deep in the ocean, there lies a wave for you

I had a really rough day yesterday. Friday night started with a couple glasses of Cava, continued with a large bottle of white wine, and ended with two beers, consumed in public where I interacted with people. I don’t remember the particulars of those interactions, and when I woke up on Saturday, I had a complete shame attack. I felt disgraced by how I must’ve looked to other people being so drunk and carefree. It didn’t help that I also felt like someone was drilling a hole into my right temple.

Whenever this happens, I text the people I was with the night before to make sure I was at least charming in my stupor. Not until I’ve heard back from everyone do I feel OK, and even then, I’m still blinking back tears at weird intervals. Last night I had to work, and I was constantly wiping away little surges of them between helping customers.

And then I talked to my mom, and figured out that I felt so horrible because I, for the night, let go of all this sadness and all of the things that happened to me. It made me feel irresponsible and guilty. And there’s the survivor guilt I’ve been hearing so much about. I tell people I don’t feel it because Clark wanted me to enjoy my life and be happy. But when, for a night, him dying isn’t the first thing on my brain, I wake up feeling embarrassed. I don’t really know how to change that, either. Yesterday I LIVED in his illness. I watch him die again and again.

And so I didn’t want to go home to the empty house. I called Cella and went over there instead. Her apartment is right near the club, and it’s clean and bright and makes me feel safe. I woke up in her room this morning, and she printed out a picture of me from our trip home to Pennsylvania two weeks ago and put it above her dresser. I’m wearing my bathing suit and standing in my parents’ backyard and smiling with squinty eyes. And it made me cry to know that she loves me so much so that she wants an image of me visible in her room at all times. It made me feel so much better.

The night Clark died, everyone who had been waiting for the news came to mom’s house, and we talked and drank beers they brought and smoked cigarettes on the porch. I remember laughing. But I can’t nail down exactly what I was feeling, sitting out there with the bandmates and Heidi. I went to sleep that night. The next day was all about planning. We had the country club on standby for the memorial service, and now we had to make decisions. Just beer and wine should be fine, no open bar. Should we have food? Who should speak? The priest will say something. Someone should read Clark’s poem aloud.

The next night, I didn’t sleep at all. I remember lying on the couch, my eyes burning while my mother snored on the air mattress next to me. I don’t know what I was thinking about for all of those hours. I took two of Clark’s oxycodones to try and calm myself down. This had become a habit of mine while I was at hospice, too. Eventually, as the sun crept up, I took two Ativan, which put me out for three or four hours. I don’t know how I passed time during the next days leading up to the service.

“I did not want to finish the year because I know that as the days pass, as January becomes February and February becomes summer, certain things will happen. My image of John at the instant of his death will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote, even “mudgy,” softened, transmuted into whatever best services my life without him. In fact this is already beginning to happen. All year I have been keeping time by last year’s calendar: what were we doing on this day last year, where did we have dinner, is it the day a year ago we flew to Honolulu after Quintata’s wedding, is it the day a year ago we flew back from Paris, is it the day. I realized today for the first time that my memory of this day a year ago is a memory that does not involve John. This day a year ago was December 31, 2003. John did not see this day a year ago. John was dead.”

I finished re-reading “The Year of Magical Thinking” today. I had forgotten most of the specifics and anecdotes. That passage appears at the end of the book, and I’ve been doing the same thing – on this blog, even, for the past year. This day last year, the doctors told us we didn’t qualify for the treatment. This day last year, Clark played what would become his last rock show. This day last year, Clark and I spent Christmas at his mom’s.

I have no idea how I filled this day last year. He was dead, and I was lost.

Anyone who wants to understand exactly how I feel should read it. It is perfect.

Today I got so many messages of love and support. And Cella brought tofu stir fry to me in the box office, and Jen brought me Calvin & Hobbes and a bag of cheddar Goldfish (I ate it all). I went to the doctor and got my prescription for Chantix, along with a physical. It was weird getting blood drawn. I must have watched that needle aim for a vein in Clark’s arm close to 100 times over the course of his illness.

The other weird thing about today was the weather. It was the same as the day he died. Cloudy and a blink away from rain. Then the clouds disappeared to reveal a pinky evening sky.

I don’t feel like going into everything I’m feeling right now because it’s too overwhelming, but someone said this to me today: “Everyone wants a witness to their existence, and you were his.” I’m putting that one in my back pocket.

Tomorrow, I will say, “It has been one year since Clark died.” And that is scary.

A year ago today, right now, I tucked him in his hospital bed for the last time. This day last year, Clark and I had our last conversation. He was so worried that the album wasn’t good enough, and that the vocals he recorded from his deathbed wouldn’t be up to par. I promised him with everything I had that they were, and that the record would see its release. And I remember telling him that people would hear it and buy it. And he said, “You promise?” And I said, crying, with all of my guts, “I PROMISE.” And then he smiled and closed his eyes. Later, Nikhil and Spencer were visiting, and Clark couldn’t wake up to talk coherently with them. He startled himself awake at one point and said, “We have to get to Air Force One!” The three of us shook our heads, smiling, and comforted him. They brought in an anti-hallucinogen and he feel asleep. And that night, he stirred a bit when I crawled in next to him. And I had wanted him to; I think I had been less gentle getting between him and the hospital bed bars because I wanted some sort of reaction. And then he never woke up. And now he’s never coming home. And that is what tomorrow is; I’ve been trying to figure it out. Basically, every day is the same in how awful and hard it is. Tomorrow I am forced to relive the worst of it.

