As I was packing for my trip to California, I found myself poking around in the closet Amy and I shared in the dream house we’d designed and built together. We’d intentionally placed the closet between our bedroom and the bathroom, so that we could share the beginnings and ends of our days together getting dressed and undressed. Not long after Amy’s death though, I knew something had to change with that closet. Just walking through it had become impossibly hard. I have a family member who’s left her husband’s closet intact for years after his death. I didn’t want that. I didn’t need to be further reminded several times a day that Amy was gone.
The truth is, Amy never cared much for clothes. She would have been happy wearing a uniform every day—which she actually did, as a form of experimental art, for a while. But despite her relative lack of interest, after her death, her clothes had a way of catching my eye every time I walked past them, peripheral flashes of color accompanied by a requisite dose of painful reality. The cute long-sleeved shirt with the French lettering . . . and a sudden pang that we wouldn’t be getting that flat in Paris we’d been talking about after all. That great little dress we bought for her in Thailand—what a beautiful trip that was, celebrating an anniversary, and now there would be no more of those.
In the days and weeks after Amy’s death, it was still too soon for those memories to be happy ones. Thankfully, Amy’s mom, siblings, sisters-in-law, and Paris came in and took out Amy’s clothes for me. I stayed in the house but out of the way and put full trust in these wonderful women. I had set aside a few items I wanted to keep for myself, memories I just couldn’t part with. Mostly, I wanted my daughter to take whatever she wanted for herself and, who knows, maybe her kids someday.
When the clean-out was finished, only a few of Amy’s items remained, hanging in the corner. Seeing the closet largely emptied of Amy’s clothes was startling at first. At the same time, it felt just like my heart, a place where there would always be a small space that would go unfilled, permanently reserved for Amy.
I took the opportunity that the vacated space provided to move my own stuff around. In one of the empty spaces I reserved a couple of shelves for pictures of Amy and the kids and a few items of hers I was not sure what to do with. One of those piles on a shelf contained a few journals and books that I had never taken the time to fully investigate.
So there I was, packing for San Francisco, when I stumbled across a book on her side of the closet. As I looked at it closely, I saw the familiar handwriting on the cover, “for Jason,” with her usual signature—a heart and “Amy” signed in her distinct cursive style, with the y attached to the a just so.
Courtesy of Brooke Hummer
It hit me right in the gut.
Just looking at the cover, the curves of the letters leading to thoughts of what could be hiding inside, made me too sad to deal with it at that moment. Instead I decided to take it to San Francisco with me and read it on our anniversary a few days later.
On March 2, 2018, I quietly sat down in my hotel room and pulled the book out of my bag. I braced myself for it, but how do you brace for a tsunami?
Words is a whimsical, brilliant book by Christoph Niemann, illustrated with his own unique language of pictures. On each page is one simple word.
And on each page, Amy had written a message to me. It became more and more apparent as I read that this was a little project she’d undertaken and hidden away toward the end of her life.
One of the early pages in the book bore the word paper, for example, but Amy had added in her own handwriting, “I always said that I may be the writer in the family, but you truly know what to do with a piece of paper. Each of our children have been gifted a ‘Jason letter’ on many occasions.”
On another page, with an image of a person with a sick face on both his face and his belly, Amy had written, “I think we should have been calling it ‘collywobbles’ all along!” The very next page, with the word gobbledygook and the image of a doctor conveying a diagnosis to a patient, included Amy’s caption: “Yes, Amy, it looks like you have quite a bit of collywobbles and gobbledygook inside you.”
I already had tears streaming down my face. Then I got to the entry that crushed me most. The image was of an ant carrying an apple several times its size. The word on the page was carry. The handwriting, shakier and clearly that of a sick person, read, “I will ‘carry’ you with me always and fo . . .”
Courtesy of Brooke Hummer
Yes, this brilliant woman—who was the most particular person about grammar and typos and would call you on your shit if you sent her even a love note with an error in it—couldn’t finish the sentence and left the page as is. Probably the result of a morphine-induced micronap. It broke my heart, and what would have been my twenty-seventh wedding anniversary ended up as a more intense day of grieving than I ever could have imagined.
One lesson I learned early on is that grief as a process is unique to everyone, and there is no right or wrong way to flow through it. This came much more clearly into focus as time went on and so many people shared their stories with me. By thrusting me into the spotlight, Amy had presented me with a path I never saw coming, but it was mine to take. Seeing this “word” book really hit me hard. I felt heartbroken that Amy had had to be so ill. The sudden wave of sadness was inevitable. I was resigned to the fact that my life would be an emotional roller coaster for the indefinite future, maybe always—one day I would be a wreck, the next, I’d stand tall as a representative of the Rosenthal family to honor Amy and help move her legacy permanently forward. I wasn’t about to let her down, and I managed to smile my way through the Matter gathering and the awarding of the scholarship in her name.
It’s a dichotomy that I realized would represent my life going forward, and indeed still does even now as I write these words. If I was going to speak about Amy, to honor her memory publicly, I needed to come to terms with the fact that my past, even the painful aspects of it, would be a part of my present and my future. It’s not a decision everyone would make, but it’s the one that felt right for me.
I am asked often whether carrying Amy with me always, and candidly telling everyone who will listen that it is an important part of my process, is like taking three steps forward and two steps back. In a word—no. I feel a healthy combination of accessing emotions about my loss that I do not mind returning to and a serene sense of my mission to keep Amy alive through talking about her and her uniquely gifted work. It is a message to the universe I think we need much more of as our planet gets more hostile and divergent. And personally, I feel good sharing her with the world, not only sharing my story but contributing my message of resilience as well.
Painful as it was, that conference, the book—the convergence of mourning and celebration of Amy on this day that had meant so much to us as a couple—all forced a realization upon me. In the year since Amy died, her life, her words, kept bringing me into contact with extraordinary new people. The essay in the New York Times had exposed a whole world of people to the woman that she was, and some of them now looked to me in ways that I never could have anticipated.
Her death had been covered in the nationwide press, from the New York Times to the Chicago Tribune to People magazine. Over five million people had read “You May Want to Marry My Husband” by the time she died; and since I was that husband, her spotlight inevitably spilled over onto me. I started hearing from a lot of women who’d lost their spouses, not with marriage proposals (yet) but with sweet, thoughtful, sincere condolences. In fact, two very accomplished women who’d been through public losses of their own reached out to share their experiences, openly describing the added intensity of grieving while strangers watch, and the helpless feeling of being at the mercy of unfamiliar emotions that are running wild. With time, they promised, joy would come if I let myself stay open to it. I couldn’t imagine it.