Book Extras: A Re-imagined Life

Note: In Fall 2016, I wrote a short essay about the origins of The Young Widower's Handbook for The Algonquin Reader. For those who weren't able to get their hands on a copy, I've reproduced the essay below. 

A RE-IMAGINED LIFE

First you start drinking, then you start talking about death. It’s a natural progression.

At least it is for my wife and me.

We’d been dating for two years when my father died of esophageal cancer. A year later, her mother died of ovarian cancer, the byproduct of a hereditary predisposition that she passed on to my wife. We were in college then. Time suddenly seemed very limited. The future seemed like a place other people got to visit, but not us. I moved to Iowa City for grad school and she stayed at home with her dying grandfather.

After two difficult years of maintaining a long-distance relationship, I was in both a personal and professional crisis: I’d wasted my time in grad school, drinking every day and never writing, and I was coming home carrying no completed work and about thirty extra pounds. I had applied for a temp job and had no marketable skills. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to marry her. I proposed after my graduation, and then we drove home together, our first real road trip. I called my brother from the parking lot of a Bob’s Big Boy to tell him I was getting married. We got lost in western Pennsylvania and drove until midnight looking for a place to sleep. I don’t remember much else from the drive, except the feeling like I’d passed through something, like I was finally entering the good part of my life.

Four years later, we were in Seattle, celebrating our third anniversary. The year before that, we had gone to Ireland, and before that, we were in San Francisco, and there had been a number of shorter trips in the interim. Since then, we’ve traveled to Italy and a dozen other places. I’m an anxious traveler—about the logistics of flight, about the crowds, about visiting the right places at the right times, about being lost—and I wouldn’t have gone on any of these trips without her. I would have talked about going, but never committed. And, as much as I’ve enjoyed our travel, I realized recently that it’s never so much about going to a specific place as it has been about being with her while we are in that place.

There has been an unspoken urgency to our travel: to see as many places as possible while it is still possible, while we are still physically able, and while we’re still both alive.

By the time of our Seattle trip, we were both in our late twenties; if we were fated to die at the same age as our parents, then we had already crossed the midpoint of our lives.

I know it sounds melodramatic. But the deaths of our parents were foundational for us; they made us acutely aware that at some point one of us will be alone again, and quite possibly that will happen long before we’re ready, if being ready is even a possibility.

When we were in Seattle, the weather was so perfect it was suspicious (had everyone been lying about the rain just to keep visitors away?), and we were sitting outside at a French restaurant that served homemade sausage that tasted better than almost anything I’ve eaten in my life, and we were both feeling very lucky to have a life that allows us moments like this. We were deep in that giddy mid-vacation high where we had convinced ourselves that not only could we move to Seattle, but we should. We ordered the fourth-cheapest bottle of wine to avoid looking like the kind of cheapskates who just pick out the lowest-priced bottle regardless of quality. We started talking about where we would travel for future anniversaries, and then she said something about how I’d better not die on her.

I promised not to be dead—or rather, I promised to try really hard to not be dead—and then I asked her for the same. Soon, we were discussing how I would handle it if she died suddenly. Would I still talk to her family? Would I sell the house and move a thousand miles away? Would I ever date anyone again? Would I even leave the house? Would I completely collapse (this was my prediction)? Would I eventually find some way to rebuild a decent life? Friends are sometimes horrified to hear that we used this occasion, of all occasions, to talk about my hypothetical life as a widower. But it’s not like I was plotting her murder. It’s not like I was looking for an escape hatch. We were a little drunk and we were in love and we were capable of talking like adults about sad things.

At some point, I joked about how I could carry her ashes with me and travel to the places we’d never seen.

“That really sounds like a book,” she said.

It did sound like a book, I agreed. I hoped it wasn’t already a book.

We ordered another bottle of wine.

Over the next hour, The Young Widower’s Handbook came to life. We brainstormed the general shape of the novel together: the backgrounds of the young couple, the cause of the wife’s death, the road trip, and potential stops the widower could make. I scribbled notes on the backs of receipts, and she tapped out text messages to me so we could have the ideas stored somewhere.

