Timeline
by Jay Hodges
One minute before you died, a friend of mine called. I didn’t answer. I’d been avoiding communicating with most people for weeks, and I was enraged the call came then, in one of your last moments. As irrational as it was, I held the interruption against him. I set the phone face down on the bookshelf but picked it up again soon after to screenshot your time of departure.
Within seconds after you die, I take an initial post-you breath.
Approximately twenty-eight years and one month before you died, we met for the first time at Quackenbush’s, the coffee shop across the street from the building where you worked your entire career. You stopped in for a late lunch of black beans and rice on workdays, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I showed up around the same time to sip a cappuccino and grade students’ German homework before class. We made eye contact and said hello a few times that week. One day you asked if you could join me at my table, and we awkwardly bumbled through the next hour or so. It was the first time I heard some of your favorite phrases, standbys I would hear so often I would be able to predict when you would use them, like “drop-dead gorgeous,” “You should be on the stage,” and “that god-damned son-of-a-bitch,” the latter reserved primarily for politicians “running the country into the ground.” I began showing up most afternoons, even when I didn’t have papers to grade or class to teach. Then we began meeting in the evenings for dinner or a movie or swimming. Then we began us. This is the story we told people. It’s one truth.
Sometime in early April twenty-seven years before you died, I shared that I was considering moving to New York City after graduate school to begin a career in book publishing. You supported the plan, saying you held me with an open hand.
One hour and fifty-ish minutes after you die, I walk Alu, our first venture into the post-you world. Two hours after you die, Alu takes a post-you shit and I pick it up and tie a knot in the New York Times bag and remember how every now and then I’d place a knotted poop bag containing our previous dog Otis’s warm sludge on your cropped head during late-night walks and you always feigned surprise I’d do such a thing. Every type of experience post-you will have a first. I will take a first post-you shit; I will pee, I will spit, cough, sneeze, smack, burp, fart, creak, pop, cum; change my underwear and tie my shoes; I will listen to Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”; ride in a boat and buy a piece of art and take a photograph; eat lunch, dinner, breakfast, brunch; shriek at Chloe for peeing on one of the Persian rugs and snap at Esteban for stealing Chloe’s treats and bark, “Stop!” at Alu when he pants in anticipation of a walk; I will decide on a plan to get into shape; ride a bicycle, run five miles, swim in Barton Springs; I will call a friend, call another friend, call my mom, call one of your nephews, call another friend; I will make coffee, buy a coffee, order a refill; I will make an international call to a friend and reserve an AirBNB in Seoul; stock up on paper towels and wash an apple with baking soda, clean the toilets, unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry; eat a first post-you banana, a raspberry, an avocado, a tortilla chip laden with homemade salsa; I will remember how you more than once pointed out that I had tossed a fruit peel into the compost without removing the PLU code sticker; type “Hola!” as the subject line in an email and mimic you saying, “Kiss me, I’m Carmen!”; write the first letter of a word, then the word, then a phrase, then a sentence, then a paragraph; doze off with a glass of cabernet sauvignon in my hand and spill it on my leg, the chair, the carpet; piss off a friend and want someone to talk to; have trouble falling asleep and have to force myself to get up to feed the animals breakfast; to stay in bed for twenty-two hours; turn a page, read a hundred pages in a day, close a book; I will forget the characters’ names of a novel I finished the day before; shove broccoli florets into my mouth from the hot bar at Whole Foods as I approach the self-checkout registers; step in dog poop, get sand in my eye and rained upon; choose sparkling water and refuse butter; end a friendship and rekindle a friendship; I will see a Missing Person notice and sit on furniture in our house that you have never sat on, never seen.
Twenty-one years and seven months before you died, we boxed up my belongings in my Williamsburg apartment. The morning after attending a wedding in the Hamptons we hitched the loaded U-Haul to a borrowed truck and began driving to Texas. Cohabitating with a significant other would be a first for both of us.
Late the evening before you died, it occurred to me that for the first time in my fifty-four years I would not share living space with another person. Not my mother, father, friends, roommates. You.
