

  “Because,” I say, and that’s my final answer.

  No further explanation will suffice.

  Their eyes fill up with tears, my hands are shaking,

  My heart’s a heavy block of solid ice.

  Insomnia

  No matter the cause of that final separation—whether it be death or divorce—there’s nothing worse in the aftermath of losing a spouse than trying to go to sleep. For years I had gone to bed cursing Starsky & Hutch and Police Woman. The only way my husband could sleep was with guns blazing and sirens wailing from the television set across the room. After he moved out, I tried to sleep with the TV switched off, but that didn’t work. I tried sleeping with it on. No dice there, either.

  In those restless, endless hours between lying down and going to sleep, we are tortured by the racket of a thousand if-onlys careening around in our heads—all the woulda, coulda, shoulda, mightas that wait to pounce in the middle of the night and send us staggering, sleepless, into another torturous day.

  During the months before and after my divorce, the only place I could sleep was in church. I will be forever grateful to the late Reverend “Mac” McKinley of Encanto Congregational Church in Phoenix for his kindness and understanding when I nodded off during countless sermons that were probably wonderful. I seldom heard more than a few words before I was a goner. I know he noticed what was happening because one Sunday his sermon was entitled “On Sleeping in Church.” I don’t know what he said in that one, either, because I slept through it from beginning to end.

  When the service was over, I tried to apologize. He shook my hand, smiled at me, and said, “Don’t worry. You’re coming to church and getting exactly what you need.”

  INSOMNIA

  I prowl the house in search of errant sleep

  Whose balm eludes me like some wily beast

  Which easily avoids the hunter’s snare.

  The bed’s to be untouched at any cost.

  Too much of him is there, too much of me.

  The cool sheets sting me with a burning grief.

  I try a couch, the floor, and finally the chair,

  But nowhere can I put my mind at rest,

  Or lose myself in soothing, sweet repose.

  For far too long I slept with my hip next to his,

  His arm thrown randomly across my drowsing breast.

  Will I ever learn to sleep again alone?

  It’s much too soon to tell.

  Undying Love

  I cannot quite recapture the depth of my misery in those first few months during and after my divorce. It must be the same kind of defense mechanism that makes it possible for women to forget the pain of childbirth and have more than one baby. I was alive, but just barely. I was divorced, but I was a long way from being over my husband. There are times even now when I’m not sure I’m over him yet. Although I’ve been happily married to my second husband for nearly twenty-eight years, my first one still intrudes in my dreams on occasion and leaves me shaken by the things he says and does.

  I know what the King of Siam from The King and I would say: Is a puzzlement.

  UNDYING LOVE

  I cling to that past love with all the ferocity

  Of a half-crazed mother

  Who clutches her dead baby to her breast,

  Refusing to give it up to other hands,

  Hands that will carefully prepare the body

  For its final bed.

  The love is past but I cannot relinquish

  Its claim upon my heart. I carry

  The corpse with me where I go

  And pray for the courage

  To one day lay it down

  And walk away.

  After the Fire

  By the time I divorced my husband, he had been hospitalized nine times for chronic alcoholism in the preceding seven years. The last time was at a rehab place in Wickenburg, Arizona. That I attended Family Week halfway through his six-week stay there testifies to the fact that, even though the divorce was in progress, I still thought I could “save” him. That didn’t happen. He was drinking again within five days of being released. What did happen at the Wickenburg treatment center was nonetheless a miracle—for me.

  All the other times my husband had been in treatment, I had gone along with the program and with whatever joint sessions were required, always in hopes of making him better. His counselors from Wickenburg kept calling and inviting me to Family Week. I told them that I was getting a divorce and that I didn’t want to be his family anymore. I also had a job to do and children to care for and support. When I finally agreed to go, I told them I’d stay for only two of the seven days.

  The first evening the counselor ended the family-member session by talking about Easter. He said that without Good Friday there would be no Easter Sunday. Without the crucifixion, there could be no resurrection. He advised us to go to our individual hotel rooms. We were told to spend the night alone with television sets and radios turned off. He said that if our loved ones were sick enough to be in treatment, then our lives had been in pain for a long time. We should simply lie on our beds, listen to our bodies, and try to figure out where we hurt.

