Jericho
Cynthia Sample
Look around the den that serves as sickroom in the house that he bought for you. “Amends,” he said, “for bad behavior.” You can still recall that laugh. Making the house perfect took a whole year. Highland Park homes shift and crack in Texas soil; making it strong again took diligent foundation repair but now the house is full of light, serenity, the restoration of the elegant architecture so lusted for: solid, polished, hospitable. With red rugs and pale gray plaster walls. What any woman would long to possess.
You set your rings amid the chaos on the bedside table: morphine, half full glasses of water, useless canisters with calorie-rich shakes now flat and hot, wadded-up tissues, pill boxes for every hour of the day. Your bargain is clear to you as you stare down at his body. You know he is dead because, when he gasped and you tried to connect with his gaze as you always had, he did not focus for even a moment. It was finished. The hospice nurse already called the funeral home and across the room, she dumps the drugs into a bowl of bleach. You consider filching the morphine, but instead hand it to the nurse and she dumps that also. Nothing can make you feel any better although as you glance around the room, you suspect no one will believe anything you say about it. Everyone loves to give advice.
You wash his body with long gentle strokes and the caregiver helps put on the freshly pressed pajamas. You do not cry. Duty requires deliberate action. Once you are finished, as you replace your rings, you ask your sister-in-law for a very large glass of wine. It’s worth a try.
When the funeral director arrives, he covers your husband’s face and rolls him out on a stretcher on wheels that form an ‘x’ like the cross at church. Without deciding to, you stand up. Everyone rises: your children, his sisters, the pastor, your husband’s best friend. Once you down the wine, you trudge up the stairs and fall into bed with your clothes still on. In the morning, and for months afterwards, your body aches because you have never moved in your sleep like normal people.
You do what you must and collapse at the end of each day in front of the television with dinner and Chardonnay until you are sure you will sleep. This lasts for thirty-three months. Friends stop asking how you are doing. You’ve been in the Grief Support Group too long. No one seems to understand that nothing makes you feel any better. The doctor offers you antidepressants. People who can’t listen show up with books you have no concentration to read. Why can’t anyone understand there is no help for this.
One day you awaken and you cannot bear the mess another minute. You gather up his clothes, his books, and all the accoutrements of his hobbies: the hunting guns, the camouflage pants, baseball hats. The lawyer tells you that you must move to someplace ‘more manageable,’ but the thought is impossible, overwhelming and exhausting beyond belief. Still, your children start haranguing and you arrange to do what you can toward the goal. The broker’s name is Phyllis and though she’s older than you are, she still has her husband, is still a wife. She cannot change anything for the better.
In the Grief Support Group, they extol rituals, so you set some up for yourself. You read the Bible every morning and write feelings down, then burn them over the toilet. This does not work.
The record of your history with him is on every wall and the photographs torment like strobe lights at a party you didn’t want to attend, so you pack the photos in a closet. You redo the den in which he died, which the hospice people insisted be his final sickroom. You recover the couch, replace the glass lamps with their taxidermy’d quail inside. You put up modern art and sell the bird dog painting he loved. You get a better television, find a place to buy wine by the case, then start feeling bad about it. Your therapist rolls her eyes.
You try moving your rings to your right hand but hastily return them to their correct place. Phyllis offers house after house but there’s always something wrong: not enough bedrooms, too expensive, not enough storage, not enough light. Nothing works; nothing makes you feel better.
Friends begin to worry, suggest traveling or taking up mahjong or going back to needlepoint. One even audaciously reminds you how lucky you are. You nod, you agree, you consider backhanding her. You decide to go to a spa.
The spa offers "challenges" and you sign up for the zip line. Some kid instructs on how to use this experience to learn about yourself. You are harnessed and climb up the four-story tower, try to trust the equipment. Although your terror is palpable, you stay focused to get to the platform on top where the wind blows. You white-knuckle the rail to stay upright; after a bit, it’s livable. When it’s your turn to hook onto the zip line, the kid says, “Just six inches of fear, then you get to fly. Better than sex!” He laughs and you think: a lot he knows. But you let go and it is a lot like flying, with only a too-thin wire between you and a calamitous collapse. The tension doesn’t eradicate the words in your head: Alone Bereft Alone. The suitcase clatters as you unlock the door in the twilight and a sigh of relief escapes you. Your reliable, perfect space … silent. Thank God you’re finished trying that.
