Wandalessness

Darkness has descended upon my world… The music has stopped, and all the vibrant and diverse colors have been reduced to a gloomy and monotonous grayness. My dearest wife, Wanda, whose huge and radiant personality shone like a sun and flooded every corner of my existence with love, warmth, and meaning, is no more, claimed so prematurely and so suddenly by a horrible disease… As I watched in horror and disbelief how the thrice-accursed cancer began to slowly dim the unfading light of her eyes, freeze the ceaseless stream of her jokes and witticisms, arrest her cheerful voice, and deprive her artistic hands of the ability to draw and write, I was still far from even imagining what my life would be without Wanda. Even in her diminished physical and mental state she generated enough life force to keep me going.

Now, as I stare at a box of ashes to which my beautiful Wanda has been reduced; as tears spontaneously and uncontrollably flow from my eyes and my academically-trained mind stubbornly objects to scientific facts and refuses to come to terms with the finality of what had happened, I begin to really feel the debilitating affects of wandalessness… It did not only invade my soul and plunge it into a dark abyss of hopeless sadness, but also transmogrified the physical reality around me and rendered it bleak, colorless, and joyless.

What use is it to rationalize that the change I am registering is only a matter of perception; that I am merely superimposing my grim and depressed mental state onto a perfectly fine world? Unfortunately, I am not one of those overeducated buffoons who could be consoled by their own ability to articulate a problem in some kind of scientific terms. I know by now that the same mind that states with such scientific certitude the inevitability and naturalness of dying and death is exactly the mind that refuses to think of its own finiteness, even as it attempts to describe it. It seems that a human mind awkwardly straddles finiteness and eternity, for otherwise it would not be able to render anything meaningful enough to pursue… Perhaps it is this unresolved conflict that prevents my mind from merely auto-correcting its own perception to make a wandaless world appear as a perfectly fine world all over again.

For instance, I am perfectly aware of the fact that I am looking at the same majestic Pacific Northwest, especially this time of the year when the autumnal dreaminess overcomes the whole of nature, and when the nature’s Master-Painter, the Fall, takes up its brushes and breaks up a monotony of the landscape’s dominant dark-green with the bold strokes of red, yellow, and ocher…and then softens this multi-colored festiveness by suspending a veil of fog or misting rain in front of it, which imparts to the scene that mystic quality of tranquil and melancholic poetic sadness that has been inspiring poets, writers, and artists of every country for centuries. I have always loved the Fall, but so has Wanda… Over the years, I have grown so accustomed to looking at the world and its beauty through the prism of her perception—mentally sharing my perception of the world with her, always thinking of what she might have to say about it when I get a chance to report my experiences to her. In other words, it was not just me, but “us,” looking at the world together. This mutually complementing and constantly conversing duality of my soul has now been sliced in half—reduced to a boring and mute singularity. That is why, perhaps, the lovely poetic Fall of the wandafull world does not strike the same cords in a world that is wandaless…

As if to drive this point home still more convincingly, I have recently found a collage Wanda had made long time ago—she sliced in half and joined together copies of our old black-and-white pictures as little children. The resulting composite image features a person that is half a girl and half a boy—one eye is mine, the other is of little Wanda; a little boy’s lips flow into a little girl’s lips; a short boyish haircut on one side is complemented by my little Wanda’s undulating locks on the other; my plain fleecy jacket I had worn over forty years ago in South-East Siberia is adjoined to Wanda’s ornate velvety dress trimmed with ruffles that she wore just as long ago in Odessa, Texas…

