A Widow Airs Memories From the Dust of the Past
By THERESE STEINER
In a totally uncharacteristic move, I have been cleaning the house and attacking my closets with a rare enthusiasm and a sense of abandon I never believed possible. Some things are easy to pitch (what took so long?).
Others I hold, linger over, caress, remember: Jeremy’s ninth-grade lacrosse helmet, his 11th-grade “Constructing America” term paper, the Continental plane ticket stub that brought him home for Christmas his first year at the University of Edinburgh. Zoe’s green, signed plaster cast from a skiing accident at Lake Placid; the early-decision acceptance letter she received from Oberlin her junior year of high school, bringing such joy after those tough, early teenage years.
A photograph of Zoe in the Tuileries Garden, wearing her favorite dress with marguerite flowers (Size 3T), which she wore the summer her dad died 20 years ago. “I hate him, because I love him so much,” she said.
You, Howie. Her father, my husband. My thoughts ricochet with each discovery. A recipe for cranberry sauce, cut from Gourmet magazine, brings back our first year of marriage and our apartment on West Ninth Street, and the 40-pound frozen turkey your father shoved through the doorway for us to prepare for Thanksgiving (defrosted in the bath tub). How much we loved to cook together and entertain.
The black whistle you used when coaching Jeremy’s basketball team of kindergartners and first graders in Yonkers. The pleasure and pride you would have felt watching your son play sports in high school: football, wrestling, lacrosse. How sad I was that Jeremy never experienced his dad watching him play.
Or that Zoe never heard the loud guffaw, which most certainly would have come blurting out of you, at her performance as the mother in “Brighton Beach Memories.” The program is stored in the “Zoe” box.
You would have been so proud to know she had inherited your love of science.
A 45-year-old father and husband lost in a flash when he slammed into the front wall and broke his neck, in a freakish accident playing squash. (Never before recorded in the history of playing squash, said a doctor friend who looked up the statistics.)
I wasn’t single parenting, I was only parenting. Finding an old dog collar from our sweet Labrador, Blackey, brought back memories of driving the children home one night during a thunderstorm, both asleep in car seats in the back. I carried Jeremy upstairs, surprised at how heavy a drowsy 6-year-old can feel, and put him to bed; then Zoe.
I grabbed an umbrella and scooped up Blackey, then a puppy, and took her out to the backyard to pee. Tears were running down my cheeks. Another Saturday night.
Where were you, Howie, when the house was robbed? The car stolen? The chimney collapsed on the roof of our turn-of-the-century Victorian home? (A “first” for our insurance agent.) And when the neighbor’s tree uprooted and fell across the backyard and onto the house during Hurricane Sandy?
That horrible year when Zoe unraveled, set off by your death; the same year that Jeremy was in the emergency room seven times with stitches and concussions from various sports injuries. Where was the “it’s going to be O.K.” warmth of your arm around my shoulder?
Shouldn’t we be cleaning, sifting, downsizing, planning for our future together?
Here are photos stuck together of birthday parties, family vacations and graduations; half-filled cans of half-dead tennis balls; notes from family; invitations from friends; letters and postcards from old lovers mailed from some spot with a beach.
I find an old passport with stamps from Morocco, Tunisia, Israel and much of Europe, reminders of my producing work on a PBS television series. I smile as I remember waking up before dawn to film at the Alhambra in Spain, lured into secret courtyards by the smell of jasmine. And reams of notebooks from my consulting work. Twenty-five years of taxes are headed for the shredder.
Both children have decamped for points West: Jeremy, a budding mobile-game entrepreneur, to San Francisco; Zoe packed up her neuroscience degree and headed to Los Angeles for a career writing television comedy. Go figure.
Never did I think Jeremy, Zoe and I would be on the same OkCupid online dating service at the same time. Yes, there really is something called OkCupid. There are Facebook friends, tweets and smartphones smaller than transistor radios that we use to take photos.
It’s a beautiful day. Should I attack more dusty boxes on the third floor? Your jazz record collection? The carton of yellowed paperbacks from my Harvard years, required reading from Prof. William Alfred’s theater course? Or your suit and my dress from our wedding, carefully stored in tissue long ago in the unlikely event our children may someday choose to wear them.
You’re missed so much. You’ve missed so much. But you know me. Not the maudlin type. I may revisit the past and savor sweet memories, but I’m not one to dwell on it. It’s time to walk our dog, Belle, then drive to the city. I have a busy day ahead.
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