Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,109
shifts on the couch, getting excited. “Take Matt and me. We won’t grow old together. We won’t even grow middle-aged together. I’ve been wondering if, for Matt, my death will feel more like a breakup than the end of a marriage. Most of the women in the cancer group who talk about leaving their husbands behind are in their sixties and seventies, and the one in her forties has been married for fifteen years, and she and her husband have two kids. I want to be remembered as a wife and not an ex-girlfriend. I want to behave like a wife and not an ex-girlfriend. So I’m thinking, What would a wife do? Do you know what these wives say about leaving their husbands behind?”
I shake my head.
“They talk about making sure their husbands are going to be okay,” she says. “Even if I’m jealous of his future, I want Matt to be okay.” Julie looks at me like she just said something I’m supposed to understand, but I don’t.
“What would make you feel that he’ll be okay?” I ask.
She shoots me a grin. “As much as this makes me want to vomit, I want to help him find a new wife.”
“You want to let him know it’s okay to love again,” I say. “That doesn’t sound wacky at all.” Often a dying spouse wants to give the surviving one this blessing—to say that it’s okay to hold one person in your heart and fall in love with another, that our capacity for love is big enough for both.
“No,” Julie says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to just give him my blessing. I want to actually find him a wife. I want that gift to be part of my legacy.”
As when Julie first suggested the Trader Joe’s idea, I feel myself recoil. This seems masochistic, a form of torture in an already torturous situation. I think about how Julie would not want to see this, could not bear this. Matt’s future new wife will have his babies. She’ll go on long hikes and climb mountains with him. She’ll cuddle up with him and laugh with him and have passionate sex with him the way Julie once did. There’s altruism and love, sure, but Julie’s also human. And so is Matt.
“What makes you think he’ll want this gift?” I ask.
“It’s crazy, I know,” Julie says. “But there’s a woman in my cancer group whose friend did that. She was dying, and her best friend’s husband was dying, and she didn’t want her husband or her best friend to be alone, and she knew how well they got along—they’d been good friends for decades. So her dying wish was that they would go on a date after the funeral. One date. So they did. And now they’re engaged.” Julie’s crying again. “Sorry,” she says. Almost every woman I see apologizes for her feelings, especially her tears. I remember apologizing in Wendell’s office too. Perhaps men apologize preemptively, by holding their tears back.
“I mean, not sorry, just sad,” Julie says, echoing a phrase I shared with her earlier.
“You’re going to miss Matt a lot,” I say.
“I am,” she squeaks out. “Everything about him. The way he gets so excited about little things, like a latte or a line in a book. The way he kisses me, and the way his eyes take ten minutes to open if he wakes up too early. How he warms my feet in bed and looks at me when we’re talking, like his eyes are soaking up everything I’m saying as much as his ears are.” Julie pauses to catch her breath. “And you know what I’m going to miss most of all? His face. I’m going to miss looking at his beautiful face. It’s my favorite face in the entire world.”
Julie is crying so hard that no sound comes out. I wish that Matt could have been here for this.
“Have you told him?” I ask.
“All the time,” Julie says. “Every time he holds my hand, I say, ‘I’m going to miss your hands.’ Or when he’s whistling around the house—he’s an amazing whistler—I’ll tell him how much I’m going to miss that sound. And he always used to say, ‘Jules, you’re still here. You can hold my hands and hear me whistle.’ But now—” Julie’s voice cracks. “Now he says, ‘I’m going to miss you just as much.’ I think he’s starting to accept the fact that I’m really dying this time.”