33. i've now written more letters about him than years he lived
written 9 months and 27 days after
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About five days before the fifteenth of this month, I started falling asleep without realizing it.
I would be working, at my desk, and suddenly my hand would drop, clattering against the keys of my laptop. I would wake up only to realize for a few minutes, sometimes even twelve or so, I had been asleep.
Since then, I feel sodden, and slow. I keep double-checking my reminders, to make sure I’m not forgetting to be somewhere. Several times, I’ve rearranged walks or moved them to FaceTime because I don’t have the energy or the will to move from inside to outside.
The weather has been grey, rainy and cool.
In two days, it will be ten months since he died. I go for a brief walk with my puppy and the sight of garbage bags, torn open by ravens and magpies — spilling out receipts, dirty napkins, husks of food packaging — makes my eyes well up, my nose sting.
“Kurtis,” I say out loud, but softly, because someone is ahead, pulling their green recycling bin back into their yard.
“Please come back,” I say and the man tugging at his bin looks in my direction.
Not you, I think to him. I’m talking to someone else. It’s not that the sight of the ravaged garbage reminds me of him. It’s that those bags, that waste, anything, can still exist and he doesn’t.
**
This month, one of my big therapy tasks is to spend a night at the apartment — something I haven’t done since he was alive.
I don’t know when I’ll do it. Maybe I’ll leave it until the very last night of the month. Maybe I won’t do it at all. I don’t know. How does someone do something impossible?
A few weeks ago, I was sitting outside, a glass of wine in my hand, grass spread out around me. I was telling a new friend about his passing, about my health journey, about the grief that now winds itself around me, stranges my internal architecture.
“You must be very strong,” she said to me.
I shook my head.
“You are,” she said.
“I’m not,” I said. “I’m really, really not.”
I tried to explain that life has asked me for more than I can give, that before I came to sit, and sip wine, I had cried all day — unable to do anything else — but the words to explain all that fell apart in my mouth.
**
A few days later, I was FaceTiming with my friend, who is also a very young widow. We were supposed to have gone for a walk but my exhaustion won.
“That’s one of the things I would want to tell people about grief, this far into it,” my friend said. “How tired you are, all the time.”
I’d just told her about the grass, the wine, the massive disparity between the strength people see and the lack of strength, the sense of buckling beneath an unbearable weight that I feel almost all the time. I don’t have to say to my friend, because she’s living it too, that when he was here, when it was the two of us, that was when I felt strong. Now, alone, without him, I feel as though there is a vacuum behind me, constantly throwing me off balance, constantly pulling me under, constantly destabilizing me.
“I know,” my friend said. “I’m not strong either. I’m just trying to get through the day, or out of bed.”
“I also would want to tell people not to equate certain behaviours with ‘doing better,’” I said.
“RIGHT?” my friend said.
We tally up the things that others seem to believe go hand-in-hand with grievers ‘getting better’ (spoiler alert: there is no ‘getting better ‘ from grief, there is just a slow, painful integration and acceptance of its enduring realities): going back to work, moving out on your own, going on solo hikes, vacations, trips, putting on make-up and brushing your hair, going on a date, and on. We named a few more, but I can’t recall them now.
We try to brainstorm ways to make people really hear us when we say that we aren’t doing well. I suggest power-screaming or sending selfies of one’s self sobbing at the top of a bridge. They’re not great suggestions, I’ll grant that, but also, I’ve looked people in the eye before and said, “I’m drowning,” and they’ve said, “You look way better though. You might not feel strong but you are!”
Another one of my suggestions is a T-shirt. I tell my friend that, for the days that I wear make-up, I could also wear a T-shirt that says: I AM DEVASTATED BUT TODAY I AM DEVASTATED IN EYE SHADOW.
Actually, I refine the idea as I’m talking, if I could just have a T-shirt that says: … I AM STILL DEVASTATED, then I think that might cover all manner of bases.
Laughing? Read the T-shirt.
Going for a drink on a patio? T-shirt.
Adopted a dog? T - S-h-i-r-t.
“I would also tell people to stop asking ‘how are you?’” my friend said and I nodded.
My friend has just entered her second year of widowhood — she finds it more raw, more suicidal, more all-consuming than the first year.