  I was skeptical at best, but since I had agreed to stay for the two days, I figured I might just as well try following the counselor’s directions. So I went to my room, lay on the bed, and concentrated on my body. After a while, I realized that my jaw ached—no doubt from grinding my teeth—and my breastbone felt bruised and tender to the touch. Feeling my own physical pain resulted in an astounding revelation. Obviously this counselor, who had never met me before, knew things about me and my body that I hadn’t known myself. And if he knew that much, there was probably a lot more that I needed to learn from him. I ended up calling home, canceling my appointments, and staying for the remainder of Family Week—all seven days.

  That marked the beginning of my own recovery. It was during that week in Wickenburg when I first realized I was living “After the Fire.”

/>   AFTER THE FIRE

  I have touched the fire.

  It burned me, but I knew I lived.

  It seared me, but it made me whole.

  He called me.

  I went gladly though I saw the rocks,

  Fell laughing through the singeing air.

  I have known the fire.

  I’ll live with nothing rather than with less.

  The flame is out. There’s nothing left but ash.

  Unilateral Disarmament

  One year after Family Week in Wickenburg, I was living in Seattle and trying to put my life back together. My daughter was in Girl Scouts. My son was once again playing T-ball. When his birthday came around that year, there was no present from his father, who was now living in New Mexico and working construction. I was utterly outraged. How could he forget such a thing? The next time we talked on the phone I lit into him about it, and several days later a tardy birthday present arrived.

  With delight, my son opened the box and pulled out what I thought was a baseball bat. That evening he proudly took it to T-ball practice. Halfway through practice, one of the male coaches took me aside and asked why my son had brought a softball bat to baseball practice. I was stunned! Floored! Livid! I’m a liberal arts major who wore glasses and never played a sport in my life. My son’s father was, in high school, a talented all-around athlete. I may not have known the difference, but he sure as hell did!

  I went home from practice bristling with anger. Did he do it on purpose? Was it an accident? Did he do it to trick me? Those are questions that will never have satisfactory answers, and it drove me wild that even from more than seventeen hundred miles away, he could still push my buttons and send me into an emotional tailspin. The next time he called it was once again a telephone version of World War III. After that phone call, with atomic fallout still floating in the air, I wrote “Unilateral Disarmament.”

  UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT

  Children are the weapons in this war,

  And neither side is blameless of their use.

  Armed with offhand remarks we send them forth

  Oblivious to the damage that we do.

  Who will sound retreat from battle lines

  Or hammer out an end to bitter frays?

  Continued fighting seems a coward’s ploy,

  But quitting will require all my strength.

  Negotiated peace eludes me still,

  Slipping from my grasp at every turn.

  For my children’s sake hostilities must end.

  I leave my trench and turn to face the sun.

  Death Sentence

  At six thirty on Thanksgiving morning 1982, my former husband called to wish the kids a happy Thanksgiving. They were down the hall, asleep, as were my parents, who were visiting from Arizona. I told him it was too early to wake them up and asked him to call back later in the day. The remainder of the morning and all afternoon passed with no phone call. Finally, when we were in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, he called back and railed at me for refusing to let him talk to his children earlier. While they were on the phone with him, I cleared the table, sweeping plates and silverware away and slamming them into the dishwasher before my guests had finished chewing their last bites. When I went to bed that night, I was still angry, and not just at him. I was furious at myself for continuing to allow myself to be suckered into the same old games.

  Two days later my mother-in-law called to tell me that my former husband was in the hospital. She had come to visit him over Thanksgiving. In anticipation of her visit, he had tried to sober up. After months of steady drinking, he had gone off alcohol cold turkey and without being under a doctor’s care. In the process, he had disrupted his metabolism. He had been found lying unconscious in the street in Tempe on Thanksgiving night and was taken to Scottsdale Memorial Hospital. At first doctors thought he had been struck by a car. Later examination revealed that he had gone into DTs. He was hospitalized with no liver or kidney function.

  DEATH SENTENCE

  He’s dying.

  Words come through the wire and hammer home

  Despite the doctor’s cloying, unctuous tone.

  He’s dying.

  I thought my tears exhausted years ago,

  And yet it hurts, oh God, how much it hurts!

  He’s dying.

  This is what I wanted when I thought a widow’s garb

  Would suit me better than a court’s decree.

