Heart Full of Soul
Meteors, a space odyssey, and the Yardbirds.
On a chilly night in April, 2019, my husband took a picture of a meteor. Four years later, on another cold April night, he died.
December 31, 2023: I welcomed 2024 with a small charcuterie plate and an Old Fashioned. We’d always done that. Special cheeses, fancy crackers, olives, Marcona almonds. Balancing the plate on the comforter, in bed with my cat, I raised my glass.
“Goodnight. Wherever you are.”
It sounded hollow. Weak. Silly. I thought of Jimmy Durante, addressing the mysterious Mrs. Calabash. But at that moment, I needed a prompt. I reached over to his nightstand and took his phone from its charger.
I’d scrolled through his photos before. But I hadn’t gone back more than a couple of years. So when I got to the meteor, I paused.
How had I forgotten? I stared at the image. White scrawl against deep blue. Then I texted it to my phone. From the nightstand on my side of the bed, a ping.
His name showed up on my screen, followed by the words:
Sent you an attachment.
A slight jolt. I felt for a moment that I’d awakened him, that he’d shifted his weight and turned towards me. That he was next to me under the duvet. But it was my cat who emerged, wide-eyed. She jumped from the bed to the floor.
We’d sat in matching rattan chairs on the deck that opens from our second-floor bedroom. Squinting into the wedge of northern sky between the branches of our big maple and the neighbors’ cottonwood, we waited for something to happen.
Our local newscasters promise lunar eclipses and meteor showers as breathlessly as they would the Second Coming. Folks, this is worth staying up for. But they hedge: Your best viewing opportunity is between midnight and six a.m. Who could sleep, given the chance of viewing a muddied red disk or a tiny streak in the sky?
In our light-polluted part of the city, we can see the moon, Venus, Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper, the alley light, and not much else. A dog barked. I tugged the cuffs of my sweatshirt over my hands. Twelve-fifteen. Twelve-thirty.
I stood. Hypothermia or heated blanket? Which was the reasonable alternative?
“Well, I’m done,” I said. He turned his head to look at me. Was he disappointed? Resigned?
“Why? You don’t have to work tomorrow.”
I looked towards the glow of the interstate, a few blocks and one insufficient sound barrier away.
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like a great night for stargazing. Despite what they say on TV.” I kissed him goodnight. Then I went in and changed into my nightgown and brushed my teeth. My hands were stiff and red from the cold.
A few minutes later, just after I’d switched off my lamp, the door whooshed open. He leaned over and handed me a shooting star.
And now it had circled back.
Never mind that it was only a photo of the same piece of space rock hitting the atmosphere. It felt like a gift from another universe.
Where is he, where is he, where?
He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in May, 2022. Around that time, my chronic insomnia worsened. I dealt with it by searching the web for mid-sixties rock groups and the connections between them. I discovered the Yardbirds.
Growing up in a household with a mother whose hearing was so preternaturally attuned to the lowest decibel level at which the Devil whispered, I learned to keep my transistor radio pushed tightly against my head with my thumb on the dial, ready to bury it the second I heard the quick knock as she simultaneously threw open my bedroom door. So it wasn’t much different to put in earbuds, reduce the volume, and shield the screen as my husband slumbered under the weight of his pain meds.
Eric Clapton. Jimmy Page. Jeff Beck. I drew loopy genealogies in my head. Cream, Led Zeppelin. I tracked 1965 Billboard Top 40 numbers. And I found a song I could not believe I’d never heard: Heart Full of Soul.
I’d missed Beatlemania. I’d watched silently, enviously, as my friends traded Monkees playing cards and argued about who was cuter, Davy or Mickey. The Yardbirds fell into the gap that had separated me from my peers. Listening to them five decades later felt like an immersion in a language no one had allowed me to learn, much less speak: longing and loss.
There was also a small bit of adult pettiness. No fair, Keith, reaching forward in time. This is, and will always be, my haircut.
It felt illicit. I’d bring him a plastic bottle of iced tea topped off with ginger ale, help him with his increasingly strong pain meds, and adjust the pillows around his left shoulder, where the cancer had stealthily and then searingly broken free of his lungs. When his breathing slowed, I’d set down whatever novel I was reading as cover, and then click on the video.
Sick of heart and lonely, deep in dark despair/ Thinking one thought only, Where is she, tell me where? The unearthly whoa-oh-oh-oh. It spoke to the desperation, the anguish, I’d felt in those grade-school hallways and lunchrooms. I held my finger to the screen, ready to silence YouTube and yank the tiny speakers from my ears.
It wasn’t necessary. He slept. So did I, after my yearnings had been, for a short time, appeased.
I wrote in an earlier post, The Music Didn’t Die With Him, about my plunge into a sense of failure after finding myself unable to retrieve his Sonos playlists from his phone. A day later, after finding an update, they appeared. Duh! was my first thought. Then: Maybe things will be okay.
We’d listened to his playlists at dinner, while sitting close together next to the fireplace, and during romantic moments elsewhere in the house. Each one was thoughtfully curated. He’d named them by date, year, artist or pure whimsy: The Next Whiskey Bar, Johnny Cash or Sue? and some that made me blush.
Here was a new one, labeled Mary. One song. I sat back on the sofa and closed my eyes.
She’s been gone such a long time, Longer than I can bear/ But if she still still wants me, Tell her I’ll be there —
Longer than I can bear.
And I know, well if she had me back again/ Well I would never make her sad/ I’ve got a heart, heart full of soul.
A song. A meteor. The thought of moving forward, forever. To wherever he is.
Tell him I’ll be there.
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Heart full of soul, essay full of soul. What a beautiful piece. The symbolism of the meteor, the way is moves like a thread (or shooting star) throughout your article, and comes full circle to tie you back to that night with your husband is so powerful. He is clearly with you still. Clearly.
It is so generous of you to share these pieces with us. I imagine it must be hard sometimes to open up your private moments to this forum, because they must feel so precious. But I do love reading what you write. I was so struck by the moment that your phone received the attachment from his. What a jolt. It's funny how technology has created that possibility of a note or a call from the past. I have so many voicemail messages on my phone from when my Mom actually sounded like my mom, from when she could actually use a phone. I go back and listen to them sometimes to try to remember what it used to feel like to be her daughter. Thank you for the beautiful, elegant writing. You address such emotional and powerful topics without wading into too much sentiment, or getting maudlin. Such perfect, spare reflections. 💙