Life goes on -- Rosie is back to school now, I have spent some time organizing my study at home and my office at work, and am back to going into the office to work at least part of each day. I find I am now able to say "my study" (it was ours) and "my bedroom" and so on. But there are still constant reminders of her. She is everywhere in my apartment, in the furniture and the pictures on the walls, the dishes we eat from and the nick-nacks in the china closet. Yesterday I had to return her university-issued laptop and then spent a couple of hours (with the help of my friend Berthold) packing up her campus office. I will finish with that today or tomorrow and then everything will be moved temporarily to an office in the philosophy department used by visiting faculty, where I will try to sort through it over the next few months in my spare time. This is not going to be easy -- I cannot possibly keep everything yet everything has some significance. Should I keep old letters of reference, or materials for courses she taught, or xeroxes of archival sources for papers she wrote and published, or her first course evaluations? Books she read, and books she meant to read but didn't get to? There are more than 20 large boxes to go through. Each item in each box will bring back memories of her.
Yesterday was a truly beautiful fall-like day and today promises to be more of the same. Angela loved the change of seasons and the especially she loved the early fall -- she would always play Yo-Yo Ma's first recording of the Bach cello suites at this time of year, somehow it just fit with the change in the weather -- she loved that recording for a sort of raw quality in his playing -- I would like to play that now, but I am not sure whether I can stand listening to it without her. I found myself yesterday feeling her absence very strongly, not only because of working on her office but also because it was just the sort of day on which she would have loved to be out for a walk or a bike ride, and there I was riding my bike around the neighborhood without her. It all started in fact when my daughter posted on facebook a line from a Roches song (Mr. Sellack) "since I've seen you last, I've waited for some things that you would not believe" and I immediately thought of the next words "to come true." The Roches were something Angela introduced me to, even before we were actually "going out," when we were just friends -- and we passed them on to our daughters. Then in my office I cleared off the table that was covered with books -- a table Angela was refinishing in her house in Pittsburgh when I first met her, which was then our first dining room table when we married, then became our study table in South Bend when our family grew, and then moved into my office here in Chicago. That table has a lot of memories inscribed around it.
So, here I am, moving on into this new phase of my life, but full of memories of Angela -- I miss making dinner with her, as I make dinner for Rosie and me; I miss her excitement about teaching new classes as we get ready for the quarter; I miss planning new things with her, and her joy in beautiful days like this; the way she would talk about her students and the pleasure she took when they did new and interesting work for her; all of the little things and interactions that shaped our life together and that are now only there in memory. It is hard now to think of this as my apartment, my room, my life, but not our apartment, our room, our life. It is still so full of her presence, as I said before.
I think I will end this with a poem Angela and I both loved, by e. e. cummings. I once sent her this in an e-mail and she told me she had sung the first stanzas at HighScope camp in Ypsilanti when she was a teenager. She also told me she liked it better with the later, more explicitly Christian stanzas added.
i thank you God for most this amazing
by e. e. cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
And with that I will dedicate this beautiful day to doing the work I am allotted in honor of my beloved wife Angela.
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