But once my children left for college, the full force of how alone I was hit me. The house felt too quiet. Empty and cavernous. For the first time in my life, I lived alone, which left me feeling vulnerable and exposed. How many people—from neighbors to the kids’friends and acquaintances—were aware that I was on my own in this spacious house?
My anxiety was most intense at night, in the dark. Before Ali died, I preferred sleeping in a pitch-black room. Ali had even hung blackout curtains for me. But now I kept the hallway lights on overnight. Awakening in the dark, blinking my eyes open and not seeing anything, felt like death.
I detested the idea of being a wimp, a grown woman behaving like a scared little girl. Sometimes, at night when I felt jumpy, I’d try to call my best friend Nicki but usually got her voicemail because she went to bed early. Nicki and I had met as college interns at the Smithsonian and talked almost every day. It occurred to me that we hadn’t spoken much in the weeks since Ali died. Why was that?
I didn’t dwell on it. I was too busy sleeping during the day. The morning I picked up copies of Ali’s death certificate, I came home before noon, slid under the covers, and stayed there until the following morning. Death is a tiring business.
There was plenty to do when I wasn’t sleeping. A swirl of documents arrived from Ali’s accounting firm, involving pension payments, life insurance, and reimbursement for the earned vacation time he never got to take. Suddenly, it was only me responsible for everything. Ali was an accountant who took care of all the finances. I had only a vague idea of how much money we had saved or invested.
I deferred to Ali in almost all financial decisions, not because he insisted but because finances bored me. The only investment I ever suggested, on a whim, was holding on to our town house after we moved farther out into the suburbs, but the idea had made Ali nervous.
“Money is going to be tighter with all of the expenses that come with the new house,” he said. “I don’t want to carry two mortgages.”
My instinct turned out to be right. Our new house would be paid off if we’d held on to the town house for just a few more years. It never occurred to me that I might have a knack for making sound investment choices. That was Ali’s department.
My focus was on the kids and my contracted work with museums. I specialized in researching and writing explanatory introduction panels and title cards for exhibits. Ali cooked sometimes on weekends and always helped clean the kitchen, except during tax season, when he worked late every night.
For the most part, though, we naturally fell into traditional roles, a separation of duties that lasted our entire marriage.
“How is it possible for the mortgage to be overdue?” I stared at the letter from the bank postmarked two weeks earlier.
“Did you say your house payment is late?” Lulu asked as she walked into my kitchen and set her overstuffed purse on the table. My sister carried her life in that worn leather tote. She found me sitting at the kitchen island, staring at stacks of official-looking correspondence littering the counter. “That’s not good.”
“No kidding.” I was surprised to see her. “You didn’t say you were coming by.”
“Just checking in on you.” She eyed the piles of envelopes laid out before me. “That’s a lot of mail.”
“I’ve kind of been avoiding dealing.” I set the bank notice down. “But I started to stress that I might be missing something important.”
“You think?” Unlike me, Lulu was the chief money manager in her household.
“Just be happy that I finally have the energy to go through this junk.” A lot of the correspondence was addressed to Ali, which made sorting through it even more depressing.
“You have at least been paying the bills, I hope?”
I nodded. “Most of them are still on whatever autopay system Ali set up. And I pay any bill that comes in the mail—water, gas, electric, property tax for the cars.”
“Time to put on your big-girl panties!” After weeks of coddling me, my sister had switched to more of a tough love approach. She studied the notice I’d placed on the island. “Didn’t you say the mortgage is paid automatically?”
“Yes. Ali set it up.”
“What day of the month is your mortgage due?”
“I’m not sure.” There was a lot I didn’t know. Without Ali, all the grown-up, real-life stuff felt overwhelming. We’d been like two sides of a house, holding everything up. How was one lone wall supposed to bear all of that weight on its own?
Lulu shot me an incredulous look. “Youstilldon’t know what day your mortgage is due? It’s been almost two months since Ali died.”
“Forty-three days, to be exact,” I retorted.
The doorbell rang.
I popped up. “Saved by the bell.”
“Are you expecting someone?”
“Yeah, some guy from the accounting firm is coming by for Ali’s work laptop.”
“Why do you still have Ali’s work laptop?” She followed me into the foyer. “You’d think the firm would want it back quickly. There’s got to be sensitive financial information on it.”
