Living with Plan B

Six months. Tomorrow, Sunday, 13 May, it will be exactly six months since that Sunday in November, when a policeman arrived in the evening to tell me that Peter died when a mountain let him fall that day. Six months since the life I had shared with Peter for twenty-five years came to a sudden, dizzying halt.

There are days when I wish I could go back to those first days and weeks, regain the feeling of urgency and determination that kept me going through the initial shock: I will cope; I will not be defeated by the loss of my love; I will not let the life we shared fall apart; I will hold everything together. And there are days when I wish I could go back to before that day, change the past, make it unhappen.

Some days I vent my anger and frustration on hapless random people on the other end of a phone line, some days I’m angry with Peter and yell at his picture or the marble plaque in the cemetery, some days I just miss Peter, some days I just curl up in a corner and cry, some days I clean the house with tremendous vigor and determination, some days I just cope. Some days I just get on with my life.

In the past few months I have been working more, my own work, my job, the professional work I do to earn my own living. At some point, I realized that I was starting to use my work as a kind of escape from my actual current reality. So many times I found myself concentrating on the words in front of me, immersing myself in the texts and ideas, just as I have done for so many years. Then somewhere in the back of my mind there was a sense that – when I finish this text, I can go out to meet Peter for a drink late in the evening, if I finish this chapter tonight, he’ll come home tomorrow, if I work long hours this week, next Tuesday I can go to the airport with Jörg to pick him up. But no matter how many words I translate, they won’t bring Peter back. He’s not coming home. Ever.

Empty corner in the workshop

Escaping into work, which is not entirely an escape, because I do, in fact, need to earn my own living, I have become less diligent about keeping up with my “widow’s tasks”. Thanks to the generous help from so many people, the workshop is nearly empty now, many domains have been transferred to other servers, and most of the paperwork that I could do so far has been taken care of. Next Tuesday the boys and I are meeting again with the court-appointed official, so that we can hopefully close the estate at last. Then I will take my list of downpayment amounts and bank details straight to our bank to arrange the money transfers to the people who have been waiting so long. After that I can start working my way through the stack of papers requiring the official authorization that I will hopefully receive on Tuesday. At the moment, I have the feeling there are still many, many things I need to do myself, before I can ask anyone else for more help, but for that reason, I have essentially stopped taking on any more translations this month, because I aim to close my widow’s tasks as far as possible by the end of this month. Then after Joseph and Emma’s wedding in June, I hope to be able to make a fresh start – at least to some extent – when I return.

Six months feels like an eternity, but also like only a brief, fleeting moment at the same time. A long time and a very short time all at once. While tomorrow marks the first half-year since Peter’s death, yesterday was the fourteenth anniversary of my father’s death. Fourteen years is a much longer period of time, yet every portion of my experience of my father’s death seems indelibly etched in my mind with such vivid clarity, as though it were only just a moment ago.

Thinking about my father this morning, I was moved to retrieve the folder from the top shelf with the stack of photocopied handwritten pages of the memories he started writing down for us. After his death, I had brought those pages home with me with the intention of transcribing them and making a kind of book for everyone, especially for all of my father’s grandchildren. Over and over, however, I found myself stymied by my father’s idiosyncratic orthography and his peculiar, uniquely personal grammatical constructions: my professional self was unable to literally transcribe his writing, while my grieving-daughter-self was overwhelmed by the vividness of the memories evoked by his very characteristic and achingly familiar writing. Even now, I can still hear his voice when I try to read those pages, but this morning I purposely paged through the different sections to re-read what my father had written about his memories of the death of his brother Burke.

John Derieg, 7 January 1930 - 11 May 1998. This picture is presumably from the mid-1950s.

