Leslie Gray Streeter - Black Widow: A Sad-Funny Journey Through Grief for People Who Normally Avoid Books with Words Like Journey in the Title

H ere, says the nice enough salesman, pointing to the lawn crypt to his right, your loved one would go in first, with his head facing this way. And when its time, you would go in headfirst, so your heads and hearts are touching for eternity.

Ummthanks?

Nice Enough Salesman makes reference to concepts like eternity and togetherness and how, forty or fifty years from now, the body that used to be me can be placed facing whats left of what used to be my husband, Scott.

All I can hear is Your husband is dead. Your husband is dead. Pick a box, your husband is dead.

Youll forgive me for not thinking clearly right now, because my husband very recently dropped dead in front of me while we were making out. And when I say very recently, I mean yesterday.

I have to pull myself together and deal with this sometimewell, right now, probablybut what I really want to do is jump on the golf cart from which my mother is nervously watching me and drive us to the nearest bar.

I should be at the Palm Beach Post, the newspaper I write for, finishing a column about the free drinks Scott and I were supposed to have had as research for a cocktail story. That research was supposed to have happened yesterday afternoon, right around the time our stunned, sobbing relatives began landing at the airport. We were supposed to be celebrating the job Scott was supposed to start on Monday before we picked up our adorably goofy baby boy from day care.

Supposed to doesnt mean crap.

Instead, Im at a cemetery trying to pretend that any scenario that involves my husband in a crypt is at all okay. Having to even think about this crypt instead of free drinks is pissing me off.

I guess its not legal to keep him in a refrigerated travel-trailer in my backyard? I ask Nice Enough Salesman, who looks startled. The widows got jokes! Perhaps this is not the time?

Unfortunately, no.

I feel like were doing some twisted vaudeville bithes an appliance salesman with a baggy suit and a comically large flower on his lapel trying to talk a dizzy housewife into buying a newfangled washing machine, but she has to wait for her husbands permission to buy it. The jokeand this is a good oneis that she cant ask him cause, you knowhes dead.

That isnt funny at all, is it?

I cannot fully fathom how we got here, because for the past twenty-four hours I swear I keep blacking out and somehow materializing in jacked-up places like funeral homes and cemeteries. I do know this: My Scotty, who had not been feeling well for a few days, got up in the middle of the night to pee. He noted that our almost-two-year-old son, Brooks, was still sleeping soundly across the hall and asked if I wanted to make out. Since I still had a few hours before the deadline for a story I was writing, and because I dont turn down twilight make-outs, I agreed. Then we started kissing until he stopped mehe never stopped meand said that something was wrong.

I turned on the light and saw Scotts head shaking, kind of like a blender that keeps rumbling three seconds after you turn it off. I wasnt really awake yet, so I couldnt quite understand what was happening, what I could not stop from happening. I cant tell you how much time passedthirty seconds or a hundred yearsbut as quickly as Scott had started shaking, he stopped moving.

Whats happening? I half screamed, half pleaded. Scott didnt answer. All I know is that finally he let out two desperate, involuntary breaths.

Then he didnt breathe again.

That was yesterday.

So what I want is for Nice Enough Salesman to give me a minute, because things are kind of fucked up right now. Im planning a traditional-ish Jewish funeral for my husband when Im supposed to be planning his forty-fifth birthday party. Im black and Baptist, and hes a white Jewish guy. I feel a little out of my depth. Also, what the hell? We are in the middle of finalizing the adoption of the aforementioned sleeping baby, whos been with us since he was six months old but is still not yet legally ours. I actually just got back from Maryland, the state of all of our births, after one in a series of very stressful legal proceedings to make sure we get to keep him. Im supposed to be focusing on that, not standing here in this stupid cemetery deciding whether Scotts body will spend eternity in a fancy wall or in a hole in the ground in the Jewish section or in some nondenominational section so he can be buried with me, his black Baptist wife. My understanding is that I cant be buried in the Jewish section when I eventually die. I cant imagine thats going to be any time soon, but then again, Scotts not supposed to be dead either. So I dont know what to tell you.

As Nice Enough Salesman continues his sales pitch, I look back over at my mother, who sits several yards away on a golf cart with my twin sister, Lynne, my best friend, Melanie, and Scotts cousin Kim, whom the black Baptists have brought along for her specific area of expertise.

We need a Jewish person, I told her that morning when she showed up at our house, in shock but wanting to be useful. When someone you love dies, thats what you do. You do everything you can to be useful so you dont have time to remember that someone you love has just died.

My sister and Melanie, both of whom came in from Baltimore yesterday and are running on fumes and stunned adrenaline, are eating out of a bag of chips. I think Mel got them on the plane. Wait, am I hungry? Probably. To date, my mourning diet has consisted of wine, cake, and last nights garlicky hummus, which I probably still smell like. Not my problem. I have lost a pound. And, yes, even tragic and disorienting sudden death cannot stop me from weighing myself. I guess I cried off a pound. Is it wrong to be happy about that?