Fishman

I’m having trouble coping, again.

Summer is here. The changing seasons have a way with burying me under a heap of rubble, the rubble that used to be my beautiful life with Chris.

I have developed a pattern over the past few days of struggling to get out of bed, arriving at work late, going home and staying up until I’m falling over and then heading into my bedroom where I crawl into bed, try to sleep but end up curled up in a ball in my bed, screaming in pain from the gaping hole in my soul. Times like this really suck.

In between my grief episodes, I really do well. I love my job, I love to be with my friends, I’m creative, I laugh almost incessantly. Then, on my walk home from the train station, sadness begins to seep in and I can’t believe he’s gone. Even now, after all this time, I can’t believe it.

You may have seen the comments left by Trevor over the past week. At first, I didn’t know it was him. Chris and I were friendly with him and his wife when we lived in Los Angeles. We had dinner together, Nicole and I ran sometimes, Chris and Trevor talked about screenplays they wanted to write and we just had fun. The two of them are one of the few things I enjoyed about L.A.

Trevor just found out that Chris died. He didn’t know. I feel horrible for him because his grief is just beginning. I think, in some ways, that my grief has been renewed with his. I can’t imagine how he feels. Not really. I know loss, but not Trevor’s loss. I do know that finding out that he just found out about Chris has made me feel, in some way, as though I just found out that Chris died. Maybe that’s why I can’t seem to stop crying at night. The tears have been gut-wrenching. Last night, I had no choice but to take an Ativan so I could try to get some sleep.

I hope I don’t always feel this defeated. I miss Chris now, more than ever.

I am not even coming close to conveying how I have felt these past few days. My emotions are locked up so tight that aside from my midnight howlings, I can barely find them.

This month has marked the year and a half anniversary of Chris’ death. I hate, hate, HATE saying that.

I get really angry sometimes because we both fought so hard, he to take care of himself and beat the cancer and me to take care of myself so I could take care of him. Neither of us really thought we would lose.

But we did.

Yesterday, I picked up my dry cleaning from Fishman, a little old eighty or ninety-some-odd Polish man who owns his own tailor shop just outside of Malden Square. He talks to me when I go into his store.

Yesterday, he brought out his old WWII uniform and showed it to me, which was really quite amazing. He then talked to me about how he and his wife were liberated from Nazi Germany and he moved here and has lived in Malden ever since.

In his shop there’s a small plaque that reads something to the effect of “I am the boss here. My wife says so.” Something about that little sign, held up with scotch tape, filled me with loneliness. I knew she was dead before he even told me. I just had a feeling.

Fishman had to take a test when he arrived in the states to prove that he could be a tailor. In those days, the test consisted of a corporate banker coming into the shop and ordering him to make a suit for him. That was the test. Make a suit. Fishman did it and earned his license here in the United States. He showed it to me. It’s written half in German and half in English.

Something about him reminded me of Chris if Chris got to be an old man. I know Chris would have loved this guy and his little independent tailoring and dry-cleaning business.

I walked home with my dry cleaning, choking back the start of my tears. I thought about the concentration camps and what this man had experienced and witnessed. He saw his wife get shot in the neck by the Nazis. She lived through it, but she is no longer alive today. She died eleven years ago.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m every going to stop crying. Is this just my life, now? I cry less now than I did in the beginning, but I still cry. I’m still overcome with disbelief followed by loneliness and I don’t know if that will ever change.

By day, I have a lot of fun. My life is rich with love and experience. It is also rich with sadness and longing.

I’m very tired.