Author’s note: I have always journaled (I have my journals and diaries back to 8 years old), and when I realized that I was losing my husband of 40 years to cancer, I began to journal with the intention of sharing the day-to-day devastation, liminal spaces, and transition of losing “we/us” and becoming “I” because I couldn’t find that story anywhere and I needed it. This piece being chosen for the Bay to Ocean Journal and then nominated for a Pushcart Prize, gave me the impetus to follow my journey after his death and fashion it into a memoir, “The Scent of Lime,” hybrid-published in 2025 with Politics and Prose’s (Washington, D.C.) publishing arm.
Not Knowing: The Uncharted Path by Tammy Vitale
May 11, 2023
Today he died, with me by his side, as we planned and as I promised. At home.
This is how it happened. When he woke this morning, I asked if he wanted meds. He nodded. With great effort, he said: “Tell everyone I love them.” And he said something else which I couldn’t guess to both our great frustration. And then he said nothing.
I started morphine every hour on the hour. I watched his heartbeat in the space where neck meets shoulder, that place where my face fits perfectly, where I have always been safe and where I have always found home. The beat was arhythmic and the pulse looked like two frogs fighting under the skin. I listened as his breath came, stopped, came again. I lay myself across him and whispered, “let go, let go, let go. I love you, I love you, I love you.” His eyes rolled back into his head and did not return. I took off his breathing tube and watched his last breath, felt how immediately his skin turned waxy. I had cracked the window in case the old story about a place for the spirit to leave is true. He has gone.
He was the first to say I don’t stay in the room the house a job many jobs, abandoning so I could not be abandoned. He was the first to say I would never let myself be the last one in the room.
I find I am the last one in the room.
When you whispered, “I’m not leaving you, I’m just leaving this malfunctioning body,” I wrote it down because it would be the first time someone did not abandon me on purpose.
Now Head abandons Body and I (whoever “I” is) float quietly behind Body like a balloon rocked by the slightest breeze.
I abandon myself.
Grief
I despise this word, “Widow.”
It tastes like ashes.
It smells like rotten eggs.
It feels like glass in my mouth.
I molt my rings like a snake shedding old skin for new, abandon the signs of “us,” reset stones, name myself “Single.” (But I keep the bracelet of silver bears because you gave it to me, “The Darkest One”)
Single. autonomous, self-sufficient [footloose, fancy-free]. Reclaimed, restored, salvaged, redeemed, remodeled, mended [not yet].
I, who in the past was a black t-shirt and jeans kind of sound guy’s wife, go to the local boutique and buy prints and stripes and bright colors. I wonder if this is what I always wanted but acquiesced to what you preferred. I am starting to wonder who “I” is now I’m not “us.” I’m starting to wonder if I am still “The Darkest One.”
May 16
A favorite restaurant in Easton has moved and I want to tell him, and, because I can’t tell him, that minute I was fine and felt like “I got this” disappears and the next minute I’m wailing so fiercely I can scarcely breathe, sure I will never make it through this path this passage this this this. I realize I don’t care if I do not make it through whatever “this” is.
I read that wanting to die is not the same a desire to commit suicide.
I’m floating. There are moments I think I shouldn’t be driving. I drive anyways.
Perhaps I expected my logical side to be happy he was through with all the crap he experienced the last five years.
Buddha suggests that no desire leads to no expectations which leads to no suffering. What would you expect from someone who left his wife and son to go find himself. Buddha is full of shit.
June 25
Adulting – surfacing to grab a breath. There is no land in sight. No lifeguard. Adulting is remembering to at least try to tread water.
My warehouse grocery store membership is coming to its conclusion. I will go tomorrow after the car’s oil change. Life goes on. And on.
Everything triggers me, even making oatmeal and pulling out my favorite spoon, the one he always made sure to serve alongside my bowl.
I write this. I stop, stunned. I cry.