This collage, which I may as well name “WandAlex,” was an outward artistic expression of Wanda’s longing for a secure and lasting marriage. She did not want to think of it as something that had started on a certain date and, hence, something that could abruptly end one day. Rather she viewed our marriage as something foreordained—a central event of our lives, encompassing both our premarital past and our future as a couple. For this reason, she tried to reinvent our respective pasts and imagine a world in which we played together as little children, went to school together and, eventually, fell in love. She loved me as a little fat-cheeked baby sitting on a tall stool, with both of my parents standing on either side, as I appear on one of the few pictures of my childhood that survived the Soviet era, previous marriages, and frequent moves. She loved me as a goofy teenager, as a swarthy and barely hewed young soldier clad in the bulky Soviet Army uniform, as a fresh thirty-year old immigrant to the United States, and as a construction worker and a part-time university student in Eastern New Mexico. How many of those pictures I did not even care to look at! How many of them reminded me of the hopeless and grim years in the USSR! How many of them portrayed some miserable and immature individual whom I did not want to recognize as myself and to whom I wished I could deny my name! Some of them harked back the periods of my life from which I later felt almost entirely estranged due to embarrassment or bad memories associated with them. Yet Wanda’s love managed to restore these various estranged hypostases of myself back to me. In fact, she rehabilitated and salvaged my past by sewing together into one quilt and rendering meaningful the numerous episodes of my life prior to meeting her. However weird, strange, and foreign my life before Wanda might have been, it was nonetheless meaningful for it culminated in my marrying Wanda. And how carefully and thoughtfully did she document not only every step of our married life, but also of my life before her, by organizing every one of my old pictures in thematic albums and preserving all other shreds of my memory, be they my university degrees, lovingly framed by her, or samples of my woodworking, poems, short stories, or dabbling in art. She proved to be a much better historian than I have ever been, for instead of investing her time in histories of generations long dead, she collected and preserved the artifacts of a history that was unfolding right in front of her eyes—our history.

Since she embraced me as her husband literally from my childhood, she knew that I had not received enough love as a child, with my mother passing away when I was at a tender age of nine and my father playing a role of a stiff martinet at best. She did not want my loveless past to ever haunt me again. She wished to wipe off tears from the face of that little orphan and shield him from all the mocking and persecution he had received in Soviet schools for coming from a family of religious believers; she aspired to give a true sense of home and family to that wandering and lost immigrant from Russia. And she succeeded in doing just that: never before had I experienced such an intense sense of home and family, even if our immediate family consisted of only a handful of persons—Wanda, I, our little doggy Fifi, and a couple of African finches. But perhaps I am simplifying things: a warm, comforting, and tender sense of belonging that I am trying to describe here went beyond the walls of our humble two bedroom apartment lovingly decorated by Wanda, even to the point of being too cluttered with all sorts of antique lamps, tasseled curtains, valet de chambers, jewelry boxes, wall clocks, table cloths, rugs, and different sets of dishes for every season of the year; beyond Wanda’s elaborate and somewhat wild garden on the balcony, lit up at night by half a dozen of intricate lanterns. I belonged to a much wider and denser Wanda-world encompassing a myriad of little traditions we had established, a special vocabulary we used in our household, all the movies we watched and all the places we visited and remembered. In other words, I belonged to a particular lifestyle inspired and cultivated by Wanda.

She was central to my entire American experience, to my discovering and absorbing the rich layers of American language, culture and tradition, not only as Wanda experienced and remembered them, but also as her parents and grandparents did before her. She animated and inserted into my life an America I had not had a chance to encounter and, in truth, would have never encountered if, as so many of my fellow-immigrants from Russia, I would have settled in some Russian community in the United States, married a Russian woman, and sank into that insular minority life—speaking Russian for most of the time and eating the same borsch to the accompaniment of some program on Russian TV. Would I have ever become a fully-fledged member of a nation had it not been for Wanda’s gentle tutoring? Being married to Wanda meant living side by side with the most imposing piece of Americana—a strong-willed Southern woman full of idioms and colloquialisms that could not be easily located in a dictionary, like all those “conniption” and “hissy fits,” or her grandma’s famous expressions: “I guess if I wake up dead, I won’t know it,” “shit far and save matches,” “there’s a chicken in the woodpile,” “hurts like death,” “that hadn’t happened since John Owen shot the dog,” “might as well laugh as to cry,” “I’ve got the blind staggers,” “as the old woman said when she kissed the cow,” “Well, shoot a monkey!”, and other countless pearls of her grandma’s down-to-earth and infinitely creative folksy lexicon. And how imaginative, artistic, and romantic she has been, creating wonderful and memorable experiences out of occurrences one could easily pass by without noticing! They just don’t make women like Wanda anymore…

