The Sunday Stories

[ED. NOTE: At the end of the year, as one does, I found myself going through past writings [mine remain on old computer files]. Tucked inside was a story I’d written in 2009, ten years after the events it described. It had been sitting there all this time, forgotten.

Reading it now — fifteen years later — felt like reading about someone else’s life. I remember every event, but the emotions I once assigned to them have shifted, softened with time. If you haven’t read my memoir or earlier writing this may be confusing but here are Cliff Notes: This story focuses on the years following the death of my husband and friends in the summer of 1999. It is set, for the most part, in Afghanistan during the war.

I never kept journals as a child, and now I find regret it. I imagine that reading them would feel much the same: the facts intact, but the feelings stripped of their urgency, replaced by a sweetness with age. Time doesn’t undo what happened — it brilliantly changes the way we hold on to it. What once felt painful becomes bearable. What once felt life altering becomes a story, and eventually, just something we can visit without flinching.]

New York City / Khandahar

Six weeks after the funerals were settled, and the ashes scattered at sea, and everyone had gone back to work and back to the lives they were living before, more or less, I turned on the stereo. We had a stereo back then. Although, my husband was no longer here, so now I suppose I had a stereo. I had an apartment. I had a couch and plates and a juicer.

I used to think truth was eternal, that once I knew it, I could use it as a constant by which everything else could be measured. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently un-retainable. We must work incredibly hard all our lives to remember the most basic things.

I sometimes wonder how my life would have turned out if my husband and friends had not all died in that one summer. Ten years ago. It’s been some time now. There are a lot of memories I’ve forgotten or lost. There are many I’ve squirreled away for another time.

Here’s the short version: In July 1999, my friend Carolyn and her husband John were killed in a plane he was piloting off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, and my husband Anthony died three weeks later, from cancer. Of the three, he was the oldest. He died five days after his 40^th birthday. Carolyn was thirty-three.

I was suddenly alone, left to face the ridiculous idea of filling seemingly endless years of life without them. That’s when I learned about despair, during that summer and into the fall, then into the cold winter.

My mourning didn’t come out all at once. I didn’t sob at the funerals. I didn’t scream the night Anthony and I knew that John and Carolyn would not be found. I was even strangely, surreally calm, the night I laid in my husband’s hospital bed and counted his heartbeats until they stopped.

No, mine was a slow and careful descent into hysteria, stopping on different stairs on my way down that included a high-vaulted Park Avenue living room with drawn shades and funeral dirges blaring every night; a hotel room in Miami; and a latrine in Afghanistan flushing away handfuls of Wellbutrin, watching the tiny blue pills, my only crutch, sink slowly into the waste.