For fifteen or twenty minutes after you die, I try to witness the first law of thermodynamics: No energy is created in the universe and none is destroyed. I turn off the lamp and wait with your emptying vessel, hoping to see your life force emanate, disperse, slip into new journeys. I pull open the curtains and switch on both lamps and the overhead lights. I squint and stare at your body from different points in the room. I lie my head on your chest and watch your mouth. Nothing. I call the cats and Alu. Because they always and forever refuse to cooperate, the cats stay put but Alu creaks up off the floor, lumbers into the room, stops at the foot of the hospital bed. I try to get him to shift his focus, but he keeps his eyes locked on me.
About three years before you died, I told you that the supermarket nearest the house would be torn down and replaced by a more upscale grocery store. “I’ll be dead by then,” you said.
Forty minutes after you die, I call hospice.
Forty-two minutes after you die, I text our loved ones your most recited poem, Sara Teasdale’s “Moon’s Ending”:
Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
In the dawn clouds flying,
How good to go, light into light, and still
Giving light, dying.
Fifty-eight minutes after you die, your hospice nurse says, “I’m so sorry,” as she heads toward the bedroom. Alu trots after her wagging his tail. She pronounces you deceased and rattles off what we need to do next—change your clothes if I want, contact the funeral home, dispose of your medication. I’m grateful she’s all business and apparently not interested in comforting me.
I don’t know how best to remove clothing from a stiffening corpse and try to mirror her efforts. Our movements are awkward, out of sync. Your cold extremities remind me how unnatural my father’s forehead felt—like damp cement—when I rested my palm on it at the viewing, a gesture I picked up from you, like a halted love pat. I slide my hands down to your lower back and find warmth, and I feel lucky to absorb the last of you, for our energies to mingle. I want your heat to transfer into my hands until your vessel runs cold, but I’m aware your nurse has more dying to attend to. I regret not discovering the constellation of warmth before calling hospice.
We slip your arms through the sleeves of an old T-shirt and your body flops toward her, and she barely manages to keep it from slumping to the floor. I help pull it upright and an eye opens like that of a jostled doll. “His eye opened,” she says. The narration annoys me, and I resist the urge to tell her I know, that I can see pretty much everything she sees. With a pinch of her fingers, gone for the last time is the Paul Newman blue.
We slide pajama bottoms up your legs and work threadbare socks onto your now marbling feet because they were always cold. I’ll save your favorite clothes for I don’t know what, but they won’t end up in a trashcan at a crematorium.
We empty the remaining morphine into a container of a spongy something that absorbs liquid, and she transfers the pills into a plastic bag. She scrapes your name from the labels of the pill bottles. I keep the empty morphine container—your name intact—and place it in the medicine cabinet between a bottle of turmeric capsules and tins of hair clay.
I ask her if she would like to take the remaining cookies she brought you four days before. She says I can keep them, and I set them aside to throw out later.
About two hours after you die, two guys in their mid-twenties arrive to transport your vessel. They remind me of characters in a movie about young people who work in a funeral home—one goth with shoulder-length black-dyed hair who landed his dream job and the other just a guy who needed a paycheck. They’re casually—unnervingly—talkative, commenting on the number of books stacked around, wondering about the age of the house, if I have more than three pets, how long I’ve lived in Austin. Inane questions I guess meant to distract from what’s unfolding in front of me, to fill the engulfing void. The last I see of your body it’s being zipped into a yellow bag that has pointed raised areas at the feet. I take photographs as they wheel it on a gurney out the front door, down the step, along the walk, through the gate, and onto the driveway and slide it into a minivan. I wonder if the neighbors are watching through their kitchen windows, through their doorbell cameras, if I’ll get texts and calls requesting updates. I don’t.
Four or five years before you died, you asked, “It hasn’t been so bad, has it? All this time with me?”
You were always a private person and rarely shared concerns or worries. I couldn’t gauge whether you actually wondered if I thought our time together had been challenging, if you were insecure about the status of our relationship. “Not at all,” I said. “Has it been bad for you?
“It’s been wonderful,” you said.
Three hours and nineteen minutes after you die, I sit in the car, hands on the steering wheel, wondering where to drive. I need to go somewhere. I head toward downtown and pass the street we took to get to Barton Springs and the macrobiotic restaurant. I turn in the opposite direction and there’s the book store where we passed an embarrassing number of hours browsing and buying more tomes to add to the stacks. There’s the default Mexican food restaurant we ate at once or twice a week. There’s our dentist’s office and the building where I would take you to have your blood drawn for labs. Our optometrist’s office is around a corner. There is the fancy ice cream shop and Half-Price Books. There’s the exit to the (un)skilled nursing facility and the road to Mount Bonnell. Everywhere I go there you are. I decide I might as well go home.
