This post has taken me months to form.

Let’s start here, it’s as good a place as any. Picture my closet as a small room, a walk-in. (It didn’t look like this, but it was close). A room with 3 1/2 walls. A room with two upper shelves which were packed with boxes: Robert put them there. Over the years he crammed in more and more and I wasn’t sure what was happening: he was impinging on my shoe territory. I gave up asking him to move the stuff to the basement. He feared the possibility that these cartons might be destroyed by water.

He had been archiving his life.

And, unbeknownst to me, he was archiving mine.

Since March, a friend has been helping me, almost weekly.

She climbs up on a tall ladder, again and again, week after week, and pulls down one carton or one shoe box at a time, dusts it off, and, we put it on the bed on a towel. I sit and read aloud, I share what I found. She gives me nonjudgmental moral support as I unveil each mystery.

First, I found a huge collection of Robert’s family photos; boxes and boxes. We tried to organize the faces of people I didn’t know or have heard of. We threw away so much repetitive, poorly done, faded photos. What remained were put aside in a family box, others went into albums. It took weeks. I am still not done.

In this time capsule I found his ticket to the 1964 World’s Fair. Books of S&H Green Stamps that supermarkets would give you at the time of your purchase. They were such a big deal in the 50sw and 60s. You’d redeem them for something — you likely didn’t need … I found Robert’s JHS ID card, his first school bank book, a note from the principal asking that his diploma be withheld because of a prank he pulled at his graduation. (Another story). There were tickets to every show he/we attended. Our college yearbooks: our books are two of the same from CCNY, having graduated the same year, just as his parents left behind two of the same book, also from CCNY.

I would keep the best of the lots and toss whatever I could: the load was too massive, it was overwhelming.

Archiving another person’s life was confusing and guilt-provoking.

We found a sprinkling of my stuff, from my small-in-comparison- memory box. I found an envelope with hair from my first haircut. I found a letter from camp to my parents telling them I lost the riflery competition by one point to my friend Janet, who, thanks to Facebook, I have found after about sixty years. I found the diary that my friend J. had given me when we were twelve. Her father had given it to her, he was an accountant, and it was kind of a date book with a blue leather cover, now disintegrating. I revisited myself when I was twelve, in 7th grade. I found my autograph books from elementary school, from JHS, from HS.

Everytime we had a chance, we hauled out another box and I would groan. “No more!” After months, the later-placed  stuff in the closet was more accessible and as we forged into the abyss, the findings were from an earlier time. One day, I looked to the sky and asked Robert, who is now part of the universe, for help, for a sign. What turned up first thing in our next box-exploration were notes from a stack that he would create and tape all around the apartment, years ago.

 

Despite his being in a nursing home for more than three years, we were together for half a century. For every occasion there was a card, many of them we created for … birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day. For each other. Recently, I found a bag of cards he had purchased years before he became ill for a future Valentine’s Day, never to be written in. The amount of mutual cards filled a large bin. Many of the cards we made had moving  parts and were as funny as hell.

And, of course, there were love letters. There were letters between Robert and his first wife:  He was married in 1969 to J., who was my childhood friend, the one who gave me the diary. There was a snapshot of them at the dais of their wedding, there were notes upon notes that they wrote to one another at work: they were both teaching and each would call the school of the other and leave silly love messages with in-jokes. I was privy to the  beginning of their life together, their life together and how it evolved was in my hands. At the bottom of the pile there was a photo of them at a beach under The Whitestone Bridge. The back was labeled “Probably the last photo of us, 1974.”  Within that envelope of little slips of cutesy notes was a four page note in red ink from J. to Robert telling him how furious she was, jealous, something had happened. Something that he did or thought that he did, or her perception.  She insisted on couples therapy. He alluded that it was too expensive, she gave a counter-complaint.

And then, toward the end she wrote,  “Husband, we have problems.”

 

Their marriage ended.

I was pulled back into a time warp of over fifty years from reading all of this and it just kept compounding, because then we found the box of stuff from MY first marriage, it its parallel universe of twenty-something year olds, another beginning of a relationship of young lovers; again, there were those sweet little cutesy notes.
It’s what Jerry Seinfeld would likely call “The Shmoopy Stage.”  It’s the young folks’ pledge of undying love, of forever, of that passion we feel with new beginnings.

Let’s go further back in time: I met my first husband when I was fifteen and he was seventeen. We were together a total of eleven years, married for seven. He was my tall, blond, blue-eyed “Peter Pan” image. He was the guy who would rescue me, so I then thought, from my life with my parents. He gave me the illusion of being my protector: He made me feel safe.

We went to different high schools. He lived all the way at the upper tip of Manhattan on the west side and I lived all the way down on the east side. He was a sixteen year-old already earning money doing television repair on the side and no one knew how young he was. A mechanical genius.  He could fix anything and wanted to be an electrical engineer. He continued his studies after H.S.

