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By Root 292 0

but I’d never been a social pariah, either. It was like my identity had been reassigned. Instead of The Guy Who Loves Music, or The Guy Who Worked in India for All Those Months, I was somebody else—somebody weird and unfamiliar. I hadn’t even had a chance to be The Guy with the Baby; I was just The Guy with the Dead Wife. I felt as though some of my coworkers were treating me like death was somehow contagious. And I couldn’t blame them, really—I probably would have reacted the exact same way.

Even the phone’s silence drove me crazy. I watched the light at the top stay dark all day. Liz had been the only one to call me on that line—as an Internet company, we almost exclusively used online messaging and e-mail to communicate. I would come back from lunch and see that red rectangle lit up, excited to have a voice mail from Liz, however mundane her message would be. Now I dreaded I would never see that light again—or worse, I would, but the message wouldn’t be from her.

I spent my first few days back sorting through e-mails. I moved all of the messages that had come during my leave to a folder called Before. But first, I sorted everything by sender and moved all the e-mails from my wife to a separate folder called Liz. I had thousands of them from her, but I simply wasn’t ready to look through them yet. I wanted to preserve them, though, so that if I ever felt ready to revisit her words, I’d be able to.

I did read two of them, but not on purpose. The e-mails were sorted by date received, the most recent e-mail at the top. There it was: the last e-mail she ever sent to me.

from: liz

to: matt

sent: sun 3/23/2008 5:48 PM

subject: I gained weight.

Probably from cookies and crap but when I stand up I feel bigger…can’t wait to show u!

I remembered that day. It was the day before Madeline had been born. I went to pick up dinner for us, and while Liz waited for me, she got a visit from one of the nurses, who told her that she had finally gained some weight—something she had been struggling to do through her entire pregnancy. It was a sign that the bed rest was working.

Looking at the e-mail reminded me of how fucking great we had felt on March 23. We’d had no idea that Madeline would make her appearance the next morning and that twenty-seven hours after that, Liz would be dead.

I saw one other e-mail that same day, and it sent me into a conference room for longer than I care to admit.

from: liz

to: matt

sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:13 PM

subject: I love u

And I’m excited to have a baby that looks like u :)

Fuck.

And my response:

from: matt

to: liz

sent: fri 3/21/2008 1:22 PM

subject: re: I love u

Let’s hope she looks more like you…

Double fuck.

When I finally stopped crying, I returned to my desk. The empty, gray walls of the cubicle were a stark reminder of just how empty my life had become. Everything that had been in my old cube, including the one framed photo of Liz that I had kept there, was still packed in the boxes under my desk, and I wasn’t ready to confront any of it yet.

I spent the next hour printing out enough photos of Madeline to completely cover the walls of my cubicle.

Chapter 21

as much as i never

expected to,

i love shopping

with madeline:

i try to buy

clothes that

liz

would choose,

but every once

in a while, i get

something that

she would have

rolled her eyes at,

just so madeline

gets both perspectives.

Before Madeline was born, Liz and I had many conversations about what our lives with her would—and should—be like. Of course, they never included the possibility of a future without me there, or without her there. We figured our biggest challenges would be whether or not our daughter needed braces, if we liked her boyfriends, or where she should go to school. But we firmly agreed that she would not absorb our entire selves.

“This baby is not going to change our lives,” Liz would say.

“This baby is not going to change our lives,” I would agree.

We knew our lives would change in a good