I stop at Goodwill and find a set of vintage Dalmatian salt and pepper shakers I consider buying to resell in my booth at the antique shop but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. A friend, also a vendor at the antique shop, says my name and asks how everything is going, and I say, “My partner died this morning.” She expresses her condolences and asks for a hug. I feel she is judging me because I’m at Goodwill, contemplating buying Dalmatian salt and pepper shakers only a few hours after you die. I press the porcelain dogs into her hands. “You should get these,” I say. “Someone will want them.”
On multiple occasions before you died, when you still remembered that one of my hobbies was reselling stuff, you declared me a genius when I told you about items that sold at an astounding profit margin. Like the huge portrait of a cocker spaniel that cost me $29.99 that I sold for over $2,000. Or the Victorian bronze urn that sold for more than thirty times what I paid for it. “How’d you get to be so smart?” you’d say.
Nine months and nineteen days and four-ish hours after you die, you receive these pieces of mail: a time-sensitive offer for a twenty-dollar gift certificate to Walmart; a 1099 from the Teachers Retirement Systems of Texas for 2022; a membership card from Amnesty International; a last chance to renew your subscription warning from The New Yorker; and a flyer promoting “The Marriage of Figaro” at the Houston Grand Opera.
I receive a large white envelope from a place called Retirement Planning University Inc.
Eleven years, six months, and thirteen days before you died, you picked me up at the airport after my trip to Vietnam and China. In the passenger’s seat, a trophy awaited. The gold muscular figure’s arms raised in victory, a laurel wreath clasped in one hand. On the base, where an engraved metal plate would usually be, you’d taped a message with our dog’s and cat’s names and your initials:
Within seconds after you die, I take an initial post-you breath.
Approximately twenty-eight years and one month before you died, we met for the first time at Quackenbush’s, the coffee shop across the street from the building where you worked your entire career. You stopped in for a late lunch of black beans and rice on workdays, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays I showed up around the same time to sip a cappuccino and grade students’ German homework before class. We made eye contact and said hello a few times that week. One day you asked if you could join me at my table, and we awkwardly bumbled through the next hour or so. It was the first time I heard some of your favorite phrases, standbys I would hear so often I would be able to predict when you would use them, like “drop-dead gorgeous,” “You should be on the stage,” and “that god-damned son-of-a-bitch,” the latter reserved primarily for politicians “running the country into the ground.” I began showing up most afternoons, even when I didn’t have papers to grade or class to teach. Then we began meeting in the evenings for dinner or a movie or swimming. Then we began us. This is the story we told people. It’s one truth.
Sometime in early April twenty-seven years before you died, I shared that I was considering moving to New York City after graduate school to begin a career in book publishing. You supported the plan, saying you held me with an open hand.
One hour and fifty-ish minutes after you die, I walk Alu, our first venture into the post-you world. Two hours after you die, Alu takes a post-you shit and I pick it up and tie a knot in the New York Times bag and remember how every now and then I’d place a knotted poop bag containing our previous dog Otis’s warm sludge on your cropped head during late-night walks and you always feigned surprise I’d do such a thing. Every type of experience post-you will have a first. I will take a first post-you shit; I will pee, I will spit, cough, sneeze, smack, burp, fart, creak, pop, cum; change my underwear and tie my shoes; I will listen to Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” and The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes”; ride in a boat and buy a piece of art and take a photograph; eat lunch, dinner, breakfast, brunch; shriek at Chloe for peeing on one of the Persian rugs and snap at Esteban for stealing Chloe’s treats and bark, “Stop!” at Alu when he pants in anticipation of a walk; I will decide on a plan to get into shape; ride a bicycle, run five miles, swim in Barton Springs; I will call a friend, call another friend, call my mom, call one of your nephews, call another friend; I will make coffee, buy a coffee, order a refill; I will make an international call to a friend and reserve an AirBNB in Seoul; stock up on paper towels and wash an apple with baking soda, clean the toilets, unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry; eat a first post-you banana, a raspberry, an avocado, a tortilla chip laden with homemade salsa; I will remember how you more than once pointed out that I had tossed a fruit peel into the compost without removing the PLU code sticker; type “Hola!” as the subject line in an email and mimic you saying, “Kiss me, I’m Carmen!”; write the first letter of a word, then the word, then a phrase, then a sentence, then a paragraph; doze off with a glass of cabernet sauvignon in my hand and spill it on my leg, the chair, the carpet; piss off a friend and want someone to talk to; have trouble falling asleep and have to force myself to get up to feed the animals breakfast; to stay in bed for twenty-two hours; turn a page, read a hundred pages in a day, close a book; I will forget the characters’ names of a novel I finished the day before; shove broccoli florets into my mouth from the hot bar at Whole Foods as I approach the self-checkout registers; step in dog poop, get sand in my eye and rained upon; choose sparkling water and refuse butter; end a friendship and rekindle a friendship; I will see a Missing Person notice and sit on furniture in our house that you have never sat on, never seen.
