My mom wrote a book about her second husband dying

            I’m reading it again for the first time since the first time, when I was feverish in a hotel. That time I cried a lot but also wasn’t thinking very straight. This time I’m thinking straight, and also thinking it’ll be interesting, and easy to write about for Grief class: I am a character and in my own way know the plot. My girlfriend saw it in my room the other day and said she wanted it when I was done. I said okay, and was touched. Date someone who really likes you.

            I remember now where I saw that expression of Stace’s before, though. They were driving me back to my apartment late at night a few years ago. For some reason I was talking about my mother, and how I thought I was so close to her in part because I’d seen her lose her partner, when I was a teenager, and she’d been really in love. So I’d seen her both really in love and grieving. The combination of these things I thought made us maybe unusually close when compared to the mothers and daughters I knew, because that didn’t often happen, with a teenage daughter: to see your mother so much as a person. 
            Stace asked, 
                        Was that your stepdad? 
            I said, 
                        Yes. 
            They asked, 
                        Had he been around a long time? 
            I said, 
                        Yes. He lived with me since I was about four or five. 
            Then they turned and looked at me with that open face, such clear eyes, dark-rimmed iris, maybe a little concerned: 
                        So that was a loss for you too then. 
            And I said, 
                        Yes, it was. Thank you for saying that. It was a loss. 
            They felt to me so empathetic that I thought for a while that they, too, had lost a parent. But they hadn’t. I really don’t know them well at all.

            I wanted my mom to call her book The Bagel Man, because the name didn’t imply dying. It was my brother’s and my name for our stepdad in the first months of knowing him, when he and my mother were trying to slowly introduce his concept into my home. He brought us bagels in the morning before work sometimes, and I’d see him through the window: Mom, the Bagel Man is back, I’d say. That’s nice, she’d say, and she’d open the door. 
            But she called it The Last Kiss because it sounded romantic and because that was, I guess, more the point: In the years of his dying they kissed each other all the time, often with a lot of intent but especially before procedures. It sounds exhausting and terrible and it’s also a kind of cavernous beautiful: She learned to sleep on hospital chairs until she figured out she could just slip into bed with him; she sourced her book club for weed and he pulled her half into the shower to kiss her thank you. He sent love letters by email and she kept them all; they went to Paris and the beach and had a lot of sex, it sounds like. They fought and were very tired. In waiting rooms, she wrote notes to herself to pay attention even though it was hard, because when it was over, she’d just wish to be waiting again. He died and she was right. 
            The pages of mourning are quieter. They invoke hazy sunlight and lying in bed alone, then with the dog we got, a new-widow dog, who is still alive. They are more peaceful and they are sad. In time, she imagines she could envision a life with a man she doesn’t know yet. I know she has him now; I know she’s happy, though of course it’s always different. 
            This time I finished reading the book while in bed with my girlfriend. She was playing Mario Kart on her phone, which sounds stupid but maybe not; she deals in cancer and death every day, and maybe it’s not so good to read over my shoulder. She can have it later. I didn’t say anything but I guess she noticed I was crying at the ceiling. She put away Mario Kart and eventually I said, They just loved each other so much. She nodded. A little while later I said, I think they loved each other the same. That’s hard to find, she said, or something, and I agreed.

            I’ve been so tired. I woke up between four or five and lay there. My girlfriend kind of woke up too, and reached her hand to the back of my neck. It’s so warm and soft. I wanted to write this but wanted to be alone, so I lay there until I slept again, between six and seven. When I woke, I was glad I’d slept, like a bath. Plants grow differently from each other; she’ll watch mine while I’m out of town, and it’s good to me that she wants to.

            On the second to last page, my mom quoted something I said as she and I did errands. I was by then fifteen or sixteen; Elliot was dead, and I assume the early months of grief were over too. I said, 
                        I hope I find somebody who loves me the way Elliot loved you. 
            In the book, the setting of the quote makes it casual, though it’s not a casual thing to say. I’m touched to read it, but also I wish I’d wished for more: to love that person as much in return; to find someone I’d do the same for, and want to. It’s harder than I thought for two people to love the same, or the same height or volume—not so hard to love, not so hard to be loved, but hard to share it at the same time, I think. It can be. I think that’s true.