Our Last Blue Moon

By Kris O'Shee

In Our Last Blue Moon, dancer Kris O'Shee, widow of Alan Cheuse, the novelist, beloved teacher, and literary commentator known as the "voice of books" on NPR's All Things Considered for over thirty years, tells the story of the loss of her husband after he sustained injuries in a car crash in the summer of 2015. O'Shee

• Language: English
• Publisher: Watershed Lit Books
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736814710

Kris O'Shee

Kris O'Shee spent four decades as a modern dancer and choreographer, including a decade in London, where she cofounded Junction Dance Company and taught at the London Contemporary Dance School. She also taught and performed in the San Francisco Bay Area and held a dance faculty position at Sam Houston State University in Texas. After moving to DC, where she currently resides, she founded O'Shee Dances, earned a certificate in massage therapy and a graduate degree in psychology. She currently has a private practice in psychotherapy. This is her first book.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Screened-in porches are a must for the mosquito-ridden summers in Washington, DC. On that hot July evening in 2015, after a tiring week of caring for my elderly parents in Sacramento and nonstop visits with family members, I was grateful to walk into the house I shared with my husband, Alan Cheuse, in the sleepy neighborhood of Cleveland Park and prepare a light supper of salmon and asparagus. I sat at the small glass-top table on our side porch. From the garden beyond, a buzzing chorus of cicadas greeted me as the light of fireflies blinked in the night air. I sighed—at last, I was alone.

The phone rang.

I knew it was Alan, who was still in California. He had been driving that day from Olympic Valley near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Mountains, where he had taught a writing workshop for the Community of Writers, to Santa Cruz, where he would spend two weeks writing and reading and walking on the beach. Then, I would join him and we would fly to Hawaii for our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary.

Such was the nature of our relationship that even after all the years, I still felt excited as I picked up and cheerfully said, Hi, Alan.

Kris.

His voice sounded unusual, almost urgent.

I had an accident. I fell asleep, just momentarily, on Highway 17. I was going to pull over but I didn’t make it.

I was stunned.

I hit a road sign. The airbags went off. Then another car hit me. I’m standing here waiting for the ambulance. I don’t have any visible head injuries, but I’m going to let them check me out. They’re taking me to Santa Clara Valley Hospital.

I felt relief. My husband was alive. He had no head injuries. That’s what he said, as clearly as if he was walking beside his beloved sea breathing the salty fresh air.

Alan was known for his calm demeanor. He attributed it to years of meditation, though some saw him as aloof, his coolness intimidating.

But as I imagined Alan standing dazed on the side of Highway 17, one of the most dangerous highways in America, the afternoon rush-hour traffic grinding to a standstill around him, I felt sickened. His body, at age seventy-five, had been hit hard. Metal crashed against metal. An approaching car rammed into his.

How had he escaped injury? Suddenly, I wasn’t convinced. I realized Alan was anything but calm. He was in shock.

Through his phone, I heard the ambulance approach. I wanted to ask questions, but I had to hurry. I’ll take the first flight out in the morning. Keep your cell phone charged. At least that way I could call him or he could call me. We could stay in touch.

Call you later, he said.

I love you. I love you, Alan. See you tomorrow.

I called my brother, Mitch, in San Francisco. He immediately left his jobsite and drove to Santa Clara. As if in a trance, I carried out the necessary practicalities. Brought the dishes into the kitchen and placed them in the sink. Locked the door to the porch. Called the airlines. Repacked my suitcase, not knowing what clothes I would need or for how long. Still, I thought to bring my sarong and bathing suit for the coming trip to Hawaii.

Late in the night, Mitch called from the hospital, his voice shaky. He and Alan had grown close, like brothers. Not good news, Kris, he said. I braced myself. The x-rays show that Alan has broken his sixth vertebra. It hasn’t punctured his spinal column—that’s the good news—but he’s also broken two ribs. He’s now going for more testing. Don’t be shocked when you see him tomorrow. He’ll be in a wheelchair and wearing a neck brace. They’ve got him on painkillers.

By eight thirty the next morning, I was on a flight to San Francisco.

I couldn’t get to Alan fast enough. A million thoughts raced through my mind. I hadn’t slept all night and couldn’t sleep on the plane. The flight seemed interminable until finally the craggy tops of the Sierras came into view, covered in snow, the San Francisco Bay only minutes away. Looking down at the very place it had all started, I felt my heart quicken, just as it had the first time I saw Alan.

