She’s gone, and the world is a
substantially worse place than it was.
I miss Stephanie, yeah. But much
more to the point, she’s not here. She’s not anywhere. There’s nothing left of
her but photos and ashes and recipe cards, old clothes and odd mementos. Every
molecule that fired the neurons of her brain is elsewhere now, doing other
things.
Everything she cared about, she
doesn’t care anymore. All the jokes she would’ve cracked will remain uncracked
forever. All the insight she offered every day, will never again be offered.
The kooky slang we had between is us a language no-one will ever speak again.
When I glance into the bedroom as I walk down the hall, it’s only the bed, and
she’s not in it.
Everything she was, everything that
made her such a delight to me — the shape of her smile, the speck in her eye,
the crack in her voice when she cried, the sound of her laughter, the scent of
the crook of her elbow, all the easy conversations, all of her laughter, all of
her dreams, all of her memories and passions, all of her accomplishments and
failures, all of her fears, all her insecurities, all of her worries, all of
her joy, all of her plans, all that she was or ever could have been — all of it
is gone.
Once, when we were living in
California, she flew back to Wisconsin to attend a friend’s wedding, so for
three days and two nights we weren’t together. With only that exception, for
more than two decades we were together every day and every night of our lives.
And it was marvelous. And it’s over.
The woman who gave me all those
years of her life, willingly and wonderfully, is irrevocably gone. That is
sadder, hollower and achier and more awful than anything I’ve ever experienced
or imagined.
Just — gone. She’ll never know how
the Game of Thrones books end. She’ll never again pet the cat. She won’t
whip up her renowned shrimp-noodles, or anything else. She won’t poke fun at me
for being hard-of-hearing, or for un-ironically using ancient words like
“knickerbockers.” She’ll never finish her latest needlepoint project. She won’t
ask me to dance, or challenge me on the lightning round of Wait Wait Don’t
Tell Me. She won’t play any of her video games, all of which she
generalized by calling them “Run, Girlie Run.” She won’t reminisce about
college, or her trip to Russia, or living in San Francisco. She won’t re-watch All
About Eve or The Women for the hundredth time. She won’t read about
the latest insanity from Donald Trump and mutter under her breath. She won’t
stroll or roll with me at Olbrich Gardens. She won’t leave a shopping list for
me in the morning. No more pontoon rides on the lake. No more nothing.
Stephanie is a memory. A very, very wonderful memory, but entirely in the past.
So, yeah, the world is worse than it
was. Exponentially worse.
And please don't tell me she's in a
better place. She's not. She’s no place at all. Stephanie and I were basically
agreed that there’s no Heaven, no Hell, no Limbo where we’ll meet again. No
purgatory, no paradise, no Nirvana, no reincarnation – there's no evidence for
any of it, and we don’t believe in fairy tales. There’s only here, and not
here. And Stephanie is not here.
It’s time to take another walk, have
another cry. After that, it's time to drive to Racine, and see Stephanie's
parents. We've only spoken on the phone since she died, so I expect there'll be
lots of tears today.
*
* * * * * * * * *
For our first fifteen years of
marriage, Stephanie did virtually all the driving. She was a better driver than
I am, certainly, and when she moved out west to join me in San Francisco, she
drove the loaded U-Haul from Wisconsin to California. I might have driven a
hundred miles on that trip; the rest was Stephanie, and with this she earned a
permanent nickname as “Truck Girl.”
In the era before GPS, I was mostly
relegated to “Navigator Boy” duties, studying the maps and telling her where to
turn. She was also, however, a better navigator than me, and occasionally she
took the map out of my hand when I’d gotten us lost. So in reality, even at the
start of our marriage, she was both driver and navigator. Or as we said in our
silly slang, she was both Truck Girl and Navigator Girl.
When we lived in San Francisco, we
didn’t have or need a car. Public transit is easier, and anyway we were poor,
and parking would have been impossibly expensive. But when we moved, first to
Kansas City and later to Madison, Stephanie rented the car and drove and
plotted the paths, and when we eventually bought a car she was again in charge
of driving and navigation.
Then, for the last six or seven
years of our time together, when health issues meant she could no longer drive,
she became exclusively Navigator Girl. And she was mighty good at it. We never
bought a GPS; instead we owned thick map-books of Wisconsin and Illinois, and
Stephanie guided us to our destinations, almost always with no missed turns.
Oh, the places we’ve been! Rustic Roads all over Wisconsin. Door County, the tourist
trap along Wisconsin’s lakefront coastline. Up the Mississippi River shore.
Across Lake Wisconsin on the Merrimac Ferry, and across the Mississippi River
on a different ferry. To Beloit and back so many times, for minor-league
baseball. We played bingo in the Dells, and at the casino in Milwaukee. Scenic
drives across half of Wisconsin, especially in the autumn, as the leaves were
turning — Stephanie loved that drive, and we did it annually. Pick a state or
county park; if it’s within 200 miles we’ve been there, probably multiple
times, and Stephanie always found the most efficient or scenic route.
Everywhere we lived — San Francisco,
Kansas City, and Madison — we frequently went to movies at the drive-ins, which
are always a long, winding trip out of the city. She always laid the course to
the drive-in and, more of a challenge, back home again late at night, when all
the backwoods highways are blanketed in darkness.
She was an excellent Navigator Girl,
as we often said to each other. It was a silly joke, but it was also true, and
she would’ve found it hilarious that I got thoroughly lost, several times, on
my first road trip without her.
