When My Husband Died, I Did Something That May Shock And Disturb You. I Hope This Explains Why.
In the 13 months Jeff lived while dying of pancreatic cancer, we walked a 1-mile loop in our small mountain town every day, sometimes twice a day, mostly holding hands. In the spring and summer, he always tore a leaf off the vine of hops that grew around the banister at the end of our alley, handed it to me, and I chewed it, a little ritual we thought was funny and fun.
On good days, he raced me up High Street and he always won because I was laughing too hard to run. And at some point in the loop, every time, I asked him questions that I hoped would close the space between us, bringing me even closer to him and his experience.
I asked him things like, “Are you nervous about anything?” to which he said, “Not being able to see,” because his chemo had affected his vision. Questions like, “Who do you want to speak at your memorial?” and, “Do you think I was a good partner?” And “Is it hard for you — all these hard questions?” to which he replied, “No, I like the chance to help.”
One afternoon, just before we crossed the train tracks on our way home, I asked, “What do you want me to write in your obituary?”
“Just tell a story,” he told me, with his characteristic brevity and trust. So I did, and writing his obituary felt like a collaboration. I didn’t want it to end. But of course it did, and now, a year and a half later, I am telling a different story.
There is a part of me that wants to warn you about it — because what I’m about to tell you may shock or even disturb you — and a part of me that wants to trust you with it, but all of me wants to tell this story because what is love without sharing and what is the truth without telling?
As Jeff lay dying in the ICU, his eyes already darkened from blue to galaxy black, I watched him peer into the unknown, into whatever lay beyond the popcorn ceiling of that hospital. For 30 years, I watched him peer into the unknown, sticking his whole curious head into dark spaces, like caves in the south of France and basements in vacant houses.
In 1995, Jeff launched his body from the top of a speed ski track in Vars, France, into the unknown and became the first person to ski 150 mph. He referred to his sport as “drag racing on skis.” Zero to 150 mph in 16 seconds. But because he was a man of nuance, he loved the sense of acceleration even more than the speed itself.
For the decade he raced, I often stood at the base of speed tracks, looking up the 1 kilometer to where he assembled his body into his aerodynamic tuck and committed to the run. During events, I stepped just in front of all the other spectators, so no one was in my periphery. So there was no distraction. So there was, in essence, no space between me and him. I wanted to feel all I could.
Jeff loved the unknown. As a child in Auburn, California, he explored caves for hours only to emerge from the earth just 15 yards from where he entered. As a young man, he slept on top of Mount Whitney in a lightning storm, and flew 700 feet from California’s tallest bridge at midnight, tethered to steel by bungees around his ankles, to the American River below. In Europe, he once skied 100 mph naked side-by-side with a friend for fun, and he stepped over all the electric fences on French hillsides to pet and kiss the goats. But when he became a husband, and then a parent, he shifted his love for the unknown to accommodate for less risk because he wanted to be around for all of it — all the love.
Just before Jeff died, we talked about the unknown at our kitchen table in the context of his impending death, and in particular, what I saw as my upcoming million unknowns without him.
“The unknown is beautiful,” he told me.
“The unknown is terrifying,” I replied.
Because his heart was kind, and because his diaphragm wasn’t working, he repeated, his voice more float than traction, “The unknown is beautiful, Carolina.”
“You think it’s beautiful because you believe things will work out. I think it’s terrifying because I don’t believe things will work out,” I told him.
“I guess we’re both right,” he said.
In the ICU, on the last morning of his life, breathing was so hard for Jeff that I pictured his mind deciding that breathing should not be involuntary: It should be one choice after the next. In this newest unknown of his life, he opened his jaw like a drawer, slid it forward for more breath, shut it, and then did it again. Each breath was another chance, another choice to inhale beauty, and pain, and the breath of his daughters, Eleanore and Frances, and me, the loves he did not want to leave.
In his last 16 hours, as with most of his life, Eleanore, Frances and I held onto him. We left no space between us in that hospital room. He was our framework, our scaffolding, our being, our body. I climbed into the bed, set my head under his jaw and draped my arm over his chest. Eleanore gripped his right arm; Frances gripped his left hand. And we told him stories. How he once found us a hidden ancient Roman bridge to sit our bodies down on so we could feel the ruts and imagine the flow of centuries. How he taught us to fly off rooftops and land in feet of soft snow.
