Writing His Name Until It Stopped Hurting
Page after page of one word, my strange private liturgy.
The grief counselor had a soft voice and a softer suggestion: write him letters. I bought a notebook, sat down on his side of the bed, and wrote one word four hundred times instead.
Sameer.
He died on a Tuesday in March, on the kitchen floor, holding a jar of peanut butter he never got to open. Aortic dissection, forty-one years old, no warning except a backache he had blamed on the new office chairs. The paramedic who could not save him apologized for tracking mud across the tiles. I remember thanking him for wiping his boots on the mat on the way out. Grief makes you polite at the strangest moments.
Everyone had advice about writing. My sister mailed me a workbook of grief writing exercises with a lavender cover and prompts inside like gentle homework. Describe a favorite memory. Write about a place you both loved. Tell him what you never got to say. I opened it once, read the first prompt... and slid it under the couch where I would not have to see it.
Because here is what nobody tells you: I could not write about him. Sentences about Sameer required verbs, and every verb was past tense, and past tense was the whole problem.
So on the eleventh night, when the casserole people had stopped coming and the house had gone truly quiet, I opened the notebook and wrote, Dear Sameer. Then I crossed out Dear. Then I wrote his name again. Then again... I filled the line. I filled the page. I filled six pages, and when my right hand cramped I switched hands and kept going, my left-handed version of his name leaning sideways like a man falling asleep on a train.
It was the only sentence I could survive.
It became a ritual with rules I never consciously decided on. Ten forty-seven at night, because that was when he used to reach over and turn off his lamp. His side of the bed, because the mattress still dipped there and I could sit in the dip. A blue gel pen, because he stole blue gel pens from every hotel we ever stayed in and there was a drawer full of them in his desk, a lifetime supply of him.
Meanwhile, in the daytime world, his name was quietly disappearing. The bank said your late husband. The forms said the deceased. Friends said him and everything, as in, if you need anything at all, and, I am so sorry about everything. People flinched around the two syllables as if the word itself were the wound. Even I caught myself saying my husband to strangers, then just, well... Then nothing.
Everyone around me was so careful not to say his name that I decided to write it ten thousand times.
By notebook three, something frightening happened. The name broke. Anyone who has written a word too many times knows this feeling: the letters come loose from the meaning and just float there, strange marks on a page, the S like a road on a map, the pair of e's like two closed eyes. For one long minute... Sameer did not mean Sameer. I sat in the dip in the mattress and could not breathe.
I had done the thing I feared most. I had worn him out.
Then the meaning came back, the way a face comes back when a crowd shifts, and I understood something that carried me through the rest of that year: the name was not going anywhere. I could spend it as recklessly as I wanted. It was the one thing of his I could not use up.
After that I got creative, if you can call it that. I wrote his name the way he signed restaurant receipts, an S and then a wave, pure arrogance. I copied his handwriting from an old birthday card, To my favorite person in this house, which was a joke, because we had no pets and no children. It was just me. I wrote his name in Devanagari the way his grandmother addressed her envelopes. I wrote it small enough to hide inside the o of another word. Some nights, four hundred times. Some nights, once... very slowly, like signing a treaty.
In June his mother came to stay for a week. She was folding laundry on the bed while I made tea, and when I came back upstairs she had notebook seventeen open on her lap. I stood in the doorway holding two mugs and my whole body went cold. There is no graceful way to explain to your mother-in-law that you have filled seventeen notebooks with her dead son's name. It is not a hobby. It is also not entirely sane.
She turned the pages for a long time. Then she said, “Can I keep one page?”
I told her she could keep a whole notebook if she wanted.
“One page,” she said. “Nobody says it anymore, you know. At the temple they say your son. Your father-in-law says he. I say it into the bathroom mirror in the morning so it doesn't disappear.”
We drank the tea and said it out loud to each other, back and forth across the bed, Sameer, Sameer, like two people checking that a bell still rang.
I know how that sounds. It was the sanest hour of my year.
The second word arrived in September.
I had started reading lists of poetry prompts late at night, not to use them, just to feel near people who still wrote sentences, and one line stopped me: write about the object they left mid-use. I stared at it for a long time. Then I went downstairs, took the peanut butter jar out of the cabinet where I had hidden it, seal intact, and wrote one sentence underneath his name: You never got to open it, so I can't either.
Not good. Not a poem. But there was a verb in it, and I survived the verb.
After that the sentences came back the way water comes back to a tap after the mains are fixed, rusty at first, then clear. I wrote about the mud on the kitchen floor and the polite paramedic. I wrote about the drawer of stolen pens. Months later I finally wrote about the grief itself instead of around it, and posted one piece on a community wall for poets, half hoping nobody would see it. Strangers answered with the names of their own dead in the replies. Ruth. Kenji. Amaka. A man everyone called Little Joe. A whole thread of names, everyone saying the unsayable word for each other because nobody at home would.
The notebooks live on his side of the closet now, twenty-two of them, stacked where his sweaters used to be. Some people would call that morbid. Those people have never needed a room made entirely of one word.
These days I write his name once, on Sunday nights, ten forty-seven, blue pen. Then I write other things underneath it: the week, the weather, poems about healing that I do not entirely believe yet and write anyway. The counselor calls this progress. I call it the same ritual with more words in it.
But some nights I still wake at ten forty-seven with my hand already moving, writing it in the dark on the sheet, letter by letter, the way your hand finds a light switch in a house you have lived in for years.
The bulb is gone. The switch still works.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.