the freedom of my chains
missed you
It was around midnight, or maybe it was around eight pm? I cannot remember. It was dark out. We were in the booth of a small pizza restaurant in Buenos Aires, floor covered in red and white tiles, pizzas spinning in a rectangular display sitting on the peeling counter. It was January. A late bite to eat with two of my sisters and the man I would marry two years later. We had flown down, via Panama, after Christmas in the city with my grandmother, my Oma, and my other siblings. It was a happy, if dramatic holiday. There was a bit of a to-do involving my parents, a nice evening with Oma and my future in-laws. A trip to The Met, some seasonably inappropriate pina coladas on Christmas afternoon. Cocktails at the Carlyle. My phone rang, Oma, flashed on the screen. It was strange of her to call so late. I answered.
“I have cancer of the pancreas.” Matter-of-fact. The oncologist told her the day before. She’d hung up a conference call a few minutes before calling me. I was upset and weepy. She was sturdy. My Oma graduated from medical school in the 1960s, she’d only stopped practicing about a decade before, she would have known that she was dying but her tone did not let on. “I love you, dear one.” She said, I hung up and broke the news to my sisters. After we flew home, I went to Dallas and slept on the couch of her hospital room for a few weeks. She was weak but acting like herself during the day. She couldn’t eat much and in the evenings often confessed that she had forgotten everything that had happened the previous night.
The great irony of pancreatic cancer is that it should be survivable. A 44% five year survival rate for stage I. Around 3% for stage IV. But stage I pancreatic cancer shows few symptoms, most people are diagnosed only after the cancer has metastasized. This was Oma’s circumstance. Stage IV.
Oma died less than three months after her diagnosis. I was in Japan.
…
The email came just after midnight, I had been asleep but I was not sleeping well that summer, wasn’t doing anything well that summer. I was traveling, seven time zones ahead of home. Subject: “Fwd: blank.” No text in the body of the email either. An attached legal document that I opened and skimmed. I called my divorce attorney.
“I’m confused? Does this mean I’m divorced?” My lawyer replied quickly.
“Yes, you are divorced.” Unceremonious. Cold, even. I didn’t remember signing anything that felt official enough for such a gargantuan shift in the trajectory of my life. I cried and called my ex-husband. He did not answer and so I called until he did.
“Did you know we’re divorced?” He did not. “I don’t want to be divorced.”
“Me either.” But we were. Impulsively but definitively. You cannot unscramble an egg. I garbled and sobbed until we hung up.
Eighty-one days. That is how much time passed between the first time the word divorce was spoken and when it was finalized. Plans for forty more years of life together undone less than three months after the diagnosis. I wanted to go home. But I didn’t have a home to go to.
…
I miss my grandmother in the expected ways. I miss her Christmas cookies and her perseverance. I miss the classical music that played in her home, her soft robes, her depth, her guidance and love. But I have always known, since I was a child, that my grandmother would die. An expected death that comes quickly feels, to me, vaguely merciful. I didn’t think divorce was on the table at all until I found myself asking for one.
Living without my ex-husband is living without a limb. I feel his absence every morning before I am awake. His ghost sits on the couch with me, laughing at jokes I make in my head. My body aches. An absence I never expected to feel. A million memories I didn’t know were significant until they were in the past. An unexpected death that comes quickly leaves aftershocks that are uncovered for years.
Was the limb Gangrenous? Did anyone double check before it was amputated? I can only remember it working well. A bit of a limp, sure. But have you never been sore before?