Two years ago I watched the slowest week of my life go by when the person I had knowingly signed on “for worse” with began to take my leave. Jeff was fine (and I use the term liberally for someone who suffered infection and fluid buildup and clinical depression and a million other quality-of-life-siphoning complaints) for almost all of the months between his diagnosis and his death. He stayed out of hospital, for the most part. He travelled. He wrote, and worked, and called his friends back, and despite almost getting picked up by the community services van for a bit of jaundiced park-bench napping that one time, walked and rode the streets of Toronto with just as much ownership and capability as he ever had.

We went to Vermont and ate cheese, threw parties, boated around Chicago’s looming buildings, sat in a balcony for the Gang of Four, all kinds of crazy things people who are in the accelerated process of dying maybe do not always manage. And then there was the night he was shaking, this was not new, this was a thing he did, because part of the thing that was killing him was infecting him, and the part of the thing that was infecting him made him sick, shake, tremble; it’s called “the rigors” and it puts you through them indeed. He began to shake and I offered Arrested Development DVDs, hot tea, the emergency room, a cat; he opted for the first and did not decide to check in for the final checkout until mid-day next day when I was supposed to be swimming and instead I met him at the hospital where Susie, who will be married in less than two weeks and is a friend I am so glad to have carried over into post-hospital life, took his blood pressure and said, “You know, I think you might be staying here this afternoon.”

My memories then are both blurry and stop-motion. There were two or three days docked in ER due to a lack of room on the (apparently booming) transplant floor of Toronto General Hospital. The room in ER was attended by various infectious diseases specialists, two of whom had rhyming names and were married, and with whom I discussed that yes, we’d tried that drug before, and no, that one wasn’t any good either, and he’d exhausted the utility of the other as well. They tried this or that and in the intervening hours I brought acceptable food and got yelled at for using a cell phone near the (unplugged) equipment, though what I was using the phone for was to solve a $2,000 shipping mistake at the hand of a French Canadian printer whose misunderstanding of a pronoun, I am reasonably convinced, provided the stress that would hasten Jeff’s slip into sepsis and the timeless aether. There was the admissions coordinator who for some reason attempted to guilt me and the family by “upselling” a better room “because of all the hospital does for these transplant patients, anyway”. There was the eventual transition to a real room, on the real floor where we knew the nurses and the toaster oven and where to get the ice, the floor where, bittersweet or not, we were comfortable — and had even been given (it’s too sad, right?) the “honeymoon suite” once (yes, too sad).

He went in on a Monday and by the Wednesday had already stopped making much sense. For a two-day stretch, as well, his voice had been shot (so many things malfunctioned then; since Montreal he’d been seeing in green) and so two of his last lucid days were mired in a rasp of speechlessness. At some point he asked me why I wasn’t wearing my new square glasses, things I don’t own for a vision problem I didn’t have, and I slowly began to realize he was mixing realities, that his interface was jammed up, that I might be lucky to be recognized at all. One day I went to get pizza for him and almost saw a guy get shot by an undercover cop in the gardens behind College Park: it was a hot weird August and nothing about it felt normal, nor, I suppose, should it have.

I performed at a Pontiac Quarterly in the middle of all this, a weird thing to do but what the hell else was I going to do on a Wednesday night. I remember taking lots of pictures along hazy University Avenue, along the hospital campus row, of sodium lights and city planters full of zinnias, of red and white streetcars streaking past. This was with the old, slower camera, not the newer nicer one of the sort one’s parents will get you for Christmas the year your husband happens to die. I remember getting to the venue and seeing Jason and Pauline and they said something like, I heard your husband is sick, that is very sad, I hope he gets better soon, and me saying, well, actually, he will not get better, this the first of many awkward interactions I would (and do) effect from my inability to be anything other than straightforward, uncouched about this kind of thing: it is true, it is sad, this happens to people, and I am sorry if it makes you uncomfortable when I tell you, but I am not any happier about the facts either, believe me.

By the weekend I didn’t need to take the hints and hushed tones of nurses (“Has….the family been in?”) and had started amassing clumps of his friends at the bedside. Sean was one of the first to come, right after an appearance on Breakfast Television to promote his Subway Rider Efficiency Guide. Jeff was at the half-crazy point then and said something wonderful to Sean, like, “Hello! We heard you coming around the corner and decided to speak only the truth!” Later he would say something to Jeremy about him being a crack dealer or something, and here and there would break through with weirdly real and wrenching statements like, to his sister and brother-in-law Carrie and Pat, “Thanks for coming. I know it’s really exhausting to be here.”

