He made me promise not to bury myself with him. That was the phrase — he’d watched his own mother do it for eleven years after his father, and he’d sat in her kitchen in 1994 and thought this is a second death and nobody’s calling it one. In 2019, after the diagnosis, before he lost the words for it, he made me say it back to him at that table: that when he stopped knowing me, I was to keep going, and that meant everything, and he was explicit about what everything meant. He was more explicit than I’ve ever been able to repeat to my daughter. He said it twice more that year. Then he stopped being able to.
The reason I can’t say it to her is that it’s unverifiable and self-serving and arrives at exactly the moment it exonerates me. It’s a dead man’s permission slip produced by the only witness who benefits. If she said the same sentence to me about her own marriage I’d want to believe her and I’d wonder. So I’ve let her think what she thinks, which is that I got tired and got lonely and got a man, and part of that is true — I did get lonely, and if he’d never said a word I’m not certain I’d have behaved differently. That’s the piece I can’t get around. The promise is real and it’s also convenient, and I can’t fully separate what I was permitted to do from what I wanted to do.
I still go Tuesdays and Fridays. He weighs a hundred and twenty-eight pounds and doesn’t track faces and his feet get dry, and I do the lotion because his hands used to be warm and mine aren’t much anymore. The man from church has never asked me to stop going and has never once come with me, which is the entire reason I’ve kept seeing him. My daughter texted in October about a school thing, four lines, nothing about any of it. I didn’t push. She’ll come around or she won’t, and I’ve decided I’m not going to buy her back with the promise. If I ever tell her, it’ll be after — when there’s nothing left for it to excuse.
