And After

A week has passed and now I have certified death certificates and an urn of ashes to pick up in Bellingham, so I guess he's not coming back.  And yet, I find myself seeing his coat hanging on a hook and thinking, "Ed forgot to take his coat." Or I see a splendid array of tiny groundflowers in the woods and think, "Remember to tell Ed to take a photo of this."  I imagine that sort of thinking will pass, but it's still kind of comforting.

A friend sent me to a Wallace Stevens' poem, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," about the death of Santayana.  Being Stevens' work, it's a tad opaque, but I recognized what he was talking about, in the way that death as a process speaks to measuring man simultaneously in inches and miles: something amazing is happening, but it is happening in the ordinariness of life, the sheets, kleenex and hands, doing small work,  a familiar bedroom--all somehow also a part of the enormousness of a death.  So that was what I was unable to articulate last week.  It was so big and simultaneously so ordinary.

The morning after Ed died, the cremation people came and took him away with extraordinary gentleness and care (the bedroom is on the second story, with a winding and narrow staircase).  Outside they placed him on a gurney, unzipping the covering over his head so that I could say one last goodbye.  Then, the gentleman asked me if I would like to gather some flowers to go with him.  I picked a bouquet of rosemary and forget-me-knots, and it was tucked inside the covering with him.  And then we came to another end.

The day after is the day of informing people.  Day 2 is the day of filling out various forms.  Day 3 is the day of trying to track down the passwords and user names, discovering that, although Ed had told me the name of the file, he had neglected to tell me that he had lightly encoded all the passwords.  Mia figured out the code with a tiny amount of help from me, and that was a good moment, indeed.  But, let me advise the rest of you (some good comes out of this event) to keep those near and dear in touch with your username and password life; also the answers to their security questions.

In the days after that, I try to figure out at least one household task for each day and one paperwork/legal task and get them done; it will take a while.  The children and grandchildren who could get here are now back in their homes making whatever sense can be made of the past week.  I have cancelled my dentist appointment, figuring that can wait awhile longer.  But I must go see the estate lawyer fairly soon to be advised on next steps.

This happens to people all the time, every day, and the vast majority of them work their tangled way through it, and I imagine I will too.  My deepest thanks to all of you who have written to me, with your comforting feelings and your stories of Ed.   We were extraordinarily lucky to have been able to spend almost half our lives with one another.  And lucky to have such a wonderful family and assortment of friends who have stayed with us, even as we wandered away to the Northwest.