The succor you’ve created for yourself begins to trouble you. So you redo your bedroom. Replace the king-sized bed with a queen. Change the dresser, replace the prints on the wall, add a television and a little cabinet for coffee and wine almost like in the movies. Now nights will be less cavernous. Surely it’s progress. Surely.
Phyllis calls with a house. “Checks every box,” she says and when you tour it, you are forced to agree. But you can’t make yourself put in an offer. At home, you look around: how can you leave this? This has been your solace and the walls like a moat protecting a fortress: safe, forecastable, secure with a time-stop-still quality.
Lent descends and you give up your nightcap. There’s less now to shield you from the full-turned-empty. Somehow you’re glad of the pain. A week into the liturgical season, you offer to buy the house Phyllis found and now you are going to own two houses. You look at the advertisement for the new one over and over and over. The house is in a gated community designed for people with grandchildren and plans. Envisioning yourself there begins to make bit of sense, even to elicit a dull appeal. As you stare at it, you turn your rings around and around and around.
The windows and archways from one room to the next in the house that your husband bought you have created a womb-like silence. You keep trying to work out how to own both houses, but it’s impossible financially even if it wouldn’t be so unwieldy. Even renting it makes no real sense. On the last day of the option period for the new one, your daughter calls to find out what you’ve decided. “I’d hate for you to get stuck, Mom.”
After the closing, you stop by the jeweler and buy a sapphire ring with pave diamonds on the band. You slip it on your finger and gently set your wedding rings into the velvet box for the sapphire. You drop by the bank on the way home and lock the gray velvet into the safety deposit box. You can revisit your diamond and the plain platinum band whenever you want –peer at them, cry over them, even long for them-- but you don’t want to insure it any longer. You just can’t afford that anymore.
The fall wind has blown leaves off the oaks in front of the house that he bought for you that will soon be no longer yours. The late sun is out. The half-bare trees force a seductive, dappled light onto the façade. A bit of fumbling is required to retrieve your keys from your frayed pocket. As you unlock the front door, you notice the door-face bricks are crumbling.
Cynthia Sample
Look around the den that serves as sickroom in the house that he bought for you. “Amends,” he said, “for bad behavior.” You can still recall that laugh. Making the house perfect took a whole year. Highland Park homes shift and crack in Texas soil; making it strong again took diligent foundation repair but now the house is full of light, serenity, the restoration of the elegant architecture so lusted for: solid, polished, hospitable. With red rugs and pale gray plaster walls. What any woman would long to possess.
You set your rings amid the chaos on the bedside table: morphine, half full glasses of water, useless canisters with calorie-rich shakes now flat and hot, wadded-up tissues, pill boxes for every hour of the day. Your bargain is clear to you as you stare down at his body. You know he is dead because, when he gasped and you tried to connect with his gaze as you always had, he did not focus for even a moment. It was finished. The hospice nurse already called the funeral home and across the room, she dumps the drugs into a bowl of bleach. You consider filching the morphine, but instead hand it to the nurse and she dumps that also. Nothing can make you feel any better although as you glance around the room, you suspect no one will believe anything you say about it. Everyone loves to give advice.
You wash his body with long gentle strokes and the caregiver helps put on the freshly pressed pajamas. You do not cry. Duty requires deliberate action. Once you are finished, as you replace your rings, you ask your sister-in-law for a very large glass of wine. It’s worth a try.
When the funeral director arrives, he covers your husband’s face and rolls him out on a stretcher on wheels that form an ‘x’ like the cross at church. Without deciding to, you stand up. Everyone rises: your children, his sisters, the pastor, your husband’s best friend. Once you down the wine, you trudge up the stairs and fall into bed with your clothes still on. In the morning, and for months afterwards, your body aches because you have never moved in your sleep like normal people.
You do what you must and collapse at the end of each day in front of the television with dinner and Chardonnay until you are sure you will sleep. This lasts for thirty-three months. Friends stop asking how you are doing. You’ve been in the Grief Support Group too long. No one seems to understand that nothing makes you feel any better. The doctor offers you antidepressants. People who can’t listen show up with books you have no concentration to read. Why can’t anyone understand there is no help for this.
