PUZZLE ME THIS

 

In the third week of April, 2018, James and I were getting ready for a trip back to the Chicago suburb of his boyhood for his mother's memorial. Far-flung family members were coming in from Sweden, the Virgin Islands, Wisconsin and California, for what was going to be an epic family reunion. We'd been saving the New York Times crossword puzzles out of the Sentinel for about a week, in preparation for the flight; James was eager to see everyone, but he hated being confined in the plane for 4 hours and needed something to do.

 

On the morning before the day we were supposed to leave, James wound up in the ICU at Stanford. Two days later, I had to let him go, and my world turned upside down. Although I have little memory of the details now, I somehow managed to send email dispatches back to the assembled Aschbachers every night. Three days later, the event that brought them all together became a memorial not only for my mother-in-law, but for James as well.

 

Among the many household chores that began to accrue for me in the days and weeks and months and years after I lost him were those crossword puzzles we used to do together over breakfast and lunch every day. My heart wasn't in it for a long time, but because I was trying to keep my life (ie: my routines) as normal as possible, I kept methodically separating out those puzzles to save for later. (Not every day, but Thursdays, because there's always something tricky in the theme or the structure; Fridays, because they have the answers to Thursday; and Sundays, because it's always a big, intricate feast of a puzzle!)

 

It wasn't nearly as much fun to do the puzzles alone; there was no one to impress when I suddenly had an aha! moment, charged eagerly downstairs, and filled in the last couple of squares that solved some obscure clue. Still, I managed to finish one occasionally, over a period of days, not hours. But I could never work enough of them to make much of a dent in the ones I kept obsessively saving, which began to stack up and up, expanding exponentially like the Blob. When one stack got too tall and tottery, I skimmed a few off the top and started another stack somewhere else.

 

Well, you know where this is going. Six years later, I have four stacks of puzzles — mostly pristine, but some partially filled in — taking up real estate in my house, three squirreled away between James' art table and his former office, plus the most recent ones I keep on the dining table. (Where I still complete one, once in awhile.) But with family visiting from overseas next week, I had to face the awful truth — it was time for a purge. 

 

28th Anniversary present from James!

It's not like I'm a hoarder. You don't need GPS, a guide dog, or a machete to navigate around my house. All the stuff acquired in our 40 years together is well organized and tidy, the Virgo in me believing that if everything can be stashed away in some appropriate place (preferably out of sight), then I won't have to deal with it for awhile — if ever. Everything but those stacks of puzzles, which have been migrating from one inappropriate surface to another, defying my attempts to corral them.

 

Well-meaning friends have offered to dump them in the recycle bin for me — problem solved! — yet I find myself strangely unwilling to agree. Over these past few years, I've sent my Art Boy's clothes to Good Will, donated his art books to the Tannery library, and his art supplies to the schools; I rehomed his collection of monster and sci-fi toys to a toy dealer, cleaned out his video closet, and had 4 of his 5 VCRs hauled off to Grey Bears.

 

So why is it so hard to give up the puzzles?

 

On one hand, it ought to be a too-painful reminder of losing him in media res, the last little project he was working on before he was struck down, all those empty little squares unfilled. But maybe that's part of the reason I still cling to them. That first little pile of saved puzzles was like his stake in the future — making the plane ride enjoyable, then the fun family reunion, and whatever adventures would come after. Any time I saw them sitting there where he left them, I felt momentarily transported back to that fateful day. As if the life we might have had, but for one split second of fate, had we packed up those puzzles, caught our flight, and gone off into our future, was still right there, within reach, as if that little pile of puzzles was a portal between the optimistic past, that still felt so immediate, and the unexpected and unpredictable future now unwinding before me.

 

Realistically, I know I'll never be able to access that portal — unless my life turns out to be a Twilight Zone episode, or a Neil Gaiman story. But it's also come to symbolize a turning point in my own identity, a dividing line between my past and present self. Past me, marching fearlessly out into the world with my Sweetie, vs. Present me, physically compromised, if still relatively functional, but emotionally rudderless on my own. Emotionally, I seem to need to keep those puzzles as the last little tangible link to our partnership, in crossword puzzles and everything else, eagerly filling in all of life's little squares together.