When we returned to the hotel, I sat and scrawled two pages of notes in our room; in the morning, I couldn’t read some of them, but many of the notes from that session have survived, in some form, to the final draft of this novel. That morning, I wrote the opening paragraph, which hasn’t changed since that day.

This novel comes from a place of great love and great fear. Before meeting my wife, I was a very sad, very angry young man, and her love and compassion showed me how to be a decent person in the world. We’ve been together for almost fifteen years, and so the person I’ve become is so intimately tied to her and our relationship that I can’t envision who I would be without her. In writing The Young Widower’s Handbook, I envisioned the protagonist, Hunter Cady, in a similar relationship, and wanted to explore his despair as he not only tries to properly honor his dead wife, but has to learn to re-imagine himself in a new life. Starting in Philadelphia, he carves a jagged path across the country, hitching on the final leg with a group of travelers, and ultimately arriving in San Francisco. Nothing on the road trip goes according to plan,  but each interaction with a stranger in a strange city is a chance for him to redefine himself, to try to be the man his wife always believed he could be.

In writing these scenes, I wanted to face my own fears. I wanted Hunter to honor his wife’s memory while trying to overcome his fear of the future. I wanted him to discover a version of himself that he could be proud of—the version that his wife had always seen. And I wanted readers to feel exactly what I felt that night in Seattle, on our anniversary, when my wife and I were celebrating the best days of our lives.

13 Notes On a Very Bad Week

1. Fred, my father-in-law, died last weekend. His son walked into his apartment and found him dead on the floor. The cause of death is unknown, though there's no real mystery; he'd been obese for decades. His health was in decline. Last time I saw him, he was in the hospital after having his toe amputated due to complications from diabetes. But he was supposed to still be alive. Until that afternoon, his death was still theoretical. 

2. I was on a bus in rural Virginia when my wife called to tell me the news. I didn't believe her, so she said it again, and a minute later, the call was dropped. I couldn't get Wi-Fi and the signal was so weak I couldn't text anyone. I tried to respond to her in all the possible ways, but I was in one of those strange few places where you're still incapable of contacting people. I wanted to tell her I was coming as fast as I could, but this wasn't technically true, and anyway, what did it matter? My instinct was to rush home and somehow save the day, but what could I do besides arrive at Fred's apartment and confirm that, yes, he was dead, and, yes, we were all sad? This was a useful reminder of my helplessness in the face of real problems; the world does whatever it's going to do, and you have no say in it. Your father-in-law dies sometime on Friday night and lies there on his apartment floor until the next day, and there's nothing you can do about it. You just ride the bus and when you get home, you hug your wife and tell her how sorry you are. 

3. My first impulse was to write something about Fred. It's one of the only skills I have. As I sat on the bus taking notes on my phone, I quickly lost faith in the value of writing as a survival skill. And yet, a week later, here I am. 

4. My own father died 14 years ago. His was a prolonged illness that gave us time to say our goodbyes and get affairs in order, to warn people, to try to gird ourselves against the injury of his loss. I remember so little about the days following his death, except that I delivered the eulogy, and that I was very angry at everything, and at night I would get so drunk it scared me and when I woke up I hated myself. Later, I wrote a book about it, and even later, I wrote another book driven by the fear of my wife's eventual death. Since then, I've written a book about a school shooting. If it seems sometimes like the only thing I write about is death, it's because that's the only thing, besides food, that I think about every day.

5. About Fred: he worked at La Salle, where I met my wife, and, though he was an enormous man, the size of an NFL offensive lineman, he was the least intimidating person I'd ever met. A different, worse, kind of man would have overstepped his boundaries trying to protect his daughter, using his access to every building on campus to check on us, asking his friends to spy on us. Instead, he would call her a half hour before stopping by her dorm room, then call again to ask if it was okay for him to come in. When he arrived, he would be carrying family sized bags of M&Ms and Wint-O-Green Life Savers. He would drive us to Wendy's and buy us lunch. From the moment he met me, he accepted me, and he trusted me to treat his daughter well. Later, when it became clear I would be around for a while, he began introducing me to strangers as one of his kids. When I had no father, he was there to fill that void. Some people never even get one father, and I was lucky enough to have had two.  