Twenty-one years and seven months before you died, we boxed up my belongings in my Williamsburg apartment. The morning after attending a wedding in the Hamptons we hitched the loaded U-Haul to a borrowed truck and began driving to Texas. Cohabitating with a significant other would be a first for both of us.
Late the evening before you died, it occurred to me that for the first time in my fifty-four years I would not share living space with another person. Not my mother, father, friends, roommates. You.
For fifteen or twenty minutes after you die, I try to witness the first law of thermodynamics: No energy is created in the universe and none is destroyed. I turn off the lamp and wait with your emptying vessel, hoping to see your life force emanate, disperse, slip into new journeys. I pull open the curtains and switch on both lamps and the overhead lights. I squint and stare at your body from different points in the room. I lie my head on your chest and watch your mouth. Nothing. I call the cats and Alu. Because they always and forever refuse to cooperate, the cats stay put but Alu creaks up off the floor, lumbers into the room, stops at the foot of the hospital bed. I try to get him to shift his focus, but he keeps his eyes locked on me.
About three years before you died, I told you that the supermarket nearest the house would be torn down and replaced by a more upscale grocery store. “I’ll be dead by then,” you said.
Forty minutes after you die, I call hospice.
Forty-two minutes after you die, I text our loved ones your most recited poem, Sara Teasdale’s “Moon’s Ending”:
Moon, worn thin to the width of a quill,
In the dawn clouds flying,
How good to go, light into light, and still
Giving light, dying.
Fifty-eight minutes after you die, your hospice nurse says, “I’m so sorry,” as she heads toward the bedroom. Alu trots after her wagging his tail. She pronounces you deceased and rattles off what we need to do next—change your clothes if I want, contact the funeral home, dispose of your medication. I’m grateful she’s all business and apparently not interested in comforting me.
I don’t know how best to remove clothing from a stiffening corpse and try to mirror her efforts. Our movements are awkward, out of sync. Your cold extremities remind me how unnatural my father’s forehead felt—like damp cement—when I rested my palm on it at the viewing, a gesture I picked up from you, like a halted love pat. I slide my hands down to your lower back and find warmth, and I feel lucky to absorb the last of you, for our energies to mingle. I want your heat to transfer into my hands until your vessel runs cold, but I’m aware your nurse has more dying to attend to. I regret not discovering the constellation of warmth before calling hospice.
We slip your arms through the sleeves of an old T-shirt and your body flops toward her, and she barely manages to keep it from slumping to the floor. I help pull it upright and an eye opens like that of a jostled doll. “His eye opened,” she says. The narration annoys me, and I resist the urge to tell her I know, that I can see pretty much everything she sees. With a pinch of her fingers, gone for the last time is the Paul Newman blue.
We slide pajama bottoms up your legs and work threadbare socks onto your now marbling feet because they were always cold. I’ll save your favorite clothes for I don’t know what, but they won’t end up in a trashcan at a crematorium.
We empty the remaining morphine into a container of a spongy something that absorbs liquid, and she transfers the pills into a plastic bag. She scrapes your name from the labels of the pill bottles. I keep the empty morphine container—your name intact—and place it in the medicine cabinet between a bottle of turmeric capsules and tins of hair clay.
