25

When I woke up this morning the rain was falling heavily, and I stayed in bed with my eyes closed for a little while, imagining how all that rain was silvering the road outside. I wrote a scene in a children's book about that once, about silver appearing suddenly in the middle of flaming October, appearing on the sheets of rain that always seem to fall mid-month. Twenty-five years ago when I woke up on this day it was the morning of my wedding, and the sky was overcast through the early part of the day, I think maybe a little rain fell, and by early afternoon the sky had cleared again and the rest of the short day was sunny. If my husband had lived we would have been celebrating our 25th anniversary--the silver one--today. Instead he died a few days after we had our 23rd. I tried for awhile this morning to remember scenes from those anniversaries: on our first we sat at the table in our little rented lakeside home and dutifully ate the leftover wedding cake (I don't advise trying to save cake in the freezer for a whole year, I just don't think it was meant for it). On our fifth anniversary we'd been living in Massachusetts for just a few weeks; I spent our sixth by myself because David had checked himself in, two days earlier, to a residential detox hospital in northern Vermont. Cancer killed him anyway but alcohol would have killed him a lot sooner, if he hadn't gotten sober when he did. On our ninth anniversary I was a new mother, and we celebrated our tenth with a one-year-old in tow; on the eleventh I was newly-pregnant again and happier than I'd ever been, because it was autumn, I was in love with my life, and pregnancy, as it turned out, agreed with me. Our seventeenth anniversary, the last good one, we spent apart: it was a Friday, and each of us worked all day and then he went to his usual AA meeting that night, because he was about to receive his 12-years-sober chip. I went out for awhile, that night, with friends. The following year my mother had died; that grimness still was hanging around me, and anyway, by then David was already feeling a little sick: in another two months the tumor on his pancreas would finally show up on the scan. On the morning of our twentieth anniversary we woke up to snow on the ground, and that year, the ground was snow-covered all the way until the following spring. At the time, I chose to interpret it as a sign that we were going to grow into the winter of our lives together. That was a Wednesday morning, and the kids went to school and we went back to bed, made love and afterwards, he slept for awhile and I got up and answered emails. Later, I could never remember for certain if that was the last time we had sex. On the following anniversary he was sick again, although at first, even his oncologist was interpreting the pain as not being cancer-related. When his recurrence was diagnosed, the thinking was that he had another two months. He died two years to the day after that diagnosis. Someone took a photograph of us on the afternoon of our last anniversary together. I think that was the last day he was able to sit upright, after that, he didn't bother to get up again. I saw the picture again about a year later. I looked so bad I didn't even recognize myself, face bloated, hair matted, the stress wiring itself to every neuron so that the whole edifice was about to implode, and you knew it. David looked like he was already dead. He had lost a hundred pounds by then and when you looked at his face, mostly what you saw was skull. I think I destroyed the photograph, thinking that no one needed to know what it looked like, being wed to a corpse husband. The shell-shocked bride, I remember thinking, and the skeleton man, both in free fall after a five-year cancer bender. David would have just shrugged at the photograph, and if he'd lived and I'd died, he might well have gone ahead and kept it.

Today would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary, the silver one, and that was probably the third or fourth thought I had after I woke up this morning. Which means, I think, that I've gotten better, since a year ago it was still all I could do to keep from howling into the empty night about it. I dreamed about Dave last night, too, which was unusual, because I had a dream about him earlier this summer which I thought was really going to be good-bye, because he said it to me: I have to go now. Good-bye. And I nodded and said good-bye, too. Last night I dreamed that David and I were packing for a trip south, because I was going to go visit my new boyfriend and he was coming with me. Which would have been strange in either case, since if David was still alive I most likely wouldn't have a boyfriend and if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be taking my husband along for the rendezvous. But in the dream, Dave was still dead, he was going to travel with me, and it all made perfect sense. I was packing and unpacking a cooler, remembering to bring along some bottles of beer, putting in more ice, frowning at it, taking it out, thinking I ought to pack some cartons of yogurt for the trip, as well. Throughout the dream my old love stood there beside me, watching while I made ready to go meet up with my new love. There is a passage in one of the journal entries I kept during the last weeks of Dave's life, when I was recording the thoughts I was hating myself for having: those nights while Dave drifted in and out, waiting to die on the couch, I was there beside him drowsing on the cot, and wondering what might be coming next for me: thinking about new love, I admit it, as my old love lay dying beside me.

I knew couples who, every year, made an occasion out of their anniversaries: babysitters, dinners out, sometimes booting the kids right out of the house so as to have an entire night of privacy. I know this because on some of those nights, my house was where those kids slept. My husband and I never did any of that, and I'm not sure why, just like I'm not sure why, these couple of years later, I still find myself unable to write about him, about our marriage, the way I want to write about it. A year ago I wrote this in my journal: I've been trying all morning to sit down here and write about Dave, about how last year on our 23rd anniversary, ON the 23rd...we knew it was our last. Don and the kids went out and bought us flowers and cards, and while it was a lovely gesture, it was the wrong gesture. I didn't want any of that, what I wanted--other than for my husband not to be dying--was some time alone with him. But from the night I got the news that he was terminal (straight from the horse's mouth: "We're at the end of the road," is exactly what David said to me) we were never alone again for more than half an hour, tops... I had forgotten about that part of it, about how public the whole end of his life turned out to be. And we weren't exactly public people, having preferred each other's company, and the setting of our own household, to most other company and most other places for most of our married lives. I don't know what we would have done today, had he lived, had we been celebrating our 25th together, instead of me just sitting here thinking about it. Bought something silver? That seems doubtful: neither of us ever paid much attention to those conventions (although the winter after Dave died, I did buy myself two different sets of new dishes, suddenly--and irrationally--furious that I hadn't gotten them on our 20th anniversary, The China Year). Most likely it would have been another day not exactly like the others, but not all that much set apart from it, either: he would have just gotten his 19-year chip, the kids would have spent the day at school and we'd likely have both taken off work again, just like on the 20th, and in the evening, everyone would sit at the dinner table and talk about the day, just like every other night, while outside the trees, a few days past peak now, would be letting their leaves sift to the ground and we'd see the evening coming on a little early, the rain having stopped just before nightfall but the clouds not quite pulling away in time for the late sun to come through.