All the Answers

by | Aug 2, 2010 | 0 comments

Following the phone call, during the first few days after I’d learned of your death- not much was clear. I couldn’t eat, sleep, I smelled weird, got my period 7 days early…definitely experienced a chemical change due to the trauma.

But there are a few lucid moments. During one of those moments, I can remember I was standing near the linen closet- though I’m not sure what I was doing there.
A thought surprised me- I realized that we had watched up until the last season of Lost together before you left, but that we would never get to see the last season together. It sounds trite, but it upset me in a deep, deep way.
We were very different people- you and I. You liked action movies and Family Guy- I stayed away from R movies and Family Guy got way too crude for my tastes. It bothered you, but you understood that I get so involved in whatever I watch, that I become it in a sense- so I have to protect myself. A simple example is that after watching any movie with spoken accents, I would also start speaking in that accent the rest of that evening. You thought it was hilarious and said I could’ve been an actress. I would pretend to be whatever character we had just watched and speak to you as if we were in the film. Oh, that was fun.
The first few years we were married, if we went shopping, you tried to sneak Twinkies or soda into our shopping cart, while I insisted on buying organic and all natural crap (that’s the word you would’ve used).
You obviously loved sports and I couldn’t understand American football no matter how many times it was explained to me so I attended Super Bowl parties with you purely for the social aspect.
You loved traveling and could adapt easily to lots of new environments…I am a homebody and get easily thrown off if I’m away too long.
But still we found common ground- and one of those things was in the TV show Lost. We’d started watching it a couple of seasons in, and then we were hooked. When the creepy music would come on in the beginning while the title spins around eerily- you’d turn your hands slowly in a spooky circle and say “ooooooooo” EVERY time we watched an episode. Yes, I actually just did that motion with my hand just now…incarnation.
We didn’t have a TV so we watched it on your computer. You’d just sit on your computer chair and I would lay on the bed.
Well, we’d go for long periods of time in between seasons and I’d feel it wasn’t worth picking up again, but then one day you’d just start watching and you knew I couldn’t resist. I’d ask you if you’d already watched any alone and you’d reply, “No, I like watching it with you.”
But one of the reasons I kept hesitating to continue even though it was very entertaining was because of all of the unanswered questions. I felt the writers had just put so many things up in the air and there was no way they could catch them all or explain them all. I wanted everything to tie together and all of the questions to be answered. I felt like maybe they were hoping the average American would just let those things go or forget- but no, not me, I had to know it all.
Well, I never will because I will never watch the last season- not without you Dan.
But in the first week after your death, as I thought about the fact that we won’t ever get to watch the last season together or learn any of the answers…I got the chills when I heard this thought drop into my own head, as if it came directly from you:
“I have all the answers now Jul, I have all the answers.”

JAC

August 2, 2010
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