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Kathy knew what she was doing, I’m convinced of that. Somewhere deep down inside herself, she did. There’s so much I haven’t told. Maybe I shouldn’t. But I want to write at least a little. It’s important.

She stopped driving a couple years ago, for one thing, and I was glad she did. Chalk it up to aging was how I looked at it, but then I would. Just like when she tapered off using her computer and didn’t check her email. Sometimes the latest New Yorker didn’t get opened. I was already doing the cooking. It didn’t bother me so much that she didn’t change her daily outfits all that often any more. Hell, I have my own “uniforms.” And then she stopped reading her books. Her short-term memory grew terrible at best. We’d watch a little MSNBC on my laptop, maybe a nature documentary on PBS, and have a cozy time together. What with all this and the virus raging, we were together 24 hours a day. She said she was happy, and our home was full of love.

You can talk about the writing on the wall. We didn’t. There were times I’d get scared and angry and try to correct her, which hadn’t been a good idea for over 40 years and surely wasn’t now. The pandemic was a blessing because we had to stay at home. What a great excuse not to see the doctor, either. She kept saying she wanted to “focus on the joy.” As long as I let myself be carried along and didn’t push her, our emotional intimacy only increased… I felt like I was moving into a magical world where nothing mattered but being together and watching for that smile. I tried to focus on my work, protecting us, and doing what I could to help.

We had some ugly days. Sometimes the screaming in my head would get too loud and some of it leaked out. After the last of those she wrote in her diary—I peeked for 30 seconds just the other day—that it was “really rough” but what she felt the worst about was “how hard it was on John.” My God. Oh Jesus. Cut me down and kill me. Holy shit.

You only think you know what’s coming down the pike. You might be wrong, though.

There was a time or two—no more—when Kathy had to take prescription drugs. She hated the very idea and hardly ever went to doctors anyway. (Her mother was the same. I doubt the woman ever had an aspirin until the nursing home where she died of Alzheimer’s.) I never put this down to being scared or stupid. She was fiercely proud and strong and trusted in her body. Whenever she did discover an ache she couldn’t explain, she’d push and poke and demand that it stop. The only thing she truly feared was ending up like Fielda. I know what you’re thinking and you may be right. It doesn’t matter now. We were independent beings joined together living our own life. This is true and possible and everybody’s birthright. Another reason why I love her so and why the emptiness has been so vast.

A few months back, I don’t remember when exactly, we were in the living room one Sunday afternoon. I was probably doom-scrolling on Twitter. She was sitting right across from me, not reading, just being still and quiet, lost in thought or having none. All of a sudden, it was like a gun went off but silently, a boom or flash inside her head:

“What just happened?” she almost shouted. She sat bolt upright and looked at me in great confusion and alarm.

“Wha—what do you mean?”

“Where have I been? What’s going on?”

She was totally her old self. Loud as hell and speaking rapidly, full cognition instantly restored. She jumped up from her chair, ran quickly to the other room—to check the calendar?—and then came back. I hadn’t seen her move like that in months. Her psychic energy was blasting out. She was absolutely normal. It was staggering and incredible. I was stunned, astonished, sobbing.

As best I could, I told her she’d been having “memory problems” for quite some time. She wanted to know how long. I lied. She kept shaking her head, apologizing. I told her, “No, no, no, you’re back, my God! Oh honey, here you are again!”, all but falling out of my chair. She talked non-stop and battered me with questions. Were her brother and sister all right? Did they know? What else had she missed? What crazy things had she been doing? We didn’t hug or touch. I was in shock. She was incredulous.

What a moment. What a miracle!

I was also terrified it wouldn’t last. Like someone raised up from the dead and then they fall back down again. After maybe an hour, very gradually, that’s exactly what did happen. Oh no, no, no, no, no. Oh yes. It was like watching someone slowly drown. Ninety minutes later, we were right back where we started. Holding on to sanity was difficult, but if it happened once, it could happen again, I told myself. All I had to do was keep on loving and believe. Just you and me, babe. We got this, we can do it. Six weeks later the night exploded.

Give it time. We’ll work this out.