We told him how lucky we were that his hands held our hands everywhere. When Eleanore was 5 years old and terrified at her first (and last) soccer practice, Jeff walked onto the field, took her hand and they ran after the ball together. Once, in the ocean, Jeff held Frances’ and my hands as we floated just above a manta ray and her liquid wings.
We whispered to Jeff that if he ever let go of our hands, it was to point out new ways to go, off-trail, off-piste: up a moraine in Yosemite to Hanging Basket Lake, down tight alleys in tall cities, into magical redwood forests, through ideas, and into hard work, joy, commitment and community. And we also told him the story of his last year, as if he did not know; how he opened, and continued to open, even when, at 55 years old, his life contracted, and pain and death closed in. How he chose his own metaphor when it came to cancer — how he chose to “compete” with it, not battle it.
At the midpoint of Jeff’s year of cancer, I developed a sty under my right eye, a sac that hung low and red and heavy. After its excision, my face was bruised and scabbed along the incision line. I loved it. I told him I wished it would never go away. When he asked me why, I said, “because finally the outside of me shows the inside of me.”
“Pain?” he asked.
“Yes, pain.”
A few nights later, when his pain became overwhelming but he didn’t want to take OxyContin, he stepped under the showerhead to let water wash some of the agony away. I lay down on the tile beside the shower and I asked him, “Are you afraid to die?”
“No. Dying is the easy part. You’ve got the hard part,” he told me.
He was standing in a shower, but really, he was stepping off a worn human trail of thinking — showing me how to see, and feel, and know things differently.
I know when Jeff’s body ended. The breathlessness that followed his breath stretched across the 60 seconds of 4:00 a.m. The timelessness of death began then. But two nurses, obeying the hospital rules, had to prove to the state of California that he was dead, so they leaned over us and listened for his heart and felt for his pulse. Finally, at 4:07 a.m., they declared what we already knew.
Our small family spent the next hour washing his arms and ankles and bruised shins. We praised his nose and neck and hands in a humble merging of borrowed rituals. We dressed his feet in socks, his legs in sweats, his chest in a T-shirt. We lifted his body onto that gurney, zipped that bag around him, and followed him down the hall to that van and through the dark to the mortuary downtown. We helped wheel him through a foot of new snow into that garage. We left his body there to be swallowed by fire. And we waited a week for what they said would be his ashes.
Jeff had asked Eleanore and Frances to promise that they would launch back into their lives after he died. He told them both, separately, “Mom is strong; she’ll be OK.” And so, brokenhearted, but keeping their promise, our brave daughters left home, one to London, the other to Nashville. I stayed.
I shoveled snow in the second biggest winter in Tahoe history, hacked at ice in the driveway, ate soup our friends delivered. I set the box of his ashes, labeled “Jeffrey Hamilton,” on the dresser by our bed. I lifted it up when I needed to feel the weight of him — not just the weight of the loss of him. I tried my hardest to put him inside my mind, as he asked me to.
“Put me in your mind, Carolina. What you build in your mind is so powerful. If you put me there, I’ll be there,” he told me.
We were left with my mind because he did not believe in heaven, and because he did not believe in heaven, I could not put him there. But in two conversations before he died, he opened to a different way.
“Are you sure there is nothing after life?” I asked him.
He fixed his eyes on me and said, “No, I am not sure. I don’t know anything.”
In an earlier conversation, he said, “If there is a place I can miss you forever, I want to be there. Because I will miss you forever.”
So, in my midnights, when I peer into the dark of our bedroom and cry out that I miss him, I picture him missing me. I picture him in my mind. I picture him not knowing for sure there was nothing else.
But picturing is weightless. And more than believing the most magnetic, weightless idea, I crave his body — his hand on the back of my neck, his foot on my lap, his legs, steady and playful, even on ice, showing me how to trust. I crave the way his body enveloped his girls to show them how to hold a catfish by its mouth, and then, later, position a putter, and then, later, drive a tractor.