My father was 22, hardly older than Christopher is now, when he received word that his elder brother Burke was in a hospital in San Diego. My father was a sergeant in the Marine Corps at that time, stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, so he used up all his leave visiting Burke, sitting with him in the hospital, playing chess and talking. Although Burke was only two years older than my father and my father’s twin brother, four years older than their youngest brother Pat, he had been the “man of the house” since their father’s departure when he was nine, essentially the only father-figure the brothers really had. Burke had been born with a congenital heart defect, and although surgery was being developed at that time to correct the defect, when Burke underwent surgery at a medical center in San Francisco, it was only the third or fourth time the procedure had been performed there, and it was not successful. He was taken back to his mother’s home in Texas to die. At Easter in 1953, my father was able to take leave again to go and spend time with Burke in San Antonio, and they resumed their chess and checker games. “On Monday, April 6th, the day after Easter, he died. He was laying there in a semi prone position and we were talking for awhile. He said he was a little tired, closed his eyes and quietly died.”

Michael Burke Derieg, 1928 - 1953. By the time he was about 16, Burke had already been the "man of the house" for seven years.

My father never stopped missing Burke. The experience of accompanying his dying brother, however, became a part of the man my father was, a part of his character in the way he could be patient, gentle, accepting, caring. There are indications that Burke and my father probably spoke at great length of all the trouble Burke had managed to get himself into in his short life, his need to guard his younger brothers from a life of sin and vice and make his peace with God as a good Catholic that he had been raised to be. Perhaps that has something to do with how tolerant and non-judgmental my father could be, his understanding that human beings make mistakes in life and need a chance to put things right. If that is so, then one of the things I valued most about my father, what I miss most even now, fourteen years after his death, stems from his loss of his beloved brother.

And so we go on living with death from one generation to the next. There is no comfort in that, and time does not heal the pain. The pain simply becomes part of who we are as we learn to live with it, shaping our character and coloring the way we view the world and live with other people. Fourteen years ago I lost my father, and I am still learning to live with that loss. Six months ago my sons lost their father, but we are all only just barely beginning to learn to live with that loss.

Three birthdays within six weeks has always been something of a challenge in my household, but an enjoyable challenge. This year, of course, it’s different. I think the conventional notion of one year of mourning still makes sense, the idea that one has to go through a whole cycle of seasons experiencing every recurrent event for the first time without a loved one – holidays, anniversaries, the first ice cream in summer, the first snow in winter, birthdays … I also think the number three is significant: after the first three months, the initial shock begins to subside, allowing pain to be felt that would have been unbearable before, but now starts to gradually emerge as the numbness recedes. This year’s birthday season, the first time without Peter, started three months after his death.

Our double-decade son

When Paddy turned ten, he said he was happy to finally be a two-digit person too, a statement that especially delighted Amy, who was happy to point out repeatedly what this indicated about the interesting way her darling nephew’s mind works. As Paddy entered the second decade of his life in February, I found myself remembering when he became a two-digit person and became determined to make the kind of birthday cake for him again that he liked half his lifetime ago. It was probably not a very sensible plan, but I was feeling unhappy about his mother’s failure to provide the one birthday present he actually asked for, the finished jacket that we started sewing together in September, and about his father’s failure to be alive and present to celebrate with a last-minute surprise, as Peter always did best.

The first hurdle to providing an American-style decorated cake with fluffy sweet icing was that the plain cake recipe we had always used was in an American cookbook that has now gone to live in Vienna. I found a recipe for “Amerikanische Biskuitkuchen” in an Austrian cookbook from the 1920s, which seemed promising, even though it calls for more eggs than flour, and proceeded to make an elaborate mess in the kitchen for an entire day. In my mind, I could hear Amy laughing at me (remembering the first time I had to make a birthday cake for Paddy without consulting Amy), pointing out that there is a reason why Americans use packaged mixes for cakes. At the back of my neck, I could feel Peter rolling his eyes, shaking his head and refusing to take any responsibility for cleaning up the mess I was making. I suspect this recipe is also based on the experience of baking cakes in a wood-burning stove, which doesn’t translate well to a modern electrical oven, so it took several hours longer to bake it, but eventually it was finished. Transporting this cake to Vienna without squashing it, especially along with the bulky birthday present of sheets and a blanket I got for Paddy’s beautiful, newly self-built bed, would not have been possible without Seth, but the cake actually arrived in Vienna the next day with minimal damage. Celebrating Paddy’s birthday in Vienna with his wonderful friends felt good, felt right. The cake was probably mostly a sentimental effort on my part, something I needed to do, but Paddy graciously refrained from pointing that out, and I was happy to see him happy.

