I can hardly stand to talk to my sister on Christmas Day; it’s the first time we’ve been apart for Jewish Christmas （Chinese food on Christmas Eve, glass dreidels and fortune cookies on the tree） in more than thirty years. When it’s over, Brian goes upstairs to nurse his cold and I start untrimming the tree.
I am practicing being a widow, preparing myself to do things alone: taking down the strings of lights by myself, listening to Brittany Howard, and having a snack. It is about as much like actual widowhood as our granddaughter Ivy making a fist and waving it overhead, saying ferociously: “When I do like this, I am magic, and you cannot catch me.” When we are being perfect grandparents, we pretend we can’t catch her. Sometimes, in the spirit of my own grandfather, I am a darkly cheerful beacon of realism and I just go ahead and catch her.
I’m waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, I’m just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I don’t yet know how soon, and he’s also still a man with a cold. It’s a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he won’t be there for me to say it to him.
* * *
—
I had two big relationships before Brian, and both ended because I wanted out. I didn’t feel truly lonely in either one until toward the end, because I had my kids and my friends and my work and a great deal of pleasure in solitude. Even when I felt ignored or put upon or mildly mistreated, I knew that the other person loved me and needed me, and even if they were not who I had hoped they’d be, I knew that I was big in their lives. Sometimes now with Brian, I am worse than alone. I’m gone from his interior landscape. Not that I have been uprooted but that I am not there, and never was. These moments are scorching. Instead of yelling at Brian, Hey, I’m a person, too, I make him a cup of tea with a big spoonful of honey and bring it upstairs. He opens his eyes and smiles and he says, Thank you, and I get to see that it’s just as scorching to be present.
I call Susie Chang for a Tarot reading, since she and Great Wayne are now the only professionals I turn to, and I tell her that Dignitas has us on hold until January 6. I ask her what she sees for this trip. It’s my only question. She tells me she’s getting out the traditional Rider-Waite deck, which is to me the “let’s get down to business” deck. No distracting beauty, no metaphorical crows, no modern re-gendering. （I have opinions about these things. The summer I was seventeen, my Friday-night job was to shill for Madame Rosa, next to Sandolino’s, in the Village. My job was to walk up and down in front of her storefront, handing out flyers and saying things like: Madame Rosa, five bucks, knows all. Before Madame Rosa closed for the night, before I got on the train back to Long Island, I’d make her a cup of tea and we’d chat briefly. “Look at the shoes,” she said. “As a rule, rich people don’t wear cheap shoes.” “Look at the hands, soft or hard.” “No one comes here because they’re happy, kiddo.” She was as good a clinical supervisor as I ever had. Madame Rosa used a Rider-Waite deck, and she told me that she had one of the originals, made in 1910.）
Susie Chang says that it will go well, no real hitches. I ask her if they’ll change their minds, once we are in Zurich. （In my mind, these are serious psychiatric examinations by serious physicians. Even though S. has now shared her actual name with us, she has continued to stress the “provisional” in “provisional green light,” in every conversation.） Susie Chang pulls the card for Brian and it is a man crossing a bridge. He will be fine, she says; he is determined to go forward and the bridge holds. I keep crying. She stops talking. I tell her that they will probably offer us a choice of dates.
“You must take the first date they give you,” she says.
“Well,” I say. “That might mean we have to get ready in a—”
“You need to take the first date they give you. I’m not saying you can’t overcome the difficulties that will arise if you take a later date, but I do see difficulties.” （As it turns out, by the time I fly home, the first reports of COVID are beginning.）
My Husband
When I met Brian （well, not exactly when I met him; when I met him I thought he was arrogant, tedious about fishing, and needing a haircut）， he reminded me just a little of someone. It wasn’t my mother and it wasn’t my father, a man who had excellent DNA and the romance and joie de vivre of a doorstop. I already knew that the Virtuous—people who cannot face their own flaws or acknowledge the ugliness in their nature, people who will patiently explain, for days, that you should not be hurt by their behavior because they didn’t mean to hurt you—those people are not for me. Brian, as it turned out, was at peace with all his faults （even the serious ones）， and most of the time, I loved him for that, too.
Before the diagnosis, Brian made jokes about taking up drinking again. I was never a good audience. When we were dating, Brian drank a large double vodka most nights. He was stunned when I told him that the standard measurement for a vodka on the rocks was just a two-ounce pour （thank you for the training, Red’s Bar and Grille and also Valentino’s Café）。 My children, who had lived through plenty of genteel alcohol abuse already, in my previous relationships, were horrified to come home for a visit and find a handle of vodka in my freezer. （I drink—but like a Jew, and not like one of my schnapps-slamming ancestors, either.）
I come from a family where there was a bottle of Tío Pepe in the sideboard, gathering dust for years. Once, at my parents’ house, when I made myself a second gin and tonic, my mother worried aloud about what was happening to me up there in Connecticut. I didn’t ask Brian to stop, but I did ask him not to drink at my professional occasions. At one big literary festival, I’d been bored and annoyed and made the mistake of telling Brian so. Ten minutes later, fueled by alcohol, his general undauntedness released, he’d paid one of the shuttle drivers, scheduled to start driving the speakers back to the hotel in a few hours, to bring the two of us back to our hotel right then. I had to explain myself to the nice driver, let him keep the fifty dollars, and tell Brian that I could not and should not leave so early. Brian napped in the minibus until I felt it was respectable to leave. He didn’t drink at my professional events after that or at our wedding, and six weeks later, he stopped drinking altogether, forever.
In the last few years, Brian would say, Can I start drinking again when I’m eighty? And I’d say, Please, don’t ever start drinking again, but you can start smoking weed when you’re eighty （he was aggressive when drunk and a cuddly chatterbox when high）， and then he’d say, reasonably, that he wouldn’t get high or have a drink until he was eighty-five and I would agree that eighty-five was fine but if he got drunk and fell down, even at ninety, I wasn’t going to help him up and he would say, Fair.