There are a million other bits to revisit, or not, like the fourth-to-last night when we ordered piles of sushi and Kate, Nousheen, Pete, Andrea, and I, probably Lise was there too, sat around eating it and talking. We congregated around the spare bed that had by then been brought in for me on the night I was so angry and resistant to the idea that I really did have to start staying the nights, that there were that few left, that he really was that helpless and my attention was that needed. Marianne was our night nurse during the sushi party, coincidentally the mother of a casual friend of Jeff’s and mine, and when I thanked her for letting so many people (more than the rules say) stay so late (well past the official hours) she simply said, this is the right thing, he is sleeping but he knows you are here, the energy is here, I think it should always be like this. She would replace the chlorpromazine drip that helped both the hiccups and the psychosis, and we ate the sushi and shared in friendship and making the good energy at him in the saddest and strangest way.

And when he came home it was lovely and bizarre and sad; we knew why, and yet, how do you ever really know how to bring someone home to die? (I myself would continue to hold onto the idea that it was useful to, say, continue antibiotics, seeing only later how much of the doctors’ role at that stage is to manage the family’s ability to deal with whatever it is they are able.) Wrapped in a white-and-orange-striped hospital blanket I still think I have not washed (instead sentimentally rotating it back to the bottom of the laundry basket again and again for 24 months) we wheeled him out to his parents’ car, where once inside (not remembering he couldn’t really stand or walk, or that he was barely anymore a living person) Jeff suggested we could all go out to a nice restaurant lunch on the way back to our house. At home he talked to his best friends on the phone — Jason in B.C., Terri in Italy. Terri got maybe the best phone call ever, which went something like: “Terri I have three things to tell you. #1 we had Pizza Pizza for dinner. #2 I love you. #3 I should hang up now.” I hope when my best friends die they are able to be as succinct.

In the weeks that followed I found immense comfort in talking about the moments of his actual death. It made it real and it made the pain more present and more explicable somehow. It was short and awful and not something people should have to see, and yet I took weird solace in the fact that through his pain and confusion he actually did realize what was happening, saw the last page of his own story for what it was, reached out to me in clarity and selfless compassion (it happens all the time, of course, but how fucked is it to know you’re dying and leaving someone you love, and muster up the ability to feel shitty for their loss and loneliness to come?) all while, you know — suffering greatly. It was a hell of a thing to watch, I would tell people, and when Lesley would return my page from the hospital later, and say, in some doctorly manner, “Well, I’m glad it was at home and peaceful”, I took some twisted pleasure in correcting what I’d felt was an attempt to gloss over the harsh truth. “No,” I said, “it actually wasn’t peaceful at all. But at least it was here.”

And here, of course, is the place in which my role was so quickly called into question — will you stay? They asked. Not that I hadn’t thought I would move on one day — with him, or with another after, to a place with room for a kid maybe, or the furniture I will one day inherit, or whatever, new lives, new movements in them. But right when he died I was so resistant and heel-dug-in. And despite flitting around the country (two countries!) for months and days and weeks and suddenly all the time, I never realized until recently when everything fell into place that I might not stay. Not that I could not be in the house with its ghosts — they weren’t many, and several of them I even liked — but that life had simply changed because it was supposed to. Because that is the right thing for life to do, whether you want to hang on to the way things were or not.

So after a year of not even noticing how little I had committed to the walls around me (nothing planted, nothing repaired, the money given for a new gas stove spent on plane tickets, escape) I began to consider things differently. From no fewer than four points on Lake Michigan (my real home, in some senses) across four midwestern states did I begin to measure the idea, test the strength of the dare, that I might chase the other things and places that I love even if they risked moving one step further from the memories and persons tied to the physical here, house, trees planted by him and for him in the yard — Toronto itself.