One day you awaken and you cannot bear the mess another minute. You gather up his clothes, his books, and all the accoutrements of his hobbies: the hunting guns, the camouflage pants, baseball hats. The lawyer tells you that you must move to someplace ‘more manageable,’ but the thought is impossible, overwhelming and exhausting beyond belief. Still, your children start haranguing and you arrange to do what you can toward the goal. The broker’s name is Phyllis and though she’s older than you are, she still has her husband, is still a wife. She cannot change anything for the better.
In the Grief Support Group, they extol rituals, so you set some up for yourself. You read the Bible every morning and write feelings down, then burn them over the toilet. This does not work.
The record of your history with him is on every wall and the photographs torment like strobe lights at a party you didn’t want to attend, so you pack the photos in a closet. You redo the den in which he died, which the hospice people insisted be his final sickroom. You recover the couch, replace the glass lamps with their taxidermy’d quail inside. You put up modern art and sell the bird dog painting he loved. You get a better television, find a place to buy wine by the case, then start feeling bad about it. Your therapist rolls her eyes.
You try moving your rings to your right hand but hastily return them to their correct place. Phyllis offers house after house but there’s always something wrong: not enough bedrooms, too expensive, not enough storage, not enough light. Nothing works; nothing makes you feel better.
Friends begin to worry, suggest traveling or taking up mahjong or going back to needlepoint. One even audaciously reminds you how lucky you are. You nod, you agree, you consider backhanding her. You decide to go to a spa.
The spa offers "challenges" and you sign up for the zip line. Some kid instructs on how to use this experience to learn about yourself. You are harnessed and climb up the four-story tower, try to trust the equipment. Although your terror is palpable, you stay focused to get to the platform on top where the wind blows. You white-knuckle the rail to stay upright; after a bit, it’s livable. When it’s your turn to hook onto the zip line, the kid says, “Just six inches of fear, then you get to fly. Better than sex!” He laughs and you think: a lot he knows. But you let go and it is a lot like flying, with only a too-thin wire between you and a calamitous collapse. The tension doesn’t eradicate the words in your head: Alone Bereft Alone. The suitcase clatters as you unlock the door in the twilight and a sigh of relief escapes you. Your reliable, perfect space … silent. Thank God you’re finished trying that.
The succor you’ve created for yourself begins to trouble you. So you redo your bedroom. Replace the king-sized bed with a queen. Change the dresser, replace the prints on the wall, add a television and a little cabinet for coffee and wine almost like in the movies. Now nights will be less cavernous. Surely it’s progress. Surely.
Phyllis calls with a house. “Checks every box,” she says and when you tour it, you are forced to agree. But you can’t make yourself put in an offer. At home, you look around: how can you leave this? This has been your solace and the walls like a moat protecting a fortress: safe, forecastable, secure with a time-stop-still quality.
Lent descends and you give up your nightcap. There’s less now to shield you from the full-turned-empty. Somehow you’re glad of the pain. A week into the liturgical season, you offer to buy the house Phyllis found and now you are going to own two houses. You look at the advertisement for the new one over and over and over. The house is in a gated community designed for people with grandchildren and plans. Envisioning yourself there begins to make bit of sense, even to elicit a dull appeal. As you stare at it, you turn your rings around and around and around.
The windows and archways from one room to the next in the house that your husband bought you have created a womb-like silence. You keep trying to work out how to own both houses, but it’s impossible financially even if it wouldn’t be so unwieldy. Even renting it makes no real sense. On the last day of the option period for the new one, your daughter calls to find out what you’ve decided. “I’d hate for you to get stuck, Mom.”
After the closing, you stop by the jeweler and buy a sapphire ring with pave diamonds on the band. You slip it on your finger and gently set your wedding rings into the velvet box for the sapphire. You drop by the bank on the way home and lock the gray velvet into the safety deposit box. You can revisit your diamond and the plain platinum band whenever you want –peer at them, cry over them, even long for them-- but you don’t want to insure it any longer. You just can’t afford that anymore.
The fall wind has blown leaves off the oaks in front of the house that he bought for you that will soon be no longer yours. The late sun is out. The half-bare trees force a seductive, dappled light onto the façade. A bit of fumbling is required to retrieve your keys from your frayed pocket. As you unlock the front door, you notice the door-face bricks are crumbling.
