Love Was All Around

September 14

Today is your birthday. Years ago, we celebrated at our Chicago 3-flat. It was a beautiful September day. It would be your last birthday.

Later that autumn, we settled into our newly acquired historic house. You had been determined to move to your “dream home on Chicago’s North Shore (your words)” before the end of the year. I did not want to leave the City but wanted a yard so we could get a dog. A German Shepherd specifically. I had longed for one ever since I was lonely kid. We looked at 90 properties before we found the one that accommodated both our dreams.

Entering the house was entering a different time. It was 100 percent original to the 1920s, right down to the ice boxes and rotary phones. It sat on the lip of a wooded bluff; there was a stream at the bottom. At night, coyotes chased deer across the yard. I called the place nous petite maison du bois, our little mansion in the woods.

As we unpacked, I played DJ from my corner office, pumping new speakers full of audio gold. When I played Beck’s Bolero, you came and stood in the doorway. While Jeff’s guitar soared and tumbled, we looked at each other wordlessly and smiled. We loved each other more than we could say. The warm glow of the rest of our lives lay before us.

Six months later, in the huge master bedroom, I found you lifeless in our new king-sized bed. In an instant my brittle life shattered. You said you would never leave me. But you did.

Before we met I had peered into the abyss. After you left, I became a resident. A protective faith in the goodness of life—a belief I never knew I had—fell away, shredded, scattered like black confetti.

My savior was my German Shepherd Precious Rose vom Felzen Haus. She was my Rosie. She and I managed untold misadventures. She died at age 13. Grief does not dissipate, it accumulates.

I lived in our dream house for 50 weeks. When I left I kept the Primitive antique furniture we both loved. I auctioned the Colonials and Victorians I always hated. Movers smashed the little rocker we had determinedly exported from Martha’s Vineyard. I still have the chair I thought was 19th century but is really 18th century. Like my damned life when you were in it, that chair is worth much more than I had believed.

Our erstwhile neighborhood had been crammed with Frank Lloyd Wrights. You hated them and called the man Frank Lloyd “Wrong.” I adored them and walked Rosie among them at night. At my insistence we looked at one of them, a falling-down mess of a house. A decade later I read it had been completely restored. The little bridge at the end of nous petite maison du bois‘s impossible driveway is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

As with everything else in our lives, you would have found ways to make fun of it all, in your uniquely Cary way, irreverent, dead hilarious.