6. This is where I'm supposed to share some anecdotes, to distill his existence into a few brief stories. One story will be funny and another will be heartfelt and poignant. Maybe the third will be a small moment that's somehow revealing of Fred's deeper character. Show, don't tell. Scene vs. summary. All that shit. I'm sorry, but I can't do that right now. You're just going to have to believe me when I say he was a very kind man who made the people around him better. 

7. He had just moved to a new apartment, and the only time I'd been there, I was helping him unpack. Even though he'd moved several times in the past few years, and he'd shed a lot of his belongings, he still had so much stuff. He was a deeply sentimental man and had a hard time parting with his possessions. There was the flimsy plastic centerpiece we'd bought for his 60th birthday, three years ago. The carpet he'd been saving for 25 years, just in case he ever needed it, because it once belonged to his grandmother. The panoramic poster of the Milky Way he'd been carrying in his car trunk for at least 8 years, just in case he had time to get it framed. Christmas decorations of every conceivable size and shape. A series of file folders of incredible specificity, including Cable TV Remote Instructions, Tom-Fred Halloween, How to Read a Palm, and Snow History - Past Bad Winters. Two weeks after we unpacked his things, I was back in his house repacking everything, boxing some items to donate and bagging others for trash. The remainder is stacked in my basement so later my wife and her siblings can sort through it and determine which of of these things will constitute their inheritance. When I was twelve years old, I had to help clear out my grandmother's three-story house; she and her children had accumulated so much junk during the decades they'd lived there that it took us nearly three full days to empty everything. That weekend was, and still is, the hardest work I've done in my life. Since then, I've been afraid of leaving a mountain of junk behind me, have hated clutter and viewed it as a sort of prison, have tried annually to walk through my house and throw out anything I don't need because I don't want to subject someone else to sorting through all my odds and ends after I'm dead, trying to determine why I kept this newspaper clipping or that magnet. And yet, I felt impossibly sad when I pulled Fred's winter hat out of his car. I placed it on top of the Keepers pile for reasons I can't explain, except that it seemed too intimate a belonging to throw away, not when there are still loose hairs in there, not when it still seems like he might show up again with a cold head. I thought then: maybe clinging to every object is the only way to live. Maybe our junk is the thing that defines us. Maybe the only way to really know someone is to dig through their knick-knacks and garbage and see the things they valued beyond all reason. 

8. The truth is, it doesn't feel like he's dead. I just haven't seen him for a couple weeks, which isn't unusual. That's all death is: it's not seeing someone again, for a very long time. Eventually, you see everyone for a last time, and you rarely know when it's coming. This is my final text to him: I think we've done 400 at 8-10. Tails on. It was about shrimp. Most of the time, your last words to someone are as meaningless as a guess at a shrimp recipe. 

9. In the aftermath of the death, the procedural details are easy. You call the people you have to call. You arrange pictures artfully on a piece of poster board. You go through the motions of being alive because there's nothing else you can do. You tell everyone you're doing your best. 

10. Okay, here's one story: when my memoir was published in 2010, I tried many unsuccessful marketing strategies, including setting up a sales table at a bar in Bethlehem, PA, where the Philadelphia Eagles hold their training camp. The book had an Eagles angle, and I hoped to intercept hundreds of Eagles fans between practices, sell out of fifty books in a couple hours, have a nice lunch, and head home. Fred drove with me, ninety minutes from his apartment, and sat there with me for five hours. We went home with forty-nine books, and that one sale was only because Fred had finally convinced the restaurant manager to buy one. One man asked me why anybody would ever write a book. Another spent a half hour telling me I was too young to have written a memoir, and he was the one who should have written a book. Several people asked me where to locate the restroom. Not only did Fred never complain about wasting a whole day to make one pity sale, but later he would talk about that day fondly, as if it had been a great success. The next year, he asked if I wanted to go again. 

11. Fred's final years were a struggle, a litany of bad breaks and health problems, and every time he called, I worried he was going to tell me about some new catastrophe. We complained about him too often, about the ways he'd become a burden and the poor decisions he'd made-- eating badly, skipping his physical therapy, not applying for a new job, everything. We worried he would end up having to move in with us as he gradually lost his legs and his ability to work. We talked about the renovations we'd have to make to accommodate him. We dreaded having to become his full-time caretakers. As you get older, you spend more and more time complaining about your parents, their foibles and bad habits, even though you know their time is limited. You love them, but they also know how to annoy you in a way that nobody else can. The complaining is a kind of fear, that before long you'll adopt those same bad habits that annoy you so much. That eventually, you will decline and become demanding and frustrating,  held hostage by your own character flaws. That you will wear out your welcome. Later, we felt guilty for all the complaining, for being so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn't realize how little time he had left. But that's an essential part of it too: the regret, the failures. 

