Darling, Be Home Soon

Mourning the meals and the secrets we never shared.

photo by the author

My husband died a year ago. Last week, I went through his wallet.

There wasn’t much in it. Credit cards, a single dollar bill, a grocery list. I took out his driver’s license and examined the picture.

He stared, not at the camera, but into some vast solitude. His expression is a mixture of regret, anguish, and private grief. I see him standing on the black line in front of the white wall at the DMV, trying not to blink, knowing that it is the last time he’ll stand there. That this photo will be who he is until the end of time.

I leaned back against the wall, closing my eyes. The air around me collapsed. My eyes stung. I crushed the dollar bill and grocery list in my hand. Abandoning my project — sorting through his things, one year after his death, as if they could disclose the mystery of who he was — I stood. Body clenched, I crept to my dark bedroom and pulled the duvet over my head, sobbing.

My cat was suddenly next to my head. She snuffed at my face, nudged my collarbone. Making small, desperate mewing sounds, she pushed against my arm with her head. Then, harder, against my chest. She crawled under the duvet. Leaning her body into mine, she shared the warmth of her flesh and fur. We curled together, and slept.

---

Some things in your life, you believe, are secret. A vast sorrow, for instance, something that wounded you. You tell no one. But your body does not lie.

Twice during my life, I’ve lost a great deal of weight over a short period of time. In 2007, I dropped forty-five pounds — a third of my body weight — through the course of six months. I gained those pounds back, but not the friendship that had been broken. That’s a story for another time.

The second instance, a decade later, was more gradual. No sudden onset. Pain in my gut, mild and occasional at first. Then: intense, near-constant distress. Finally, imagine a roll of barbed wire unspooling in your belly. It expands upward, towards the liver, gallbladder, heart. WebMD is vague. Kidneys? Back, right. Spleen? Left, middle. Pancreas? Duodenum? I didn’t know the territory. I saw only dragons, and they all breathed fire.

Over the following year, I had more than a dozen tests: colonoscopy, endoscopy, blood, urine, EKG, ultrasounds. Red-faced, I handed a white plastic bowl to a lab technician but it turned out that the thing hurting me was nowhere to be found in its contents. I ate toast and radioactive scrambled eggs prior to X-rays to see if my stomach was emptying normally. It was.

I sat on an exam table as a gastroenterologist pushed, hard, into a place just below my rib cage. “Does that hurt?” he asked, glancing over at the two nurses standing silently over by the sink.

I winced. Nodded. It was excruciating.

“Do you have children?”

“Two.”

“Well! There you have it! Women who have children are more likely to have gallbladder disease than those who don’t. Right?” He turned his head toward the nurses, who nodded. When he swiveled his chair away to make a note, they looked at each other and shrugged.

I didn’t have gallbladder disease. I moved on to the next test, until there were no more tests.

There was also no pathology. I had landed in the default zone, the end of the line, the functional disorder. I had nothing exotic or interesting, nothing that would bring in profits. My diagnosis was Irritable Bowel Syndrome: IBS.

“Acupuncture works for some people,” the digestive care specialist said. She was young, and kind. But something in her tone hinted She’s old. It goes with the territory.

She gave me handouts — breathing exercises, relaxation techniques — and wrote a prescription for something called Bentyl. “It’s an antidepressant. But some people find it really helps the gut. Take it at bedtime. It might help with your sleep, too.” Old people have trouble sleeping.

“There’s this diet. You may want to check it out. Do you have the Internet at home? If not, you can go to the library.” Old people — The thought wasn’t worth finishing.

By that time I’d dropped fifty pounds. Once again, a third of who I was had been erased. This loss was not only of my physical self. All that I had once been was dying.

What good was that MFA? I asked myself, staring at my two copies of the journal that published my first poem.

You are a writer, I’d say. Then: You are a loser.

Loser was one of the kindest names I hissed at myself. The words, and the thoughts behind them, left my mouth as if I had Tourette’s. I slapped at them like mosquitoes. They came swarming back.

---

I looked up the special diet for IBS patients. Google FODMAPS if you’re interested. The acronym stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. These are short-chain carbohydrates that are poorly absorbed in the small intestine and ferment in the colon. Foods containing FODMAPS are legion. They are out to kill me.