Birthday Roses

After my week in Ljubljana, where it felt so good to just be myself for a week, taking a holiday from being Peter’s widow, I returned to Linz with more energy and confidence. Unfortunately, however, I could already see my own birthday looming then. I tried hard to resist the temptation to slide into gloomy self-pity, knowing that for the first time there would be no roses and fresh rolls for me in the morning, but since I had a class at nine that morning, I wouldn’t have had time to enjoy them anyway. Peter’s family was incredibly sweet and generous about making a nice birthday for me the Sunday before my birthday, Paddy and Christopher and our new friend Agnes came from Vienna, Seth came on the tram, and we all went out for lunch together and came home for coffee and Oma’s famous celebratory nut-cake. After my class the next morning, Sophie and George took me out for another nice lunch and then accompanied me to the cemetery. Since Peter didn’t bring me roses this year, I took one to him. While Sophie kindly went to get a candle, because I had stupidly forgotten to bring one again, I enjoyed telling George about Peter, while George made contented little burbling noises in his buggy. As soon as Sophie returned, however, of course George realized that he was absolutely famished and urgently needed to be fed. Immediately! Since it was a bit too chilly to sit outside on a bench in the cemetery, Sophie and I made our way back to the main building as quickly as possible, while George protested the delay with all the vociferous insistence that a person just seven weeks old is capable of. The same cheerful man who had accompanied us, when we took the urn to place it in the niche in November, then cheerfully led the three of us into the same room, where we had met with the officials from the cemetery to discuss Peter’s funeral. It is a comfortable, peaceful room, and sitting in that same room again, this time with Sophie and George, felt good, it felt right.

Since I am fortunate enough to share the same birthday with two friends, the three of us met in the evening at Solaris to celebrate together and spent a comfortable, enjoyable evening with friends who came to join us. There was no need for self-pity at all, because there was no need to feel lonely the whole day, so the next time will be easier. And I didn’t even miss the roses, because I enjoyed bringing them myself for the other two.

Other Plans

Two birthdays successfully passed, one to go: March 28th would have been Peter’s fiftieth birthday. He had been looking forward to it, and after I assured him that I had no intentions whatsoever of organizing another surprise party, as I did for his fortieth birthday, he was enjoying thinking about how he would like to celebrate, all the people he would like to celebrate with, thinking more and more about spreading celebrations across the whole week to fit everyone in. Whenever he started thinking out loud about ending up with a party in a little cabin high in the mountains, I asked him whether he was sure he really wanted to celebrate his fiftieth birthday without me. He always just laughed then and promised that he would organize a helicopter especially to get me up to the mountain cabin.

Helicopter

It was a helicopter that brought my love’s broken body down from the mountains, but his life was left behind. No helicopters for this birthday then. Instead, the boys and I agreed to hold a kind of open house on Peter’s birthday, so that people who are thinking about Peter, missing him, remembering him, can come by any time starting in the afternoon until open end, to share stories, memories, music, tears, laughter and all our different experiences of how life goes on.

Waking up this morning with the thought of seeing lovely friends later today already felt much better than starting the day with a feeling of emptiness. So far, it feels good, feels right, and that is very reassuring.

Every company that sends out bills and is serious about collecting payments due, ought to have at least one staff member who knows what to do in case of the death of a regularly paying customer and can clearly and courteously explain the procedures on the phone. And every other staff member should know who that person is and have their extension readily available. Sadly, frustratingly, in my experience over the past three months, this is almost never the case. Especially with phone companies.

