Amber

We are up by 2:30 to get her to Stewart Airport for a 5 AM flight. The sun will join us for hours. Amber says that I don't have to be awake yet. Alarms do not give much of a choice. She didn't think it would make a sound. I assure her that is what alarms do.

Yesterday, when she came home from work, I could tell by the way that she walked from her car that something was wrong. She, in lieu of talking to me about it, put her phone near me.

It said that GP, what people call her grandfather, was not doing well. He had been moved from the hospital to hospice. He had had cancer for a long time. Years ago, Amber and I had to go to a party on Long Island because we weren't sure how much longer he would be around, and the guilt was good leverage to induce us to make the drive. (This was where I told Amber's father that I would be marrying his daughter, which he said was fine with him if it was fine with Amber.)

I asked Amber how she was feeling if she knew, and she said that she was okay. She did not have time to feel anything else. She had to set her mind to planning her next move.

He does not live in Long Island but in Georgia. She sorts through our old mail to try to find a card that he sent us for our anniversary because she otherwise does not know the address. ("This is why you are supposed to save envelopes," she assures me.)

At first, she wanted to drive down. Georgia is thirteen hours away. Amber said she's driven further. Still, she had worked a long day and had been up since 6 am. She was in no shape to drive down that night. Furthermore, her car recently broke down on the highway and required both AAA and both our parental intervention for rescue. She would not be taking her car.

I was willing to sacrifice my car so that my wife was not trapped without a way to get home. Within an hour and a half, she had plane tickets instead. The options were that she could leave before 3 AM or at 7 PM. Given that the text said that she could die within hours or weeks, emphasis on the hours, Amber did not have the luxury of waiting.

On the drive to the airport, we are quiet, both from sleep deprivation and why she must make this trip.

Once we get to Stewart, she says that I don't have to go in with her, that she's fine waiting on her own. She then burst into tears in the passenger seat, and she seemed so vivid. This is not a thing she is doing, but a thing that needs to be done. It's strange that she is doing it on her own. But we have pets in need of care, and I don't have much of a place there.

She will be staying until Wednesday when I pick her up after work.

Her sister Rebecca will be meeting her there, having come on her own plane from Texas.

I try to stay connected with Amber after I wake up again. Once she lands in Georgia, she texts me that her grandfather died while she was in the air. There is no way she could have gone down there any sooner than she did, and so there's no fault in this. There's nothing more she could have done.

From what little I know, her grandfather was not in anything like pain at the end. He had had a series of heart attacks, but then the doctors put him on drugs that erase your memory during surgery, which also abate anxiety. While I know I am fated to die someday, I wouldn't like to know it was this week.

Amber felt guilty telling her professor and coworkers that she would not be available for days. What are extensions and days off for if not the death of one's grandfather? Still, she is Amber and does not like the idea of shirking her responsibilities.

Though Amber calls and texts me for comfort, I cannot know what is going on inside her. Surrounded family with whom she is not close, she is not at liberty to divulge her emotional state even to herself. This is her journey and, though I cannot wait for her to return to the home I represent, I cannot assume this burden. Even if one has been through something similar, it is always different in the specifics.

My relatives to this point have had the good manners to die within a short drive. I have not gone to a funeral that took me more than seventy-five miles from where I nightly lay my head.

To me, it seems better that he died on her flight down there because I wouldn't want her to have to watch him die in person. How much comfort would her presence have supplied him? I cannot know, but it would further her distress. Now, she can be there for the aftermath of others' mourning.

I do not remember my paternal grandfather dying. I barely remember him as a person, so small was I, just the odor of cigars and a sepia picture, folded and flattened again. I was small when my maternal grandfather died. My mother rushed us there, a town away, knowing that his time on this earth was ending. I have the image of him in his hospital bed in his living room, where he had been largely comatose for years. I may remember him turning blue and adults shooing me into the parlor, but this might as well be imagined. Of his funeral, my only memory is standing in the living room by somber adults, eating baloney and cheese wrapped into a tube. I do not think my parents allowed me to attend the funeral proper. My paternal grandmother was suffering from dementia and moved across the state to live with my aunt, so she was in two parts gone to me before she died. Had I been there, she wouldn't have known me. I had the flu for her funeral and was miserable, but her body was not there. She had been cremated and was nothing more than a brick. My maternal grandmother survived into her mid-nineties, most of those years as good as can be expected. In her last few months, she saw things that were not there, black dogs and dead relatives sitting on her bed. I do not remember the last time I saw her. She may not have had the opportunity to meet Amber, so it had been a while. Every time I saw her in the last few years, it might have been the last time, once I learned she had congestive heart failure (which she had for years, however like a death sentence it sounded). I found out about her death when I went on my lunch break in a series of voicemails from my mother. She fell. She was unresponsive. She was dead. I was her pallbearer and broke down that night into uncontrollable crying.