It’s very hard to talk this way. Many people have no idea and there isn’t any reason why they should. I needed to and I’m the one who’s left. I know she knew I’d tell you. It matters because of what it sets up. Only the last few years, too, nothing fatal in itself. She was never going to go out like her mother. Her conscious ego might not have been aware and struggled, but no way, no how. I can feel her whole self now. I know.

Kathy was always ahead of her time, always ahead of me. She pounded on a neighbor’s piano in Wall Lake (and made her mad) when she was only three. At her elementary school in Des Moines, they had a recital for all the kids who’d been taking lessons. Her family couldn’t afford those, so her mother taught her. Music in hand, she walked up to the stage and asked the teacher if it would be all right for her to play even though she hadn’t had “real” lessons. Of course, her teacher said! (Thank God.) At every stage of her life, help came from out of nowhere when she was following her heart.

Her parents bought her a piano when she was still in school and even let her pick it out. To the very last, she never understood how they were able to afford it. It still sits in her studio four miles away. Instead of going to college at Drake and living at home to save, she ended up at Cornell College with the best professor of piano in the state of Iowa. (A scholarship? Her sister would know.) When she fell in love with me and moved in, she called her mother and made her cry because we were living in sin, but Fielda—what a beautiful name—never once rebuked her. After we moved to New Mexico, when Kathy was living in Dubuque to give me space to grow up, make some money, and help take care of her mother, my cousin in Florida inherited a sizable chunk and bought her a beautiful brand new Kawai RX-3 grand piano! How often does this happen to anyone, anywhere? There wasn’t room where she was renting, so she played it at her sister’s house until her mother died and she could come back to Taos. The things we had to do to get it here, her joy when the mover unpacked it and set it up. I can’t begin to tell you all the ways the love and blessings manifested. She never really had bad luck. I’d better repeat that:

She never had bad luck.

Life has sliced open my heart and fed it to ravens and bears. There’s a hole in my chest the size of a grapefruit. I drip blood wherever I go, but where does it come from? On the other hand, I still have a partner.

Maybe it’s hers.

The fear came back. The kinds of things that woke me up at night before she had the goddamn stroke and suddenly I cared too much to worry. Even when she died, I didn’t cry. Not the last few hours. Not after I realized that might make it hard for her to let go, and then the love poured out of me like Niagara Falls. The last damn chance to show how much I loved her and a whole lot more. The power of it wiped my psyche clean. I need that back again because I’m crying now.

Not all the time. Monday when I decided I’d better see if the 1099-R was in her studio. It wasn’t, naturally, but so much else was. A picture of her as a little girl, the photos of her mom and dad. Performance programs, PR shots, resumés, syllabi, mementos, paintings, dying plants, her favorite rocking chair, the little notes she always left around. Her grand piano hasn’t been tuned in over three years because the very best tuner in all the world, the only one she trusted, up and moved to Spain. “Don’t you think you ought to have it tuned?” I’d ask, “I know it sounds okay now, but—”

“Wait until we find a home!” she’d interrupt. “After it’s been moved.”

I thought of that when I was looking through her desk and lost it all again. Oh baby, honey, baby doll, why did you have to go?

The physical details of her dying come back sometimes when I lie down or go to bed at night. Of course they do. I paid such close attention. The way she breathed or tried to. The blackish-purple blotches on her tongue and lips. The absolute impending certainty of what was happening, the nothing-I-could-do unfolding as I stood or sat there, holding, touching, talking to her constantly. The time I called the nurse at 4:00 a.m. because I couldn’t get a reading on my pocket oximeter. She looked at me like I was from another planet but humored me by wheeling in the big machine that told us 98% and afterwards I tried my own again and there was nothing. You see it spilled out on the floor or painted huge across the wall but don’t know how to feel. I know she’s dying but I stand there fooling with the stupid plastic thing as if it makes a difference…

Okay, you get it. Welcome to my world. And now a little shift but still on Planet Juan.

