Attention
By Em Wilding
PROMPT — Ask Me.
Ask me what it’s like to live in someone else’s house, taking care of their pets and their plants, and I can answer. Ask me what it’s like to be an apprentice to an herbalist, living with her and learning herbal medicine, milking goats, preparing meals, and I can answer. Ask me what it’s like to live and work at an ashram, smiling and greeting guests, chatting with them at meals, silently sitting with them in meditation, and rolling out a yoga mat next to them twice a day, and I can answer. Ask me what it is like to grow old next to someone, greeting each other with smiles each new day for a job well done, and I will have no idea.
I thought that was both our dreams, my husband and me. But he exited stage left, “I’m out!” he said, metaphorically, because he didn’t leave a note. Don’t most people who kill themselves leave a note? I looked it up and it turns out they do not. But that’s not what the lawyer said, the lawyer who I called after the homicide detectives came pounding on my door, five months after he died of unknown causes. Unknown to me. The coroner knew, and the police investigated, and they had ruled it suicide. I gave the detectives his phone when they came that day, and the search confirmed it.
But before that, I called a lawyer, who had me more terrified than anything before or since, especially because he didn’t leave a note. And the way he killed himself, “It’s like he was trying to set you up,” the lawyer said. But she didn’t know my husband. He would never have done that. Then again, he would never have killed himself. The ice of fear that ran through my heart when I realized how easily he could have killed me too.
He said often in the nearly twenty years we were married, “I could kill myself.”
“You wouldn’t, though, right?” I asked. “You wouldn’t do that to our daughter” I said. And he agreed that he wouldn’t. Of course he wouldn’t. What changed?
Maybe it was the Lyme disease that burrowed into his brain, and caused such severe “brain fog" that I finally understood what those words meant. He couldn’t follow a conversation to the end.
He’d ask me a question and I’d say, “We just talked about this yesterday!” in an annoyed, put out sort of way. “You need to pay better attention,” I’d say.
“You don’t understand,” he’d say, “I’m really worried about this,” and I would scoff and dismiss. Husbands never pay attention to wives, I thought.
Sometimes it’s the wives who aren’t paying attention.
He finished the complete course of antibiotics for Lyme but it didn’t get better. He went back to his doctor who tested him again and said “Your Lyme is gone, you must be depressed. Go see a therapist.”
He made an appointment with the therapist, but the earliest they could see him was three months away. “January 4” - the date of his appointment - became his mantra. “I just have to make it to January 4.”
Finally January 4 came. He went to the therapist. He cried for two hours, he said, talking about our daughter’s death, eleven years earlier. He had a standing weekly appointment, and another appointment set up with a psychiatrist, for medication.
“Did she give you anything to do?” I asked.
“She told me to look for joy every day.”
“Did you find any today?”
“Any what?” he asked.
On January 7 he was dead.
Em Wilding’s writing explores loss, family, and the healing power of nature. She has been published in The Sun, Mothering Magazine, Wild Greens, and Literary Mama. She travels widely and recently returned from a writing residency in Dublin, Ireland. Em writes from Pittsburgh, PA.
