The Unreliable Cartography of Grief

My wife kept journals for thirty-one years, and I did not open a single one of them until she had been dead for four months, because I had promised her I wouldn't, and because I was afraid, and because while they sat unread on the shelf above her side of the bed she was, in some superstitious chamber of my mind, not entirely gone — there was still a part of her I had not finished, a country of Elena I had not yet entered, and as long as I did not enter it she remained, however thinly, alive.

I opened the first one on a Tuesday in February, the anniversary of nothing, because grief does not respect anniversaries; it ambushes you on ordinary Tuesdays. The journals were forty-some volumes, cloth-bound, dated on the spine in her small upright hand, and I had imagined — I had been imagining for four months — that they would be a continuation of the marriage by other means, that I would hear her voice in them, that they would be, in some consoling way, more of her. I expected to be comforted. I had not understood that to read the private record of a person you have loved for three decades is to be introduced, page by page, to a stranger who happens to share all your memories and almost none of your conclusions about them.

The trouble began with a café. In the entry for the third of June, in a volume from our fourth year, Elena described in tender and specific detail the café on the Calle Mercer where I had first told her I loved her — the marble tables, the bad-tempered waiter, the particular slant of afternoon light in which, she wrote, "he finally said it, and I had known for a month and said nothing, because I wanted him to arrive there himself." I read this with my eyes stinging, because I remembered that afternoon, I had carried it for thirty years, except that in my memory it had not happened on the Calle Mercer at all. It had happened in a park. By a fountain. There had been no café, no marble, no waiter; there had been a bench, and pigeons, and a paper bag of cherries we were sharing, and I had said it with a cherry stem in my hand. I remembered the cherries the way you remember the few things that turn out to have been load-bearing.