It’s been five years since the day I said goodbye to David, so I commemorated the date by hitting the road to visit with people close to him and remember him in all the good ways.
I drove back to Pennsylvania last night with the faint hope that I could do it all in one shot. I was feeling very ragged and a little uncertain about how the car would perform this time in the bitter cold, a month out from the repairs. It is one thing to break down in the summertime, it’s another matter entirely to wait for roadside assistance in the middle of the night along a toll highway in winter. That’s when I realized I’d forgotten to replace my automobile association membership card. Uh oh — is that tempting fate?
But the trip was thankfully uneventful, extended from six to eleven hours because I stopped to sleep through a snow squall and ended up staying there for five hours. I woke up at 2am, saw snowplows, and went back to sleep until nearly 4:30am. Once I left that service plaza, there wasn’t a bit of snow to be found and it was relatively smooth sailing.
Needless to say, I had a lot of time to analyze my thoughts about the past five years and take crappy cameraphone pictures of the pink dawn while driving south. I brought my DSLR, but have barely had time to use it.
In some ways five years ago feels like yesterday, in other ways the person I had been is very distant from my recollection. It’s probably my mind’s way of dealing with the stress from five years ago. We’d been married barely two and a half months. The unfairness of it all was unbearable, and I was inconsolable. When USCIS sent the letter to my immigration lawyer telling me I was now an illegal alien and threatened to deport me if I did not leave by early March, I thought life couldn’t get any worse… but it did, with more setbacks than I could imagine. But it also got better, after failed attempts at therapy and lots of self-therapy.
To complicate things further, people in Toronto didn’t know David and I resented that my Toronto life didn’t resemble my former life in Pennsylvania. It was a tough slog.
Fast forward to today. I spent time with people David cared about and who cared for him. We talked about him for a long time. I can’t do this in Toronto; I have to travel to Pennsylvania to do it. Gradually I began to feel like an infection had invaded my lungs and throat. Blech. Now I have flu-like symptoms, and I’m dreading the drive back to Toronto.
But today was about David, and he would be pleased if he knew what I’d accomplished on this little weekend road trip — who I saw and how things went. And now I can sleep, and hopefully feel better by morning.