Of course, no one I have run this past is actually surprised (well, a couple of people said they thought I might return to Chicago, but I mean, really, have you seen the traffic there?) and yet it is simultaneously not easy and not happy and also so amazing and exciting and the right thing to have decided, yes, sorry, 2000 words into this ramble, that I am moving along to the next stop. Not precisely for the need to turn a new page or run away; or for any other sideways reasons — but for the reasons of taking the lesson of a loss, of a life change I had absolutely no say in, and turning it into the impetus to own my happiness more fully; be ahead of the changes this time, come to accept that you truly cannot have all the things you want simultaneously, but you pick the most right one at the most right time you can and run with it hard and fast because that is the only way to get anywhere at all. Life is short and time’s a-wastin’, and nothing will drive that point home more fully than the person who loved you most disappearing in front of you and telling you that no, it is you they are sorry for, and they wish it could be different but you will simply have to move on to Plan B without them. So, Plan B it is, two years after someone asked the question the very first time. It took that long to finally be able to ask it to myself, as it turns out. I will see you all in New York.

(A version of this was given as a speech at a Hospice Toronto event in June; they’re good, give them money. It’s a little straightforward and heavy, so if you really like reading about coffee and rock and roll music just be patient for a week or two. I struggled with putting this up, actually, but some had asked to see it, and though it’s a bit squeamish to be so revealing and earnest, I thought a lot about how much braver it is to just talk about shit like this than it is to pretend it doesn’t happen. Also, a really funny chain-smoking guy approached me after I read this and said something like, “You know, that was great, you really nailed it, but you made me feel like crap, so screw you.” Which I thought was pretty awesome. )

As a writer, I suspect I spend a higher than average amount of time trying to—let’s be honest—control memory. I can write about my memories to fix them clearly, and to make them into things I like. By using words to shape and color, to navigate and avoid, I can try my very best to make permanent the finest points and turn the lighting down on things that I do not like to dwell on. But one thing I’ve learned from the experience of loss is that the act of remembering does not often bend so easily to our will, and that, like the worst—and best—moments of life itself, memories crop up when we do not want them at all, or worse, at those times we feel we need them most, they may fail to come.

Though all seasons can be nostalgic, summer for me is loaded with childhood outings and the essence of cross-country roadtrips, long walks, and the adventure and potential of nights that never seem to end. But for the past two years the feeling of summer has also been loaded with the bittersweetness of gradual loss: summer is now also the season in which my husband Jeff, at 31 years old, passed away on a warm August night. That the weather that day was perfect was so strange to me, but an inseperable part of understanding how the good and bad in this world—those cycles that are magical and natural and unavoidable—will always coexist. That summer he died had been an amazing one for us: we spent months travelling and goofing off and simply being with each other, with friends, trying to appreciate all we had, by which I mean—all we had left. But despite the cloud of illness, we made the most of our time those months. And as his days became clearly shortened, remembering everything correctly became all I could think about.

I started to write things down: everything he said, the way I felt, those moments of change and fear within the hospital walls. My desire to record everything was obvious: it was a way of holding on, of staying attached to what little I had left of Jeff, and it was also a way of trying to stay attached to reality, to my own storyline. I knew this would be among the most trying and dizzying times in my life, and I somehow believed that if I didn’t write things down and try to fix those memories in words for later, I might just never recover some of them at all.

I kept a laptop in the hospital while I stayed with Jeff those last days, and recorded things that doctors said as well as things that Jeff said—which towards the end of his disease process were hilariously bizarre. He said crazy things—literally crazy—that despite the sadness of their circumstance brought me great delight. “What would you like me to bring you for dinner?” I’d ask him, knowing his distaste for hospital food. “Oh,” he’d pause for a moment. “A whale?”

Now how could I ever want to forget something as funny as that?

Yet the other things I wrote down at that period were more difficult. How scared I was of the days to come. The things that doctors said that angered me, that I couldn’t deal with hearing yet. The things he said while in great pain. And yet all of them were important to me as part of this world I wanted to remember—it was mine, after all. Mine and his.

But in the months after Jeff died, indeed, in the years, I was surprised at how memory failed to work for me, despite my best efforts to write and remember and cherish. Almost immediately I began to feel so distant from the sweetest memories I had gone back to again and again from my years with him—they were murky when I wanted them to be clear, or there were times when I tried to go back to those good memories and then rejected them once I realized they were going to be too painful. The act of remembering had become more difficult than I had ever anticipated. Wasn’t it something within my own control? Weren’t the memories mine, still in there deep down, things I needed to acknowledge as what made me who I am? Why couldn’t I enjoy them on my own terms, anyway?