In the movie, “Avatar,” someone (I forget who) says, “I got you.” And I remember the card you gave me after a particularly mean meeting of poets. Distilled, it said, “I got you.”
But you do not, anymore, “got me.” I cry.
I am making art. He is not here to shoot his “you have your own space for art” look. He does not say, “You cannot have the whole house.” I do not grin and ignore him. I know I can leave the art here for days, for years if I want. I cry.
I am exhausted and it has nothing to do with sleep. Yesterday at a regular checkup, the doctor looked at bloodwork, listened to my chest, and said, “kidney liver, lungs, heart – all in good shape.” What does she know?
I eat, I drink water and wine, I even laugh. I float. I stop and smell the flowers I have feverishly planted in the front yard this long, cooler than normal, May and June. I bob behind my body, the softest breeze a storm. I wonder if there will come a time when I, the watcher, re-meld with her, the pretender. I cry.
I want something to show me how to deal with this thing I could never have imagined, this howling black hole where my insides used to be. I want someone to tell me how to find and reattach the left side of myself that, in my mind, has ripped away leaving me shorn in half, tatters wafting like seaweed in the ocean where I find myself underwater trying to breathe.
This Space Called Not Knowing
I did not know that I didn’t really believe in death. I did know that death happens, just not “now.” Even when we are expecting it. It is abstract. Even though I have experienced the death of both my parents, I was no longer living with them every day, and not in the rooms where they died. Even though we had thought all this through and had necessary documents and end-of-life plans in place. Even though I had all the passwords. I did not know that buried in my psyche were movie and cartoon visuals: the smooth sheets on the hospital bed; the peaceful opening of the eyes; the brilliant last words at the end. I did not know that I expected that. Or maybe I did. I did not know (why didn’t I know?) that he would be unable to speak in more than a whisper. I did not know that my hearing aids would die two weeks before him. I did not know that cancer would eat him to limp skin over nothing but bone. I did not know about bed sores.
I did not know how hard it is to lose 40 years of glances that speak novels, the funny words and actions remembered long after the child who started it all has forgotten, all that laughter. I did not know how much I loved how funny he was. I did not know I loved Gus (his public/work persona) in addition to Shawn (his private personal and my husband).
These things I did not know sit in the corner with all the memories, grinning. They hold the memories closely. I do not know the word that will make these things stop hoarding the stories, banish these things to the unknown like Rumpelstiltskin. I do know that I do not live in a fairytale. Anymore.
I did not know that what everyone said (being with a loved one when they die is a privilege) was a lie. I do know that I promised to keep him at home until the very end. And he knew that I never promised unless I knew I could keep it. And I kept my promise. To the very end.
In the early morning between sleep and awake, my mind imagines a word that would make the things in the corner release all the memories. But the things in the corner still grin, and any word that comes is written in an unknown language, like ancient runes someone once carved into stone trying to tell everyone those things that you do not know.
I do know I will always love him and me–us I do know I miss him.
Sometime within a month after he dies: I am sitting at the local Unitarian Universalist fellowship meeting. There are about 40 of us in a gathering room with windows for walls. Trees and flowers and grass. Folding chairs. A piano player that knows the song (I don’t know it) but not the instrument’s nuances. It doesn’t matter. I am practicing deep breathing to keep away unbidden and unwelcome tears and the things in the corner which have followed me here. My thoughts tumble through what was us and is now me. It is all more a feeling of breath and sadness than specific pictures, and the room fades. Then, I feel hands on my shoulders from behind and startle back into here and now. I would know those hands anywhere. The touch is light (when I was upset he always approached gingerly), his hands, bigger than my octave stretch hands by an inch, warm. I hear him say, very clearly, “I had to go so that you could do what you came to do.”
And then he is gone. And I am left. Again. And angry. I think, ‘What must I do that we couldn’t do together? Sounds like a cop out to me.”
I no longer feel like crying.
I do not know what any of it means.
Grieving Contemplation: looking thoughtfully at something for a long time.
