Life Space

Toronto is where he should be, so carrying my life through its every day in Philadelphia with my family, I don’t feel Colin’s absence. When he was alive, we only spoke on the phone about once a month and, while it was a reflexive motion that sent my hand for the phone to tell him good news or just share my litany of the kids’ antics with him, I’ve toyed with the idea that I don’t miss that freedom.

But I do. I miss it, that right to just pluck the phone from its cradle and dial him up, the way a tooth that was once in an easy-to-probe spot now leaves a pulpy black cavity in its place. So, I push that feeling away when I get the urge, when I forget for a moment and move toward the phone, and I resume the every day to sidestep the bruise of reminder.

Here in Toronto, the empty space is altogether different. It is everywhere I look even as he did not roam the city or always make it a point to be at Mom and Dad’s house upon our arrival. When I see a cyclist, the blunt force adjustment to fact makes me swallow harder, look away; a dog like his Gabby trots past and my head turns with it, following it for a few more steps. I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination, spying men who look so like Colin that if I weren’t a lucid woman, I would stop them to peer into their faces and prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness. Something would be missing in the eyes – and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown, round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine – the smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore, more a clue to his clever mind than a put-down. So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth. I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could, who they cannot possibly, be.

Now that we’re here, I notice more the way my parents’ home has filled with things. Still a safe house for the treasures my mother picks up at yard and estate sales, turning a few of them over on e-bay, it has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work. Volumes of paper clutter my Dad’s music room, the space where he does his own e-bay whirligigging and listens to his voluminous record and CD collection.

In the room where Joe and I sleep, my bedroom for one year before I married, Colin’s down comforter covers the bed and some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables. They are books I took from his house after he died, though I took many more home; the ones he’d inscribed with his name, or slipped a piece of paper in between the pages. He had, I knew, read all of the books he owned. It was part of his weave; a voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter and, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life, his life. Life.

When I first enter this city, I feel a veil of something like grief come down on my shoulders, feather light but present. It is a welcome feeling, I don’t mind admitting, because it’s the reminder that eludes me in my everyday life with my family which, in its manipulative way, is merciful. For my parents, living in the city where they were born, where they raised us, where their son no longer lives but may circle overhead in the frantic space in their own minds that harbors that grief now that two years have passed, it can only be a kind of hell.

I don’t always feel it the moment I arrive. Perhaps it’s shamelessly maudlin of me to say I do. But I wait for it, welcome it and let it come to me in its time. Grief has become such an elliptical thing that I sometimes wonder, how can we all continue as we do, move unimpeded, plan, hope, and aspire when this life, Colin’s truncated, soon-to-be-brilliant, already so promising life is gone? It’s when I think in these terms that I know the answer and need hardly spell it out for myself, for anyone reading, listening.

Last night I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car, of seeing people riding their bikes and being tossed in the air, left to die on the ground. I awoke anxious and knew what the dream was; a symptom yes, a reminder, of course.

Mom and Dad keep talking about cleaning up the clutter even as they fill rooms with more. The thought of walking into a house without the stacks of books, the boxes of trinkets and knick knackery, Colin’s works-in-progress (of which I know I have copies), and a pervasive sense throughout the house of a life no longer lived but cherished, even if it isn’t only Colin’s, would send me out the door thinking I had come to the wrong place.

They will attempt slowly to clear the house, maybe to archive his works and to have a gala yard sale, even giving much of their decades’ worth of collection away, but I do need to feel the presence I always felt when I’ve come here, before losing Colin and since. I wonder if my parents share my feeling that clearing the decks would, in some way, leave gaping a space that, filled with its heaps of things blocking staircases and linear movement throughout their lovely old house, signifies life.