Just as she reinvented and sanctified my past and filled my present, she also prefigured my future. I was looking forward to living one day with her in a cute little house (preferably a stone one) in which we would have enough room for all those neat old things she had kept for years in storage for the lack of space in our apartment. I certainly would have remodeled the house to create an area for Wanda’s art studio. Our house would have a backyard big enough for Wanda’s garden, my wood-working shop, and a play ground for our multiple doggies and kitties. In the evenings she would be waiting for her husband, Professor Kashirin, to come home from his work at the university. And of course he would now proudly be carrying her present to him –a fancy leather briefcase featuring a little gold plaque with his initials engraved on it. I’ve had it since graduate school, but as a doctoral student, and even as an adjunct instructor later, I felt embarrassed and undeserving to show up in front of my colleagues with such an expensive and showy briefcase.

She expected me to take a job in Texas, close to her relatives and her brother’s ranch. She believed that any university would grab such a talented PhD graduate as her husband. How much fun would it be to spend our Thanksgivings and Christmases with the family! This was our dream… and although I had a premonition that this classic career scenario was somewhat out of touch with reality and belonged in the previous century, I had no idea what other cruel surprises the future held in store for us. What I did know was that Wanda would love me just the same even if I had to go back to doing construction full time. But why didn’t I carry that briefcase anyway just to make her happy? How will I feel carrying it when I finally get a “real job”? Will I be able to place it on the table in front of an audience full of students without breaking into tears? But I am jumping ahead of my story…

Why did I decide to commit these reflections to paper? Perhaps because I am trying to save myself from the void Wanda’s death had left in my soul, for one half of that composite person, represented by the “WandAlex” collage or the biblical “the two shall become one,” if you will, is now gone, having left me partially hollowed out and incomplete. How do I fight against this emptiness threatening to swallow up whatever remains of me—emptiness that cloaks itself in the garb of reason? How do I resist its cold scientific verdict—“She is dead, and she is never coming back”? It sounds so commonsensical, so axiomatic! I must accept this immutable fact, or drive myself into insanity! Or perhaps there is a compromise…?

“Art, we’ve got art in order not to die from the truth,” Nietzsche said tersely somewhere, and this might be what I am instinctively doing here—trying to sublimate the pain of losing Wanda by turning it into some sort of art. Writing about Wanda, moreover, means an ongoing dialogue with her, a continuous journey with her, and I cling to this opportunity. I also hope that these reflections, which in time may add up to a coherent story, will reveal this brave and unique woman to even more people than the multitudes she had already touched throughout her life. She certainly inserted herself into every nook and cranny of my being—my past, present, and future—and left a lasting imprint on everything that constitutes me as a person. She gave me a sense of purpose in a world that previously seemed purposeless to me. The world became more meaningful to me because I could share it with my Wanda. A wandaless world which I’ve been trying to depict here is a world devoid of meaning—an anti-thesis of a wandaful world, a reversal to a world in which I had lived before Wanda. It does not mean that I am incapable of standing on my own. I have been a survivor all my life, and I will survive wandalessness also… At least I hope so. But there is a difference between surviving something and living it, and the difference is precisely in the quality of experience. One can survive a purgatory, for instance, and this is what my subjective and sorrowful world increasingly resembles—a purgatory of sorts, for Wanda’s passing away also evoked in me a woeful and inescapable sense of remorse and guilt for not having loved her enough, kissed her enough, caressed her enough; for not having made myself more available to do things she wanted us to do together… And this irredeemable sense of guilt is yet another component of wandalessness.