I’m eating breakfast looking out my back window at the wild offering of volunteer sunflowers along the birdfeeder line and catch a glimpse of the royal-blue motorcycle tank holding his ashes. The mobile of drift redwood we bought in a town with one restaurant, three art galleries and the Pacific crashing in the background hangs motionless. Out of sight, the silver ankh I designed for him our first year, the one I took off his neck after I watched his heart trying so hard to keep going, the beat tumbling around under the skin where neck blends with shoulder. About a month into our relationship, I surprised him at a show where he was doing sound and found him delighted to see me. He gathered me into a hug, my nose in that softly curved space smelling slightly of lime, and I knew I had found my way home.
Cataclysm: calamitous, devastating, momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval.
Son gave me the word cataclysm in a Facebook message the other day. I was telling him how I am outside myself, watching as I go through the motions of living. Not to be overly dramatic, I decided to choose it for my word for the year since I hadn’t thought to pick one in January.
Inconsistent: not staying the same throughout
The house we bought hoping we had more time together is too quiet without his music and his singing (before he lost his voice) and his loudly proclaimed “Good morning! Good morning.” Some days I found that cacophony annoying. Its absence is louder.
Mixtape: a compilation of music from different sources.
I turn on his iPod to fill the silence. There is danger in this, a chance that a song from a tape he made for me will send me spiraling with lyrics like:
I know this sounds too good to be true
But I devote my whole life to you
And if my life should end my love goes on
And you will always have this song
You will see
You and me
Will always be… [unknown, transcribed from iPod compilation]
That song played five days after he died despite my not hearing it in at least 30 years before or the weeks since, even though he played that iPod all the time around the house and when we traveled.
Coincidence: a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.
Cheryl Andary says that deceased loved ones communicate by ways of uncanny songs. She also says that people have reported a shift in electrical energy when a deceased loved one visits. That presence can manifest itself sometimes in the flickering of lights. But because of how effortlessly spirits can manipulate electricity, they often do more than trigger a flicker in lights.
Babe, was that you who blew the circuit and broke the light in the room that was to be your studio, that I am now claiming for my bead room? Please stop breaking things I can’t fix.
Internal Monologue: a voice or voices in your head, your own or others.
A voice in my head, his, says, “you cannot usurp the whole house for your art.” One of my voices answers back sadly, “Now I can.”
Wish: desire for something that probably will not happen.
Ellen Bryant Voigt says, “Grief has one great wish and an eager imagination.”
Miss you. Wish you were here.
This Space Called Not Knowing II
Where do you end this journey, this space called not knowing.
I have not discovered any way to tie things up with five steps having been completed or ten strategies that have been worked through. I’ve wondered if I should put together a worksheet or 12 pages: work through these and, by the end, grief will be over and done.
I’ve considered how lovely it would be to wrap this journey in flowers and platitudes. It is not to be. I am still in this space called not knowing.
I read somewhere that what we want in grief is to return to a place we recognize. I find that when I return to a place I recognize, I, myself, am unrecognizable.
On the morning of the day he died at 10:30 a.m. (officially later because I stayed with him a while before I called Hospice, who called his death at 11:30 a.m.), he said, “Tell everyone I love them. “Then he said something I couldn’t catch. I guessed, he shook his head no, I guessed, he tried again, I guessed, wrong again. He stopped trying. That was the last he said.
In my journal, I wrote that he said, “I cannot say I love you enough.”
I’m glad I wrote it down. Because I do not remember his saying that. I wonder what else I have forgotten.
I am out at the place with crayons and huge cups of coffee to write the end of this story— something about this place called not knowing and grief, something about how I don’t want to be defined by grief, something about how I can put grief aside, something about how I know to distract—but the things in the corner are always there, grinning. I want to write something about how I can leave the things in corner grinning and still be okay, something about how grief is a dance with three partners – was, is and will be.