I understand only vaguely why I can eat cantaloupe, but not watermelon; a firm banana but not a mushy one; maple syrup, but not honey, and that high-fructose corn syrup is evil in its liquid state. Consuming too much — and it is virtually impossible to avoid — can land me in bed for two days. Garlic will earn me a week. I can eat the green part of a green onion, but no part at all of any other kind of onion.

Fruits containing a pit may not sound murderous. But cherry pie, peach cobbler, apricot jam, and plum tarts must be whisked away before I’m tempted to take a bite. Raspberries, yes; blackberries, no. Apples and pears — so benign that they are the first solid foods we give to infants — can send me, within seconds, to the nearest restroom. Cruciferous vegetables, legumes, beans: those fiber-rich foods are uniquely violent to a body with IBS. And the worst offenders? Lactose. Gluten.

My special diet is a special kind of hell.

---

My husband researched, shopped, cooked, and baked. He examined the tiny print on packages. Maltodextrose. Sorbitol. He studied The Gluten-Free Bible, an actual book, and experimented with rice, tapioca, almond, and potato flours. His efforts to find the precise amount of xanthan gum to bind a batch of dinner rolls were monumental.

“What about asparagus?” he called from the kitchen.

“What does the app say?”

He pulled up the one with the red-, yellow-, green-light system.

“Red. But zero-point-four ounces is green.” His voice was hopeful. He loved asparagus.

“Wonderful. It’s in season.” Keeping me alive had become more than a project. It was an act of devotion. I was hurting too much to see what it was costing him. I wonder, now, how hard it must be to live with someone who is spending so much time not living.

---

Our schedules meant that we rarely saw or spoke to one another during the week. He left for his job as a university librarian at five-thirty in the morning and got home at three. I spent two hours in bed each morning, talking myself into going to work at a job I hated. I started at one, arrived home after ten. He always had a dinner plate waiting for me to heat up in the microwave. Poached chicken, glazed carrots, a twice-baked potato. Beef medallions in a red-wine reduction. Omelets that were, mysteriously, not rubbery. He adjusted his diet, cooking for the two of us.

I got better, then worse. One day, I was in such misery that my supervisor called the paramedics. I went to the emergency room in an ambulance, attached to an IV bag of dilaudid.

No burst appendix. Nothing. IBS: a functional disorder.

He drove me home. Neither of us said a word until after he stopped the car in the garage.

“I’ve had it.”

We sat in silence.

“I love you.” I thought of all the nights, all the dinners, all the mornings I could not get out of bed. The five days and nights a week we lived in separate worlds. I clutched the bottle of painkillers I’d been prescribed. Fentanyl.

“But.” Nothing good could follow that word.

“You’re killing yourself. If you don’t stop, I will leave you.”

He was breathing hard, holding back the rage that had been building for years.

“You’ve left work on a stretcher. I don’t want you to come home in a body bag.”

I stayed in the car as he closed the door and walked to the house. The engine ticked, then went quiet. The yard light, then the door light, went out. The house went dark.

Fentanyl.

---

I retired in 2021. We had a life together: dinners on the front porch, nights spent quietly by the gas fire pit on the deck off of our bedroom, nights in the Adirondack chairs by the pond he’d built, listening to the splash of the stream.

After his diagnosis, we had another, closer life, for the year that it lasted. We spent all of our evenings together. He cooked for me until he no longer could. Then I cooked for him. Write, he said before he died. If you don’t, I swear you’ll never meet an angrier ghost.

Yesterday, I found what I’d been looking for: his university student ID. He’d carried it in his wallet since freshman year, 1974. The ink is faded, the plastic cracked. The photo is my favorite.

He’s eighteen. His hair, parted to one side, falls below his shoulders. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses below his high forehead. But what I like most is his wide, crooked, joyful smile. I set the picture on my nightstand.

I make myself an omelet and a side of glazed carrots. I put on one of his playlists and sit across from the fierce-eyed owl statue I’d moved from his desk to the dining room.

I bought asparagus, I say to the owl. It was on your grocery list. Oh, and I’m writing again.

The owl is silent. I take a bite of my omelet. It’s a bit rubbery. You didn’t share your secret, I say. Again, nothing. He’s probably thinking that we should have cooked together, eaten together more often. Or maybe I’m the one who’s thinking that as I talk to the statue of an owl, listening to my dead husband’s playlist. My darling, be home soon.

I spear a baby carrot. It’s not just these few hours, but I’ve been waiting —

I sing quietly along with Joe Cocker.

For the great relief of having you to talk to.

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