What he said before he died

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

“I’m a mangy gray dog with its ribs showing named van Gogh,” my husband told me not long before he died. “I have soulful brown eyes.” In real life, his name was Kevin, and he had blue eyes. But my husband was always a writer. Words were his tool, employed skillfully to explain, to invent, even to protect. Many years ago, defusing a self-loathing comment I made, he told me, “No, you’re a silk undershirt named Simone.”

There was a lot of living between the silky Simone and the mangy mutt. It was mostly delicious, beaches and beds, reading out loud, laughter unspooling through the days. Even a shared stint of unemployment we spent traveling through Italy, slowing down in Florence so we could cook from the markets. Fava beans were in season. When we met, on a junket for journalists in the Bahamas, we were magazine editors living a continent apart. Kevin had read a feature I had written quoting one of his favorite Berkeley professors. He thought I was smart. So we began our relationship via email, Los Angeles to Vermont. It was always built on words. It wasn’t until he sent me a poem, the one about eating the plums, that I understood he was at least flirting with flirting.

Losing my husband, 140 characters at a time

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:56:00 +0000

There was a time when I kept private journals, chronicling stories of time with my husband as if words could nail down a life and build strong, warm walls around us. That was before cancer. A kind you’ve hopefully never heard of, a sure, slow killer. Once we’d slogged through a couple of years there, I logged into Twitter and didn’t grapple with whether or why. Rather than holding us together now, I was a spectacle of flying apart. Twitter unleashed my inner ranting-woman-on-the-subway. You know the one — no inhibitions, breaking the code of civilized silence.

Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

Salon.com > Lee Ann Cox

What he said before he died

Losing my husband, 140 characters at a time