“Just keep checking in,” she says when I ask how I can best be there for her.
I think, once again, how so much of what others perceive as strength is really just a griever, a widow, staying alive because she feels seen enough, feels not alone enough, feels connected enough.
**
In the last few months, sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, the right side of my jaw pops, near where it connects to my ear.
I would describe it as clicking but that’s somehow too sharp for the sound that it makes.
I have never had my jaw be anything but silent before. I don’t even bother Googling to see why my jaw has found a voice.
Grief, I assume as I walk towards my bathroom.
When I pick up my toothpaste tube, it’s all crunched up in a ball. I always squeeze it from the middle, cramping the tube into a withered claw by the time the toothpaste is almost out. This used to drive him nuts. He would smooth out the tube, lengthen it, instruct me to squeeze from the top but I never would.
“How can this not bug you?” he would say, shaking the squished toothpaste tube at me.
“How can someone use so much?” I would respond, watching him layer toothpaste onto his brush. It was always far more toothpaste than I had ever seen anyone use.
I look at the knotted tube and think, for the first time since he’s died, how he will never again smooth it out, set it upright on its cap, how I will never come into the bathroom again and set it horizontal on the counter, continue to squish it from the middle.
I leave the tube where it is and go sit down on the toilet to pee. When I stand up, I remember the time, a year or two ago, that he told me the way in which I wiped my ass was not the best way.
I had stared at him, incredulous.
“You’re telling me how to better wipe my butt?” I said. “Really?”
He grinned, roared with laughter.
“But I am,” he said. “Let me show you.”
He knew I had no intention of taking any notes on this topic, but at that point we were both laughing, almost carbonated by the strangeness and eccentricity of the moment. I used to call these comments—these ostensibly ‘helpful’ criticisms that he would proffer up on all manner of things—Kurticisms.
Being told I could wipe my butt better: that’s the kind of oddity and freedom and ease that time brought us.
We were lucky, in that sense. I was lucky.
**
Last week, I listened as a friend of mine said that she missed being married.
Her voice went soft as she said it. She said that she missed caring for another person in those little ways that you do when you’ve been with that person for a long time.
She wasn’t looking at me when she said this, so she didn’t see the ways in which I rolled my lips inward, pressed them together, blinked away the tears that had arisen. I heard her voice catch and when I looked at her, I saw that her eyes, too, had watered up. I looked away, watched the candle wick flicker with flame on the table beside me.
I find it really brave, what my friend said. I wouldn’t have been able to say something like that out loud, unless someone else had said it first. Some pains are so sharp that I find speaking them drags too much of a blade through my body.
“Yes,” I finally said. “I agree,” saying it so quietly I don’t even know if my friend heard me.
I wanted to tell my friend, though I didn’t, because it was too painful, that I even miss the ways in which, sometimes, we would fight so late into the night that the only take-out options still open and delivering by the time we had resolved our issues were Wendy’s and Little Caesars. I wanted to tell her how we haggled over which to order — me preferring the former and him the latter. I wanted to tell her we would stay up even later and eat together, fresh in that raw tenderness that follows after a fight.
**
A few days ago, I spoke, over Zoom, to the 2021 graduating class of the School of Architecture at the university.
The first Kurtis Nishiyama Memorial Scholarship was awarded and I was invited to speak about my sweet man, about the award.
I did not get even a few minutes into what I had written before I started crying.
I choked my way through sharing his professional accomplishments, his love of music, of wine that stank like poop (his words), of skiing, and cycling, of inclusion and equity, of the power of kindness, community, and social activism. I told them of his sweetness, his charisma, his charm. I told them how he thought flexibly and incisively, how he was quick to laugh and even quicker to forgive.
I told them how, when he would go to Design Matters lectures, he would always have an extended and involved question for the speaker during the Q & A session. Indeed, I have been told my his peers, that his questions were so consistently present and engaged that he earned himself the title ‘The Young Contrarian.’
While I did not know about that title until after he was gone, I was not surprised when I heard about it. He would often come home from those lectures and tell me, while beaming, that he’d asked a question that everyone had listened to.
He loved engaging, he loved architecture, and he loved, when he felt comfortable, the limelight.
I also spoke about how much he loved magic.
