Starting From Square Two. Caren Lissner

      Chapter

       2

      “This girl, Erika, told me she’s just like me, but we’re really very different,” Gert told her support group on Long Island.

      The group was for young widows. Until a few years ago, most of the “young widows” in Gert’s area had been in their forties and fifties. Now there was a handful in their twenties and thirties, too. Gert found it worth the forty-five-minute rail jaunt each Saturday morning to talk to people who could understand what she was going through.

      She hadn’t gone to the group right away. In the weeks after Marc had died, she’d been surrounded by close friends and relatives. They were at the funeral, at Marc’s parents’ house, stopping by Gert’s apartment. Gert needed to be squeezed among a crushing throng of people who knew Marc so well that they understood the profoundness of the loss; people who knew his interests, his kindness, the expressions on his bespectacled face. Only people who knew him as well as she did could understand the depth of the void.

      Right after the accident, Gert’s mother temporarily moved into Gert’s condo in Queens. She had already tried to convince Gert to move back to L.A., but failed. Gert’s best friend from childhood, Nancy, had tried, too. But Gert wasn’t sure she wanted to go back yet. All the experts said that you shouldn’t make major changes in your life within a year after a death. Besides, deep inside her, she feared that going back home would make her feel even lonelier. At least in New York, there were people like her. Alone.

      For a while, relatives stopped by her condo to visit. Co-workers of Marc’s from the brokerage firm sent cards and flowers.

      Then, slowly, the comforters tapered off. That meant that entire days yawned open with emptiness. Gert would pull herself out of bed, slog to work, get the occasional call from a friend who’d emit platitudes about taking things one step at a time, come home and, if she could stand to do something normal for two hours, watch a movie. In the past, no matter what happened to her, she knew he would be at the end—the end of the phone line, the end of a rough day, the end of the long commute home. Now, only she was there. All she had left to cling to were the vestiges of old routines.

      Gert’s parents found her a therapist on Fifth Avenue. For the first six months, she went every week and talked to an overly clinical woman who was nevertheless a good listener. But she realized that she would have rather stayed home. What she really needed, she decided, was to interact with people her own age who’d lost a spouse.

      Gert knew she wouldn’t have found such a support network if not for September 11. Most of the young widows’ support groups in the area had sprung up because of that day. Marc had died only four days before that, on the seventh. The funeral was two days later. If it had been two days after that, it probably would have had to be postponed. She’d lost him, buried him and forty-eight hours later the world had exploded.

      She found several groups advertising on the back page of the Voice. The first day, she had felt intense self-loathing as she walked into the room. All of the women were strangers, and they looked strange, too. Strange and sad. They were women who had absolutely nothing in common with her—except for one horrible event. But she had forced herself to hold back her tears. She sat down in a hard school chair in the circle. She listened. And she talked. She found out they all had similar experiences to hers. The other women in the group were prone to dazing out for five minutes at a time for no reason, too. They, too, were still getting sales calls for their husbands and not knowing how to respond. They, too, were incessantly told by well-meaning people that they would feel better soon. They, too, had assumed they would be married to one person for the rest of their lives—and suddenly had had that person yanked away forever.

      The only time Gert felt unburdened was when she was in the group. Normally she struggled under the weight of knowing that if she bumped into someone and had to explain that her husband had died, it’d be an uphill battle to deal with their awkward responses, to make them understand how she felt and all of the challenges she faced. The women in the group just knew.

      “Where were you when Erika said this?” asked Brenda, a heavyset thirty-five-year-old nurse. Brenda, who had the voice of an evangelist, had become the group’s de facto leader. Their group had been started by a social worker from a local hospital, but the social worker eventually had found they were able to run it on their own.

      “We were staying at Hallie’s apartment Friday night,” Gert said. “Hallie was my roommate in college. Erika is her friend from high school. Anyway, Hallie was in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and Erika and I were smoothing out our blankets on the floor, and Erika got serious. She turned to me and said, ‘I know you think no one understands what you’re going through. But every day when I wake up, I still want to say hi to Ben. He was in my life for so long, and then he was gone. I love him and I never get to see him anymore. So believe me, I know how you feel.’” Gert paused to take a deep breath. “And I know she was trying to be helpful, but having your husband die in a car accident is not the same thing as breaking up with him because you weren’t sure you loved him and then he ends up with someone else. I wanted to tell her this—”

      She broke off.

      “But you didn’t,” said Leslie, a short owl-eyed girl who had been married to a man thirty years older than she. Gert felt sorry for her, imagining she’d taken the first guy to be smitten with her—and then Gert felt bad for being judgmental.

      Brenda said to Gert, “You could have told her.”

      “But she was only trying to help,” Gert said.

      Michele shook her head. She was thirty-four, a paralegal. “They all are,” she said. “But don’t you ever want to say, no, this is how it really feels? Losing your husband feels like nothing, dead, like you want to jump back into that week when you had him back, and all you can do is look back because there aren’t things to look ahead to anymore.”

      “I can’t say all that,” Gert said.

      “Honey, you need to let someone in,” Brenda said. “Don’t be afraid of being real with people.”

      If I was real with people, Gert thought, I’d lose all of them.

      The other topics at the meeting were standard: How they’d gotten through special occasions, how they filled their free time, how they were managing their financial affairs. Marc hadn’t had any life insurance, except for the $1,000 policy he’d gotten—along with a free Discman—for signing up for a Sony Mastercard. Who would ever have thought to get life insurance for a twenty-seven-year-old? Marc’s parents, luckily, paid for the burial and for a year of the mortgage on the condo. Some of the women in the group had had to sell their homes.

      “The problem with moving isn’t necessarily about money,” a woman named Arden said. “I can’t pack up his things. Some of them, I haven’t touched since he died.”

      Gert thought of the extra bedroom in the condo, the one Marc had used as a workroom. It held a computer, trophies going back to his high school soccer championships, even Boy Scout patches. She had barely touched these things since he’d died. Sometimes she wandered into the room and stood there for a while, in a comfortable haze.

      “Don’t push yourself,” Brenda told Arden. “Everything has a time.”

      “It feels like you’re putting him away when you put something aside,” Leslie said. “A pipe exploded last year and it poured all over Jesse’s Yankees cap, and I had to throw it away. Then I started crying.”

      Everyone was quiet for a minute.

      “But see, they got to the Series,” Brenda said. “So he was watching over them.”

      Leslie laughed. “I don’t think he did that.”

      “See?” Michele said. “We can smile when we remember, not just cry.”

      Gert’s mind started drifting. She found herself wishing that Chase were there. Chase was a quiet girl with short hair and a shy smile who had come to several