The college-era zeitgeist was to land a diamond while in school. Everyone seemed to be engaged. It was the 1960s.

Steve gave me a pear-shaped diamond. Little did I know it was really tear-shaped.

We got married when I was nineteen, I had just begun college. It was 1967. I often questioned what I had done,  I would fall into periods of anxiety: Before the wedding, which he pushed for, not I, (I didn’t know how to defer to myself, rather than another), I felt like I had electric shock springs, shivers, winding up and down my body, ending in my gut.  I was sick with excitement and dread. He declared a couple of months before the big event in a restaurant in the theater district. My parents pulled it all together. I was a zombie.

I left one frying pan and was soon to be cooking myself in another.

We lived in a tiny basement apartment in The Bronx, far from my family’s Lower East Side Manhattan apartment.  The two windows, one in each room, facing the street, began mid-waist. Feral cats would stroll by and look in.  I was expected to arise whenever Steve got up to go to school or work, to make him breakfast, then I’d spend an hour and a half commuting to school on busses and trains, and let’s not forget the twenty minute walk to transportation. We were living where we lived because it was convenient for him.

On our TV with rabbit ears, that sat on a rickety metal stand against a pine-paneled wall, we watched an endless line of cars making their way to Woodstock. We marveled at the moon-landing.  As the veil fell away, just like the previously mentioned couple, Robert and his wife, we had problems. It was, after all, The 60s. Young men had anxiety and feared the draft lottery for the Viet Nam War. It was the age of free-love, it was pot-laced, it was the “do you dig it- era, the time to do your own thing.

And he did. It was the era of cheating.

 

In those days, everyone I knew seemed to be a little nuts, or stoned. In reality, society was going a little nuts. We were listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, grooving on Joni Mitchell. It was a weird time of transition. I didn’t want to face the reality that the person who I thought would rescue me, was in need of rescuing himself.

We moved to a more normal apartment across the street, this time upstairs while the creepy landlord lived below in the garage with his family. If we dropped anything on the floor he would bang on the ceiling with a broom.

Unbeknownst to us at the beginning, or at least to me, Steve was ill with an horrific case of Crohn’s disease. At that time this disease was just managed with steroids, a drug that eventually destroys you. Even today there is no cure. At one point, he decided NYC was not good for him: He found a job in Florida, packed up his things, (post two-affairs) and fled to the warmth, to work for a utility company. He thought the change would do him good, but things only got worse.

While I was in The Bronx and working in Manhattan.

 

 

Back to the closet where there was a huge bag, full of letters. Who knew that this guy liked to write and would send daily tomes of introspection and contriteness? Who would imagine that he had that capacity to step out of himself and examine the situation we were in, that he caused. Could he be believed? Was he gaslighting? Should I leave? He felt he was maturing, was seeing more clearly, was apologetic.

Now he knew what he wanted. A better future.

 

He returned from Florida still sick and wanting to begin a new life.

We eventually bought a co-op apartment, moving from The Bronx to Queens.

The cycle of illness returned. He was in and out of the hospital, two hospitals, with worsening Crohn’s disease. I moved him from a Bronx hospital to a Manhattan hospital where the best specialist was on staff.  At times during attacks, he looked like a leper; what was happening to his insides was mirrored on his outsides. His face dissolved into peels. He writhed with pain from his disintegrating guts. He was admitted to the hospital and released over and over. I got up at dawn, took busses and trains to work and then visited him, coming home in the dark, exhausted.

I had to do the move to the new apartment alone.  He came out of the hospital for a short period, no longer looking like the young robust man I had married. His skin was hanging from malnutrition. He could barely stand. His bones were being eaten away and so was his mind. For a period of time while in the hospital he was psychotic: delusional.

Eventually he came home. He lived in the new apartment for a few weeks but had to return to the hospital.

Steve’s Peter Pan image didn’t save him, all the cutesy love letters leading to pages of introspection betrayed him along with his young body: he pulled out a tube on a Saturday morning, just as I was calling him Mt. Sinai Hospital, just as he picked up the phone and breathlessly screamed, “I’m dying!” “I’m dying!”

Then he did.

He was twenty-eight years old.
I was twenty-six.

The only thing I had left were words on well-preserved paper.

First, I took the notes and letters that Robert’s and his first wife wrote. I took the letters between finacés.

Then, I took the pile of letters except for a few, that Steve had written to me. They had been preserved for half a century and pulled me backwards, for weeks, into the strangest time-warp, where I lived in and re-lived pain and confusion.

 

 

I took the bags and boxes, and folders of paper and reduced hundreds of pages to shreds, something I had to force myself to do, to let all the old toxicity go. I continued to be confused on the time-space continuum. I was living in an era that had long since ended.