12. I got that phone call last weekend, and I wanted to rush home and I wanted to do something. I knew I couldn't save him, and I knew I could only do so much to help my wife, but what I wanted to do more than anything was to be there in the moment and to see him, to bear witness to his life. To say, yes, this man lived, and he was good. It wasn't always the life he wanted but it was a life still, and it mattered, no matter how you parse all the details. 

13. One of the happiest times of Fred's life was when he worked for the Girl Scouts. He told me often that the number one rule at camp was to always leave a site in better condition than it was in when you'd found it. We don't get to determine how people remember us, but if he could, I think he would want everyone to know that nobody ever worked harder at following that rule. 

A Brief History of World Travel (part 13) - Notes on the Jersey Shore

1. When I was young, most of my friends took two-week family vacations to Ocean City, New Jersey every summer. We went to Ocean City, Maryland for one week. These two places shared a name and an ocean but very little else. As I got older, I came to resent these separations from my friends; when you’re twelve, everything becomes a personal affront, and I was sure my parents were trying to spite me in some way. Mainly what I did on these vacations was watch TV with my dad; we didn’t have cable at home and I spent months looking forward to the indulgence in what seemed like a rich person’s hobby. On the drive down, I read back issues of TV Guide cover to cover and did the crossword. During the day, my dad stayed inside and watched mystery shows—Quincy, Poirot, MacMillan and Wife, Alfred Hitchcock Presents— while we sat on the beach. When I had the remote, I watched standup comedy on Comedy Central. The comedy you encounter when you’re young has the potential to shape you for your entire life. As I watched Steven Wright spin non sequiturs into brilliant jokes, I fantasized about being a standup myself. I even wrote jokes, which I later threw in the dumpster behind the building. I never had the courage to try, or even seriously think about trying comedy. When I got home, I would repeat my favorite jokes to my friends often enough that it was like they’d been watching with me.

2. When I was thirteen, I joined my best friend on his family vacation to Ocean City, NJ. We spent mornings on the beach with his family, and in the afternoon, we watched music videos—that summer belong to Macarena, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, and No Doubt. We watched each video at least twenty times. At night, we walked on the boardwalk and played in the arcade. I’d spent months collecting quarters, stacking them in old film canisters, and planning on dozens of hours of Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and whatever else was open. I had a searing crush on my friend’s older sister, and I kept hoping for some magical transition to occur if I were left alone with her even for a minute. One night, she and her friend came to my room to let me know they were sneaking out. They laid on my bed on either side of me, and said, “You should come!” One of them had her hand on my arm. I was acutely aware at the moment of each of my skin cells, all straining to be closer to her. I had never had a private conversation with a girl, let alone kissed one, and already this scene had accelerated far beyond any reasonable fantasies, so I panicked and said I was sick, a decision I spent the next five hours regretting while sitting on the floor and listening to Weird Al Yankovic’s Bad Hair Day, the only CD I’d remembered to pack for the trip. The next day I called my parents and told them I wanted to go home, I couldn’t spend another ten days here, and my dad drove to Ocean City to pick me up, claiming some family emergency had come up.

3. I inherited my dad’s pale skin, propensity for weight gain, and aversion to the beach. He never joined us on the beach. At some point during the day, he would step onto the balcony and wave to us before going back inside to watch more TV. I don’t think I ever saw him touch sand. The beach is bad and boring and full of people. It’s a long expanse of dirt that you pay money to lay on so that wind-whipped cigarette butts and errant Frisbees can terrorize you as you get burned nearly to death by the sun. You can try reading, but the wind keeps blowing your pages and throwing sand into your eyes. When you want to cool off, you take a leisurely swim through the ocean, which is the most destructive single force on the planet, and is filled with so many deadly creatures we haven’t even identified them all yet. When you’re a fat, pale, self-conscious kid, every anxiety is compounded, and when you’re a fat, lonely kid surrounded by unattainable girls in bikinis, the beach may be the worst place on earth. I went to the beach begrudgingly and stayed until I was allowed to go. The beach is fine if you’re just passing through and you get to make stops on the boardwalk for free samples at The Fudge Kitchen, where every day women with indeterminate Eastern European accents tell you that you’re in luck because today only they have a special where if you buy two pounds of their creamy fudge you get one pound of saltwater taffy free. The fudge is worth the trip. So is the pizza and the polish water ice and basically all of the food. The beach is a fine place to look at in pictures.