Apparently, the proper procedure with phone companies is supposed to be that one presents a copy of the death certificate to cancel all existing contracts and make a new contract, if the services are still needed by someone else (e.g. our sons). Obtaining this information has involved endless Kafkaesque encounters with an endless number of phone company employees both on the phone and in their gaudy shops in town – because phone companies obviously don’t provide services, they sell products. One company still continued to send stern reprimands to Peter threatening to cut off his phone connection, if he did not immediately pay the last bill along with all the mounting and exorbitant late fees, even after Seth brought them a copy of Peter’s death certificate and wisely insisted on being given confirmation that it had been faxed to the appropriate office. When yet another angry reminder arrived, this time addressed to “Hütmannsberger family”, threatening to turn the matter over to a collection agency, I snapped. When the woman who answered the service desk number told me that I needed to send them a copy of Peter’s death certificate, I started yelling at her, venting all my anger and frustration and threatening on my part to turn the matter over to my lawyer, if this company didn’t stop sending collection letters to the “Hütmannsberger family”, which does not even exist at this address. Seth took the death certificate in again and insisted again on receiving confirmation of receipt. Finally, a letter arrived from this company a few days ago, which started: “Dear Mr. Hütmannsberger, we received your message and offer our sincere condolences for your loss…” Of course, the letter went on from there to list various possibilities for Mr. Hütmannsberger to still use the company’s services (and hence pay them yet more money), even though the contract was canceled due to his death. Despite his lifelong love of telephones, I seriously doubt that Mr. Hütmannsberger will be taking advantage of any of these offers. And I seriously hope that someone somewhere is feeling extremely foolish now, realizing that in all these exchanges, no one ever even bothered to ask my name. I tend to doubt that, however.

Then there was the credit card company that sent a bill for the yearly card fee, even though I had been convinced that they had received notice of Peter’s death from the bank. Apparently not. And although I am aware of the cliche of irate wives accidentally discovering dodgy charges on their husbands’ credit card bills, I don’t think credit card company employees should immediately presume that to be the case. When the first person I got on the phone coldly and brusquely asked, “And who are you?”, I responded with what I hoped was the same callousness, “I’m his widow”. There was a brief moment of silence, then he decided to put me through to someone else. Who listened to the reason for my inquiry and decided to put me through to someone else. Who listened to the reason for my inquiry and decided to put me through to someone else. Who listened to the reason for my inquiry and decided to put me through to someone else … Does anyone actually believe it is easy to have to explain over and over and over: “I’m calling about the bill you sent to my husband. The reason he hasn’t paid it is that he is dead …”?

Sometimes the people I get on the phone (once I get past the machine-voice instructions and push the right combination of buttons to get through to an actual human being) are courteous, and a few are even capable of speaking in coherent, grammatically correct full sentences. The outcome of all these phone calls is almost invariably the same, however: “Send us an email with the information x, y, z and the documents a, b, c.” Sometimes I can do that, but very often I can’t. Sometimes the reason I can’t is that the requisite information at home when I’m in the office or vice versa. Sometimes it’s because I now have a frustratingly limited, temporary Internet connection in my office, which only works on my laptop, because another telephone company erroneously assured me that I had an Internet connection with my telephone, before I had Peter’s office phone turned off – and my Internet connection with it.

Sometimes the problem is simply that I still haven’t got one of the most frequently requested documents: official legal confirmation that I am authorized to take care of Peter’s business and access his assets as his widow. The reason for this is that now, over three months later, negotiations are still continuing about how much money is owed to the tax office for Peter’s income last year. Are living, thinking, actual human beings to be found in the tax office? In light of the frequent news items about the former Austrian Minister of Finance who “forgot” to pay taxes on part of his income, I’m sure it must be very confusing to work in a tax office, but how hard can it really be? Peter ceased to generate any income at all on 13 November last year, and his “assets” include down-payments for instruments that Peter will no longer be making, which now have to be returned to the people who paid a down-payment for instruments they will not be getting. Having to ask all these lovely people again to be patient sometimes feels harder than having to argue with all the ludicrous phone companies, and it seems so terribly unfair.

As these negotiations drag on and on, too many loose ends are left over, too many things left open. For one thing, we need to re-register the car in Paddy’s name, so that the city administration of Vienna stops sending parking tickets to Peter. For some reason, one was sent last week as a registered letter, which the woman at the post office told me had to be signed for in person. When I explained that that would not be possible, she said she would have to send it back with a note to that effect. Unless there is a Tom Waits fan hiding in the traffic violations department of the city of Vienna, I’m concerned that someone there may take the advice to “never drive a car when you’re dead” more seriously, so I asked Paddy to find the number and call them to see what the problem is. He will probably have to go there to show them the legal document stating that he and Christopher are allowed to drive the car, but at least he has that document.