Before my honey died she looked me in the eye and shot a picture right into my brain. It was the local cemetery in Keota, Iowa (pop. 958) where her parents are buried. No one in the family lives there any more unless we count the aunt by marriage who erected headstones for her miscarriages and gave them names. She meant well of course and I don’t mind. My sister-in-law and her husband have a monument in place with dates of death left blank. Their brother in Georgia wants his ashes scattered in the Gulf of Mexico so he’s out. But scads of other relatives are already in the ground, including Kathy’s beloved “Gram” who came all the way from England. She had a hand pump in her kitchen for the well and once had grapes and chickens in the back yard. Her cherry dresser stands beside my bed. Our bed. My bed. Goddammit all to hell.

The telepathic prompting told me, yes, please put my ashes there. (Finally looked at them last night. Quite finely ground, about five pounds of powder in a heavy plastic bag.) The plan is I will use her parents’ plot to bury the urn and place a flat “companion stone” on top. Having neither of these on hand meant I had to do extensive research.

One place I found is called “Mainely Urns” and guess which state it’s in but they sell every kind of urn and granite gravestones from a website built in ‘96 I’d say. They’re not the only ones, either. Returns might be a bitch if anything was spelled wrong but there’s no reason I can’t do this. I’ve even been texting back and forth with a fellow named Slaubaugh who handles all things cemetery-related in Keota. He hasn’t gotten back to me yet about borrowing a post hole digger so maybe I pushed him too far. Mainely Urns does sell nice bronze urns that cost much less than I ever would’ve thought. There’s even one on sale right now for 80 bucks. Don’t know about the granite business yet.

By “companion stone” I mean one that has both our names on it. The drawback here is that it’s heavier but I’m still shopping. Two small stones side-by-side might do even if I’m never buried there. Having some kind of marker is the thing though. I’m proud to have walked this Earth with the love of my life and want at least a few to know. So here’s the deal: I have the gravestone (also called a “grass marker” since it lies flush with the turf) shipped there if it’s not too heavy, regardless of where I order it from, or maybe I could pick it up along the way. Early September after Labor Day. Perhaps my sweetheart’s siblings will be there. I dig a hole, bury the urn, and place the stone. Everybody cries and I drive off into the sunset. Maybe I return years later on secret pilgrimages. Not tell anyone, just me and her. Strange dude kneeling on the grass and weeping. Leaves a bouquet of yellow roses, walks back to his Maserati and disappears.

I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where I’m staying. Driving through Taos, it feels like Venus or bad luck. What is there to stay for? Soon everyone who knew who Kathy was will be dead just like me, and mostly people didn’t know. Now there’s a funny thought. We only pay attention to you while you’re in our faces, then we all go back into the stew. I guess the thing is do it now and let us know.

She lasted 22 years after she retired early. We didn’t plan it though, she simply quit and then we winged it. Everybody thought we must have gotten an inheritance but no, not anything. What if she had stayed on ten more years in the academic cancer factory? Shut up you shit you can’t ask questions like that. The point is that she stood for joy and insisted we follow our hearts. That was how we got here and it’s beautiful. There are no mistakes, not ever, and there’s no way I can make one now.

I’ve opened a brokerage account with Charles Schwab. Watch the old dead hippie blow the rent on mutual funds. A couple, anyway. Wake up a year from now and find I made a couple thou, I’ll keel right over then go buy another phone. Felt I couldn’t do that while we were “saving for a house” of course. That didn’t work in any case and now she’s gone, goddammit, but still here in my heart and maybe cheering.

When I was looking for the tax form in her studio, I came across some old silverware she had there. Pieces from a larger hoard here in the hutch, actually my great-grandmother’s silver plate from way back in the 1800s in West Virginia. I kid you not. We—“we”—have tons of things like that. No one in either family ever threw anything away, especially mine if it were worth a nickel. Somewhere I have my great-grandfather’s “clergyman’s pass” for the B & O railroad. Worth lots more than nickels then, but the point is that my grandmother kept it, see, because she was proud that he could ride the train for free…

Where was I? (These people. Me too, obviously.) Anyway, the silverware:

It’s heavy, solid, and I like it. Could easily be 150 years old. Why am I eating with soulless stainless steel utensils made in China? Let me say again, I like these. She made me find them. The drawer was even hard to open. They’re a symbol. Follow your fucking heart right now or die a worthless sack of scum.