I told them how, once, I came into the bathroom to check on him as he had been gone an extraordinarily long time. When I pushed the door open, I found him tangled up in a series of large, silver rings. He grinned at me, caught out like a kid doing something off-side, when I opened the door.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Just practicing a magic trick, baber,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, he emerged, ready to show me.
Nothing had prompted the magical performance. He just did it. That’s what he was like.
He just had his own, certain way.
Somewhere in my phone, I have videos he filmed of himself doing a number of card tricks. I can’t bear to pull them up and watch them.
I told the graduating class that it will remain one of the great mysteries of my life as to how someone who loved living as much as he did could have ever gotten so little time to do it.
When I was finished speaking, I turned off my camera and my speaker. I thought about how he had attended his own convocation in 2013; I thought about how I would never have seen an architecture convocation, even by Zoom, if he wasn’t gone. I thought that he must be gone because there is no way he would have missed something like this.
I put my head down and cried so much and so long that my tears turned into a small flood, weeping off the edge of my desk.
**
A few hours after the convocation ceremony finished, across the street from the apartment, my neighbours pulled up in their orange hatchback. I winced, already preparing.
My neighbours have two small girls, and any time they return from errands or what have you, they make several trips back and forth, their arms full of kid-stuff, bright, jangly, awkwardly sized. Because of these numerous trips back and forth from the car, they don’t lock the car right away. Usually, they lock the car from inside their home, using their remote button. By the time they lock the car, their front door is closed, and my line of sight to them obscured.
In all the years that he and I lived in this apartment, I never noticed our neighbours, before. Now, my excruciating awareness of their comings and goings is borne of the fact that when they lock their car, they press the button twice, so that they hear the honk the car makes to signal that it’s locked.
The honk is exactly the same sound as the honk his car made when he pressed the button on his remote, twice, to ensure it was secured. I have listened for this honk for years — the sound of it signalling his arrival back home.
Now, I try to plug my ears when my neighbours come home, but I never get the timing right. I always take my fingers out of my ears too soon.
At the sound of the honk, I still look up. I still expect to see his lanky frame in the window, still hope to watch his loose hair fall into his face, still want to trace the way his work bag and bike gear flaps around his butt, still wait to see him lift a hand as he waves through the glass at me.
It’s insane, I know, but I have, on multiple occasions, considered walking across the street and asking the neighbours I have never spoken to before, to consider not honking their car as it locks. Or maybe, I think, they could get a new car.
**
Just yesterday, I went, with my mother, to MoMa’s third puppy class.
MoMa is the youngest (currently at 15 weeks) and the smallest (currently at 4lbs) in her class. The oldest and biggest is a 5 month old Lab cross who weighs a whopping 70lbs. MoMa is undeterred by this massive size and age difference, happily bounding over to try and play at the start of the class.
As I listen to the instructor and work with MoMa on the assigned focus games and command exercises, I feel the tension gathering in my skull, the worry that I’m not doing the hand signals correctly or that I’m holding the leash too long — allowing MoMa to wander. I stress about whether MoMa is progressing at an appropriate rate, if I’m working on the puppy homework enough at home.
Something about my tension reminds me of a time, several years ago, when I half-jokingly mused that maybe parenthood would see a role-reversal in he and I.
“Maybe,” I said while frying dumplings in a pan in our kitchen, “You’ll be the stressed-out parent, and I’ll end up being super Zen, like Gwyneth Paltrow.”
He laughed so hard I think it could only accurately be termed a GUFFAW.
“I don’t think so,” he said, grinning. “But nice try.”
I watch MoMa perform her Stay command and then try to see if MoMa will Stay while I walk much further away. It’s farther than any of the other owners have attempted with their puppies and when MoMa remains in a Stay I feel inordinately proud.
“Not laid back,” I want to tell him. “Duh, you were right,” I want to tell him.
Instead, I put my hand up and give MoMa the signal for Stay again. I tell her, “Stay, stay, stay.”
I back away and walk around and come back to her. The whole time I keep telling her what I want: “Stay,” I say. “Stay, stay, stay, stay.” She watches me, head tilting.
I wonder if she and I are thinking the same thing: if we are both wondering what the signal is for please, Come Back.
Devastatingly raw... sending love always ❤️
Painfully beautiful…💝