Memories Redux

I find myself remembering more and more every week, or I should say re-remembering. It’s been just about a year since Bruce died and for a long time I found it hard to picture his face as it used to be. Neck cancer and its subsequent surgeries and treatments took their toll, although he always looked handsome to me. But I found I had trouble remembering his face from before. I could just about hear his voice and his laugh, but his face seemed to elude me. Even staring at photos, which I did a lot, didn’t seem to quite bring it to life. I’ve dreamed about him several times in the last few weeks – something that only happened once before. The dreams didn’t make much sense, at least not in the light of day. But I seem to have regained his face. I can picture it again, three dimensionally, not flat as it looks in those photos. Somehow, dreams brought him back to me.  

            To be frank, I lost more than just his face. This past year I’ve been going through the motions of life, doing the grocery shopping, making the bed, feeding the cat. All the necessaries that keep one from looking like a crazy old cat lady. I’ve spent a lot of time with friends and family. It’s a wonderful and powerful thing to connect with people. To listen to stories about their daily lives, their travels, their families, their pets, their jobs, their highs and their lows. These things all helped keep me anchored to the world. Otherwise, I really felt…untethered. The best moments were when someone brought Bruce up – related some good memory or funny story. I don’t know about anyone else, but I like talking about Bruce. We spent forty six years together and, if you do the math, (which Bruce wouldn’t have done, he did not like math), that’s 72% of my life. So yes, I like to talk about him. I like other people to talk about him if they want to.

But other than bits and pieces, Bruce himself seemed to be hiding from me. But lately, the funniest things have returned, seemingly all in a returning wash of memories. I was reading in my screen porch last week and I happened to look up and see the bell Bruce hung near the door. He used to ring it for cocktail hour. Wonderful evenings magically showed up in my brain’s hard drive. Evenings where we would sip cocktails, Bruce with a vodka and tonic and me with a tequila drink, listening to his favorite music, sharing the day’s trivia, sometimes slow dancing in the ‘shuffle left, shuffle right’ style we perfected in the late 70s.

            It surprised the hell out of me to remember later that week how he rarely called me Joyce, but rather Bobby. It was like Samantha Stevens wiggled her nose and I could recall a flood of things. Forty six years worth. How when we first met he refused to tell me what his middle name was for the longest time. He always said his middle name was Happy. (It was Harrison). How his favorite song was ‘Build Me Up Buttercup.’ The rapidity of his mind when it came to a retort or a quip. A million brilliant, funny, annoying, missing details flowed back into my brain. His obsession with the Pats and his love for Creedence Clearwater and Neil Young, his endless hole by hole recaps of golf games and how he carried Zach around the neighborhood when he couldn’t walk. How he made up his own names for things like Sherman Williams instead of Sherwin…so much, so many millions of things. The hard drive felt overloaded, but in the best of ways.

            I read recently that one of the things that disappears when your spouse dies is the secret language you shared. The inside jokes, the pet names, the unique shared experiences, the thousand and one habits you develop over the course of your life together. And oh, that ability to share just a look that says, “I’m tired,” “I’m scared,” “I’ll take care of it,” “We’ll be okay.” I think that article was wrong. The language hasn’t disappeared, I just needed to remember it.