In Between Days

These days ahead, little sweetheart, while not quite as dark as those of March, also have a kind of bitter memory to them. They are the days between my returning to New York after your tragic passing and my return to San Francisco for your memorial - held, incredibly on my birthday.

There was a something about flying back to New York that held a kind of magical hope that I would find you here. Joan Didion speaks of how she kept her husband’s clothes after his own tragic passing, very consciously thinking that he would need them when he came back. This place, of course, our little apartment here, is very much filled with your things to this day and pictures of you on every wall and surface surround me. But even then, I felt somehow I would find you here when I got back. I’d been gone two months and the landlord had to get into the apartment to fix a couple of things. They’d been waiting until I got home. They were very kind and empathetic, knowing of your loss, so they didn’t bother me for a few days but they did finally have to repair a radiator that had been leaking - my neighbor had let them in weeks before so they could shut it off - and all the stove/ovens in the building had been replace except for mine while I’d been gone. They went from gas to electric, I think because there’d been some problems with the gas lines - remember when you were here and you thought you noticed a funny smell, like gas escaping? Remember, I called them and they were quite unusually prompt, arriving within the hour.

I was here alone for that first week and then Sean and Meg asked if I’d like to come out Rye Brook and stay with them and their two little girls (they’re both very big girls, high school and college, now). It was enormously helpful, actually, little sweetheart to be with them. They knew you, of course, and were unfailingly kind. You and I were supposed to have visited them on Cape Cod that summer. It was nice to be around their family, having dinner and playing with the dog, going for walks, hearing about the girls’s day at school and staying up talking with Sean and Meg. I told Sean at one point that I didn’t know how I was going to do this (like keep going on) and he said, very kindly “you’re doing it”. It was way too soon to start working on the album you and he and I had begun, again, but the thought did occur that I would do. I wrote my speech for you for your memorial and spent my days out there with our lovely friends until it was time to fly back to SFO.

I rented a car and got lost trying to get in from the airport. I’d only ever traveled to and from SFO with you and I wound up way over on the other side of town, near the stadium just as a Giants game was getting out. I was, literally, lost without you.

These days, these three weeks in April always give me such pause, little sweetheart. I know they will again this year. In a way, they fold somewhat neatly into Holy Week, which begins on Sunday. My thoughts, as ever, of you. With all my love.