I tried hard in those early months to remember things how and when I wanted to, and during that time I mixed the worlds of healing and remembering together. If only I could get my mental story straight, I kept thinking, I would be healing in the way that I wanted. If only I could call up the memories that gave me solace, I could be with them and feel comforted by them. Weren’t we lucky, anyway? Wasn’t it better to have loved?

But my thoughts worked just the same for memories I didn’t want to have: If only I could walk down the street and not be hurt by the memories of being on that same street with him, I could feel like the city and my life were my own again. If only I could experience the nice things in life without them being so bittersweet, I could begin to rebuild.

But rebuilding and remembering are different, of course. Often for us to begin to rebuild after a loss, our ability to remember is shut down. Biologically. On purpose, to help us make it through the days and nights, though we may not realize it at the time. Those deep in grief may not even be able to remember their phone numbers for awhile—and it can be a horrible feeling to think that along with the loss you’ve suffered of a loved one, you can’t even call up their memory clearly. I spent a lot of time thinking about whether I was too sad, or sad enough, or remembering too much, or too little. And in all of these moments was a key misunderstanding: I thought that remembering was something I should control.

And though remembering is indeed an act, the times it has served me best are when it has been a passive one. When I have let it direct itself. It was when I finally learned to stop searching so hard, and judging the outcome of those searches, that the process of remembering became a peaceful one. Remembering does keep us attached to the past, but one need not force it or constrain it—and believe me, as a writer, that’s a tough thing to admit. Because that same biological process that tries to shield us from what we cannot handle in one moment is there on our side in the next moment. Those memories we’re searching for aren’t lost, nor the sensation behind them. They fill our every movement and direct our paths in the future, whether they are in our conscious mind or not. In that way, remembering is a bigger thing than I had ever expected: these memories of our loved ones, indeed of life, do constitute us. They are what helps us rebuild. But they may come to us on their own schedule, and impossible as it is to believe, it’s the biggest step of all to know and trust that it will happen.

So for those who see remembering as a process they have not yet mastered, as an action that is painful or sneaks up on them, or as an unfolding mystery: you’re all right. Remembering is a thing that is dark and sinewy and not easy, and like anything else in this world, doesn’t always work quite how you want it to. But that it works mysteriously is just as much a blessing as the memories themselves: sometimes in years or weeks or even days after the hardest times of life, a memory will emerge that you once deemed too painful to spend time with, and it will seem amazing and special and like a gift. You’ll walk down a street you had been long avoiding, visit a friend in the hospital you never wanted to set foot in again, or simply pause in a moment and be overcome with remembering in a way that, once painful, has now become sweet. Most of you know this already, of course. But no matter how well I’m aware of its magic, remembering always surprises me a little. Its tricks sneak up when I least expect them, adding shades of colour to the present, and reminding me of all that I am in those mysterious little moments when I wasn’t expecting to feel. Memory left to its own devices is backward-looking and forward-giving, and completely outside of our control—and exactly what feeling life is for.

Exactly a month after my husband died I received my New York Times Sunday paper and found inside, in the magazine section, a lengthy piece by Joan Didion on the death of her husband. That this article, an excerpt from her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, should arrive in my home in a time where I was still so fuzzy-headed, so disassociated and raw, seemed a little uncanny. This article about the death of a partner written by one of my most beloved — and one of the world’s most effective and meaningful — writers, that this article would arrive for me, at that time, seemed, well, pointed.

I read the article and don’t remember being unravelled, but I did remember feeling that the forthcoming book would be something to put off, savour, wait for, use as a tool somehow. I got it for Christmas and it languished attractively in unread book piles. I wondered what it held. I wondered what inside me it could loosen. Eventually I decided it would make good summer beach reading. Notwithstanding I spent a great deal of time being happy at the beach with Jeff, the juxtaposition of delving head-on into someone else’s grief while I was still eerily surrounded by my own, and yet, ostensibly doing fine, seemed somehow appropriate. Doing fine, of course, is one of the strangest things of all about grief: you function. You do go on living. Not everybody, certainly, but so much of our responses to things are automatic, and physical, and mysterious. You survive when you have absolutely no interest in survival whatsoever. You do go on and things do continue all around you; time passes, people write books to get over things, new people come, others fade. None of it seems real or possible, but there’s a distinct point where biology takes over: you eat the dinner while you wait for the morticians to come, simply because the dinner is there and and so are you and no one can think of anything else that makes any more or less sense than heating up the macaroni anyway.

