The Is of Us: The Search for Meaning and Joy After the Death of My Husband

By Amelia Borealis

The Is of Us is an attempt at re-piecing together the shattered identity of a trauma survivor. In a colorful timeline of vivid, real-time accounts, secondary losses, and existential discoveries, the author explores centuries of thinking and philosophy applied in her own tale. Whether stumbling upon a fig tree while lost and famished in the wilderness, covering the bloodied scene of her husbands death with roses, or hurling herself out of an airplane upside down at 120 miles per hour, Borealis regales the reader with a slew of her own intense experiences balanced with a spoonful of perspective.
The author invites us on a wild ride through the landscape of a life reimagined and boundless. Its relevance is echoed in Eastern philosophy, physics, and adventure stories. Gripping and poignant while philosophical and uplifting, familiar yet uncanny, metaphysical yet scientific enough to interest intelligent questioners, this story will resonate with and fascinate anyone who lives or will die.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524553227

Amelia Borealis

Amelia Borealis is the author of The Is of Us. Originally an opera singer, Borealis has her innate sensitivity and artist’s spirit present in even her banal endeavors. With her being a spare-time writer, it was not until the sudden death of her young husband that a certain enlightenment developed in her prose. Having advanced several notches on the life-perspective dial with a sudden prolificacy never before realized, Amelia Borealis endeavors to reach out in a dark world to the cognoscenti of grievers with a message of recognition. Namaste.

Book preview

The Is of Us

The search for meaning and joy after the death of my husband

Amelia Borealis

Copyright © 2017 by Amelia Borealis.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016917660

ISBN:      Hardcover   978-1-5245-5324-1

         Softcover   978-1-5245-5323-4

         eBook      978-1-5245-5322-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by the Zondervan Corporation.

Rev. date: 12/28/2016

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

723673

Contents

1 Silent Explosion

2 The Call

3 Magical Thinking

4 Why?

5 Mad Men

6 Bereavement

7 The Search

8 A Widow Begins

9 Titanic Table

10 The Night We Met

11 Rigid Thinking

12 Marking Anniversaries: Weddings and Funerals

13 Pilgrimage

14 Dedication

15 Turning and Turning

16 Loving, Caring People

17 The Is of Us

18 Little by Little, Then All at Once

For Manuel

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Xlibris Publishing for helping this book reach those who knew Manny, those who will know him through my words, and those who know what it is to be loved and what it is to grieve. For the support, suggestions, and patience during the first year of the fallout, I am grateful to Edward, Chris and Elisa, Andrew, Eugenia, Jessica, Tiffany, Holly, and to my sister Wendy, for putting a journal in my hands while my head was still swimming. Thanks to my parents and family especially for your patience. Thanks to the Presbyterian bereavement group, who first heard my voice read the secret entries of this book in our meetings and whose overwhelming response helped me realize that these words may help others. Thanks to Dr. Schlenk and Dr. Vogelbaum and Cleveland Clinic and the numerous friends who extended condolences over the stretch of the years. Thanks to Melba, whose unexpected and eloquent greeting card I have read a hundred times. To Wil I extend a special note of thanks for believing in me enough to push me to publish. Thank you to Jonathan, who reminded me, when I was disappointed that my book turned out to be about coping instead of the loving tribute I had envisioned, that the tributes are all in me, written in time and in deeds.

There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.

—Dostoyevsky

Chapter 1

Silent Explosion

If I had previously watched a death like my husband’s in a horror film, I would have scoffed at the excessive gore. "That doesn’t happen, I would have snorted. Nobody just bleeds from their eyes for no reason while they’re sitting on the couch."

And yet …

Incredible, the perfect silence—as though watching your story telescopically in deep space—at the precise moment in which your destiny suddenly explodes. One minute he was lucid, stroking my hair, laughing. The next, he threw back his head and made a tiny noise in his throat like the grunt of regret. What? I asked. But he didn’t answer. Instead, he slowly drew up a croaking gasp, gritted his teeth and screamed. When he opened his mouth to breathe, it was full of blood, and he gurgled scarlet ribbons down his chin. Each labored breath rumbled louder in his chest, and he turned purple all over—even in the whites of his eyes. Blood ran from his nose. I blurted his pet name in my panicked screams. I called 911, but the television was on and the commercials were so loud I could hardly hear. Fumbling to reduce the volume, I dropped the remote control, and its batteries skittered out under the couch. It was deduced that he was probably having a seizure and I should lay him on his side. Clutching my cell phone with my shoulder, I bumped the End button on the screen as I rolled him, and dropped the call. For a few seconds, I held his straining body to mine in some parallel universe, drifting, just the two of us, lost at sea. I dialed again but don’t remember much from the second call. There he lay, the joy of my life, screaming, bleeding from no visible wound, gasping and gurgling, and worsening. I knelt under him, cradling his torso against mine on our little couch. Blood ran down my forearms. The operator told me he would wake up soon and not to let him get up in case he felt groggy. I reassured him that I was right there and it would be over soon and I would be holding him when he woke up. He slowly grew quiet, and I was relieved, kissing his forehead and repeating, I’ve got you. I’m right here, help is coming. I thought how he would now take some seizure medicine in order to continue working as a doctor, and we might have new things to consider while we were getting pregnant. I thought how glad I would be to help him move forward and stay cheerful after these awful moments. The paramedics rang the doorbell, and just then, he drew his last breath in my arms. I froze in horror. The last breath is different, and I recognized it. You will recognize it too when your time to witness it comes. You’ll never forget it.

