THURSDAY, February 18 – I was flabbergasted. This morning Eamonn put on his shoes and his jacket, grabbed his schoolbag and gave me a kiss. He went down the stairs, followed by E, and they were gone. Off to school. I was left behind, wondering what had just happened. Last night she told him she was taking him to school. Which she did. It still strikes me as something of a miracle. Him, gone, without me.
SUNDAY, February 14 – Valentine’s Day. We didn’t celebrate: no roses, no cards, no kisses. Why should we? I did tell the boys how much I love them and how much I loved Jennifer, and still do. The afternoon dragged on.
I’m sitting and staring at the empty page in my diary as I’d had in mind elaborating on how I was planning to buy lingerie for her. How I still walk past store windows and visualize how good she’d look in this dress or in that skirt.
I could have gone on and on about her breasts, about the first day I was allowed to kiss them and fondle them, how they clung to my body. How her breasts became boobs during her pregnancies, how she showed them off , and had me photograph them. (That photo must still be around somewhere.) How on her deathbed I caressed her breasts, which were smaller then, this one last time. And kissed them.
I simply didn’t have the urge or the energy to explain it all in detail here on paper today. The memory was enough, but also too painful. I read what Sander had written on his mother’s Facebook wall: ‘Are you dead? Well, that’s what it feels like. Papa tried to mash cauliflower tonight. It wasn’t a great success. Why can’t we ask you how you do it? Love you.’
SATURDAY, February 13 – Irritations pile up. Between the au-pair and the children, between her and me, between the children and me. There is something more than time needed in order to accept a woman into this house. I call a meeting and we compare notes on the first few weeks. Her physical and mental presence is overwhelming and she also wants to know what we think. Communication is the key.
Am I going to tell her what we think, how we feel? Not always. At most I give her a few vital details about the kind of fucking life we’ve been leading. She’s right here in the middle of everything, but can’t seem to grasp it all. She can’t see, let alone experience the pain that once again swept so mercilessly into our living room this afternoon. It started with a clash between Sander and me. The trigger was the homework which he refused to do and which I in turn ordered him to do.
Of course, that wasn’t what it was really about, but the two of us need to thrash it out. A knock-down, drag-out fight over nothing; but fury at the reality of Jennifer’s death. The powerlessness of the situation. The frustration and the hatred, genuine hatred towards him, that bastard who has all this on his conscience. Frightful arguments, really, with Eamonn as unwilling victim along the sidelines. We ended up on the floor, all three of us, crying, sobbing, and cuddling.
Totally defeated, I was the first to get myself up again. I took a chair, placed it in the middle of the dining room, tied a pillow to it and told the boys it represented the motorcycle cop. I took the lead and started swearing at this empty chair, save for a pillow. I ignored the idiocy of the situation. No blows, just words. Shouts. Then the boys took turns. One at a time, we faced the imaginary motorcycle cop and gave him hell.
It didn’t solve anything; but, we felt better and after that we went go-karting. When we got home later that night, we were in high spirits and E looked at us a bit puzzled. She’d been downtown all day. Still, peace reigned once again and we didn’t say a word about our temporary breakdown that afternoon. That was between just the three of us.
TUESDAY, February 9 – Sitting on the couch, Eamonn leaning against me. He’s reading Garfield and I’m following the news. Haiti. The official death toll has reached 230,000. A man has been hauled alive from under the rubble some twenty days after the earthquake. He’s being interviewed and I don’t give a shit. My world revolves around Eamonn, Sander and myself.
Eamonn looks at me.
‘Papa, what do you think Hitler was like when he was little?’
I laugh. Really loud.
‘No, I’m serious. I always wonder what bad people and big-time criminals were like when they were children.’
It’s the sort of question that only Eamonn would ask. I sincerely hope that when he grows up he will look back on his childhood and accept that despite its bad moments, it still turned him into a good person. I’m convinced that he’s already a good person and will be one for the rest of his life.
MONDAY, February 8 – The pain was still there, but now it was surfacing differently. It had started with my son incessantly pacing back and forth across the living room.
‘Eamonn, is anything wrong? I asked.
‘No, I’m okay,’ he said.
I knew there was something wrong, so I asked him again what was bothering him.
‘It’s nothing,’ he again assured me. I followed him as he continued slowly walking around the room, after each round returning to the coffee table where he took tiny sips from his glass of water and I could see an expression of horror in his eyes.
‘Come on upstairs with me,’ I said. Once up in my bedroom he refused to sit down next to me on the bed. He just stood there, stock-still, next to the mirror.
‘There’s nothing wrong,’ he repeated.
Then it started to dawn on me: ‘This nothing. Is that what you have been talking about? Is that what you feel? I asked.
Indeed, this is what he was now feeling.
‘I’m nothing. My body is worthless. It’s nothing but me, and I don’t care about it.’
My brain was going full tilt and I spoke to him straight from the shoulder.
‘Do you want to live?’
‘Yes.’
Relief. We were in touch. He began to explain.
‘I drink sips of water to push everything back into my head,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand. What do you mean?’
‘I feel like if I don’t do that, I’ll fall apart.’
