I wore Greg’s sweatshirts every day; only wrapped in Greg could I function again. Before, I would dress with care. I would take time with my hair, even apply some makeup, just to go to the library or the toddler gym. It used to be important that I looked composed, envied by other, more frazzled moms. But because coiffed hair and makeup looked clownish with oversized sweatshirts and yoga pants, I quit bothering. Since I also wouldn’t wash them, they took on an odd odor after the first month. I didn’t care. I felt swallowed by sadness.
Behind the sadness was a simmering anger. The anger would boil over unexpectedly. I must have started cursing more without realizing it because I would hear Hannah in the playroom, trying to put together a puzzle, and frustrated with the pieces, she’d say, “Oh, shit,” or “Damn it.” I made a mental note to watch my mouth, but since I had no control over my verbal tirades, either the language I used or who I directed it at, my efforts were kind of useless. Everything felt useless.
Mom brought me a book titled On Grief and Grieving that was about grief having five stages. I started to read it, hoping that once I understood my emotions, I would be able to resolve them, or at least work toward pretending to be normal again. But the book talked about death, divorce, and infertility. There was no chapter on lost husbands. Everyone in the book had a label: a widower, a divorcee, an orphan. I was label-less.
The book explained the stages of grief, but my heartache was more than building blocks to be piled one on top of the other until I could bridge the gap between my two lives. My existence was a complicated tapestry: red for anger, blue for intense sadness, green for happiness. Yes, happiness existed, not much, but some, particularly in the early morning, in the place between sleep and awake when I’d think Greg was lying next to me in bed, and imagine us talking softly, deciding who would get up first and who should get coffee in bed on Sundays. Then Leah would cry, awake and wanting out of her crib. When I opened my eyes to the bare sheets, cool in the early morning light, I’d weave a thick, ugly braid of red and blue into my blanket of sorrow.
I searched each memory for signs. Was Greg unhappy? Did he really up and leave us? That one day a few months ago, he had said he didn’t mind if I took the day off and went shopping while he stayed with the girls; was he really angry instead? How about the time I washed a few of his white work shirts with one of Hannah’s red T-shirts and turned his pink? Had that been the final straw? For his birthday last year, I’d gotten him an expensive watch he claimed to want. When he opened it, he looked almost disappointed. Why?
No memory was safe from my scrutiny. I went through photo albums, studying Greg’s face, his expressions, running my hands over the plastic-protected pictures. When he scowled at the camera last year on the Outer Banks because I insisted on taking a picture of him covered in zinc oxide, was that disdain in his eyes? I had waved off his protests, showing him the picture. You just look so ridiculous! Like one of those old men with the white noses! He picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and marched down to the ocean. It’s not white, it’s blue! he yelled, mockingly shaking his fist from the shore after he tossed me into the water. When I came up for air, he stood with Hannah and Leah, all three of them laughing. Had he been genuine that day, or had I missed the signs all along? Those were my fears, that I’d missed the signs all along. That our happily ever after was a sham was the fear that would settle in my stomach, twisting my insides.
I felt sick all the time and even trudged into the CVS one day while the girls were at Mom and Dad’s to buy a pregnancy test. Wouldn’t that be a bitch? It had been a few months, but stranger things had happened. The nausea was so reminiscent of my pregnancy with Hannah. When I studied the readout, my hands shaking, and saw the one pink line instead of two, I collapsed on the toilet with relief. And then, inexplicably, overwhelming sadness.
I began to think of my life as divided: my before life, with Greg, and my after life, without him. The deep chasm that separated those two lives was my current purgatory, as deep and dark as it was wide. I didn’t believe I’d feel so lost forever, and I frequently hoped that my life afterward would be sunnier, and maybe I’d legitimately laugh again one day. But Leah, Hannah, and I passed our days at the bottom of a black gorge, blindly feeling for the rope that would save us.
My parents called every day. My mom came over at least three times a week, sometimes more. She would come in the door, a flurry of movement, such a stark contrast to the stillness of our lives that I would cringe. She had bags of activities, small toys, or stickers for the girls and always a bottle of wine for me. She had apparently skipped the chapter in the grief book on the dangers of self-medication. Some days, she would take the kids to the park if it wasn’t too cold, or to the aquarium or on some other outing where they could be the loud, unruly kids they should be, but selfishly, I limited those days. I needed Leah and Hannah. Without them, I was alone with my despair and had no reason to get off the couch or out of bed.