Immediately I thought, hey.

Hey, Juan.

You need a funky old museum kind of house to keep and use this stuff. It makes you smile. Then you don’t have to sell or give it all away and pull a stupid trailer around to state parks like a sad old motherfucker with a little yappy dog and scare the little girls. My Kath-a-leen approves. (“Why didn’t you do this before I died?”) I know, it’s sad and crazy but there is this kind of sense. I had a thought I liked and didn’t kill it. My family, all mostly dead, would not approve and this does bring me joy.

A flicker of direction. A drunken firefly at 40 yards. I may barf it up tomorrow but tonight I sleep. Oh look, a half-dead lilac. Moving on.

Thinking of her infected lungs. There is nothing anyone can do. The exhausting dreams that take all night and wake me up but I have only been asleep for 90 minutes. The aching spasms in my legs. The box of ashes on the chair. “Aspiration pneumonia,” the death certificate said,* from stroke-affected swallowing that lets food or drink get sucked into the lungs. She was in a rehabilitation clinic. During a pre-release conference call with staff, they pounded into me that I would have to watch her swallowing, prepare soft food, thicken her drinks, and don’t forget the diapers just in case, at the same time she was dying of sepsis from a lung infection no one noticed. I’d already read up on things to watch for, too, but no visits allowed because of covid. Surrounded by nurses, occasional doctors, therapists, and staff, and she got sicker there than she had been before admittance.

With the blood clot in her artery she was probably already doomed. We had no idea, obviously. As mechanisms go for checking out the stroke was short and violent. Not fatal in itself but consequential. Again no damned idea, no one ever tells you straight what to expect. I guess I wouldn’t either. Why preclude the possibility of miracles?

The clinic days were ragged, brutal. Her cognition cracking. She was frightened and confused and wanted to escape. She couldn’t hold her iPhone straight for FaceTime calls and almost no one helped her. I couldn’t be with her, not even for a minute, for the full three weeks after her disabling stroke. The situational cruelty was staggering. I’d call her, finally get through, and hear her half-shout, half-cry, “JOHN! JOHN!” then lose the phone, and I would try to hold myself together until she heard me once again, and I could say good-bye, I’ll call you in the morning, anything it took.

We had our time together. So full of love there finally were no tears.

There’s so much business to take care of that the days go by. The bank, insurance companies, the MVD, finding time bombs in the drawers. Telling the minister who doesn’t read obituaries to take her off the email list because she’s dead and hasn’t been to church for five years anyway. Sometimes I fall apart. Other times there’s strength I don’t remember from before. I shave, I floss, I wear sharp clothes, allow myself to follow every impulse. Make all the noise I want at 3:00 a.m., stay up till dawn to write. Though she always insisted that was fine (“I’m a musician, I don’t mind!”), I only half-believed her. There never were any limits right from the beginning.

I never needed her permission, only mine.

What then do I do with this? I used to leave her notes on index cards, things I thought of after she had gone to bed, prop them up where she would find them when she made her morning tea. Sometimes she’d stick them on the fridge with magnets, other times they’d disappear. The other day I found one she had kept for years…

“Wherever you are, wherever we’re together, that’s my home.”

Oh man. We spent the last 10 years especially, trying hard to put down roots. Taos is a heavy place to do that. The physical environment is so harsh, the economics crazy. Nothing ever felt quite right except we loved the mountains and the local culture. (Hint, hint.) “Home” was still elusive. We hung onto this much too small and funky old adobe with a view and dreamed of something nicer for so long. She often said, “I don’t want to die here in this house!” but just as often said how grateful she was that we had it, how solid and safe it felt inside. The privacy. The quiet. The trees, for heaven’s sake. Our time was up, however, and we knew it.

Was it ever. Jesus.

I’ve realized something since.

