A Letter from Loneliness

It's been two years since you died.

Mary Roblyn

Apr 15, 2025

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Dearest,

How are you?

I know that’s not the most logical way to start a conversation with someone who’s clinically dead. But conventions don’t just up and leave because one party is no longer among the living. Two years is a long time, and I thought it might be nice to catch up.

Can you guess which room I’m in?

I remember when we designated the rooms you carved out from this 1913 Craftsman house and transformed into living space. Loft, sunroom, sauna, pantry: easy. That place in the basement with a body-sized area of too-smooth concrete in the floor, and the shelves full of hazmat and craft materials? Root cellar. I’m proud of that. It speaks to the house’s character and charm.

But this room. You took some square footage from the wraparound front porch and put in windows and a vaulted ceiling. Then ruined it — sorry, but it’s the truth — with a big-screen TV and shelves full of DVDs. East Room was pretentious. Den was the default.

I hope you don’t mind that I took that stuff out. Brought in a desk and chair, opened up the shades, and —

Your den is now my study. In the two years since you’ve been gone, I’ve been writing.

And grieving.

You?

Now that I’ve situated myself in your mind’s eye, you’d probably like to know where I put you. All right. You’re on top of the china closet in the living room, in a black plastic box. A place of honor.

Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.

It’s not just a box. The crematory gave me your ashes, still warm, sealed in a matte-black plastic container. An urn, and not a cheap one. I walk past you a dozen or more times a day on my way to or from the kitchen. Sometimes I think of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time.

Unravish’d? If you mean unopened, yes. I did try. I drove for a full day up north to the Mississippi Headwaters, intending to sprinkle a few of your ashes. There, in that place where the Great River begins, where Minnesota children perform the ritual of crossing, barefoot, on a bridge of slippery rocks —

I’d left you at home, on the kitchen table.

Is there anything you’d like to tell me, foster-child of silence and slow time?

April, the cruelest month. And because my April starts in March and can last into June, it’s a long time to spend breeding lilacs out of the dead ground.

For most of the month, I’ve stayed in my bathrobe. Six hours. Eight. Scrolling on the phone, staring out the window. I got dressed on Friday and went to Target, because Mini is going through Fancy Feast Savory Centers like you wouldn’t believe. Little gravy-filled lava cakes. They keep her alive; she keeps me alive.

On my birthday, the kids took me to lunch. I check for mail each day. That’s about as much as I’ve moved. Kind of like you, right?

Sorry. I should dust you more often. Pick you up and give you a good shake. That counts as exercise, right? For both of us?

We’re both sixty-nine now. I caught up to you because you’ve been gone for two years, your life permanently bookended by dates. I have to remind myself that you died in 2023. In a few days, it will be two years. Interjecting How is that possible? is what happens as we get older. We turn into old people, querulous and tiresome. Even you did, I’m sorry to say.

The Big Lebowski got you started drinking White Russians. Now, I do. It’s no longer ironic. They go with the bathrobe. Call me The Dude.

No. Don’t.

The bathrobe. Your last birthday gift to me. In the hospice, wrapped in a white plastic trash bag, the handles tied in a bow. When I got home, I looked in the pockets, hoping for a special note. Or a diamond.

I always teased you about how the stone did double duty, as April’s birthstone and as forever. A diamond is forever. The ultimate gift, suitable to any occasion.

The pockets were empty. I hadn’t expected to find anything, don’t get me wrong! No disappointment; the robe is great. If I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t spend whole days wearing it. The crimson plush, the subtle pattern in the nap, softer with every washing. The color deepens instead of fading. A miracle. Or: I’ve finally found the right laundry detergent.

Solitude abhors silence. Noise seeps into the space created by your absence.

When I’m home, I hear a constant thin high whine, like a wire spun out of the clouds of matter, antimatter, whatever, that followed the Big Bang of your death. Or: tinnitus.

Again, I’ve fallen through loneliness into music and words. “Wichita Lineman” is on repeat in my head. After I am a lineman for the county, I can’t pick up the needle and drop it elsewhere. It plays, relentless and sad, to the end.