Chapter 2

It began in June of 1990. What a wild ride that summer! when Alan and I had a love affair at an artist colony in the Santa Cruz mountains. What a stir we caused. After two weeks of flirting, I moved into Alan’s room. In the mornings, I would sneak out early, thinking no one would notice, but they did, especially the writer who shared a bathroom with Alan. He had to wonder about the new toothbrush sitting on the sink, and who else was going to the toilet in the middle of the night.

By the end of the month’s residency, Alan had asked me to marry him and I had said yes. We lay in bed and called all our friends with the news. I met most of Alan’s friends by phone that summer—there was no FaceTime back then, but they got the picture. We decided to marry in Sacramento the following summer. But thrilled as we were by our decision, there were facts of our histories we had to acknowledge: Alan was twice divorced and had three children from those marriages; I was twice married, once divorced and on the way to the second. But as we waved our goodbyes to the other residents, our lives together had already begun. We took off down Highway 1 toward Santa Cruz, pulling over a few times to look out at the ocean and kiss, then on we’d go, as carefree as any two lovers with nowhere in particular to go and no one to stop them.

I didn’t know it yet but Alan’s presence in my life would change everything. In time, problems seemed to melt away. I’d never known, given my past, that life didn’t have to be so hard, and that differences between two people could be solved calmly and sensibly, without drama.

From the very start, we lived together harmoniously. Of course there were challenges, but we were always able to work them out. Perhaps it takes getting to midlife for two people to get past at least some of life’s most vexing problems and simply be happy. I think that’s what Alan and I wanted most—happiness—and that’s what we gave each other plenty of, no matter the challenges we faced. We found our balance: I did the laundry, he took his shirts to the cleaners; I cooked, he took out the garbage; he helped with the dishes (well, somewhat—he brought the dishes into the kitchen from the table); I did the grocery shopping, he brought in takeout; I planned the parties, he bought the wine; I watered the plants, he took the cars to be inspected; he made the airline reservations, I changed the toilet paper roll; I buttoned his tuxedo shirt and fastened his tie, he zipped my dress. These things we did for each other. We simply fell into our tasks naturally, without thinking about who did what or who did more than the other. That would have taken time and energy away from what mattered—our love and our work.

In 1992, the year after we married, Alan and I moved from Texas, where I had been working when I met Alan, to Washington, DC. We rented a tiny basement apartment in an enormous house in Cleveland Park, not far from where we later bought a house together. The apartment had one bathroom. In the morning, every morning, Alan wrote in the bedroom, which meant I had to get out of bed early if I wanted to escape the sounds of Alan pecking away on his electric typewriter. (This was before he moved to computers.) Eventually, Alan wanted to write in the living room, so I was exiled to the bedroom. Things got more complicated once I graduated from massage school and needed the living room to set up my table.

I don’t know how we worked it out, but for seven years, Alan and I managed, shuffling between the rooms of our small space, until one day we bought our house and our working and living arrangement greatly improved. Not that we were happier. We’d had sweet times in our apartment, which included a wide porch on the back where we threw great parties—fifty people at a time would come, sometimes more. But in the new house, we each finally had our own space for our work. Alan wrote novels and short stories and reviewed books for National Public Radio, as well as for several major newspapers, and he taught classes in the creative writing program at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs. When he put out a new book, he’d go on the road to give readings. I choreographed and performed, even as I moved into starting a massage therapy practice. I also taught part-time in the dance departments at George Mason and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

I’d never thought much about houses until Alan and I bought ours. During all my years on a dancer’s income, I never could have afforded to own a house. As a dance instructor at a college or university, I could make a decent income, but solely on earnings as a modern dance performer or choreographer, not so much. I had never really cared. The dance studio, where I lived most of the time, was the only shelter I needed, and the tiny spaces I seemed to end up inhabiting with crazy husbands (before I met Alan) were simply places to sleep before returning to the studio—all the space in the world, this dance house—like the pin someone once gave me engraved with Home is where the art is. That’s how I thought about my home in dance.

The house we bought, we learned about from our friend and neighbor, the writer Susan Shreve. She said it was a steal, a house being sold as is. Susan and I wondered how we would get Alan out of our apartment to even look at it. Alan didn’t like change. From his years of living alone, he had established certain routines that brought order and stability to his life. We joked that if we purchased the house, we would have to get a couple of students to pick up Alan in his writing chair, with his computer, and set him down in his new office. We laughed about how he’d probably not even notice.

