"Finding my way as I walk" by Patty Somlo
Creative nonfiction
At one time, women dressed all in black to signal the period of mourning. It lasted one year, which might sound like a long time.
I have just passed the two-year mark, and my mind still wears its mourning dress. This invisible cloud of grief, which I don’t control and can’t explain, has its own clock and seems to be in no hurry to go anywhere.
***
People say, He would be proud of you. Or some imagine, He is looking down at you.
I talk to my husband, who I once spoke to every day. There was plenty of time to talk about unimportant things. What should we have for dinner tonight? What movie do you want to watch?
Before my husband Richard’s death, we talked about him dying and what life would be like afterwards for each of us.
***
Richard wanted to live. There’s a difference between not wanting to die and wanting to live. A person who wants to live has something to live for. Richard wanted to live because that would give him more time to spend with me.
In the end, Richard chose to die. This may sound morbid but it’s not. As the song goes, there is a season and a time for everything.
***
I walk nearly every day. When I was young, my friends and I challenged one another to walk longer and longer distances.
After the pandemic crashed into us and the gym closed, I started walking in a neighborhood I’d never entered before. To get there, I needed to cross busy Sonoma Avenue. Along Sonoma, which stretches several miles, from downtown Santa Rosa to Howarth Park, there are few traffic lights. I sometimes have to wait a long time to cross.
At first, I didn’t know the neighborhood was called Sherwood Forest. Later, I noticed the street names – variations on Sherwood, including Sherwood Avenue and Sherwood Place; Marian; and Little John. Towering redwood trees with thick trunks can be found along my route, in yards outside the compact, one-story houses. Tall palms sway in the breeze, and Spring Creek runs muddy and brown, if we’ve gotten enough rain.
The October afternoon following Richard’s death, I didn’t know what to do. I had already sobbed for hours. The only thing left, after calling family and friends, was to walk.
***
Barely a day has passed in these two years that I haven’t walked. Of course, walking is good for my health. I like to say I walk for my mental health, especially with Richard gone.
As Richard moved closer to the end, he grew thinner and weak. Yet he never stopped trying to join me on my walks.
Many days, he didn’t have the strength. When he did, he steadied himself with the trekking pole he’d carried in the past on our hikes.
When we waited to cross busy Sonoma Avenue, drivers, even in big trucks, couldn’t help noticing my thin Asian husband, who had always appeared a decade or more younger than his age but now looked old. They couldn’t help but stop to let my husband, whose cells were being assaulted by cancer, walk across.
***
On our first date, Richard drove us across the Golden Gate Bridge in his red sports car, the moonroof open to let in the warmth of the sun. He loved cars, especially that one. Before long, he would fall in love with me, a woman who didn’t know how to drive.
You might say the day was made for love. Though San Fracisco, where I lived then, was often shrouded in fog, that morning dawned clear, without a cloud to be found.
We took the small old ferry across San Francisco Bay to Angel Island State Park. After stepping off the boat, we found a trail and followed it uphill, to a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree viewpoint.
I didn’t know that I would marry him, and we would one day hike to see glaciers on Mount Rainier and in Glacier National Park. I wasn’t aware that we would snorkel in the Pacific Ocean off the islands of Maui and Kauai. I never imagined that we would spend nearly three decades together and one day Richard would receive a diagnosis that I needed to accept was going to take his life.
***
There were times on our hikes when we got lost, once on Mount Tamalpais, I recall. Years later, I don’t remember if it was foggy when we set out or that the cold gray mist blew in after we’d been hiking for some time.
I calmed us down enough to carefully retrace our steps and find our way to the car. Later, Richard would be the person who remained aware of certain plants and trees, as we made our way through the forest on foot or pedaling bikes. For decades, he took care of me, making sure I never lost my way.
Now that he’s gone, the trail I ought to take remains hidden behind the clouds.
***
The moon is full, following the storm that dropped over four inches of rain in two days and brought trees down. The full moon feels like a miracle, even though I am alone. Nature goes on, turning leaves red and Meyer Lemon yellow, and loosening their grip on slender branches, doing nothing to rescue them, as they fall to the ground.
Some leaves never lose their color, even though their lives are done.
***
I always feared Richard would leave me. I never thought he would die. Before I met him, I fell for men I would realize too late were unavailable. Though the names changed, the pattern remained the same.
Sitting across from my kind therapist in a soft gray leather chair, I started to see the parallels between the fleeting attention of each lover and that of my father. Those sessions in a cozy room at the top of the stairs, in an elegant Victorian which must have been a family home once, made it possible for me to find Richard.
Over time, I understood that he had no intention of leaving me. Even after receiving a deadly diagnosis of stage-four cancer, he still expected to stay.
***
I started writing and publishing my work long before I met the man who would become my husband. Every morning after getting up, I made a cup of dark French Roast coffee by letting water drip through a filter into a large white mug. I carried the cup back to my room where I sat on the bed and took slow sips of coffee as I proceeded to write. I had an idea that writing first thing in the morning, when I’d barely woken up, made it easier to tap into the unconscious.
Even so, I always had trouble coming up with endings. I wanted to leave the reader with memorable words and thoughts, while not tying the whole thing up in a neat tight bow.
***
A life has ended, yet I’m unable to let it go. I’m incapable of loosening the ties to my heart from the kisses, the words spoken, the jokes and endearments shared. I keep imagining Richard walking beside me, holding my hand, then smiling, as he wraps his arms around me and pulls me close.
I am waiting for him to shout from the bedroom, “How’d it go?” every time I walk through the front door. I search for him on the bed, where he spent most of his days that final month.
A life has ended and I want to believe that it goes on. I want to think, as friends say, that he is looking down. I keep imagining that though he isn’t here, he exists. Somewhere.
I am not a religious woman and have never been. But I can’t quit hoping that after the breath stopped and the body died, a spirit lived on.
***
A few days after Richard’s death, I went on my usual walk. When I turned off Shortt Street onto Marian, a long-haired black cat hurried over. He rubbed his side over and over against my ankle. I leaned down and lightly brushed his fur, which was warm and soft.
Perhaps this is him, I thought. Perhaps.
About the author:
Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), were Finalists in several contests. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Delmarva Review, Under the Sun, the Los Angeles Review, and over 40 anthologies. She received Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest, was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest, had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.