Next week, however, I’m going to take a break from explaining to strangers on the phone and random office workers that Peter is dead. I’ve been invited to go to the Eclectic Tech Carnival being held in conjunction with the Red Dawns Festival, so I’m going to take a short holiday from being Peter’s widow and go to Ljubljana to just be me for a week. Maybe the tax office and the phone companies and all the other offices will be able to sort themselves out in the meantime. That would be helpful, because I need to be able to stop repeating over and over that my husband is dead, so that I have a chance to come to terms with what that actually means.

Keep moving

There are times – it seems actually most of the time at the moment – when I feel like a little toy figure in need of someone to come along and wind it up to set it in motion again. As my spring winds down, I find myself moving more and more slowly in smaller and smaller circles. There are still so many things I need to do, but each step seems just a bit further than I can manage, and multiple steps seem to make up an insurmountable distance. To answer this email, I need to make that phone call, but first I have to find certain information, and it all seems just a bit more than I can cope with. Sometimes it is easier to just answer the phone and agree to go for a drink with whichever kind person is calling me; sometimes it is too much of an effort to even answer the phone. So I wind down a little bit more. 

Kind people keep assuring me that I need to be careful, take it easy, give myself time. From experience I know they are right, and I also know I have to be careful not to take on too much and risk going over the edge again, as I did after Amy’s death, because now Peter isn’t here to help me pick up the pieces and put myself back together.  Sometimes I worry, though, that there is a grey area between taking it easy and coming to a complete standstill, incapable of taking any action at all. I’m afraid of missing the boundary within that grey area and coming out on the wrong side. 

Yet there are still people who come to give me a hug as soon as they see me, every time I go into town, people who share their memories of Peter with me, others who remind me that I have never been helpless and weak and will not become so now. When the computer seems like a black hole that will suck me in as soon as I turn it on, I keep looking for different approaches, a safe way to sneak up on it. Soon I will have a new bed, a smaller one, just the right size for me and two cats, so it won’t feel empty, and it will come with a lovely soft matress for my aching old bones. Then hopefully I will eventually be able to sleep again and wake up feeling rested. 

I just need to keep reminding myself that I am not a toy figure needing to be wound up again. I am a person surrounded and kept safe by so many wonderful people. I need to hold on to the conviction that someday I will be able to take responsibility for other people again – someday, but not yet. For now I can only feel grateful for so much patience and understanding and just keep trying to keep moving. 

Eight weeks and still counting. Every Sunday I am still acutely aware of the clock, remembering what happened at this time and at this time… In the meantime, a few applications and forms have been processed, a few more signatures delivered, some bills paid, transferred or deferred. And I began what is allegedly a new year by paying all the bills for the recovery, storage, transport and cremation of Peter’s body and all the funeral arrangements. I’m not sure I really wanted to know in such detail what I was paying for, but it’s done now.

There are more bills to pay now, not only my own bookkeeping to close for the past year, but also Peter’s as well. More phone calls to make, more emails to write, more things to sort through and organize and put somewhere else. At the same time, I am deeply grateful to Cornelia for her beautiful description of our experience in Windischgarsten, this necessary reminder of the overwhelming sense of love and loss, which is the reason for doing all of these things.

Holidays are over now even in Austria, everyone else has gone back to normal everyday life. Somewhere in the middle of the past few weeks, however, there seems to be a blank space for me. As I learned after my sister’s death, grief has an adverse affect on the immune system. It is therefore hardly surprising that after a few lovely days of Christmas with the house full of people again, immediately afterward I succumbed to a virulent flu bug that has been circulating in Linz. Feeling very ill with a fever and aches and pains seems to facilitate denial, repression, something like that. I didn’t even feel guilty about escaping for a few days into fantasy novels and silly films, forgetting about everything else, but by the time the fever resided, it was very late to be thinking about plans for New Year’s Eve.