I read Joan Didion’s memoir and account of the year following her husband’s death when Clark was still alive. It was a time in which I still flat-out refused to believe he was going to die. Didion talks of the “someone else” you always think things like this will happen to instead of yourself — maybe when I read it, even when he was going through treatments, she seemed like a “someone else.”

Within the first few pages, she explains the book’s purpose: “To make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

I remember a conversation I had with a dear friend about two months before Clark died – before he was officially dying. My friend believes in God and goes to church regularly. We were talking about religion and beliefs, and he said, “You know, Rebecca, all this time, I have never truly believed or thought it was possible that he could actually die.” I didn’t either, until it happened. I still wake up some mornings and don’t believe it’s real. And Didion is right – every idea I’ve ever had about everything she’s listed has been kicked in its face. And those ideas keep turning over and changing with time, morphing into new ones. I feel differently about my life than I did right after he died, and four months after he died, and I might wake up tomorrow and run three miles and have a great day at work, or I might cry during my commute and cocoon myself in blankets with a bottle of wine as soon as I get home. This is a learning experience, and the wheel will never stop turning.

I remember when I was a teenager, I was fearful of so many things that seemed irrational. I remember being in sixth grade, just after my parents had separated and we’d moved in with my grandparents, and I had this weird fear that my little brother was going to get kidnapped. At that age, I couldn’t sleep at night, thinking this. In an effort to calm myself, I’d say, Rebecca, you’ve already been in a horrible car accident where you almost died, and your parents got divorced and you don’t talk to your dad because he’s a shit, and there is a limit on how many bad things can happen to one person in a lifetime. But I was a child then, and those were childish thoughts, and the adult me is very aware that there is no limit. And I don’t even have it so bad. Even though I lost Clark, even though I watched the man who loved me to absolute pieces die, I have a place to sleep and food to eat and people that love me. So the scary part is – it could always be worse. And with that in mind, I will keep trying to do the absolute best with what I have, because it all comes down to the fact that you get one life. That fact, that realization – this is our one life – will remain constant. And Clark lived the hell out of his.

All I want right now is to have a Sunday like Clark and I used to. I want to not shower and trek to So’s Your Mom and get bagels and salmon and drink coffee all day. I want to go to the convenience store for a 12 pack of PBR cans and motor our way through it together. I want him to scheme about what’s for dinner and cook up some weird pasta recipe from the few ingredients we have in the house. I want to feel tired at 3 p.m., even though we did nothing to make us tired, and take a nap and watch Battlestar Galactica or The X-Files in bed, under the covers in the air conditioning. This photo, definitely taken on a Sunday:

My fretting over what to do with myself on the year anniversary of Clark’s death has been squashed by plans I unintentionally made. Finally covered by health insurance, I called a doctor in Northern Virginia to schedule an appointment for a physical and to get a prescription for Chantix, the quit-smoking drug. “Oh, I’m sorry, but the earliest we have is June 16, anytime in the morning,” the receptionist said. “Hm, fine, how about 9:30?” Immediately after I hung up, I thought, “Ohhhhhh.” Well. I didn’t request off that day at 9:30 Club either, and I got my schedule late last week. Yep. Box 1, the Melvins and Isis. So I’ll have some blood drawn and go to the pharmacy and pack up some records and work in the box office.

Lately I’m not replaying memories over and over in my head as much as I’m wishing Clark were here to experience all that’s going on. Two weeks ago Medications, a Dischord band, had a show at Black Cat. All of our friends were there and everyone in the room was so excited because the band’s new record is fucking awesome. And then the other night the 9:30 had its 30th anniversary party and the Evens and Bob Mould and Dave Grohl played with Henry Rollins hosting and it was so much fun. He would’ve loved it.

Today I did think, though, about when we told Clark he was going to die. Me, my mom and Clark’s mom met in the hospital room with his palliative care doctor and the doctor-patient liaison to try and figure out how we were going to tell him we were done with the fight. We all anticipated an absolute meltdown on Clark’s part, and he had tubes in his nose that went down to his stomach at that point, and I remember being very positive that he would try to rip them out once we told him the news. But he didn’t. He looked at both his mom and me with a glassy-eyed smile and said, “You know, I’m kind of relieved.” He was full of calmly delivered tidbits like that for the rest of his time and said things like, “We tried. We fought as hard as we could.”

He temporarily panicked that night after we moved him from the ICU to his hospital room. He said he was feeling anxious and antsy, so the nurse plugged some Ativan into his IV and he looked to me for comfort. “What would make you feel better?” I asked him. “I don’t know, I feel like there’s not enough time to get everything done and to see everyone I need to see.” So we made lists. A list of things he owned and to whom he wanted them to belong after he died. A list of people he wanted to see. And then I delivered the news in a succession of phone calls to all of our friends. I remember talking to Bonnie, who I hadn’t met yet, and her telling me how much she loved me.

When I look at pictures of him, I just can’t believe he’s not here. How is this gone?