I ask her if she would like to take the remaining cookies she brought you four days before. She says I can keep them, and I set them aside to throw out later.
About two hours after you die, two guys in their mid-twenties arrive to transport your vessel. They remind me of characters in a movie about young people who work in a funeral home—one goth with shoulder-length black-dyed hair who landed his dream job and the other just a guy who needed a paycheck. They’re casually—unnervingly—talkative, commenting on the number of books stacked around, wondering about the age of the house, if I have more than three pets, how long I’ve lived in Austin. Inane questions I guess meant to distract from what’s unfolding in front of me, to fill the engulfing void. The last I see of your body it’s being zipped into a yellow bag that has pointed raised areas at the feet. I take photographs as they wheel it on a gurney out the front door, down the step, along the walk, through the gate, and onto the driveway and slide it into a minivan. I wonder if the neighbors are watching through their kitchen windows, through their doorbell cameras, if I’ll get texts and calls requesting updates. I don’t.
Four or five years before you died, you asked, “It hasn’t been so bad, has it? All this time with me?”
You were always a private person and rarely shared concerns or worries. I couldn’t gauge whether you actually wondered if I thought our time together had been challenging, if you were insecure about the status of our relationship. “Not at all,” I said. “Has it been bad for you?
“It’s been wonderful,” you said.
Three hours and nineteen minutes after you die, I sit in the car, hands on the steering wheel, wondering where to drive. I need to go somewhere. I head toward downtown and pass the street we took to get to Barton Springs and the macrobiotic restaurant. I turn in the opposite direction and there’s the book store where we passed an embarrassing number of hours browsing and buying more tomes to add to the stacks. There’s the default Mexican food restaurant we ate at once or twice a week. There’s our dentist’s office and the building where I would take you to have your blood drawn for labs. Our optometrist’s office is around a corner. There is the fancy ice cream shop and Half-Price Books. There’s the exit to the (un)skilled nursing facility and the road to Mount Bonnell. Everywhere I go there you are. I decide I might as well go home.
I stop at Goodwill and find a set of vintage Dalmatian salt and pepper shakers I consider buying to resell in my booth at the antique shop but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. A friend, also a vendor at the antique shop, says my name and asks how everything is going, and I say, “My partner died this morning.” She expresses her condolences and asks for a hug. I feel she is judging me because I’m at Goodwill, contemplating buying Dalmatian salt and pepper shakers only a few hours after you die. I press the porcelain dogs into her hands. “You should get these,” I say. “Someone will want them.”
On multiple occasions before you died, when you still remembered that one of my hobbies was reselling stuff, you declared me a genius when I told you about items that sold at an astounding profit margin. Like the huge portrait of a cocker spaniel that cost me $29.99 that I sold for over $2,000. Or the Victorian bronze urn that sold for more than thirty times what I paid for it. “How’d you get to be so smart?” you’d say.
Nine months and nineteen days and four-ish hours after you die, you receive these pieces of mail: a time-sensitive offer for a twenty-dollar gift certificate to Walmart; a 1099 from the Teachers Retirement Systems of Texas for 2022; a membership card from Amnesty International; a last chance to renew your subscription warning from The New Yorker; and a flyer promoting “The Marriage of Figaro” at the Houston Grand Opera.
I receive a large white envelope from a place called Retirement Planning University Inc.
Eleven years, six months, and thirteen days before you died, you picked me up at the airport after my trip to Vietnam and China. In the passenger’s seat, a trophy awaited. The gold muscular figure’s arms raised in victory, a laurel wreath clasped in one hand. On the base, where an engraved metal plate would usually be, you’d taped a message with our dog’s and cat’s names and your initials:
Welcome home from China,
Beloved Hero!
Summer 2010 * Otis * Rover * JOK
Beloved Hero!
Summer 2010 * Otis * Rover * JOK
About five months after you die, the friend whose call interrupted our last moments emails that it must be tough being newly widowed (it seems a blunt, cruel way to put it but at the same time somehow gentle) and encourages me to reach out if I’d like to talk. In another email he says he wants to see me, that I should visit him and then leaves something similar in a voicemail. Certain I know what he’s up to, I reply that I have zero interest in interacting with anyone outside of friendship. He insists I’ve misunderstood his intentions, that he only wants to offer me an escape from the animals and a chance to process your death far from the confines of the last two years. I don’t know what to believe, but I tell him I’ve been burning through relationships—arguing, blaming, ghosting, blocking. He suggests I find a therapist.