I do not wish I was much more present with their deaths than I was.

Even though it is only Sunday, this weekend feels weeks long. The following weekend, Amber will be out of town for dental training. She will arrive home Wednesday evening and leave again Friday morning, working a shift between. There isn't even going to be time to unpack. This week will be as long as we will have ever been apart since we moved in together.

It's strange not to have Amber home. She calls around 8, but she's not herself in this setting with these people, having only gotten two and a half hours sleep.

Lacking Amber even one night ranks odd to me. I thought I might sleep better because -- darling as she is -- her fidgeting, rare snoring, and occasional ill-timed cell phone alarms can contribute to waking me. Instead, I am conditioned to find her breathing and physical presence necessary. A part of me is searching. We are not codependent, leading often separate lives with overlap. If it were not for knowing she will be gone this coming weekend, these necessary days apart would have less impact. Other couples do this regularly, but that is baked into the nature of their relationships. I am inclined to orient myself by the north star of time with Amber. In both the mourning and training, things are taken from her hands. She just must attend.

She is floating house to house, sleeping in one relative's home this night and another's the next. She has yet to see her grandmother, who wants to be left alone. Her grandmother said she is looking forward to the increased closet space of being a widow. One must look for bright sides as soon as possible.

Amber's father wishes that there would be more of a memorial service, but that is not going to happen. Her grandfather will be cremated and placed behind a plaque. There may be a gathering in Myrtle Beach in some uncertain future, but it is not in the immediacy of his death. When Amber leaves Wednesday, it will be with as much formal mourning as she is apt to get.

I feel anxious in a way I have not in a while. Not full-blown panic attacks, though I was never much for these, but a simmering dread. In some part, I attribute this to my disrupted sleep. It is only Tuesday, but my circadian rhythms may still be uncertain they can trust me. Years ago, I would have assumed I intuited something that was wrong. I am weaning myself off the notion that being mentally wobbly is the same as being psychic.

I’m surprised how much I talk to myself when she is gone. Perhaps talking at home is my default and Amber is usually there to respond. The cats meow back, but only one seems to realize he has not recently seen Amber. The other would not notice if the both of us died if her food and treats were administered at the appointed hours.

Living on my own is a distant memory, though I was less inclined to question the air and enumerate the order of tasks I ought to undertake. When I lived alone, I did not know what it was to live with a wife, to care for someone this much. I lived with Emily in a few situations, but none felt like this domesticity. I don't remember how we made dinner or even how we ate or where. It does not feel as though we did, aside from a dish of improvisational tetrazzini in our Walden apartment and a glut of bread straight from the machine, slathered in butter because I knew only its deliciousness and not its calories. I remember a fight over a dish sponge, thrown out without replacement though it was my chore in need of doing. I remember stubbornly carrying home too many bags of groceries at once because the store was close, and it would be sinful to bring a car. I remember the diner across from the apartment and the Chinese food. But the domestic details are fuzzy or escape me.

I wonder sometimes what it would be to live alone now, but it is mostly when messes I am not permitted to touch start to crowd. I would have no taste for living alone. If Amber were no longer in my life, I would try to induce visitors so that I did not have to dwell so long in my quiet.

Will this low buzz of anxiety abate when I pick Amber up at the airport? No matter, I am willing to say it will, even if a full sleep doesn't accomplish this on its own.

I gather her at the airport, arriving only a few minutes before her plane touches down. I don't know if I ought to expect some grand reunion. I do not sweep her up in my arms and spin her, in part because I have hurt my foot and aggravated my injury in my stubbornness of exercise.

I see her across the room, small and pretty. I go to her. We kiss, and it is soft and sweet, a little hungry. We hold one another, though it has been only a few hectic days and neither of us has had the luxury of missing the other properly. I remember other reunions I have experienced, where it was as though I were discovering this person for the first time. It is not that with Amber, as we know one another, but I love her well.

She goes to the bathroom and I wait for her checked bag to appear on the concourse.

We order pizza on our way home because it would be late indeed before I could otherwise have made her dinner. We watch a couple of episodes of something on Netflix, then one of our comedy news wrap-ups. We shower, we cuddle, she tends to the pets, and we go to bed early. As we both have work early the next day, we don't even have the opportunity to become reacquainted. Friday, she will leave again. I will not see her until the early hours of Monday. When I tell her that I will be asleep then, she pouts, but it is the truth. I will have work the next day and there is no way to avoid our responsibilities.

Soon in Xenology: Writing.

last watched: Schitt's Creek
reading: Trying Not to Try