I didn’t really want to be anywhere on New Year’s Eve, I didn’t even want it to be at all. Inside Peter’s wedding ring, which is still lying on my dresser, since the police returned it to me in Hinterstoder, it says that he married me on 31 December 1986. We should have been celebrating our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on New Year’s Eve, so anything else couldn’t possibly feel right. In the end, the boys persuaded me to drive back to Vienna with them that afternoon, and the drive itself, with my two highly entertaining sons, was actually surprisingly enjoyable. In the evening I went to a small party with Christopher, which felt like the right place to be. Of course, there is no way at all to escape the Blue Danube Waltz at midnight in Austria, so when the time came, I gave up, put my head on Christopher’s shoulder and just cried.

Since I felt worse again the next day, I simply got on a train and went home again to cough, sniffle and ache my way through the first week of January, the first week of a new year. Although I sadly had to cancel my plans to meet with one of my oldest friends that week, I did manage to finish the one translation that I felt I absolutely needed to do myself – I needed to do it to remind myself that I still have a life, I still have something valuable and meaningful and useful to contribute to this world. Then I sent off the translation in good time to just sit there feeling glum, remembering that 7 January would have been my father’s 82nd birthday, had he not died at the early age of 68. And after all these years, I still miss him terribly, especially now.

In a way, it was probably the most convenient time to be ill, since I didn’t miss anything, since no one else was working or expecting anyone else to be working. Unpleasant and annoying as it is to spend two weeks battling with a flu bug, I tend to suspect there is a reason for that too: when I think of the past eight weeks, when I remember experiences from the past eight week, I have the feeling I can remember no physical sensations at all, as though I was there, but not actually physically present. Being ill has returned me into my body, and although I’m not particularly thrilled with the situation, I can still see certain advantages in living embodied experience.

For one thing, I now live with two cats. Before Christopher and Paddy returned to Vienna in November, before Pat returned to Albuquerque, they surprised me one afternoon by taking me to the local animal shelter and coming home with a kitten, Ginevra. Two days before Christmas, Paddy surprised me again by bringing home a second kitten, Hester, as an early Christmas present for Ginevra and me. Living with two small feline companions does require more than theoretical reflection, so they help me to remember where I am. They are also helpfully bilingual, which enables me to continue living in two languages, even though I still miss being able to tell Peter what I’m thinking about. Of course, Ginevra and Hester are no substitute for Peter, but they are good companions, and for that I am very grateful.

My “widow’s tasks” are still far from finished and my energy level is still quite low, but a reminder of an overwhelming sense of love and loss is sufficient motivation to keep going – and to be fully present again to do so.

Peter Hütmannsberger 28 March 1962 - 13 November 2011

In the mornings when I open my eyes and see that the other side of the bed is empty, out of habit I check whether he has brought me coffee yet. When there is no coffee, I get up to look for him. Is he there in front of the computer again, engrossed in untangling someone’s problem with their email? Is he running back and forth packing a rucksack with all his climbing gear and enough provisions to feed the whole group for a week? Sorting laundry or hanging up the washing?

No, he’s not there.

In the evenings, just after dark, I start listening for the gate to the garage to open, knowing out of habit exactly how long it will take until I hear his footsteps coming up the stairs. But the gate doesn’t open, and if there are footsteps on the stairs, they are not his. I know the sound of his footsteps.

But he is not coming home.

Tomorrow I will have been a widow for two weeks now. Two weeks? It feels like an eternity. Time stopped that Sunday evening, the whole world came to a sudden halt. “Peter stayed in the mountains,” some people have said. It sounds poetic and gentle, but I am still angry with the mountain that let him fall.

That Saturday evening, while I was enjoying Christopher’s exuberant concert with friends, Peter stepped outside the mountain cabin with a friend to enjoy his one cigarette under a beautiful night sky full of stars. The next day, Christopher and I went to visit Peter’s mother in the hospital. When we came home, while we were waiting for Christopher’s roommate to come and pick him up to drive back to Vienna with a desk from the cellar, Christopher and I went out on the balcony for a cigarette together, and I said to him, “It’s getting dark, your father will be home soon.” When the doorbell rang, we assumed it was Leo coming to pick up Christopher. When I heard unfamiliar voices and then saw a policeman walking up the stairs with two people in bright emergency services jackets behind him, I was certain there was some mistake. I told the policeman he had the wrong door, but he insisted on coming in. It irritated me that he knew my name. That he knew I was married to Peter. When he explained to me that there had been an accident, that the accident was fatal, I tried to convince him that I had had enough of death, it couldn’t still be my turn, but the policeman wouldn’t take back the words, would not accept that he must have made a mistake.