I reply: “Avoiding antidepressants with wine and exercise, which I think are cancelling each other out.”
Approximately twenty-six years and seven months before you died, you met me in Norway. I’d spent a few months on a small island off the coast of Trondheim, working in a fish-packing plant a friend of mine managed. We traveled for three weeks. The sculpture park and the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo. Sex in our private room with the stacked beds on the train after crossing into Denmark. Overnight in the red-light district in Hamburg. Hide-and-go-seek around the cathedral in Cologne and oversized pretzels with spicy mustard and sides of sauerkraut. The Goethe House, Alte Oper, and the beer garden we thought may double as a gay bar in Frankfurt. Bicycling along the river and eating marzipan and hazelnut Milka bars in Salzburg. The Gustav Klimt Villa and the formality of Vienna. The exquisite architecture of Budapest. Stealing coffee cups from a Franz Kafka–themed café in Prague.
Three hundred and five days and approximately fourteen hours after you die, a friend and I sit on the bed chatting inches from where you expired. She nods toward a shirt hanging on the end of the rod holding the overly long off-white blackout curtains Esteban curls into, leaving smudges of black hairs. “Is that his?” she asks. It is, and I tell her I hung it there soon before you died, but I’m unsure. Maybe I hung it sometime after to block the gap between the edge of the fabric and the window casing, maybe during one of the paranoid stretches while binging on true crime podcasts and draining wine bottles until my tongue coated red. I can imagine myself thinking I’d leave the shirt as a reminder, though it’s not one of my favorites—the white oxford with the blue grid print and clear buttons and, as with many of your preferred shirts and mine, fraying cuffs and collar.
The shirt doesn’t help me place you in one of our earlier scenes. Not like the blue chinos with the short red ribbon you tied on when the slider fell off the zipper. Those you would pair with a blazer and loafers when an occasion called for fancier dress than our default jeans or shorts. Not like the Tam o’ Shanter you wore throughout our Istanbul trip. Not like what I referred to as your Michael Jackson jacket, the quilted black one with the elastic waist you wore every day of every winter and about which hipsters would ask where you found it and you’d give me that “See!” look.
Four or so days after you die, I text the vendor friend: “It must have been strange to spot me thrifting hours after my partner died. I didn’t want to be in the house. I didn’t know where to go.”
Hundreds of times throughout the years before you died, you said, “She’s just trying to make a living,” when I’d complain about a mosquito or smash one mid-bite.
Eight months and eleven days after you die, a man named Joseph backs a tow truck into the driveway. Wearing a shirt with palm trees on it, madras shorts, and flipflops, he looks more like he’s running errands for Jimmy Buffett than hauling automobiles around the city. He’s grateful I’m donating our old car to the local classical music channel you used to listen to while cooking. They’ll have it auctioned off to raise money to support various programs at the station. Apparently it’s not a problem that the car has sat inoperable in the driveway for over three years. That’s how long it took me to find the title—in a closet in a box containing newspaper clippings, a Nature Conservancy calendar, unopened mail, and an uncashed check from the IRS.
Joseph raises the bed of the truck and lowers the back end so it’s at a forty-five-degree angle. He asks me to put the car in neutral and then catches a hook somewhere on the undercarriage and pushes a lever and the car is pulled up onto the bed of the truck. Another lever and the bed is lowered until flat.
The afternoon bends in an unexpected direction as I watch Joseph wait inside the truck for a couple and their standard poodle to pass. I conjure the images I captured as your body was wheeled out the front door, down the step, along the walk, through the gate, and onto the driveway and then slid into a minivan. Joseph waves bye and begins easing the truck out into the street. I snap photos as he drives away with our car. An across-the-street neighbor texts, “How much did you get for it?”
Eighty-six days and a handful of hours after you die, I read an article about a man who died from grief a few days after his wife was killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting.
Once I mentioned that someone had passed away, and you said, “They didn’t pass. They kicked the bucket. Call it what it is.” I feel like a bad partner—still here, kicking about, my foot haphazardly searching for a bucket.