I know I need a small vay-cay-tion. The way Glen Campbell’s voice breaks. And if it snows that stretch down south will never stand the strain. The bass bridge. And I need you more than want you. The near-fatal And I want you for all time. Even the trailing orchestral part doesn’t hit pause on that last pure, held, sorrowful note:

Is still on the line.

Mini sleeps with me. She crawls into the safe space beneath my bent knees. Curls into a comma against my side when I turn out the lights. In the morning she’s on my pillow, fur in my face. I’m going through a lot of artificial tears. They’re expensive. I should stick with the real ones. They’re free, and abundant.

I lean against the headboard with my open laptop. Or I scribble in the notebooks with elastic bands and grosgrain ribbons that I buy in packs of three from Amazon. Stacked the floor around the bed are these knock-off Moleskines. I don’t mind the non-standard colors, except for the overripe tangerine and the plum. The plum’s like an Urban Decay lipstick shade so garish that it may never have made it to the shelves. Or one from the sixties that someone’s older sister wore.

But that’s not what matters. What matters is that every one of those notebooks is full.

We were married for forty-three years. Not a milestone number. An in-between one. It would have been forty-five last July. On our fortieth, in 2019, we went to the Commodore. An art deco bar out of The Great Gatsby, a place you took me before we were married. It may have been one of the reasons I married you. So cool and literary, a man who could mix gin and tonics that didn’t taste like a pine tree. We walked to W.A. Frost and sat near the ivied brick on the romantic patio.

This was a drugstore in Fitzgerald’s time, I said. Another one of his hangouts.

Remember how perfect the weather was that night? Not a steambath like the day we were married, with temperatures over ninety and humidity to match. A mistake to choose July but we did. Sweltering weather pursued us through those years like the triumphant reproach of a wedding guest. Couldn’t you have picked a hotter day?

No. We tried. It was the hottest day we could find.

Changing the sheets.

Pewter-gray sateen, inch-wide jacquard stripes. The same pattern in ivory. In navy. Taupe. I rotate colors, wash the dark linens in cold water. Like the robe, they haven’t faded.

My hand flattens the bottom sheet against the lozenge-quilted mattress pad. The sound is brusque. It speaks with the self- assurance of a high thread count and a trusted brand.

The slap and sigh of the top sheet. An unexpected resistance as I push the new pillows, four of them, into their cases. The old ones had to be replaced. Sagging in the center, sour, yellowed. What happens to us happens to bedding. Sweat, oils, and what the salesman called body lint, when he tried to sell my mother an Electrolux for five times the cost of a Hoover upright.

You read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, over many nights. I read it in one, understanding it all. Eleven kinds of universes. Strings. Black holes. Wormholes! Smug with my new knowledge, I fell asleep. In the morning, I understood nothing. You?

You read Hawking again. Again. When I get to the other side, we can discuss. For now, I’m going with my personal Standard Model, in which the universe is made up of:

Dark matter
Body lint
Dryer lint
Fitted sheets

That’s ninety-nine percent of it, anyway. You can fill me in on the rest.

Time, A Brief History of:

Measured in cats: Myshkin. Loki. Tybalt. Titania. Ninja. Mini.

In dwellings:

The apartment in Southeast. Two bedrooms, two months, next to a fire station. Panic attacks.
The house in Minneapolis. Seven years renovating it. When our daughter was born her toys expanded to fill the space — a law of thermodynamics you don’t learn until you’re a parent. We moved.
The house in St. Paul, this one. Thirty-nine years. (Me.) Thirty-seven years. (You.)

A strange thing: Leonard Cohen’s song, Famous Blue Raincoat, just came into my head. It’s four in the morning, the end of December —

and I picked up my phone to check the time, and it was four in the morning, exactly. Did you? Was that —

Are you trying to tell me something, foster-child of silence and slow time?

love,

Mary

A Letter from Loneliness

It's been two years since you died.

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