4. LauraBeth’s mom died in September 2004, three weeks after I’d started grad school in Iowa City. I canceled a week of classes to fly home and be with her. We spent one afternoon in Ocean City, partly because her mom loved going to the shore, and partly because LauraBeth wanted to be away from her house, the planning, the misery. We sat on the beach for a while before retreating to the shade, then walking the boardwalk, then eating fudge. We played two rounds of miniature golf. When I was young, I ruined many vacation evenings for my parents by throwing tantrums during rounds of mini golf, hurling my club across the course, beating on the windmill obstacles, throwing the ball off the course and onto the beach. By the time I was there with LauraBeth, I’d gotten much better, had come to understand that missing a putt in mini golf is a completely meaningless act. Sometimes I think I should be more competitive than I am, but then I remember what a nightmare I was when I felt that way. I don’t remember much else about that day, besides that it was a good day in the middle of a very bad time in our lives.

5. After high school graduation, my friends and I rented a shore house in Ocean City for Senior Week, a tradition of pre-college partying with hundreds of other graduates who descend on the town at the same time. In theory, we would experience the most memorable parties of our lives and permanently strengthen the bonds that had brought us there in the first place. I was too young then to realize how ephemeral most friendships are. My best friend disappeared after the first day, in pursuit of a girl he loved. The girl I’d been sort of dating called on the first morning to say she’d been grounded for life because an ex had mailed nude Polaroids of her to her parents, and also whatever thing we had between us was over. Another guy in the house got dumped by his girlfriend on the second night, and he mourned by taking a five-gallon tub of cheese balls and a bottle of vodka to the living room, where he sat until he’d finished both. At the time, everything we were doing seemed very memorable, but now the whole week blurs into a series of indistinguishable games of beer pong, stacks of red cups, and rooms full of drunken strangers.

6. A couple weeks after I moved home from grad school, I went with LauraBeth and her family—dad, both brothers, one future sister-in-law—to a rented shore house in Ocean City. It rained most of the week, but we sat on the porch and played board games and drank, and at night we took turns cooking. It was the first extended time I’d ever spent with her brothers; now I consider both of them good friends, but then I wasn’t sure what to expect. LauraBeth and I had gotten engaged recently, and we had to drive home one afternoon to sign some paperwork for the house we were buying. It was a time of great upheaval, and a time, finally for some optimism after several years of feeling lost.

7. LauraBeth and I now most often go to Cape May, which skews older and also offers a wider range of activities than most shore towns. We live close enough to Cape May that if we have a free afternoon we can easily drive down and spend the day there without it feeling like a long haul. LauraBeth can get her fix of the ocean and the beach, but at night we can go out to restaurants where you have to wear shoes, and we can feel more like we’re in an actual town. We spent our first anniversary in a bed & breakfast from which we could admire the ocean without all the misery of sitting on the beach itself. Most summers, we go for at least a day, and we always do the same things, many of which she did with her mom when she was young.

8. Nine years after the first vacation I took with LauraBeth’s family, we all shared a shore house again, this time in Cape May, and this time with more people: my father-in-law’s girlfriend, another sister-in-law, a toddler, an infant, and another baby due any day. Does it matter what we did there? We did the same things we always did. Cape May does offer more variety than the other shore towns, but it’s still a shore town, so you do the same things you always do. What matters is that you’re there, doing them again, and every time you do them, you’re a different person walking alongside those old versions of yourself. What matters is who you’re with. You start life with one family, and if you’re lucky someday you find another one, and they tolerate you enough to let you go places with them, even if you spend the whole time complaining about the beach.