Susceptible to fear and panic in extraordinary situations, Wanda often likened me to a sturdy ship staying the course no matter what. But I could steer my ship and keep it steady because Wanda served both as my compass and anchor. With her gone, my ship now resembles a ghostly Flying Dutchman, unsinkable, but tossed about the stormy sea without any sense of direction and no means of anchoring itself… And so I drive around town, aimlessly it seems, observing how the autumn wind blows a swarm of fallen leaves across the pavement, thinking of Wanda, crying, making turns unconsciously, ending up in parts of town away from my destination, and then wondering whether I had a destination at all… I pass by an oncology clinic and recollect all the times I dropped off Wanda there for her chemotherapy or radiation treatments after her fist cancer… And here is a little café we frequented… We would often play cards or do crossword puzzles as we were waiting for our food to be served… And there is an antique store where she always felt tempted to stop as we would be passing it by on our way to Walmart (“Sweetheart, do you think I might can stop here for just fifteen minutes?”)… And here is our old apartment where we lived for eight years… I can see her standing on a balcony, surrounded by her plants and flowers, smiling, waving her hand at me, and telling our little doggy: “Look Fifi, our daddy is home!” What would I give now to experience any of these moments, trivial as they may have seemed when things were well!

I see her everywhere I turn in this town, and yet I cannot hold her, embrace her, feel her lips, or smell her hair… Oh how much I wished I could drive her to every antique store imaginable, to Michaels, Hirons, Walmart, to her storage unit—just to be with her, to have her sitting next to me in my truck, to be able to hold her hand! I would even get a different truck, with an automatic transmission, in order not to ever have to free my hand from hers to shift gears… What would I give now for cozying up with her in front of the TV on a rainy day, for coming out on the balcony with her at night to observe the full moon (She loved full moons, and some months before she died, she counted all the full moons we lived since we had met; there was a full moon the night she passed away…), for listening together with her to the roar of thunder in a distance (“I’m scared, honey,” she would usually say, and press herself closer to me, as if in search of protection. I knew that she wasn’t really scared but simply used these occasions to extract more affection from me.)! And why didn’t I go to church with her more willingly and more often, not just on big religious holidays such as Christmas and Ester?! It made her so happy to have me sitting on a pew next to her, holding her hand, bonding with her spiritually… What tenderness usually overwhelmed my heart each time I listened to her sing with the congregation at the church! She had hardly sung anything around the house, although, apparently, she had a very pleasant voice. But at the church, she felt compelled to sing, and there was such sweetness in her voice, as if the experience of liturgy mellowed her down, caused her to lower her defenses, and brought forth a much gentler side of her. Oh how much I wish I could hear that angelic voice again!

How often she suggested that we tried going to a bowling alley: “Let’s do something different this Friday night, honey; it could be fun!” Yet I always came up with some stupid excuse not to go. Why did I often wait until she would pull her old trick on me and begin singing in a quiet, pitiful, and demure voice a refrain from a popular song—“All by my-se-e-e-lf…” (the sound of which has never failed to melt my heart)—before agreeing to join her in so many other activities? Why, knowing how much she loved Christmases, couldn’t I show some initiative for once, reciprocate that Christmas cheer instantly and gladly, and tell her: “Baby, let’s get into my truck and go shopping for a Christmas tree this afternoon?” Why did I always procrastinate until she would tell me: “It’s already the middle of December. Are we going to have a damn Christmas tree this year or not?” Why couldn’t I understand that buying and decorating a Christmas tree, or putting up Christmas lights on our balcony meant spending quality time with my wife—something far more important than grading my students’ papers or final exams. I certainly could have handled both activities at the same time. But instead, I often acted as “a fuddy-duddy,” as she was wont to say.

It is just past Thanksgiving, and many radio stations have already begun playing Christmas music. Although I had fallen in love with these Christmas songs long before I met Wanda, she made them resonate even stronger in my soul, for with her, my formerly peripatetic and homeless Christmases had finally acquired a home and a hostess who, in every sense, was the very embodiment of the spirit of Christmas. Now that she is gone, I listen to the same songs as I drive around…and weep, feeling as if some cruel Ebenezer “Cancer” Scrooge has stolen my Christmas, and not just this year’s Christmas, but all Christmases for years to come… I hear “All I want for Christmas is you” on the radio, and I think of my Wanda, as I try to sing along in a broken voice… I hear another popular Christmas tune—“I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams”—and I sob, because I know that Wanda’s death robbed me of even a possibility of dreaming about being home for Christmas. What sort of Christmas would I have in a wandaless home? And who will remind me now the name of a performer of this or that Christmas song? Wanda seemed to know them all —Bing Cosby, Gene Autry, Burl Ives, Dean Martin, etc—and would often quiz me: “Who is singing this one, honey?” “Is it Frank Sinatra?” I would guess. “No, I think it’s Perry Como,” she would guess in her turn, and always correctly.

