On the first anniversary of Jon’s death and on the second one, our daughter Christina and I made the drive over to Colma where Jon is buried. We laid, not flowers, but vegetables on Jon’s grave. Artichokes, asparagus, avocado, Jon’s favorites, the three As.
Jon liked a joke, and Christina and I were pretty sure that the laying on of the vegetables would amuse Jon, wherever he was.
Wherever he was.
Where is Jon, anyway? I’ve been widowed three years and I’m still expecting him to come back. It is not possible that he is gone for good, snuffed out, existing no more. That can’t be.
Milestones Invite Ceremony
Milestones like the one earlier this week, February 19, the anniversary of Jon’s death, cry out for acknowledgement. They invite ceremony. And each time I execute such a ceremony for Jon, I expect it to be the turning point, the moment when Jon returns after all. Because of course he will return. He’s off somewhere, on a high adventure or an irksome errand, intending to come back when the time is right, when the artichoke is laid on the grave. Or the asparagus.
Watching an episode of “Young Sheldon” a few years ago, a throwaway line caught my attention. Young Missy, distraught over some pre-teen disaster, arrives at her Meemaw’s door.
“What’s the matter?” says the grandmother. (Or words to that effect). “Did someone die?”
“No.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
Meemaw had some years on her, and she’d figured out that most human troubles have a solution, or a work-around, or can be endured. Nothing in life is written in stone. Except death. There is no undoing death. But the human mind is not built to work with this kind of implacability. It is built to come up with solutions. To persist. To hope.
Widowed: He’s Still Not Back
Christina had paid me a visit a few weeks ago, so it didn’t feel right to ask her to fly up from SoCal for the annual laying on of the vegetables. And when the day arrived this past Monday, a dark and ominous rainstorm was promised and delivered, complete with thunder and lightning.
I’m pretty much recovered from the annoying vertigo that has plagued me since before Thanksgiving. I’m driving again, but the 25-mile trip to Jon’s gravesite in the downpour seemed a bad idea. Unpleasant, if not risky.
I resolved to spend the day here at home with Jon. I thought perhaps I could mark the day by packing up Jon’s clothes and getting them ready to donate. Perhaps the time had come for that.
In our closet, I pulled out two laundry baskets still full of Jon’s things — one with the clean laundry I’d washed and folded and left for him to put away three years ago. And one with the dirty clothes he’d tossed there for me to wash.
Jon’s Socks, Right Where We Left Them
And there they were. A pair of jeans. A plaid nightshirt I’d bought him for Christmas. A scramble of socks waiting for him to fold together into pairs.
Jon wanted his socks put away mated in pairs. I preferred neat stacks of matching, flattened-out socks. If I stacked them like that, it would save me time and they’d take up less space in his sock drawer, I told him. Jon didn’t listen. Irritated, I took to tossing my husband’s socks in a scrambled wad into his clean laundry basket.
The man could fold his own socks, by golly.
Another story about socks at “Writing Tips From a Famous Author — I Put on My Best Socks to Get Them.” And more about socks in laundry baskets at “I Let the Maytag Man Into the House During the Pandemic and Here’s What I Learned About Human Nature.”
And you are still here and you have to make your way on your own now. But you did before you even met him.
This is true. I was a very independent single woman for years, until I met Jon at the age of almost 30.
I ate my first artichoke at Piru seated next to Jon. In 1968. I watched him to learn how to extract each petal and dip them into lemon butter. New experience for an 18-year-old cub reporter. I think of Ruth, Scott, Jon and Tony whenever artichokes are on the menu.
Kathleen, I remember being seated across the table at Piru from a young Signal reporter who revealed toward the end of the meal that she had never eaten an artichoke and, rather than confess her innocence, had watched everyone else pull the leaves off their ‘chokes and dip them in the lemon butter — and then proceeded to attack her own artichoke with courage and abandon. Was that you? If so, it could not have been in 1968. I didn’t meet Jon until 1971 and didn’t make my first trip to Piru for a while after that . . . Funny how that story sticks in the mind.