Like that, on a lazy, sunny Saturday, without warning, everything changed forever.

It is difficult for me to recall the days and hours that immediately followed Manny’s death, and yet some are perfectly crystal clear, as though I were a radio tuning in and out of my body depending on how necessary it was to be present in a given moment. For instance, I very vividly recall the stunned look on the faces of the two firemen who were the first to arrive after Manny drew his final breath. For a moment I thought they weren’t going to take another step. What are you waiting for? I demanded. I suppose they couldn’t have expected the ghastly scene that met them at the end of the entryway. They were responding to a seizure call, and instead, they walked in to find us covered in blood as I rocked his purple-and-gray body against mine on the floor. I recall too a police officer dragging me by the waist out of my apartment while a team went to work. I can still hear my own voice playing like a recording in my mind, still calling his pet name, as I was dragged out of my own apartment, away from the one place I felt I absolutely must be in that moment. "No! I’m here, Habi! Don’t give up, Habi, don’t you give up. Please don’t give up!"

I know that our puppy, Mina, was put in her kennel upstairs, and I suppose I must have done that, but the memory is gone. However, I can clearly see a flash of her sitting on Manny’s lap as he screamed. She was so tiny and vulnerable compared to him, but she seemed to understand that something bad was happening; she was licking his hands and gazing desperately into his face. Moments before that, he had just been playing fetch with her, throwing her toy higher and higher up our staircase to try to motivate her out of her fear of the steps. The night before, she hadn’t let us get a moment of rest, whining and yipping unusually and leaping at the bed all night. In hindsight, it seems as though she sensed that something was wrong and she was trying to tell us. We were baffled at her behavior, though. If Manny felt like something was off in his body, he hadn’t said so. He did mention that airport security had seen something on the scanners, on his way home that night, and pulled him out of line to repeatedly check the collar of his T-shirt, confused. What did they see? Was there a hemorrhage so dense that it was showing up on the screens? It seemed to stress him out when he relayed the story to me, but at the time, I thought nothing of it.

That night, because the dog wouldn’t let us sleep, together we watched a full moon rise and wash the room in white light, sharpening thin black outlines around everything, blanketing our seamless bodies, positively cozy, fingers interlaced. Nothing was lovelier than his balmy scent, no caress more charged than that of his electric skin, no greater beatitude than his voice against my ear, no luckier soul in all of creation to simply receive his breath lightly on the back of my neck. I loved him beyond me; I loved him, tethered out on hallowed silver lines gleaming into all that ever was. He was me, and I was him; he was my soul, and breath, and blood, and Elysium.

The next day, in the emergency department of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, someone made the decision to turn off Manny’s machines, although I don’t think anyone asked me what I wanted. I was led into a section of the emergency department where a doctor explained what each machine did—this one was making his heart beat and that one was breathing for him, etc.—and he was doing none of this for himself because his brain had no activity. A doctor told me I could say good-bye if I wanted. In a last vain effort to stall, I said I wanted a priest to pray, although I already had the entire waiting room praying aloud together for him in Spanish. While the doctors had worked, I had gone around to each of the others in the waiting room, touched them, clutched their shirtsleeves desperately, searched their eyes in a full exploding panic, urged them to please pray for mi esposo. We lived in the Dominican neighborhood, and I spoke enough words to want to use them. While the room filled with a spontaneous chorus of prayer nothing short of magic, I lay down on the floor with my feet on a chair so that I would not pass out, in case he needed my blood or if they needed to ask me a question that would save his life. Hyperventilating, I called out from the floor, His name is Manuel! I heard some of them use it. I tried to follow the prayer; I remember thinking I heard a descant in this chorus declaring how great is God. I was glad for their faith. Eyes searching wildly, I had moved my lips a second after them, copying sounds I did not wholly understand.

