Memories

Got a call minutes ago from a friend expressing condolences, a friend who took us to eat once when we were in NYC.   He said he was having a tree planted in Israel in my wife's name.  She would like that.   Not that she fully supports all the State of Israel does but that she would want to reforest deserts, and was ever fascinated with Israel and the story of the Jewish people.  At her bedside there were several books about Israel and Jewish history, a couple that I had given her.   There were also a couple of books by Noam Chomsky she found for herself, but I did not mention them to the friend, whose leanings are quite conservative and Republican.

Memories are everywhere.  As I drive her car my hands touch the places her hands touched.  As I walk on errands I walk on sidewalks where my wife walked too.   I checked my voice mail and found messages from her from a week or so before it happened.   Archived now, to preserve her voice for a time when I can hear it without breaking in pieces.

Her children tell me "We have to work and carry on;  it is what she would want."   That is easier to say when they have their own lives and husbands and wives and children.  I have three dogs, some cats, an aged parent, and nothing else or hope for anything else.  Memories only and a bare skeleton of what was a life.    I am a ghost walking in shadowy gardens of memory.

Soon I will analyze and separate out the feelings that I am experiencing, because only here do I reveal myself.  There are those among the family who encouraged me to talk, but I will not burden them.