When I first met Alan, he’d gone from living in an apartment complex in Fairfax, Virginia, near George Mason, to living in a basement apartment in DC that was better suited to a teenager. The bed was on a platform that made the ceiling so low, Alan had no headroom to sit up. He had to roll off the bed to get to the floor and stand up. When I visited, I rolled off with him.

When I first walked into that apartment and saw how meager Alan’s life there was, I felt badly for him. A student had given him an old foldout sofa. Susan Stamberg, his friend and colleague at NPR, had donated a chair with all the stuffing coming out. When Alan sat in it to read, his butt sank to the floor and his shoulders hiked up to his ears. Alan was oblivious, and that turned out in my favor.

We tossed out the old sofa and chair when we moved into our house, and I began, at age fifty, to get interested in home decorations. Alan claimed shopping gave him migraines, so I took off on my own. I bought a dining room table, a new reading chair for Alan, bookcases (naturally), and a few lamps. But there was something missing. We kept hearing our voices pinging off the walls. Rugs, of course, we needed rugs. Back to the store.

Alan was happy to let me select all the house furnishings. He always seemed pleased with my choices, when he noticed them at all. One day, looking down at a smallish rug off the kitchen, he remarked, This is a pretty rug. Is it new?

I told him, No; this rug is ten years old.

Down the hallway from our second-story bedroom was a rectangular space originally built as a screened-in porch, characteristic of old houses in Cleveland Park before air conditioning. This was to be Alan’s writing office.

The first summer after we bought the house, when Alan went off to Santa Cruz, I renovated his office. I had a skylight installed so Alan could look up and see the clouds or the clear sky and be inspired, and I replaced the small windows with larger ones that covered half the wall; the other half became bookshelves. Instead of a desk, my contractor suggested using a door. Edged flat into the wall, it made a perfect desk with plenty of room underneath for long legs and filing containers. So Alan had plenty of light, and when he returned each year at the end of August, he could look out the windows and see the pink flowers blooming from the tall crepe myrtle tree. When he spun around in his chair, he could see photographs of his kids and parents; his grandchildren; birthday cards and Father’s Day cards; the Hindu goddess statues I placed around the room to protect him; the statue of Ganesh, the obstacle-demolishing elephant god Alan bowed to each morning; and the miniature snow globe with the floating red lips that I gave him one Valentine’s Day.

With the house, we also got a rather large yard, which Alan insisted he could take care of. We bought a lawn mower and a pair of hedge clippers. One day, Alan decided to trim the hedge. He got out the cutters and began clipping off the tops of the bushes. With graceful swoops, he lifted his arms, sliced off some greenery, then stood back, appearing proud of his efforts; then he clipped away again. This went on for a while, until about three quarters of the hedge had been cleared and Alan figured he’d done enough for one day. He dropped the hedge clippers and walked away.

I had watched this whole scene with great amusement. Alan, I called out, what about picking up the bits on the ground?

Not necessary, he said. Good for mulch.

The next day, I hired a yard crew and Alan’s days as a gardener came to an end.

*

Who knows how two people find each other? Alan and I couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds. While I was attending daily mass at a sedate Catholic school for girls in Memphis, Alan was fighting his way through public school in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. One of us kneeling in devotion, about to make her first communion, the other fidgeting in Hebrew class in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Latin and Hebrew. Catholic and Jew. Irish and Russian.

We were both restless and bored in high school. He was shy and awkward with girls and struggled to hold his own with the local boys. I loved boys and had no difficulty flirting. We were typical teenagers trying to find our identities. Because I got moved around a lot, I had to wait until college to achieve any success at realizing my dancer self. Alan stayed in the same town until college. He could walk home from school, where his mother was a secretary, and stop for a snack at his great-grandmother’s house or go to his grandparents’ corner candy store and fill up on sweets. When he wasn’t trying to get away from his parents’ arguing, he tended to get lost in books or movies. He was moody and brooding. I escaped into extracurricular activities and was always outgoing and social.

But for these differences, we each grew up near rivers; or rather, Alan grew up near a river, a bay, and an ocean. And in each of our childhoods, one southern, one northeastern, we heard American music—jazz and the blues. I could hear it while swimming in the Mississippi, holding onto my inner tube, how the people would sing on the riverboats passing by. Too young then to go to the blues clubs on Beale Street in downtown Memphis, I would hear my mother singing the blues. As a kid I’d try to imitate her,