After the Fire (6 page)

The hours flow by. We hold his hands.

I sing a line and wait to see if he will breathe again.

He doesn't. It's over. Amen.

When I agreed to go to Phoenix, I thought I was going to help my mother-in-law. Before his hospitalization, my former husband had been reduced to being little more than a bum on the street. I was the one who still had the Christmas card list and knew the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the people who needed to be notified or asked to serve as pallbearers. What I didn't recognize—something I believe Mary Grandma did—was that my being there was important for me, too. Her son and I were divorced, but she understood that I needed to come and say good-bye, not so much because it would help him, but because it would help me.

I will always be grateful to her for that. It was an important gift, one that gave me the strength to pick up the pieces of my own life and go on.

I come to widow's weeds unwed,

The tie that binds unraveled but still bound.

I sang a song to speed him on his way

And hoped he gained some comfort in the sound.

And as his painful struggle neared its end,

When ragged breath gave way to endless sleep,

We welcomed death together, he and I,

For granting us the blessing of release.

I met my first husband the evening before my eighteenth birthday. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance from Bisbee who gave me a ride home from Tucson for the weekend. The two guys were on their way to go deer hunting, and the man who would be my husband lost a wager on me the first time he ever laid eyes on me. He had bet his friend a pitcher of beer that I wouldn't be ready to go, but I was. I was waiting in the vestibule of my dorm—packed, signed out, and ready to leave. Over the years we stayed friends with the guy who introduced us and, once he married, with his wife as well. When our son was born, his middle name was Mikki, in honor of our friend.

After my first husband's death, I received many expressions of condolence, but there was none from the man who had introduced us. I learned years later that he blamed me for my husband's death and claimed that his friend wouldn't have died had I not taken his beloved children away from him. It was easy for the friend to blame me. After all, he hadn't been at that baseball field watching my children's father crawling toward the car on his hands and knees.

Pretty cards and thoughtful letters come

Bringing sympathy and comfort from our friends,

Both his and mine.

It does not come—no sign, no call, no word.

The loss of friendship pains me still,

An ache persisting in an amputated limb.

I loved my mother-in-law. The only thing Mary Grandma and I had in common was her son, but even after the divorce we stayed in touch. I made sure she saw the children and talked to them on the telephone. After her son's death, that relationship continued. The following spring she came to Seattle to visit. The children and I took her to Butchart Gardens in Vancouver, British Columbia, but the light had gone out of her life, and she never regained the joy of living.

On June 12, 2000, my mother's middle son, my younger brother Jim, suffered a massive heart attack and died while swimming off Hermosa Beach in California. As I worked on these notes first in 2003, I realized that the words I wrote for Mary Grandma in 1983 now applied to my own mother as well. Evelyn Busk raised seven children. There are six of us left, but like that single envelope in “Missing Condolence,” with first her beloved son and later her husband gone, much of the light went out of my mother's last years as well.

To be mother when a child is gone

Beyond reach of touch or drop of tear,

Is grief that only a mother can know

And pain that only a mother can bear.

But love him, and we know you did—

Loved him with love unstinting, free.

You loved him enough to let him go.

You loved him enough to let him be.

I remember my husband telling me that it didn't matter if he drank; he was only hurting himself. That's nonsense, of course. He was killing himself, but he was also hurting all the rest of us—the people who loved him, his children and his wife. He moved out of the house in 1980, we were divorced in 1981, and he died in December 1982. Time has passed, but much of what I wrote in “Building a Legend” in 1983 still holds true today. One of my children has moved beyond what happened back then. One is still trapped by his unwavering belief in the legend. My son harbors a legacy of blame that holds me responsible for everything that happened and for everything that went wrong. I believe both his parents were at fault.

I like to think that someday we'll be over this hurt, but at this point, I don't hold out much hope.

It's easy now for him to be a hero.

He's moved beyond the reach of new mistakes.

In legend he is twice as big as life-size,

And the things he did were honorable and great.

Then let me find the middle ground between them,

These two opposing views of one who's gone.

And when I tell the children of their father,

Let me lighten truth with just a hint of sun.

If you're married when a spouse dies, there are certain rules that govern your behavior. The grieving widow or widower knows generally what is expected, and other people have some idea of what they should say or do and how they, too, should behave. If you're divorced and a former spouse dies, all those rules go out the window.

Months after my husband's death, I was on the opposite side of this thorny issue when a good friend of mine died. She had been an invalid for years. She and her husband had long been estranged, but due to health insurance and financial considerations, divorce simply wasn't possible for either of them.