Half a century later, I realized I had never grieved Steve. But having re-read his letters, I forgave him.

At the time of Steve’s death, the apartment we had purchased was several blocks from where Robert lived. He had been divorced and now engaged. He was the first person I called after calling the hospital. I couldn’t depend on my parents. Robert was engaged to a woman attending Bryn Mawr College whose family demanded that Latin be spoken at-the-dinner-table: When I found the letters between L. and Robert, pledging undying love, they joined everything else in the shredder.

After my call to Robert, he appeared at my door with two turkey sandwiches from the German Deli on Kissena Boulevard, and The New York Times.

As fate would have it, Robert and I married a year after Steve passed.

Finally some normalcy.

As we pulled more things off the shelves, we found cartons stuffed with more large envelopes. We had reached the travel section: there were our 10 European trip itineraries and large, stuffed envelopes of paper souvenirs: brochures, letters of confirmations from hotels which in those days were written and mailed to and fro Europe. The envelopes were labeled with the year and the names of the countries from that trip, … Spain, Portugal…Liechtenstein, France, San Marino, Andorra, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg …Great Britain …

 

 

One of Robert’s created itineraries, everything planned, nothing left to chance.

 

 

Back in the closet, we reached cartons of envelopes containing every letter and note Robert had ever received since the late 1950s; thank you notes from Bar Mitzvah gifts, hundreds of letters between himself and family during years of camp and some travel. Everything labeled with the name of the person the letters were from. Mail between himself and so many young ladies pledging their love. Ah yes, he was charming.

I mean, look: how many guys have three degrees in architecture, can paint, play the guitar and five string banjo, sing, tell jokes, have a great sense of humor, have a sense of righteous indignation and act on it? He tried to make the world a better place. He worked with the community, he was a founder of the Bayside Historical Society. He knew thousands of classical music pieces and then went out and bought the vinyl or CD. On and on. He was a true Renaissance man.

 

And, he could drive you crazy. He had shtick. He also had obsessions. Several were annoying, sometimes intolerable. They were part of his genius. As our son wrote in a Father’s Day card in the third grade:

Dear Dad,

Thank you for scratching my back every night. As I told you on June 11, why do you do things your way all the time,
Mr. Picky? 

Sincerely,
E.

 

Out of the mouth of an eight-year-old: That’s how it was. A child perceiving his father’s need for control, to save, to archive, to remember. To be remembered.

Robert could be difficult. He was a brain running wild. He was perfectly imperfect. He never stopped talking! And then he went into a nursing home.

And he went silent.

 

 

 

Lago di Como 1985

 

But, grief is strange. It is a filter of all the mind-movies you replay. It peels the skin off the things that drove you crazy and somehow, someway, leaves you with a fruit that is ripe, juicy and flawless. That’s how the mind works. Maybe that’s how the mind heals.
Maybe that’s how I keep going, along with the doubling of anti-anxiety meds.

Feeding birds off the hotel balcony in Firenze

 

As I near the area that is left to unload, this one with my comparatively little stuff, I am still stuck in that Quantum hyperspace. For the first time in decades, there are empty shelves in the closet. And in my heart.

I live with the memory of the different time zones of my life. The then, the after-then, and the now. I was caregiver to two men who were trying to figure out the world. The first, the younger one, was introspective and apologetic, trying to define himself. The second could not face his inner workings and lived an extroverted life. He said he could never relax. Maybe that is why the Universe took him when it did. He was burned out.

I thought that both of these men could rescue me, but I ended up rescuing them to the best of my ability.
With both, there was suffering; theirs and mine. Going back into the now-sorted plastic bins of memories, I realize that both of their bodies betrayed them.

Those letters, bags and bags of letters, stuffed to the gills, opened a window to the workings of two people, both at a time when they were young and not yet fully formed.  I remind myself of a 1974 postage stamp series from Robert’s collection.

“Letter Mingle Souls.”

And mingle, our souls did. Two men poured their hearts out in different ways, one expounding on feelings, the other on observations. But that is what love is: a cookbook, a multitude of recipes. Sometimes you have the ingredients for perfection and sometimes you have to improvise.

I  forgave Steve. I forgave Robert. I forgave myself: survivors often have guilt.

Now the house is quiet. All of those hundreds of pages of written words, pledges, thoughts, promises from the past are either in shreds, recycled, or in a huge plastic, labeled bin which will end up back on a near-empty shelf of the closet. My closet.

Now it is time to write another love letter.

To myself.

 

 

📌The series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey
(becomes the husband journey)

The previous post is here

The next post is coming …

 

The Cerebral Jukebox is playing Love Letters
sung by Ketty lester

 

 

 

Allusion to the Seinfeld Shmoopy episode  https://youtu.be/eC8xvLT70C0?si=Ghix_DN1ayqXhmpR