She’s given us another chance. I don’t have to be a caregiver. She skipped right past her mother’s fate. There’s enough money to survive a while. This is where I am, I’ve no idea what to do. It’s not the what, though, but the essence of it. I can do whatever I want. I always could. She always told me to. Insisted, yelled, cajoled, implored, and even cried. I mean, I really can. I must. I owe it to her. I owe it to myself. Maybe I owe it to the air, the sun, the rocks. Maybe you.

Everything I did for more than half of my whole life was mostly with this woman. Even when I went off on my own, sailed my kayak down the Chester River, hiked almost to Wheeler Peak, or drove off in the wilderness where she’d be scared to go, I told her all about it. Talked her head off, raved and cursed and got high afterwards. Took a bath and fed the cat. Wrote a letter, showed her pictures. Went to bed and held her close.

Why is she gone and I’m still in this body? Can anybody do this?

DO THEY KNOW?

* No second stroke apparently as others speculated.

Nothing over there but air. I’m still sleeping on the sheets I changed to on her final weekend when I thought that she’d be coming home. I used to come to bed and run my hand along her hip to let her sleeping self know it was me. Three weeks ago I put an extra blanket on the bed because I wake up cold and crazy. This morning I traced an arm along the outline of her body in my mind. The volume that she occupied, the warmth, her little sounds, the scent and touching reaching out into my brain. The way I’d read her moods, stay in bed a while to hold her or get up to start the day. Tucking in the bottom sheet on her side was impossible at first. I’m already on my knees to do that so the pillow’s right for punching, but I don’t. Food lasts twice as long now. I don’t have to keep the old New Yorkers. There’s all this fucking tea. I have so much to tell her, dammit.

This week was the worst. At least I walked, though. Every other day in fact. The muscles have already snugged up against my knees so they don’t rattle quite as much.

We used to come out to walk the Rift Valley Trail until she started feeling “shaky.” Now I know it was the aneurysm and the blood clot. Maybe she was having mini-strokes the whole time she suspected Parkinson’s, or something else. One of the last days we hiked there she strode out far ahead. No power on earth could slow her down and I lost sight of her. A minute later I came down a steep place where the trail crosses a small arroyo and found her sitting in the path. She wasn’t resting. “Where were you?” she wailed. Her knee was cut and bleeding. She’d badly skinned a shin, and there were gashes on her forearm where she’d tried to break a fall.

“God, what happened? I’m so sorry, look at you, you’re all banged up!”

“The trees closed in on me…”

The trees? They what?

Oh what a dark cold gust blew through my chest.

I’d fallen out there too on longer solitary hikes (not where she had), twice on another isolated stretch in both directions. Both times I felt for sure that something pushed me. I didn’t remember that this afternoon, too scared of what I thought the tree thing meant for her. It would have been a good thing, though, and quieted my heart.

On Monday and Wednesday I stayed on old familiar ground, climbed the hill I measured long ago to know where I should turn around. Maybe too familiar. The place where Kathy fell had always had a feeling to it, years before in fact. On Friday I felt strong when I walked past and then my gumption drained away. Farther on I reached the large arroyo at the bottom of the hill. Long ago I named it “Aster Gulch” for the purple flowers that bloom there if we have a rainy spring. I’d never walked farther up or down it than it took to hide away, but yesterday I wanted to explore. The will was there for that.

You never know where arroyos go unless you give in to the impulse. Eroded banks can give up treasures. Sometimes I find bones. The sand and clay dust in the bottoms hold clear footprints for a while. I followed boot prints, small ones like a woman’s, that quickly disappeared. There were critter dens and not a speck of trash, untrod rocks and silence if I didn’t click my pole against them. The sagebrush scratched my legs and drew a little blood. Somehow that appealed to me.

In places there are stunning boulders smoothed and rounded by primeval floods. Not this time, but I did see tall trees on a ridge line not too far away and decided to climb out. (Carefully, in case I had no cell phone signal.) When I hit the ridge the only thing I saw was miles of sagebrush and piñons, but I knew where I was headed from the mountains and took off, meandering around the vegetation. Five minutes later I was shocked but happy to stumble out onto the trail.

Amazing when that happens, and you’re almost home again.