I had listened sympathetically to my friend's side of the story as her marriage disintegrated. At the time of her death, I was still angry with her husband and ready to blame him for abandoning her emotionally if not financially. Still, when she died, I couldn't help remembering how I had felt the previous year, when I was the one looking for that missing sympathy card—the one that never came. Bearing that in mind, I straightened up and sent my friend's estranged husband a card. Then I sat down and wrote “Kindred Spirit”—for me.

I leaped to name another's grief as false,

To claim his tears as crocodile or worse.

I laid my friend's flown spirit at his door

And called for him to know his just deserts.

So instead of blame, I offer consolation.

Instead of hurt, I give him hope and love.

The giver with the gift is overtaken

While blessings flow to me as from above.

By September 1983, I was beginning to feel better. I was living in Seattle and still selling life insurance but also starting to write mysteries. The first novel I wrote, in 1982, never sold to anyone. The second one was accepted by the first agent and sold to the second editor who saw it. I wrote every morning from four to seven, at which time I would awaken the children and send them off to school. Then I would get myself ready to go to work. I was involved in several civic organizations in Seattle, including the Denny Regrade Business Association, where I served on the committee that planted street trees in the Regrade area in the early 1980s.

One of those civic organizations met in the early morning for breakfast. Going to a meeting one fall day, I walked downhill in fog so thick that I could barely see half a block in front of me. Being from the Arizona desert, I was totally unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Somehow I had always imagined that fog and rain went together. That particular morning, however, I came out of the meeting less than an hour later and was astonished to discover that the fog had burned away, leaving a clear blue sky overhead.

I walk in fog.

Its velvet touch caresses me

And hides the hurt.

Beyond the fog, the sun

Shines clear and bright.

I must keep moving,

I have earned the light.

In early 1985 an old friend came to Seattle to visit. His marriage had recently dissolved. We had coffee and talked. There was never any hint of romance between us—it was more a matter of talking together and comparing notes. Somehow, though, by the end of that conversation, I knew I was moving in the right direction—knew I was getting better.

He is a long-lost friend who comes to town.

We meet to talk about old times.

The years between this meeting and the last

Have cost us both the people that we loved.

Our scars aren't visible to naked eyes,

But underneath a bland façade

We both are hiding wounds that won't be healed

By anything but time's slow steps.

He goes, but subtle changes have occurred within,

A hint that springtime's thaw is under way

And flowers are pushing through the glacier's edge.

Growing up in Bisbee, Arizona, I had three special childhood friends. Donna Angeleri was the first. She lived at the top of Yuma Trail, and we spent summer afternoons clambering barefoot through the desert that lined the far side of our street. We coasted down the hilly roadway with a maximum load of four kids packed into our Radio Flyer wagon. When I was in the third grade the Angeleris moved to California, and I never heard from Donna again.

In fourth grade I met Pat McAdams. We were pals all through school and coeditors of our high school newspaper,
The Copper
Chronicle.
School, marriage, kids, and divorce took their toll on our friendship over the years, but now, through the magic of the Internet, Pat and I are back in communication almost every day.

Diana Conway arrived in Bisbee the summer I entered sixth grade. Her family moved into the newly remodeled house that had once belonged to the Angeleris. They lived there for a grand total of three months. The Conways were sophisticated oddballs in small-town Arizona. The kids called their parents Joe and Sally. They all rode bikes at a time when no other grown-ups in Bisbee would have been caught dead riding a bicycle. They all loved books, and Diana played the piano wonderfully. Without any noticeable nagging from her parents, she practiced at least four hours every day.

At the end of that summer the Conways, too, moved to California. I visited them once, the summer after eighth grade, catching a train from Tucson and traveling out to see them. Diana and I corresponded for years after that, but shortly after we graduated from college, we lost track of each other. When my first hardback,
Hour of the Hunter,
was published, in 1991, I dedicated it to “Diana Conway, wherever she is,” in hopes of finding my long-lost friend. For years nothing happened. Then in 2001, a fan of mine asked about the dedication. It turned out that one of her good friends in Alaska was my missing friend. Since then, Diana and I have picked up the threads of our childhood friendship. And it turns out, my poem was right; our paths have been in parallel. Diana, too, is a writer.

To Diana Conway from Judy Busk

We were young girls together,

Eleven or twelve at most,

Yet our conversations soared to galaxies afar.

We lost each other later in a maze

Of married names that easily removed all trace

Of those two friends together.

My youngest brother, Gary, was an impressionable high school student when I was at my fiercest, most fire-breathing feminist stage. He made a key ring for me in welding shop and gave it to me forty years ago, when I was teaching on the reservation. I still have it. I am working on my laptop in the living room. The key ring is in the kitchen, resting in the top drawer with my other keys and a haphazard collection of coupons and Ziploc bags.