*
* * * * * * * * *
Stephanie and I didn’t have an
extensive collection of friends in Madison. Our few friends are in San
Francisco, and in Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, and my own family is a thousand
miles away, so the only people we had in the area were her parents. They live
in Racine, a mid-sized town a hundred miles from Madison. That’s where we had
an informal wake, just her parents and I, at the house where Stephanie was
raised.
I hate almost everything about the
traditional American-style funeral, so this intentionally wasn’t anything like
that. Nothing was organized, no scriptures or speeches were spoken, nobody sang
“Amazing Grace.” There was a lot of crying, but mostly by me. Her parents are
“Midwest stoic,” devastated by their daughter’s death but they’re not going to
cry about it in front of me. Still, it was a surprisingly effective wake or
going-away party, or whatever-it-was.
Her father grilled some pork
tenderloin for lunch, and for several hours we talked about Stephanie’s
childhood, and things that happened long before I knew her. I already knew many
of the things they told me, but some of it Stephanie had never mentioned.
I knew, for example, that she had
taught herself to read when she was a toddler, years before kindergarten. Hey,
I told you she was smart. But I hadn’t known that her nursery teacher
hadn’t believed that 3-year-old Stephanie could read. When Steph’s mother said Stephanie
could read, the teacher guffawed and said perhaps Steph had memorized the
stories in her books, but she couldn't possibly read. Steph's Mom said,
"Grab a book, any book," and the teacher skeptically handed itty-bitty
Steph a book she’d never seen before. Stephanie read the title aloud, and then
started reading the book – and not faltering, sounding out words; she read it
easily.
Just for comparison, I wasn’t allowed
to have my sixth birthday until I could tie my shoes. No party, no presents, no
cake, no celebration. I wasn’t even allowed to say I was six years old. I had
to continue telling people I was five for another several months, until I
finally mastered tying my shoes. So, Steph was reading at three, and I was
tying my shoes at 6½.
She had told me that she could play
the piano, but we’d never had one. The few times we'd been in the same room
with a piano Steph had always declined to play, so I never heard her play the
piano. What she didn’t tell me was that she had been a piano prodigy,
playing classical pieces by sight and sound well before adolescence. How could
we be married for all those years and I’d never known?
She told me she'd earned an academic
scholarship at Michigan State, but she didn’t tell me that she aced her Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT) with a perfect score. I never went or wanted to go to
college, so I had to Google it when I got home, but yeah, a perfect SAT is
incredibly rare. My assumption, then, is that she didn’t tell me about her it
because she thought it might’ve made me uncomfortable at the difference in
intelligence between us. But c’mon,
Steph. I knew you better than I’ve ever known anyone, and believe me, I always
knew that you were way, way smarter than me.
It’s surprising how
little I know about Stephanie’s childhood, college years, and early adulthood –
everything in her life before meeting me. I met several of her old friends, but
they never became my friends, and we were so far away that Steph rarely saw
them.
We flipped through photo albums and keepsakes,
and went through a lot of Stephanie's stuff from childhood. Here's the announcement
of her birth, clipped from the Milwaukee Sentinel – Racine,
WI, July 8, 1970 – Born to Mr and Mrs Jack L Webb, a daughter, Stephanie Lynn. She was six pounds,
10½ ounces.
They let me take two boxes of mementos to keep, and one box they made me promise to return. In grade-school pictures, she's just a cute kid who bears some resemblance to my Steph, but in the pictures by the time she's a teenager, it's remarkable how much she's Stephanie. There are a few pictures of Steph from high school where I'm certain what was on her mind at the moment the camera clicked; I can see it in the expression on her face.
So, thanks, Mom and Dad Webb, for an afternoon spent remembering Stephanie. I cried a lot, and it felt good to share the grief. There’s been no-one I could talk to in person about Stephanie’s death, until today. Her parents have always accepted me into the family, and today that meant a lot to me.
They let me take two boxes of mementos to keep, and one box they made me promise to return. In grade-school pictures, she's just a cute kid who bears some resemblance to my Steph, but in the pictures by the time she's a teenager, it's remarkable how much she's Stephanie. There are a few pictures of Steph from high school where I'm certain what was on her mind at the moment the camera clicked; I can see it in the expression on her face.
So, thanks, Mom and Dad Webb, for an afternoon spent remembering Stephanie. I cried a lot, and it felt good to share the grief. There’s been no-one I could talk to in person about Stephanie’s death, until today. Her parents have always accepted me into the family, and today that meant a lot to me.
*
* * * * * * * * *
I thought that crying would be the
most difficult part of the day, but it felt good to let the tears flow. Indeed,
the hardest thing for me was simply driving to and from Racine. It's a
hundred-mile drive, and I’ve made that trip and back many times, because we visited her folks frequently. Today, though, I couldn’t bear the thought
of driving our normal route via Interstate-94, where every landmark along the
freeway would be a reminder of the person who wasn’t in the car. We had
lunch at that restaurant, and We filled the tank at that gas station,
etc.
So instead I mapped out a longer
trip, far from the interstate, along state and county highways we’d traveled
much less frequently. And predictably, driving without my Navigator Girl left
me confused, scratching my head, and completely flummoxed finding her family’s
house. I arrived half an hour late for the wake. Then, on the return trip to
Madison, I made two wrong turns and went 75 miles out of my way.
So, two observations: First, it’s
not just a cliché that I am lost without Stephanie. I am utterly, absolutely,
and literally lost without her, and I’ll be lost for the rest of my
life.
And second, I need to buy a GPS
device for the car.