Eamonn took another sip of water, this time from the glass on the bedside table. Eventually, he agreed to come and sit next to me on the edge of the bed. He wouldn’t let me touch him.
Trying to comfort him, I said the first thing that came into my head: ‘It’s all right to have feelings like that, when you think that you’ve lost control over yourself. But just remember that if you explode, or if you fall, that I’ll always be there to catch you. I know that you’re feeling totally empty, that there’s nothing that seems to make your life worthwhile and that it feels imposible to find pleasure in anything at all. But listen carefully, and remember this: I promise you, here and now, that one day you’ll wake up and discover that you can still enjoy life. You’ll be able to have fun again and this ‘nothing’ will make way for ‘something’, and gradually that ‘something’ will become ‘everything’. When that happens, you’ll feel Mom close to you, inside you, and know that somehow she’s watching over you.’
I took a deep breath. That waterfall of positive thinking which had seemed to flow so automatically from my mouth was becoming a bit too much, probably. Just so long as he believed that ‘nothing’ wasn’t that bad at this moment in his young life.
He looked at me. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
I held his hand and told him to breathe slowly, in and out. For fifteen minutes we sat there together, I was lying on my bed and he was sitting on the edge. That was all I could do. It proved to be enough. Just enough.
SUNDAY, February 7 – What bothers me the most is the fact that we are gradually learning to go on living without you, Jennifer. The thought is unbearable.
FRIDAY, February 5 – Tears of love ran down my face. Although it would seem I’m not ashamed to cry anywhere these days, I’m glad that Eamonn didn’t see me cry this afternoon. Burying his head in my lap, he had been more open than ever before with the psychologist.
I felt a surge of pride, relief and sadness alongside the love for my son who had talked about the accident for the first time. The dam had burst the evening before when he confessed that he was still tormented by the images of the accident and his memories of the fatal moment.
I couldn’t help him, no matter how much I wanted to. So it was a good thing that a visit to our psychologist was scheduled for today. Eamonn wanted me to bring up the subject and after that he would start to talk.
He described how the mother of his friend, who had both come to the park with them, suddenly called out to him telling him to turn around and go back to the road. He described how he immediately realized that there had been an accident and knew that his Mom had been in the crosswalk and he had run back. And then his voice faltered.
He put his head in my lap and through my tears I told him how brave he was and that I was proud of him. I reassured him that the exact words of his story would never go beyond the walls of this room and that gradually all this pain would begin to lessen. Then it was quiet for a while and that was okay.
Tears of pain, but above all, tears of love.
THURSDAY, January 28 – Don’t have a clue what I meant when I wrote down last night’s terms. Can’t remember much about yesterday. What on earth does Auschwitz have to do with Sander’s half-birthday? Jennifer perfected? Dammit! I’m losing my marbles.
Well, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. A chance to catch my breath. Maybe that’s what I need most at this point.
I quickly, however, reject that idiotic idea. My mission, my life task, could not be clearer: the children. Nothing but the children. And then myself. I have to take care of myself and it was a good thing that I gave in to my fatigue, left the dancing letters to their own demise, and went to bed.
I found Eamonn in my bed. During and probably because of my absence he had become upset and vomited all over the stairs. Sander called me during the meeting. The babysitter assured me that it wasn’t serious. ‘Entirely psychosomatic’ was my diagnosis, and I hung up after suggesting that Eamonn might want to crawl into my bed. That helped.
This morning he came downstairs with a poem, written specially for me. Tears immediately came to my eyes. ‘It made me cry, too,’ Eamonn said. It’s called ‘My Dad’.
“My Dad
Is #1.
I love
To hear him hum,
His meals
Make me say yum.
My Dad
Is #1.”
I hang it on the wall.
(The book is now for sale. Click here for more information)
THURSDAY, January 21 – ‘Do you think about Mom, Eamonn?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘And what exactly do you think?’
‘Everything. But this ‘everything’ is totally blank.’
‘How about if we sit down on the couch and look at photos of Mom?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good, where shall we start?’
‘You know what, maybe we shouldn’t do that after all.’
‘Okay, Eam. What shall we do instead?
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe just nothing.’
‘Okay.’
Tomorrow I’m going to let him play hooky. He’s earned it. In fact, he needs it.
SATURDAY, January 16 – I resolved to learn from yesterday’s lesson. The first baseball practice of the season and Eamonn displayed little to no enthusiasm. If skating with his mother proved to be so emotional for him, then baseball probably wouldn’t fare much better. As the time to leave drew closer, his dilly-dallying spoke volumes.
After breakfast I called him over and started to talk about yesterday and how it was clear that skating without Mom was difficult for him. I tried to create a link to baseball, but Eamonn interrupted me. He was more direct: ‘What are you trying to tell me, Papa?’
‘What I’m trying to tell you, Eamonn, is that we’re going to skip the first baseball practice.’ This was followed by a hug and a kiss on the cheek. All of a sudden he was cheerful again and his high spirits continued the rest of the day. We decided to watch Avatar .
‘The best movie of my whole life,’ he proclaimed.
‘My whole life,’ echoed in my head.
Diary of a Widower 