Yesterday, taking pride in the previous day’s accomplishment of finally buying and assembling a much-needed baker’s rack to create storage space absent from my tiny kitchen, I decided to journal about it.  I had been procrastinating with the purchase for months, and completion of the task seemed to call for some sort of celebration, and if I wasn’t going to have one outright, then I ought to at least jot down a few words to record the moment. It wasn’t just that I had gotten it done, but that it was the first furniture assembly of any kind that I’d completed without my husband in over a decade. I’d channeled my inner task master and inwardly felt quietly heroic. 

Over the years, Nelson and I had moved several times; together to an apartment in the Bronx, apart to separate spaces in the Bronx and Brooklyn, together again to North Carolina after we got married, and eventually to DC. Each move was accompanied by the usual packing, unpacking, and reassembling of furnishings with Nelson helping every time, even when apart. 

The baker’s rack lives in Brooklyn now, where I reside with our cat Lima. Nelson has died. Needless to say, the self-congratulatory journal entry I was trying to write got hijacked by grief. It happens a lot lately. Just when I think I’ve made it past a particular threshold, it happens upon me again, ever insistent, waving me in yet one more time, forcing me to the ground. 

Throughout his fifty-three-year life, Nelson had many close encounters with death. His body had been touched, prodded, and poked by many; people, plastic, machinery, and metal. But this was his normal. Living with Warm Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia takes its toll. It was the price of his life. 

A rare form of anemia, WAIHA affects approximately 1 to 3 in every 100,000 people and is characterized by the body’s immune system producing antibodies that attack the red blood cells, leaving one in a constant state of hemolysis with chronically deficient red blood cells and chronically weak. While it can be managed, occasionally, and unpredictably, the condition will worsen, leading to severe hemolytic episodes where the heart rate shoots up, the eyes and skin jaundice as bilirubin levels rise, breakdown of red blood cells accelerate, and the urine darkens as the kidneys attempt to clear excess hemoglobin that has been released into the bloodstream. The condition also makes one vulnerable to blood cancers and blood clots in general. Needless to say, Nelson had suffered both; surviving a blood clot in his brain and Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. These were in addition to the lung nodules that were ever present, the collapsed lung that followed a biopsy, the multiple bouts of pneumonia, a double hip replacement due to avascular necrosis from excessive prednisone use prescribed to manage the anemia, a full splenectomy, and a titanium cranial replacement as a teen after being struck by a bus while out bike riding. This is the abbreviated version. 

On June 24, 2024, after several days’ unconscious, my Words with Friends self-named Man-of-Titanium husband took his last breath. The cause of death: an E.coli infection and organ failure, conditions accompanied by edema and ascites that developed during three concurrent hospitalizations for a hematoma at the site of his mediport implant to facilitate his immunotherapy treatments for stage 4 urothelial cancer. 

At the time of his death, the cancer was in remission. 

While fumbling with the parts of the baker’s rack, I found myself feeling a mixture of hope and frustration. On the one hand there was pride that I’d finally not only ordered it, but also generated enough chutzpah to actually put it together. Just lifting the components out of the box made me feel like my life was somehow moving forward, even if that just meant I’d finally have a couple of extra feet of counter space that I could wheel around the kitchen area. But when the top shelf failed to lay flat after being put into place three times, demanding to be removed repeatedly to get it level, the low-grade frustration that has been a constant companion since living alone these past five months quickly gave way to anger, followed by a slow, warm, steady cry. I cursed the air. I cursed Nelson for dying. And I cursed God for taking my person from me and the potential that would have been our future together. 

This is life with grief. It is the assassination of hope, a shattering of dreams that leaves one with an emotional canyon of injury that is outside of language. 

Like life itself, there is no instruction manual for grief. And unlike life in general, where humans constantly seek to control, master, and achieve, – in grief we are brought to our knees, its finality a barren landscape that can leave one feeling uprooted, bewildered, and hopeless.

For the entirety of my life, I have found a way to plough through and white knuckle my way forward. Even in the face of my own chronic illness, I pushed, driven by the ghosts of traumas past, residual fight/flight patterns and feelings of worthlessness and shame casting a constant shadow. 

But not so anymore. For whatever I thought I was healing initially, has now, by necessity, changed shape. Grief does that, taking us out of our element, spotlighting old wounds, tapping on the door of traumas past demanding to be let in – and gotten out. It is the assault of an invisible barrage that arrives unexpectedly, spurred by mundane tasks and seemingly benign events, placing a vice-like grip around the present moment, weighing on the heart and pushing in on all we urgently want to let go of; all we wish to be done with. In grief I am traversing foreign terrain, a minefield of the unpredictable that is anything but smooth, my view continually obstructed by visceral memories and the ideals of where society thinks I should be by now. 

It’s not Nelson I wish to be done with, just the pain of the loss. And yet, in grief, there is no such thing as ‘just’… It is an all or nothing affair. The only way over is through. And there is no finish line, either. Grief expert David Kessler has commented how the bereaved often want to know, “How long will I grieve?” His response, “How long will your loved one be dead?”

Sigh…

Kessler also says that the pain of grief doesn’t diminish with time, but that we grow our love around our grief, so that eventually the love we carry in our hearts outweighs the pain of our loss. 

Although not what I want to hear, it feels right. 

I’ve since loaded up the shelves of the baking rack, the appliances sitting neatly arranged and easily accessible. We had a similar one in our Bronx apartment. It does what it is designed to do. Beyond the convenience of it, my life is no more now with it, than it was before without it. But it is indeed remarkably less bright without my beloved.

And so, I grieve. Working to grow my love around the pain, it is a process. I’m not there yet. But I’m inching forward. Slowly. One self-assembly project at a time.