On Feb. 14, a month after he died, as I shoveled more snow in the driveway, I thought, I will transfer his ashes to the urn today. He and I did not care one bit about Valentine’s Day, so doing this big thing on this day felt like it could be our inside joke — something unexpected that we could share.
My idea quickly turned into momentum. I ditched the shovel, marched into our house, lifted the cardboard box given to me by the funeral home weeks before, set it on the kitchen table, and ripped into it. I was terrified of this unknown, of the way Jeff would look, rendered.
I had put off this act for weeks, and I had even asked his sister to help me transfer his ashes whenever I had the courage to do it. But on this day, I knew I wanted to do it alone, with no one in my periphery — just Jeff and me. No space between us.
I clawed at the box and cried. I was afraid but also raging. I heard myself speak to him in a current of words, like “Baby, my love, I am here, right here,” and then, suddenly, there he was: a dune of gray and white.
I pulled the dog tag from the zip tie and tore at the rigid plastic bag. I opened the bag and stared into him. The body of his body was not ash at all. Everyone was using the wrong word. He was more bone than flake, more rock than air.
I stood over him, looking into him, and I felt a surge of autonomy and intimacy at the exact same time, as if I’d been set free by my hunger for him. I dug my hands into the pile of him, just like he dug his hands into beaches to sculpt sand mermaids with our girls. I felt him, and moved my fingers to sift him, letting him fall back into the bag. I ached for more of the body of him, and so, without a single thought about what I should or should not do, I leapt the fence of protocol and all its barbed rules, and I wet my finger with the tip of my tongue and I set that finger into the pile of him.
I felt him settle there on my fingertip — part grace, part mischief, all love — and then I lifted him to my mouth and I tasted him.
He was salt.
“My god,” I cried out loud in my kitchen, “My god, Jeff Hamilton, you are the ocean!”
I cried tides and wept words. He was the ocean. He was ocean-sized. He was the salt of every being through time. He was the salt of every being to come.
I couldn’t stop. I sunk my fingers into him again and gathered part of him up in one primal pinch and set him in a small mound on my tongue. This time, I shut my mouth, and I worked my jaw, and I chewed what was left of his bones. They did not cut my gums or my tongue, but, instead, forgave, and relented to the work of my jaw and the hunger of my heart.
Jeff always preferred the truth, so here it is: I ate him because I could not not eat him. And this is also true: With the first grind of him against my teeth, the howling inside me stopped. My ache settled. My hollow filled. My cry dried. And I hummed.
As I moved my jaw, I heard Jeff, and felt him, and followed him, and embodied him, and I hummed a low hum. My inhale was hum. My exhale was hum. I hummed while I walked to the island in our kitchen. I hummed as I opened the bottom drawer. I hummed as I found a measuring cup, and I hummed as I walked back to the box, and scooped one precious quarter-cup of him at a time into the ceramic vessel I bought online.
When Jeff was still alive, with just 13 more months to live, I sent him a daily morning email. It was long, more like a list. In a succession of 10, 20 or 30 lines, I thanked him for the little and big things I noticed about him the day before, like, “Thank you for teaching me how to play darts — ‘Keep your feet steady and just push.’” And “Thank you for saying, ‘What prepares you for a thing is not blind optimism but knowing that it might be hard.’” And “Thank you for the chance to feel your lips on my cheek when you came to bed. Big loving kisses.”
It was my habit to watch him, be awed by him, and write to him, so just before he died, I asked him if I could still write to him every day after he was gone, or if that would be weird. He said yes, of course, and no, it wouldn’t be weird at all.
So on Feb. 15, I wrote the Valentine’s Day story to him. I needed to understand what happened alongside the person who had always helped me understand. What I learned as I wrote to Jeff was that somewhere on this planet there must be an ancient knowing that found a way to hum through me, and tell me, without words, that my act of eating Jeff’s ashes was proportional to my grief. I learned that I reconfigured our relationship to accommodate the fact that one of us was dead. And, after I finished writing, I knew that for one hour in my kitchen, I hummed the hum of the universe, the hum of the merging of dead and alive, gone and here, known and unknown. I hummed the hum of my beautiful man showing me the way to him, off-trail, off-piste. I hummed the hum of love.
