Front Porch: Quiet of night fills with memories

Several years ago when I was visiting family and friends in Florida, I spent two days with a cousin I hadn’t seen in a couple of decades. As we were putting sheets on the hide-a-bed in her den, she looked over to me and said she was glad I’d be there overnight, as she sleeps so much better when someone else is in the house.

That surprised me. Evelyn was a good bit older than me, but I remembered her as something of a force of nature. She married and had a child quite young, divorced quickly after her philandering husband made it impossible to stay in the marriage. She was not going to live that way, even though that brave choice launched her into rocky financial waters.

She set out in her early 20s working and raising a child alone – back in the 1950s. Eventually she married again, and with her second husband, started a new family. They saved, no doubt at her insistence, and managed to buy land on a lake in upstate New York, where they constructed cabins, set up a waterfront recreation area and provided outdoors experiences spring, summer and early fall for city dwellers, largely from the New York metropolitan area. They worked seven days a week, and the kids pitched in, too. It was a great growing place for their children, and Evelyn learned how to do everything – from carpentry to plumbing, wiring to engine repair. And, quite frankly, she was the driving force behind their enterprise.

When she and Nick retired to Florida, life was active there, and then she nursed him through illness until he died. Their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren lived close by, so she was never without family or something to do. A strong woman. Even when I visited, she insisted on driving us to a restaurant for dinner, although it was just a few weeks after she’d had a mastectomy. And she apologized for not cooking the meal herself.

She considered life to be good. Yet, evenings and nighttime were hard. That’s when the quiet in the house wasn’t so benign, because it was in the evenings that she and Nick would catch up with one another and then, later, feel the presence of the other sleeping alongside.

My mother lived for 17 years after my father died. She left Miami and came to Spokane, where she worked as a buyer for The Crescent. She belonged to a number of civic and fraternal organizations, was active in her church and attended all sorts of entertainment events in town. I once asked her why she didn’t just come home and relax occasionally after work.

It was because that was the worst time. There was nobody to debrief with at the end of the day, not with the kind of detail that friends are likely to want to hear. There was no one to smile with over a shared memory and no one whose breathing she could sync with her own at night. No other heartbeat in the house when it’s dark and still.

I quickly volunteered, “Well, you can call me at night, Mom.” I knew as I said that it was a hollow offer. Evenings and nighttime were when I was putting dinner on the table, taking kids places, overseeing homework, bedtime routines for our sons and – oh, yes – catching up with my own husband. Mom and I spoke a lot, but, realistically, not at night.

Since then, a number of friends of mine have lost their husbands, and while I haven’t asked any of them about this, a couple have volunteered that evenings and nighttime are the most difficult, even for those who did things independently at home in the evenings. He might be in the garage tinkering with something; she might be filling the week’s pill containers and doing other chores in the kitchen.

“But I always knew he was there, could hear the sounds, could feel that he was at home at the end of the day,” one friend said.

At first, after you lose your spouse, everything seems unbearable all the time. But then a new normal happens. That same friend said she didn’t know why it was so much less awful in the morning or during the day, but the silence, the absence is so much more palpable at night.

There’s no solution to this, I suppose, except maybe phoning someone who is now alone, in the evening, rather than during the day, and just asking how the day went. And listening in detail. A poor substitute, but it’s something.

Sometimes in the evening when I see my husband maybe working at his desk or coming in from the yard or reading a book in his reading chair, I’ll just go over and plant a kiss on the top of his head or back of his neck. For no reason precisely. Except that he’s still with me, and I still can.