The Long Way Back to You

Prologue

One Year Later

Chicago — December

There is a photograph on my phone that I have looked at every day for a year.

I did not take it.

It was taken on a ferry from Athens to Santorini, thirteen days into a three-week trip to Europe that was supposed to be the end of something. She is standing at the railing on the upper deck with her camera raised, shooting the wake the boat makes in the dark blue water behind us. She does not know I am photographing her. She is too busy photographing everything else.

She is always too busy photographing everything else.

She was always.

I have been trying to write about her for twelve months and this is as far as I get before the grammar changes tense and I have to stop and breathe and start again. Was. She was. The single hardest word in the English language, for me, right now, is was. It is a small word. It is an ordinary word. It appears in sentences I construct without thinking, dozens of times a day, and then it arrives in a sentence about her and it is suddenly not ordinary at all. It is enormous. It is the word that means everything that came before it is finished and I am still here and she is not and the world is requiring me to organize language around this fact.

I am trying.

I am getting better at it.

That is the honest answer to the question people ask — how are you doing, Noah, really — that is the honest answer: I am getting better at it. Not over it. Not past it. Not healed, which is not a word that applies to this kind of loss the way it applies to other kinds. Just: better at carrying it. Better at knowing where it is and how heavy it is and what I can do on a given day with the weight of it.

Some days I can do a lot.

Some days I sit in the green velvet chair and I read her journal until I can hear her voice, and that is what the day is.

Both of those are acceptable.

She taught me that.

* * *

I am leaving for Santorini tomorrow.

I booked the flight in October, on a Wednesday evening, sitting at the kitchen table where we used to have arguments that were not about what they were about. I booked it the same way she booked things: decisively, without allowing myself too much time to reconsider, because reconsideration is where the courage goes.

She left me a line in the journal. Day 2, Paris. She wrote: I want him to come back here someday. Without me. I want him to stand on the caldera and see it the way I see everything on this trip — like it is enough. Like being here is sufficient reason to be here.

I read that line for the first time in January.

I booked the flight in October.

It took me that long to be ready. I think that is the right amount of time. I think she would agree, which is something I say to myself often and which I cannot verify and which I choose to believe anyway because grief requires some acts of faith and this is one of mine.

* * *

Here is what I know about the last year of her life that she did not tell me while she was living it:

She went to the cardiologist alone every two weeks. She sat in waiting rooms I did not know existed in a hospital I passed on the L without knowing she was inside it. She received news I did not receive and made decisions I was not part of and chose, deliberately and with full knowledge of what the choice cost her, to protect me from all of it.