Nine months, twenty-four days, eleven hours, and forty-nine minutes after you die, I write this sentence.
I reply: “Avoiding antidepressants with wine and exercise, which I think are cancelling each other out.”
Approximately twenty-six years and seven months before you died, you met me in Norway. I’d spent a few months on a small island off the coast of Trondheim, working in a fish-packing plant a friend of mine managed. We traveled for three weeks. The sculpture park and the Edvard Munch Museum in Oslo. Sex in our private room with the stacked beds on the train after crossing into Denmark. Overnight in the red-light district in Hamburg. Hide-and-go-seek around the cathedral in Cologne and oversized pretzels with spicy mustard and sides of sauerkraut. The Goethe House, Alte Oper, and the beer garden we thought may double as a gay bar in Frankfurt. Bicycling along the river and eating marzipan and hazelnut Milka bars in Salzburg. The Gustav Klimt Villa and the formality of Vienna. The exquisite architecture of Budapest. Stealing coffee cups from a Franz Kafka–themed café in Prague.
Three hundred and five days and approximately fourteen hours after you die, a friend and I sit on the bed chatting inches from where you expired. She nods toward a shirt hanging on the end of the rod holding the overly long off-white blackout curtains Esteban curls into, leaving smudges of black hairs. “Is that his?” she asks. It is, and I tell her I hung it there soon before you died, but I’m unsure. Maybe I hung it sometime after to block the gap between the edge of the fabric and the window casing, maybe during one of the paranoid stretches while binging on true crime podcasts and draining wine bottles until my tongue coated red. I can imagine myself thinking I’d leave the shirt as a reminder, though it’s not one of my favorites—the white oxford with the blue grid print and clear buttons and, as with many of your preferred shirts and mine, fraying cuffs and collar.
The shirt doesn’t help me place you in one of our earlier scenes. Not like the blue chinos with the short red ribbon you tied on when the slider fell off the zipper. Those you would pair with a blazer and loafers when an occasion called for fancier dress than our default jeans or shorts. Not like the Tam o’ Shanter you wore throughout our Istanbul trip. Not like what I referred to as your Michael Jackson jacket, the quilted black one with the elastic waist you wore every day of every winter and about which hipsters would ask where you found it and you’d give me that “See!” look.
Four or so days after you die, I text the vendor friend: “It must have been strange to spot me thrifting hours after my partner died. I didn’t want to be in the house. I didn’t know where to go.”
Hundreds of times throughout the years before you died, you said, “She’s just trying to make a living,” when I’d complain about a mosquito or smash one mid-bite.
Eight months and eleven days after you die, a man named Joseph backs a tow truck into the driveway. Wearing a shirt with palm trees on it, madras shorts, and flipflops, he looks more like he’s running errands for Jimmy Buffett than hauling automobiles around the city. He’s grateful I’m donating our old car to the local classical music channel you used to listen to while cooking. They’ll have it auctioned off to raise money to support various programs at the station. Apparently it’s not a problem that the car has sat inoperable in the driveway for over three years. That’s how long it took me to find the title—in a closet in a box containing newspaper clippings, a Nature Conservancy calendar, unopened mail, and an uncashed check from the IRS.
Joseph raises the bed of the truck and lowers the back end so it’s at a forty-five-degree angle. He asks me to put the car in neutral and then catches a hook somewhere on the undercarriage and pushes a lever and the car is pulled up onto the bed of the truck. Another lever and the bed is lowered until flat.
The afternoon bends in an unexpected direction as I watch Joseph wait inside the truck for a couple and their standard poodle to pass. I conjure the images I captured as your body was wheeled out the front door, down the step, along the walk, through the gate, and onto the driveway and then slid into a minivan. Joseph waves bye and begins easing the truck out into the street. I snap photos as he drives away with our car. An across-the-street neighbor texts, “How much did you get for it?”
Eighty-six days and a handful of hours after you die, I read an article about a man who died from grief a few days after his wife was killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting.
Once I mentioned that someone had passed away, and you said, “They didn’t pass. They kicked the bucket. Call it what it is.” I feel like a bad partner—still here, kicking about, my foot haphazardly searching for a bucket.
Nine months, twenty-four days, eleven hours, and forty-nine minutes after you die, I write this sentence.