For the next six months, I wrote every day for hours. I wrote a series of stories to Jeff about love and loss. I couldn’t stop. Writing was the way I closed the infinite space between him and me.
I shared that first story about what I did with his ashes almost immediately with very close friends, beginning with Jeff’s sister. I called her one night, and as I read, she listened, and when I stopped, she sobbed. In that moment, I felt seen, as if she was peering through my skin to my pain, my loss, and my love. I continued to share my writing, one-on-one, with dear friends, my parents and siblings, and Jeff’s mom.
Jeff has been dead for 22 months, and in that time, I have hauled him into my daily life because I don’t want him to become an idea. I want him closer than that. The truth is, Jeff gave me a kind of grief map a month before he died.
“If I died, what would you do?” I asked him
“I would want to feel it all — I would want to feel all the grief,” he said.
So I don’t feel wrong about walking straight into my sadness, leaving no space between Jeff and me in this new reality.
Every morning, when I first open my eyes, I slip my hand over to his side of the bed under what would have been his hip and I say what I said for 30 years, “Good morning, Jeffrey,” and then I say what he always said, “Mornin’ Sweet.” It shocks me how much I sound like him.
Every day, I press record on my phone and talk into it, to the Jeff who lives in my mind. I ask for advice, tell him about our girls, and, looking into the sky, I ask him where he is. And usually I cry because hearing my voice and not his makes me miss our back-and-forth.
One year exactly after that first Valentine’s Day without him on this planet, I decided to start taking daily self-portraits because the person who knew me and loved me and laughed with me best was gone, and now I needed to see myself.
I caption each photograph, keep them in a folder on my desktop, and that is where they sit, unseen by anyone but me, telling me my true story of being a widow. They are not pretty, and I love how not pretty they are.
I exchange hard and beautiful daily truths with my sister and two dear friends. I regularly interview Jeff’s mom, who lost her husband to Alzheimer’s on the day Jeff was diagnosed. Our recorded conversations give space and attention to her grief, and they bring me closer to her and to Jeff.
And, every day, I read aloud one thank you note from the 375 I emailed him. In the minutes it takes me to read them, we are together, seeing each other.
I don’t just grieve for Jeff. I celebrate him by finding joy, being strong, helping my community, and guiding and being inspired by our daughters. I am teaching myself how to live alone, manage and clear feet of snow, locate irrigation issues, and drive our mower, which was easier to learn than I thought it would be. I planted another generation of the sunflower and hollyhock seeds Jeff harvested for me, and I continue to clear and plant spaces for new growth, which I sometimes refer to as “rage-planting” because it is such a muscular act, made possible by a pickaxe, a broken heart, and belief in beauty. Slowly, I am speaking the intimidating language of finances. And, because Jeff showed me how to be brave, I practice being brave like him every day.
Sharing my story with the world in this very public way means I have to be brave. I will tell these most private truths with the widest circle yet. So, to prepare this piece for you, an audience of strangers, I will admit that I am picturing six familiar faces. The first is Jeff for all the reasons. I also picture the faces of three peripheral friends whose husbands have died since Jeff died, and I hope this story frees them to tell their own stories, as soft, frightening, raw, unpredictable, mundane, or sacred as they are.
And I picture the faces of our daughters, Eleanore and Frances, who stayed open as I told them this heavy story — heavy enough to shut anyone down. I told them in person, but separately. Their collective response amounted to compassion and love. They met my story with reverent words like, “Being an artist means sometimes not being polite at all, Mom, but disrupting the conversation with the truth.” And “What you did seems ancient.”
Jeff said, “Tell a story.”
I did, I am, and I always will. Feeling it all, telling the truest stories I can about what I feel, and trusting people with those stories is the way I grieve, the way I live, and the way I hum the hum of love.
The mother of two daughters, Carolyn Hamilton writes, hikes, collects oral histories, and is learning how to balance joy and loss in the mountains of Northern California. She holds a master’s degree in the teaching of writing, and is the author of the memoir “The Hum of Love,” from which this piece is derived. Learn more at thehumoflove.com.
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