• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 449 0

he had arranged for us, the people he wanted me to meet, and the picnics we would take to the islands nearby. I could not wait to be with him again. But then one night, not too long before I was to join him, I was at home writing a chapter for a textbook when there was a knock at my door. It was an odd hour, I was expecting no one, and for some even odder reason I suddenly remembered what my mother had said about how pilots’ wives dreaded the chaplain’s knock on the door. I opened the door, and it was a diplomatic courier with a letter from David’s commanding officer saying that David, who had been on general medical duty in Kathmandu, had died very suddenly of a massive heart attack. He was forty-four, and I was thirty-two.

Very little sank in. I remember sitting down, picking up my work again, writing for a while, and then telephoning my mother. I spoke also with David’s parents and his commanding officer. Even when we were discussing plans for the funeral, which was significantly delayed because the army required an autopsy before David’s body could be returned to England, his death in no way seemed real to me. I went through all of the motions in a state of complete shock—I booked a flight, taught my seminar the next morning, ran a clinic staff meeting, renewed my passport, packed my clothes, and carefully gathered up all of David’s letters to me. Once I was on the airplane, I methodically put the letters into order according to when they had been written; I decided to wait until I got to London, however, before reading them. The next day, in Hyde Park, when I sat down to read, I found I could get through only the first half of the first letter. I started sobbing uncontrollably. To this day I have neither reopened nor reread any of his letters.

I found my way to Harrods to pick out a black hat for the funeral and then had lunch with David’s commanding officer at his club. He was, by virtue of his job, chief psychiatrist for the British army; by temperament, he was kind, direct, and tremendously understanding. He was used to dealing with women whose husbands had died unexpectedly, knew desperate denial when he saw it, and clearly grasped that I had not even begun to comprehend the reality of David’s death. He talked to me for a long time about David, about the many years he had known and worked with him, and what a wonderful doctor and person he had been. He also said he thought it might be “terribly difficult, but a good idea” if he read me portions of the autopsy report. Ostensibly, this was to reassure me that the massiveness of David’s heart attack was such that no treatment or medical intervention would have helped. In actuality, it was clear he knew that the cold-blooded medical language would shock me into beginning to deal with the finality of it all. It certainly helped, although it was not so much the gruesome medical details that lurched me toward reality; it was, instead, the brigadier’s statement that “a young officer had accompanied the body of Colonel Laurie on the Royal Air Force plane from Hong Kong to Brize Norton airfield.” David no longer was Colonel Laurie; he no longer was Dr. Laurie; he was a body.

The British army was unbelievably kind to me. By definition the army is used to death, especially sudden death, and much that is healing comes from their traditions. The rituals of military funerals are in themselves predictable, reassuring, dignified, religious, and dreadfully final. David’s friends and fellow officers were blunt, witty, matter-of-fact, and deeply compassionate. They made clear the expectation that I would handle things well, but they also did every conceivable thing possible to make a terrible situation more bearable. They never left me alone, but they never hovered; they kept me plied with sherry and scotch; they offered me legal counsel. They frequently, openly, and humorously discussed David; they left little room for denial.

During the funeral itself, the brigadier insisted I sing along with the hymns, kept his arm around me during particularly difficult times, and laughed out