Forever, Interrupted(38)
As the pastor’s voice dies down, I can sense that my turn to speak is coming. I am relieved when his hand gestures first to Susan.
Susan moves toward the top of the grave and opens a manila folder. Should I have brought a manila folder? I barely prepared anything. Thinking of what to say was so awful, so ulcer-inducing, that I simply didn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I decided I was going to wing it. Because nothing could be worse than lying in bed thinking of what to say over your husband’s dead body, right? At least that’s what I thought until I saw Susan’s perfectly preserved manila folder. She hadn’t cried on it or ripped it up. She hadn’t folded the corners over and over out of fear. It is straight as a board. I bet the paper inside isn’t even scribbled on. I bet it’s typed.
“I want to start by saying thank you to everyone in attendance today. I know this is not the way anyone wants to spend a Saturday morning.” She half chuckles to herself, and the rest of us make a noise resembling a snort so that she can move on. “Some of you were with me a few years ago when Ben and I commemorated Steven, and I know I said then that Steven would have wanted us to enjoy this day. He would have wanted us to smile. I happened to have known that for a fact because Steven and I talked about it before he passed. We lay in the hospital together, when we knew it wasn’t going to get any better, when we knew the end was near, and he told me, as I told you then, ‘Make it fun, Susie. My life was fun, make this fun too.’ I wasn’t able to spend Ben’s last moments with him.” Her face starts to scrunch and she looks down. She regains her composure. “But in many ways he took after his father, and I can tell you, Ben would have wanted the same thing. He had fun in life, and we should do our best to find the fun in his death. It’s senseless and painful, but it can be happy and I promise to try to make today a day of celebration of who he was. I thank God for every day I had with him, with both of them. We can lament that Ben is gone, but I’m trying to, I’m choosing to, I’m . . . ” She laughs a rueful laugh. “I’m doing my best to instead think of Ben’s time in my life as a gift from God. One that was shorter than I’d like, but miraculous nonetheless.” She makes eye contact with me for a short period of time, long enough for both of us to notice, and then her eyes are back to the page. “No matter how many days we had with him, they were a gift. So in the spirit of celebration, I wanted to tell you all a story about one of my favorite, favorite Ben moments.
“He was eighteen and leaving for college. As many of you know he went to college close by, only an hour or two away, but it was much farther than he had ever been from me and I was terrified. My only son was moving away! All summer long I was crying on and off, trying to hide it from him, trying not to make him feel guilty. The day came to take him to school. Well, actually, wait.” She stops, no longer reading from the paper. “The other part of this you need to know is that we have a guest bathroom in the house that we never use. No one ever uses it. It was this big family joke that no one had set foot in the guest bathroom for years. We have a bathroom downstairs that guests always use and an extra bathroom upstairs that I had deemed the guest bathroom and insisted it had to be redone and gorgeous because guests would use it, but no guest ever used it. I’ve never even had to clean it. Anyway . . . ” she continues.
“As Steven and I are moving Ben in, we bring in the last of his stuff and I just start bawling my eyes out, right in front of his new roommate and his parents. It had to be mortifying for him, but he didn’t show it. He walked me out to the car and he hugged Steven and I, and he said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. I’ll come back next month and stay a weekend, all right?’ And I nodded. I knew that if I didn’t leave that minute, I’d never be able to. So I got in the car and Steven and I had started to drive away when Ben gave me one last kiss and said, ‘When you get sad, check the guest bathroom.’ I asked him to explain what he meant, but he smiled and repeated himself, so I let it go, and when I got home, I ran in there.” She laughs. “I couldn’t wait another minute, and as I turned on the light, I saw that he had written ‘I love you’ across the mirror in soap. At the very bottom it said, ‘And you can keep this forever because no one will ever see it.’ And I did, it’s still there now. I don’t think a single other person has ever seen it.”
I look down at the ground just in time to see the tears fall off my face and onto my shoes.
JANUARY
It was the day before our five-week deal was up. For the past four weeks and six days, Ben and I had been spending all of our time together, but neither one of us was allowed to mention words like boyfriend, girlfriend, or more specifically, I love you. I was very much looking forward to tomorrow. We had spent the day in bed, reading magazines (me) and newspapers (him), and he had been trying to convince me that it was a good idea to get a dog. This all started because of the pictures of dogs for adoption in the classifieds.
“Just look at this one. It’s blind in one eye!” Ben said as he shoved the newspaper in my face. His fingertips were covered in gray ink. All I could think was that he was getting the ink all over my white sheets.
“I see him!” I said back, putting down my magazine and turning toward Ben. “He’s very, very cute. How old is he?”
“He’s two! Just two years old and he needs a home, Elsie! We can be that home!”