as wrong as it was, eventually it would become the only true thing left: We would never get him back.
* * *
A PE turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. He’d developed a blood clot sometime during the flight home from Italy, apparently—and it had made its way to his lungs and blocked an artery. Deep vein thrombosis.
“He didn’t walk around during the flight?” I asked Babette. “Doesn’t everybody know to do that?”
“I thought he did,” Babette said, dazed. “But I guess he didn’t.”
It didn’t matter what he had or hadn’t done, of course. There would be no do-over. No chance to try again and get it right.
It just was what it was.
But what was it? An accident? A fluke? A bad set of circumstances? I found myself Googling “deep vein thrombosis” in the middle of the night, scrolling and reading in bed in the blue light of my laptop, trying to understand what had happened. The sites I found listed risk factors for getting it, and there were plenty, including recent surgery, birth control pills, smoking, cancer, heart failure—none of which applied to Max. And then, last on the list, on every site I went to, was the weirdest possible one: “sitting for long periods of time, such as when driving or flying.” And that was it. That was Max’s risk factor. He’d sat still for too long. He’d forgotten to get up and walk around during the flight—and that one totally innocuous thing had killed him.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
An entire lifetime of growing up, learning to crawl, and then to toddle, and then to walk, and then run. Years of learning table manners, and multiplication tables, and how to shave, and how to tie a bow tie. Striving and going to college and grad school and marrying Babette and raising a daughter—and a son, too, who had joined the Marines and then died in Afghanistan—and this was how it all ended.
Sitting too long on a plane.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t acceptable.
But it didn’t matter if I accepted it or not.
People talk about shock all the time, but you don’t know how physical it is until you’re in it. For days after it happened, my chest felt tight, like my lungs had shrunk and I couldn’t get enough oxygen into them. I’d find myself panting, even when I was just making a pot of coffee. I’d surface from deep sleep gasping for breath like I was suffocating. It left me feeling panicked, like I was in danger, even though the person who had been in danger wasn’t me.
It was physical for Babette, too.
When the two of us got home from the hospital, she lay down on the sofa in the living room and slept for twelve hours. When she was awake, she had migraines and nausea. But she was almost never awake. We closed the curtains in the living room. I brought in blankets, and a bottle of water, and a box of tissues for the coffee table. I fetched her pillow off the bed upstairs, and some soft pajamas and her chenille robe.
She would sleep downstairs on that sofa for months.
She would send me to get anything she needed from their bedroom.
She would shower in her kids’ old bathroom down the hall.
I mean, she was Max’s high school sweetheart. Can you imagine? They’d started dating in ninth grade, when their math teacher asked her to tutor him after school, and Max had been right there by her side ever since. She hadn’t been without him since she was fourteen. Now she was almost sixty. They had grown up together, almost like two trees growing side by side with their trunks and branches entangled.
Suddenly, he was gone, and she was entangled around nothing but air.
We needed time. All of us did. But there wasn’t any.
Summer was ending soon, school was starting soon, and life would have to go on.
Three days later, we held Max’s memorial service at the shore, on the sand, in the early morning—before the Texas summer heat really kicked in. The guys from maintenance built a little temporary stage in front of the waves, and in a strange mirroring that just about shredded my heart, Max got a whole new set of offerings from all those people who loved him: The florist on Winnie Street offered funeral wreaths and greenery. The photographer from the party gave Babette a great photo of Max to feature in the program. A harpist, who