Bathtub

One week after Andy died, there were so many gaps to fill and pieces to pick up. The puzzle of his life, and mine, were formulating from my own story. But he had his own version, overlaid with mine. He had notebooks, journals, and audio file recordings. I had text messages, bank accounts, and so much more I likely hadn’t even begun to uncover. “His story”, his writings... emails!

At this one week mark, I found gut wrenching grief. Unlike the grief from the earlier days, I was grieving myself instead of him. My body was weak, my legs heavy and shaky. It was hard to stand, let alone walk or climb stairs. I had to keep sitting. My mom told me I looked pale, and I sat on a dining room chair. I told her, "I don’t feel well."

I started sobbing, and went to the kitchen to fill a glass with ice and water. I leaned over the farmhouse sink, holding onto the sides, and doubled over with grief. The sobs racked my body, the waves just keep hitting me. Over and over. I sunk to the floor.

My mom suggested I lie down to take a nap, but I wasn't tired. I’m also a terrible napper. She asked if she could rub my back. I declined.

Then she offered to rub my legs. I reluctantly agreed. I went to my room and laid down on the floor, listening to the advice my friend Shannon gave me moments before to put my legs straight in the air on the wall. My mom rubbed my legs, my feet. She went downstairs to get a heating pad and put it under the small of my back. I sat with my legs elevated, and continued to sob, letting the sorrow spill from me.

I begin to fear my body wouldn’t recover, and I’d be handicapped by this trauma. I started wondering if my body was broken, incapable of healing. I feared the kids wouldn’t have a functioning parent, that I’d let them down.

I feared becoming Andy.

I cried out with this vision, of my children needing me and my inability to care for them. I said to my mom, “The kids can’t have another broken parent”.

My mother reassured me, “This is all normal, part of the grieving process. You’re having a physiological response to all of the weight you’ve been carrying – for years. Years. And you’ve been holding it all together this past week. You’ve finally hit your wall; I’d be surprised if you didn’t have this kind of reaction.”

We sat like this for a long time. She gathered a u-shaped pillow Andy gave me from Natalie’s room, and put it under my head. My mother, providing what physical comfort she could give me. I realized this pillow was the last gift Andy ever game me, the month before he died. I had never even used it. As soon as I opened the box it came in, Natalie snatched it away for herself, carting it to her room and claiming it as her own. I realized how fitting it was that I was using it in my most vulnerable moment of need and despair, almost as if it had all been part of his plan. Similarly, 2 days before, my mom and aunt had purchased a heating pad for Colin when he experienced ear pain after diving too deep at Green Lake. And here I was using that, too.

My mom went into the kids’ bathroom and draw a hot, steamy bath. She asked what I wanted in it and I told her to choose a bath ball from the drawer in my bathroom. She selects one wrapped in blue tissue paper with a pink ribbon, a favor from a baby shower I attended years ago for our old nanny, Saara. I told my mother I had never taken a bath in this house since we remodeled it 6 years before, despite having 2 bathtubs installed. The baths were supposed to be for our young kids, not for me.

My mom gets the bath ready, but the water was scalding. I added cold water to even tolerate putting a foot in. The water was a deep arctic blue, from the dye leeching from the bath ball. There was an orange-mango scented candle lit in the corner of the bath, a fluffy new white towel hanging on the door, and an older grey one folded on the floor. I take hold of the glass of ice water as I stepped into the bath. I sank into the tub, feeling the heat overtake my body. It was uncomfortably hot, but also therapeutic.

I felt my legs relax, the discomfort from earlier disappearing. In noticed my toe nail polish was the same shade of blue as the water. I put this polish on Natalie’s toes and fingers, and my own, on the deck at Gun Lake the day Andy died as I anxiously waited to hear from Andy after hours of silence. I selected this color before I left for Michigan, the only color I brought with me.

I examined the icy blue color of the water. It reminded me of a tropical ocean, the color of the shallow waters in the Bahamas with sands so white. A place Andy and I had traveled to in our youth, visiting my aunt and uncle on their sailboat, with countless hours snorkeling and swimming. Our shared life of adventure. I see the orange candle glowing and it reminds me of the sun. And then I realize the tile on the walls is a color of gray that isn’t too far from the color of the sand. In this place for healing, my mother had created a beach, my happy place.

I took comfort in the heat, feeling my face beginning to sweat. I felt Andy’s presence and thought of all of the Epsom salt baths he had taken in this exact spot. His own attempts at finding calm and healing. In this small bathroom, ee would turn on the heated tile floor and bring in a portable electric heater to get the room hot, his way of creating a sauna to heal his physical pain and relax.

I asked for his strength to help me get through this. I told him, "I will tell your story. It will be my last gift to you."

I cried slow tears, dripping into the bath water, much more gently than before. I practiced releasing my sadness, a skill I would learn to embrace in the months and years that followed. I hoped he knew my story now, that I always loved him, and most of the challenges in our relationship were due to the disease -what it did to him, and us. I think back to his last day and try to make myself believe that he loved me up to the very end.

I recalled a journal entry from late May 2021 I discovered the day before. The message was one I needed to remember, and copied over onto a bright green sticky note, and tucked away into my bedside table. The message, “I love her more than anyone in the world”. I wanted to believe this was true on July 12, the day he took his last breath.

I began so see that when Andy died, he could no longer see or feel love. He was in so much darkness. In that moment, he couldn’t “be a light” like he wanted to be, he couldn’t even see light. Andy renamed our wi-fi network “Change with Love”. This was a daily mantra for him, a lesson to teach our kids, and me; his family, and society. But on that last day, my dear husband couldn’t give or receive love. He could only see the end of suffering and pain.