I remember all those beautiful Christmas decorations and ornaments Wanda collected over the years. I still have them, packed away in special boxes in storage. The boxes are easily distinguishable, for Wanda carefully overlaid them with brightly-colored Christmas wrapping paper… But I dare not open those boxes, for every object coming out of them would tear me up by bringing back memories of precious moments that cannot be relived, restored, or altered. How much good cheer and fun had I missed, for instance, complaining about the consumerism surrounding Christmas—all that pre-Christmas shopping craze and attendant bad traffic—instead of focusing on what my dear wife was doing: diligently and patiently signing dozens of Christmas cards and lovingly wrapping gifts for as many family members and friends as possible! Why couldn’t I see as clearly as I do now that her labor made someone happy and touched, even if momentarily; that her signs of attention kept us connected with so many of our far-away friends whom we could have otherwise lost over time… I miss my dearest Wanda so much this Christmas, as I painfully realize that a wandaless world also means a Christmasless world… Maybe it will change some years down the road, but at the moment I feel, that without her around, I can only fake Christmas…

But what is the worth of this belated wisdom now, if no matter what I would give for it, I cannot have my Wanda back… I cannot even hear her voice… It’s been almost fifty days since I last heard her say anything to me, and her last words before she died—“I love you, Sasha”—are perpetually ringing in my ears, inside my head, day and night, making me break into tears again, and again, and again… I can still open my phone, press on her name, and hear her recording: “This is Wanda Jeanne. Sorry I’ve missed your call. Please leave a message.” But I dread to do so, for the last time I did so I could not stop crying… By doing so I would only be feeding an illusion… I know she is not going to pick up her phone, for it is resting on a table, just a few feet away from me, next to an urn with her ashes…

Oh, never before in my life have I wanted to believe in the immortality of a human soul and the afterlife so strongly and desperately as I do now… “I believe, Lord, but help my disbelief.” My mind rebels against its own reason and refuses to accept that a personality as huge as Wanda’s could be reduced to a bowl of dust and a collection of cherished memories. But how helpful are all those purely mental sensations we call memories after all, if just one laugh of the real, living and breathing Wanda could do more to revive me than all the words about her that I have assembled here? I want to be able to talk to Wanda once again, even if in some distant future, after I will have crossed the bar and entered into that sweet and mysterious beyond where I believe she is now… I want to be able to hug her once again, even if it meant embracing her immaterial ethereal body… That would suffice, for as long as I knew she was aware of my affection. But even as I believe in the immortality of the spirit that once animated her body, I terribly miss the physical manifestations of her spirit.

What had happened on that fateful night of September 29^th feels like a never-ending nightmare. It’s been almost two month since she died, but the nightmare persists. It seems that almost yesterday I was looking into her beautiful eyes, fondled her hair, rubbed her hands, shoulders, and footsies; communicated with her, fed her, bathed her, and laughed and cried with her. I simply could not think that those sensations might have an expiration date. But they did… It all ended so instantly, so abruptly, before I could even process fully what had just happened. My dear wife’s still warm body was taken away from me, and two days later, I received a box which I now kiss reverently and talk to… But as I kiss the box, it screams at me: “Here is the hard scientific evidence that she is gone; her eyes, hair, hands, shoulders, everything—incinerated and turned into a whitish dust. You can pretend talking to her, but you will never hear any feedback from her or feel the warmth of her body.” And I cannot help but cling to the idea that this is all a nightmare; that I will one day wake up from it, even if the stimulus for the awakening would have to be my own death… So I conscientiously choose an imponderable Mystery over a more transparent Reason, and favor a promise of continuity over total annihilation…