Then, in the little emergency room packed with doctors, nurses, the ambulance crew, a priest, and my naked, bloated, bloodied husband, it was time to say good-bye. I knelt very close to his ear and watched a nurse gently pull a sheet to his shoulders. She wiped the blood from his eyes and slid them closed. Again it was suggested that I say good-bye, but I said the only words I could find: What happened to you?

Someone in the room wept as I caressed him. Who? I could only hear it, too stunned to locate the origin of the sound. My hands were trembling. I realized then that I’d had his blood all over them and up my arms, but now I didn’t. It only remained under my fingernails. I wanted it back. It was mine as he was mine. We were one safe unit against the world. They gave me his wedding ring, but not his clothing. He was barefoot. He was wandering the brambles of death with bare feet. The love of my life.

A nurse handed me his wedding ring. She just took it off his hand! Pulled from my favorite hands, and she didn’t even ask! I felt so angry at her. I thought, you can’t do that to someone while they’re helpless, someone who is loved so much. I clutched it tightly, terrified that it could get lost now that it was off his finger. It belonged to him. It meant that we loved each other; that us was the glowing antidote to the world. You can’t remove that.

Mark and Elizabeth, another recently married couple that had been our companions for almost everything, made phone calls. I have a flash memory of being on the phone myself, lying on the floor next to his gurney, eyes darting and wide, too winded to speak.

I remember caressing his blotched face, still taped with the ventilator tube between his teeth. I sang You Are My Sunshine with my nose pressed to his ear. There was caked black blood in it. He always got the words wrong when he had sung it to me, replacing when skies are gray with the skies are great.

My recollection of the next two weeks consists of only the most extraordinarily painful segments: the time in the hotel lobby when our song came on over the speakers and my legs folded, and the moment at the medical examiner’s office when I had to write what to do with his remains and then write my name. Trying to whisper but failing, and in sudden bursts of voice, over and over, I frantically repeated I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to! What if we buried him alive? He might wake in the cremator furnace to unimaginable suffering. Couldn’t I just come visit him here every day, downstairs on the palette, just to see if he woke? He might! No one could determine what had even happened to him. Maybe he wasn’t even dead!

My parents and Manny’s brother and his wife all came to New York from out of town, rushing out of their houses while still on the phone, on that initial disturbing call. We stayed in hotels because my apartment was stained and strewn with syringe caps and plastic wrappers, discarded gloves, and various other medical paraphernalia. We learned that I could not take my husband with me out of New York to my home state, nor to his brother’s home state, without significant paperwork and delay. On top of that, the thought of his body bouncing around on a long drive in a dark car with a stranger driving was enough to turn me into a hysterical animal. Manny was tall, and the stairway out of our apartment was exceedingly narrow, and there had been a significant struggle to get him down the stairs on the medical stretcher. Paramedics scuffed dark-gray waves along the walls all the way down, his body gray and jiggling, dripping blood onto the steps and walls. One of them had steadied himself with a gloved hand against the wall, leaving a bloody handprint. There was a moment when they deliberated carrying him out on our brand new monogrammed bath towels, I think, but the idea was scrapped for some reason. Actually, I don’t know what they wanted with the towels, but I never saw them again. In the end I decided, although we were still newcomers, to let the State of New York handle his remains quickly and with the least disturbance to his body. That silky soft, warm, and fragrant body I had nestled beside for so many tranquil nights, during the best years of my life, should be handled with the kind of slow reverence reserved for a great slain king.

We walked from funeral parlor to funeral parlor for days, blindly trying to find a nice place we could also afford. I don’t think any of us were in the mental shape to be making arrangements while so overwhelmed. At the front desk of one parlor sat an obese man in a suit that was much too small for him. He was watching sports loudly on a very small television, eating Funyuns from a snack-sized bag, and he had just shouted something including the f-word to somebody in the other room. He had a New York accent. I got the feeling, by his nervousness, that he was inventing stories regarding the whereabouts of the owner, who was not present. He’ll be here any second. He’s on his way. Moments later, he said the owner was just about to leave his house in West Nyack, which I knew to be forty-five minutes outside the city. Without a word, I rose and wandered directly into the street. My mother ran after me. They can’t touch him, I said.

They won’t. She arrested my steps and held me. I stared.

They can’t touch him. I whispered it over and over until I didn’t know what it meant anymore. It felt good to keep saying it and not stop.

Without knowing which day it was, I recall the first time I wept. I had known tragedy, I had suffered to the core of me, but I had never wept like this. Had I heard someone else making the sounds I made—through a wall, say—I would not be able to guess what was happening, but I would have instinctually feared it. That day, the first weeping day, I had just showered, I think. Autopilot reflexes had been carrying me through a vast, silent gray obscurity. Draped in a hotel chair like a heavy garment, I gazed wide-eyed and saw nothing, breathing hard from a gaping mouth.

"I want you to