Didn’t you hear me? When you left with your ridiculous rucksack that morning, the last thing I said to you was, “Take care, my love”, and you promised me you would.

What happened then? When, how did the house start filling up with people? How, when did all these kind and caring friends come to hold us, cry with us, take care of us and carry us through?

Christopher fell into a deep, dark well of despair, but somehow Leo was there, the same Leo who had been having so much fun with him on stage the night before, now gently wrapping Christopher in a blanket, holding him, sitting quietly there, just holding him. Somehow Paddy came home from Vienna and started taking responsibility, standing in front of me with his hands on my shoulders, insisting that he could take on such difficult tasks. Looking at his thin, pale, earnest face, I thought I couldn’t bear to see my little guy have to become a responsible adult that quickly, that suddenly. Christopher and Paddy are only twenty-one and nineteen, much too young to lose their father who wasn’t even fifty yet.

Somehow Jörg and Cornelia were there, and the next morning they drove with Paddy and me to Hinterstoder to talk to the police there and collect Peter’s belongings, pick up our car and continue on to the morgue in Windischgarsten. On the way, we stopped and the policeman showed us the mountain where Peter fell. It is such a beautiful, beautiful place, and I still keep reminding myself that Peter was so very happy up to the very last moment of his life. But I am still angry with the mountain for letting him fall.

Driving through the beautiful, beautiful scenery of the Alps, at some point I realized I had a song stuck in my head that I had to get rid of, so I asked Jörg to put on some music. The CD in his car stereo was Christopher’s new album, which I was happy to hear, relieved to hear Christopher’s voice, as he had been unable to speak when we left. Listening to the song “Clutter” was so comforting, so reassuring: “There’s a hopelessness growing, but there’s hope stuck in there too.” As I kept losing my balance, feeling dizzy, disoriented, I played that song in my head over anhd over, and it helped me to get my bearings again.

The mortician was concerned about letting us see Peter: he was an “accident victim”, it might be disturbing, frightening to see how injured he was. Three years ago, my sister took her own life: nothing can be worse than that, and Peter was so wonderfully happy up to the last moment of his life. When I saw him in the morgue, I was only peripherally aware of the injuries, how damaged his poor body was. I only saw that beloved face with the same expression that he always had when he fell asleep on the couch.

Don’t be silly, my love, you can’t sleep there. Wake up now.

Somehow there were more people and more people and more people. Peter and I have always had an open house, and everyone who shared that space returned. There were people shopping, cooking, tidying, doing laundry, holding us, crying with us, carrying us through.

Somehow there were arrangements to be made, decisions to be taken, but there was always someone there, guiding me along, helping me to take one step, then the next, then the next and the next.

Messages, cards, phone calls, prayers in different languages from all religions, warm thoughts, kind words – an outpouring of human kindness flowed over us in an endless stream.

Then somehow it was the next Tuesday, and all the notes and instructions left for me in strategic places guided me to the funeral home for the memorial service. And people came – and more people and more people. Although it is all a blur now, I know that I was so grateful for each and every face that appeared before me. Later it was agreed that there must have been about 350 people at the memorial service, but I only know that it seemed an endless stream of warm hugs and kind words. And Hari was there, bringing me water and handkerchiefs, taking over when I just wanted to stop talking, just sit there looking at the pictures, listening to the kind and generous words about Peter, listening to Dani singing so wonderfully.

But then the large doors started to move, closing in front of the coffin made of the same wood as Peter’s instruments, and there was a sudden moment of panic, when I wanted to stand up and shout, “No! Take it all back, we’re not doing this, we’re not going to say good-bye now!” But the doors still closed and the memorial service was over.

Then somehow Hari wrapped his coat around me and whisked me away to a safe hiding place, where I could just be alone for a few minutes. As I stood there at the edge of the cemetery looking out over a field, a huge flock of birds rose up out of that field and flew noisily away together. In the emptiness that rose up in their wake, I heard my own voice speaking from far away.

Good-bye, my love.