My friends, believers and atheists alike, keep telling me that life has to go on; that I need to focus on the living—people who love me and who are still with me. But while appreciating their advice, I have a difficulty following it. “Life has to go on…” Isn’t it what the grieving and the heartbroken have been hearing for generations? But doesn’t the attitude encapsulated in this advice represent an escape from the truth—a defense mechanism distracting us from pondering at any length of time the horror of our human predicament. And isn’t it also an admission that we are all disposable as those candles at the church: when one burns out, it is quickly replaced by another; the flame is maintained, and things return to normal… I understand that this attitude is probably hardwired in our brain, and it helped us to successfully propagate ourselves as a species over the millennia of wars, epidemics, and all those countless man-made and natural disasters. But where does it leave the uniqueness of each individual’s personality? None of us, except for some utopian socialist demagogues, falls in love with humanity as a whole, or grieves over the death of thousands killed by an earthquake with the same intensity one grieves over a death of his/her own spouse, parent, or child. Even a brute like Stalin recognized the difference when he said: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is statistics.”

Parents, teachers, and social thinkers stress the uniqueness of each human person and encourage the development of a personality to its fullest potential. Theologians emphasize not an abstract collective, but an individual salvation through an individual relationship with God. And yet when one of such unique, irreplaceable personalities dies, we are advised not to dwell on it for too long… because “life has to go on.” Why don’t we then stop talking about personalities all together and settle for some faceless collective soul? It would suffice to propagate us as a species. But if a personality is dear to us, then we need to confront and answer a larger philosophical question: What is the point of developing a unique personality, with its self-perception, memories, skills, and talents, in view of the fact that death utterly and indiscriminately destroys a shining intellectual luminary and a seeming non-entity alike?

If there is no continuity beyond death, if there is no way to ensure that one’s identity as a self-aware individual can survive the grave in one form or another, then why work so hard to develop it? So that one’s accomplishments and genius could merely fertilize the ground and thus make the propagation of our species as a whole smoother and easier? So that one could leave a scratch on a tablet of history in a form of a publication, or a collection of artworks, or a mention in the Guinness Book of Records? But if death utterly destroys a personality, one would not even be aware of his/her own fame (especially if it were to come about posthumously), or whether and for how long the grateful humanity would remember his/her accomplishments. As he lay on his death bed, the ostracized Athens’ gadfly, Socrates, had no idea that his witticisms and dialectics would survive for millennia. From this point of view, he still does not know and never will. The same goes for Van Gogh and many other posthumous celebrities. So if not the hope of a continuity, of an afterlife, what else motivates us to want to become someone—a mere desire to be noticed, to bask in our own fame in the here and now, while we are still able to enjoy the benefits of money, attention, or popularity? Could it be simply something biologically hardwired and yet scarcely understood that drives us to live to the fullest, to achieve something, to define ourselves as individuals, even in the face of a disheartening prospect of total eradication of our identity and self-awareness at death? Wanda’s passing away compelled me to pose these questions a fortiori, and whether or not I will ever be able to answer them, I am not going to quietly abandon them because some impersonal and abstract Life “has to go on,” because the current of this meaningless cycle of Life’s self-replication is too strong to go against.

My life in a wandaless world is going to be a protracted, attritional war against the void. I know I will lose some battles in this war… At this point, to be honest, I feel like the Russians in the Fall and Winter of 1941—beaten, hopeless, humiliated, and depressed. By writing these pages, I am trying to establish a little salient, a little foothold of being within nothingness, and from this tiny beachhead I will keep pressing forward, bringing back into being, inch by inch, what the void had so ruthlessly swallowed up… In the end, I believe, an individual life, be it Wanda’s or mine, will come out triumphant. “Life Everlasting,” promising to preserve each individual’s precious personality, will defeat the all-consuming samsara of endless repetition and overcome the sorrow of an existence gone meaningless, including my personal sorrow of a wandaless world.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 669