By the time I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking I was ready to feel a lot of things that had, for reasons of biological survival or whatever else, grown more distant from me in the passing months. Despite the general sense of “getting on”, I was dogged more and more by those shadowy things, the gossamer tricks of mind on which Didion poised the theme of her book. I knew full well what happened to me, and to Jeff, and yet the more time went on, the less it made any sense. For Didion, “magical thinking” moved somewhere between denial and fantasy; for me it was more about confusion. How can I even be sure something that was so vibrant in the past even existed? It wasn’t that I was trying to convince myself he was still alive — it just didn’t make any sense that he could have both been alive and be now dead. You mean things just disappear?

But from where exactly did Dr. Volkan and his team in Charlottesville derive their unique understanding of ‘the psychodynamics involved in the patient’s need to keep the lost one alive,’ their special ability to ‘explain and interpret the relationship between the patient and the one who died’? Were you watching Temko with me and ‘the lost one’ in Brentwood Park, did you go to dinner with us at Morton’s? Were you with me and ‘the one who died’ at Punchbowl in Honolulu four months before it happened? Did you gather up plumeria blossoms with us and drop them on the gates of the unknown dead from Pearl Harbor? Did you catch cold with us in the rain at the Jardin du Ranelagh in Paris a month before it happened? Did you skip the Monets with us and go to lunch at Conti? Were you there with us when we left Conti and bought the thermometer, were you sitting on our bed at the Bristol when neither of us could figure how to convert the thermometer’s centigrade reading into Fahrenheit?

Were you there?

No.

You might not have been useful with the thermometer but you were not there.

I don’t need to ‘review the circumstances of the death.’ I was there. (p.56)

For me this excerpt hits at the very crux of it: It’s when the time that the person was alive begins to feel less real to you than the time when they are not there any more that things go a little sideways, particularly if it’s someone you’ve mixed up your identity with, like a partner. And the talking about it, the writing about it, the reading about it, the trying to figure it out in words or art or psychotherapy or forcing yourself to remember are all parts of keeping that person alive and keeping the continuity between the then (which doesn’t make sense) and the now (which doesn’t make sense either, but involves at the very least getting up every day and eating the yogurt and puttering about in whatever ways you can deem meaningful at the time because you simply just do). I don’t know if Didion felt the same incredulity at the sun rising each day as I did, but the weird thing is you get used to it.

It turned out that reading The Year of Magical Thinking was a little bit like hitting myself in the face with a two-by-four every day—and yet, of course, I couldn’t put it down. I forget where I started on Didion: whether with The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, but both were perfect, hitting on all that I love about nonfiction, somehow filling not just pages but landscapes with spare but emotionally luminescent prose. Her ability to evoke emotion has been so strong at times as to almost pull me out of relationships. I had saved this book like I was saving a special bar of chocolate. I expected it to take me somewhere understanding, to elicit things I feel sadly distant from. Well, let’s be honest. I was hoping it would be a part of closure.

But the book itself feels slight and unfinished. Knowing the dimensions that lie beyond it, of course, makes it feel more fragmentary—Didion’s daughter Quintana, whose prolonged illnesses the book also weaves around, died after the book was completed (and four days after Jeff did, actually). Though it’s not the unfinished story of grief for Quintana that leaves me wanting, it’s the sense that grieving is in many ways never done. Not in a “never wear colors or feel love again” way, but in the way that grief is also celebration, that memory is crazy but necessary, that the things that are too much for us are also what we may need the most to ground, renew, and make things seem real. And because of that it seems hard to snap the book shut and say, “Oh, well then, that’s sorted out!”—for Didion or for myself or for the countless people beginning these same journeys themselves every day. From where I sit anyway, the collective confusion of grief is palpable: that slow uphill climb of absence, confusion, sadness and—I’m going to say the word no one admits to—relief that can come in the watershed of fear, sorrow, and loss.

Like they say about anything else, it’s a process.