DEAR LISA | JENLISA

FIVE

LISA

Three (or four?) weeks after Jennie’s funeral

March
***

FOR A STREAM of unmarked days after her wife’s funeral, Lisa Manoban, BFA in industrial engineering (summa cum laude), MS in biomedical design (ditto), and PhD in mechanical engineering, watched TV. Not her usual shows—The Great British Bake Off and Star Trek, the original series—but cooking shows that involved frantic dashes to the grocery store and making a dish out of rattlesnake and watermelon. Those docudramas about ancient battles. Alaskans looking for gold. People who cleaned hoarders’ homes.

She was fine. It was fine. The shows all put her to sleep, which was the point. Numbness settled in around her, and she welcomed it.

She ate. Or she didn’t eat. It was one extreme or the other—an entire pizza in one sitting, resulting in her feeling sick for the next twelve hours, or blurry days without food, marked by her phone; she’d set an alarm to feed Kuma so he wouldn’t starve to death. Her own intake seemed irrelevant. Back before she’d dated Jennie, and when they were first dating, she’d been like this—unstructured, eating to survive, not to enjoy. It had driven Jennie crazy. By their third date, she was organizing her life.

Let her do it again. Let her come back and get right to work.

She looked around the apartment and was horrified at the mess. Jennie would hate it. She was—had been—a very tidy person, and she would hate seeing their place like this. She was forty-five minutes into cleaning before she realized she was cleaning up for her. In case she came home.

When people called, she said she was doing okay. Getting through it. Hanging in there. But she kept looking at the door, same as Kuma did. The poor dog did not understand that his owner wasn’t coming back. Kuma used to sleep with them, but Lisa couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping in the bed she’d shared with her wife. Kuma and she now slept in the guest room at the end of the hallway.

She didn’t want to work. She didn’t care what was happening in the world or nation. She powered off her computers and set an automatic response for emails, saying she was taking some time off after a death in the family.

Jisoo, Haein and the kids had come over the day after the funeral to return Kuma. Little Sebastian had run around the apartment, opening doors, looking under the couch, in the cabinets. “Where’s Auntie?” he demanded. “Is she hiding? She’s not dead! She’s not! She’s hiding!” A screaming tantrum had followed. Lisa knew exactly how she felt. Haein had left with both kids, apologizing.

Grieving together, Lisa found, was worse than grieving alone. Her own searing pain was shocking—physically agonizing, causing her to bend in two, her hands over her head as if warding off a blow.

But seeing Jisoo sobbing into a towel in the bathroom, or sniffing the sweater Jennie had worn so often, ripped her heart out and ground it up with shards of broken glass. The sight of Donna, her mother-in-law, stroking a picture of Jennie, her mouth trembling, suddenly looking twenty years older, gutted her. Her own mom, her face swollen from crying, trying to hide her tears by scrubbing her counters. Ben, squeezing her shoulder, wordless, her eyes wet as she looked away from a photo of Jennie on her wedding day. Ben had served as best man that day.

Yeah. Solo was definitely the way to go. Without her family, or hers, it didn’t feel so real. Sitting alone on the couch with the dog in the evening, all the lights off, she and Kuma could both pretend Jennie was just about to walk in the door.

It was exhausting. It was like swimming in hot black tar. She worried about Donna and Jisoo, already having suffered the loss of Dave, Jennie’s beloved father. She worried about her mother, who had worried that Lisa would never find someone and had been so glad when she did, and now had a thirty-year-old daughter who was a widow. She worried that Kuma would die of a broken heart. She worried that she would die, and there would be nothing, no Great Beyond, no afterlife, no reunion, and then she wondered if that would be a chance worth taking.