  He’s dying.

  Should I go to him or stay away?

  What right have I to be there now?

  He’s dying.

  I’ll go.

  Vigil

  My former husband was hospitalized for over a month with his mother at his side. She called me daily with updates. I agonized about what to do. Should I send the children to see him or should I take them? And what about going myself? When I finally, tearfully, asked an old friend what I should do, she said, “Have you asked the children what they want?”

  So I took the children out to dinner separately. I told each of them what I had been told—that their father was dying—and asked whether they wanted to go see him before it was too late. Individually they both decided against going. Finally, the day after Christmas and at my mother-in-law’s urging, I went myself.

  Walking into that hospital room, I was shocked to see my former husband’s condition, and I was grateful the children had decided against coming. He was mostly unconscious by then and had wasted away to almost nothing. Out in the hall, I overheard a pair of doctors talking about him. Despite the fact that the man had been a patient in their hospital for over a month, the doctors and nurses were still mispronouncing his last name. I’m sure my mother-in-law had tried to correct this situation, but she was too worn down to fight anymore. I wasn’t. I went out into the hall and lit into them about it. From then on, the hospital staff gave me a wide berth.

  New Year’s Eve came. Mary Grandma—as the children called their grandmother—had been at the hospital day in and day out for weeks. I insisted on taking her to a restaurant for dinner. When we came back to the room at about eight o’clock, a nurse told us that his blood pressure was falling.

  VIGIL

  We keep a vigil by his midnight bed,

  His mother and his former wife,

  Grieving for the man we loved and lost.

  It’s harder for his mother than for me.

  I’ve already known the sting of loss.

  She’s only now begun to see she cannot win.

  He’s quiet now. A nurse comes in to loosen his restraints,

  Not looking at the women waiting there.

  She knows. She doesn’t want to say.

  The hours creep by. All stories are expended,

  Yet we need some sound to hold the night at bay.

  “Please sing,” his mother asks me, and I do.

  It is a serenade of love,

  Of songs we knew and treasured through the years,

  From bawdy barroom ditties to sweet hymns.

  The hours flow by. We hold his hands.

  I sing a line and wait to see if he will breathe again.

  He doesn’t. It’s over. Amen.

  Death After Divorce

  When I agreed to go to Phoenix, I thought I was going to help my mother-in-law. Before his hospitalization, my former husband had been reduced to being little more than a bum on the street. I was the one who still had the Christmas card list and knew the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the people who needed to be notified or asked to serve as pallbearers. What I didn’t recognize—something I believe Mary Grandma did—was that my being there was important for me, too. Her son and I were divorced, but she understood that I needed to come and say good-bye, not so much because it would help him, but because it would help me.

  I will always be grateful to her for that. It was an important gift, one that gave me the strength to pick up the pieces of my own life and go on.

  DEATH AFTER DIVORCE

  I come
to widow’s weeds unwed,

  The tie that binds unraveled but still bound.

  I sang a song to speed him on his way

  And hoped he gained some comfort in the sound.

  My love renewed in those brief final hours,

  All rancor gone, all bitterness and grief,

  And as I touched his cheek or soothed his brow,

  We wrote the final chapter of our breach.

  And as his painful struggle neared its end,

  When ragged breath gave way to endless sleep,

  We welcomed death together, he and I,

  For granting us the blessing of release.

  Missing Condolence

  I met my first husband the evening before my eighteenth birthday. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance from Bisbee who gave me a ride home from Tucson for the weekend. The two guys were on their way to go deer hunting, and the man who would be my husband lost a wager on me the first time he ever laid eyes on me. He had bet his friend a pitcher of beer that I wouldn’t be ready to go, but I was. I was waiting in the vestibule of my dorm—packed, signed out, and ready to leave. Over the years we stayed friends with the guy who introduced us and, once he married, with his wife as well. When our son was born, his middle name was Mikki, in honor of our friend.

  After my first husband’s death, I received many expressions of condolence, but there was none from the man who had introduced us. I learned years later that he blamed me for my husband’s death and claimed that his friend wouldn’t have died had I not taken his beloved children away from him. It was easy for the friend to blame me. After all, he hadn’t been at that baseball field watching my children’s father crawling toward the car on his hands and knees.