I want to write all of this, but I do not know how. I dwell in this space called not knowing.
11:02, July 27, 2024
Fourteen months, 16 days and ½ hour after he died, I find myself still in this space called not knowing.
I am sitting at a porch table at the Robert Morris Inn in Oxford, MD, here for a four-band music festival. This morning, I sat for brunch in the tap/dining room, the fireplace dark, heat not needed. Not quite 40 years ago, we, he and I, sat in this same room honeymooning, enjoying oysters Rockefeller (well, he was. I had not yet learned to like oysters and still only like them fried) in front of a crackling fire, celebrating our Valentine’s Day marriage. I’m making my best argument to my brain neurons that he is no longer anywhere on earth. If he were, he would be here with me in this space of celebrations: marriage, anniversaries, and quick two-night vacations. He is not here. He is, therefore, not anywhere on earth.
I am trying to rewrite my story (one of the ways of dealing with change and grief and reaction).
A new Story. The sun is hot here and things wilt all day but return during the dark, leaves outstretched. Even the birds are more active at night, sounds I have never heard coming from the aspens shivering along the banks of the frothing creek.
Yesterday it rained so hard I feared for all the seedlings. Yet here they are, stretching as if just awakened.
Last night I watched a green comet slash the black sky and dreamed of a coyote too tame for a wild thing and too wild for a tame thing. It made me think of him and the time we walked the redwoods, and how he (finally) felt their energy and found one to hug. How we found magic there. How I want our ashes to rest together there some day.
Pema Chodron says, “Let the hard things in life break you. Let them affect you. Let them change you. Let these hard moments inform you. Let this pain be your teacher. The experiences of your life are trying to tell you something about yourself. Don’t cop out on that. Don’t run away and hide under your covers.”
I have let the hard things in life break me. I have changed. I have not run away.
Wendell Berry says, “After a while, though grief did not go away from us, it grew quiet. What had seemed a storm wailing through the entire darkness seemed to come in at last and lie down.”
I have not reached the space where grief lies down. I have not found the word that will make the things in the corner release the memories and go away. I still travel with grief. It rides just under the surface and comes up for air and tears when it needs to. I have invited it from the corner to come lie down next to me so that we can talk. So far it has declined.
August 19, 2024, under the Sturgeon moon, I walk barefoot in the grass, talk to my garden plants, see the moon itself low low behind the tall pines across the street. I whisper to him, to myself, to the moon, to the All: “letgoletgoletgo.”
Rewrite your story:
Life is a mess/messy. It is random. It is a roulette wheel. But, if you want to “win,” you must play your chips. I play my chips. The wheel spins on.
I am back at the beach in the same house with the same friends as this time last year. Last year I asked him for dolphins and got none. This year they arrived in a huge pod I watched for 20 minutes on the horizon, and another the next day, and another the next day.
I think: “Is this a sign?” Grace–outward sign of inward change (Catholic Catechism definition memorized in third grade–grace the only thing I learned that I still believe in). A release. His goodbye. My acceptance. I’ll take that sign that he and I can come to closure, that we can let there be spaces in our togetherness with the winds of the heavens between us, where we sing and dance together but allow each of us to be alone [with thanks to Rumi].
I think: “This can be closure if I allow it.” I do.
Tammy Vitale has been writing and publishing poetry, prose and creative nonfiction on and off for over 30 years. In addition to the excerpt published in the ESWA anthology, an excerpt was published in the anthology, “Grace and Grit,” in 2025 (American University). Since completing her memoir of lyric essays, “Scent of Lime,” she has turned her attention to studying ekphrastic poetry and prose and has had ekphrastic pieces accepted for “Blood Dance,” and “The Metaphor Tree,” anthologies published by “The Ekphrastic Review.” She holds an M.A. in Story and Social Change from Goddard College (1996) and an M.F.A. in Writing (Creative Nonfiction and poetry) from Lindenwood University, St. Charles, MO (2024).
