Apologies for being so cryptic in the previous post, but I was feeling protective of the details. Less so now.
Jack was up at his friend Jim’s house when he died. They had a regular guys’ weekend twice a year where these four men would eat and drink and play music and laugh and talk for three days and then go home, wait six months, and then do it all again. It was good for him. He loved his friends.
I said goodbye to Jack at 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 3, when he packed up his truck with a bass and an amp and a bag and said, I’ll see you Tuesday. I was looking forward to three days alone in the house with no kid, no husband, no constant background of sports on TV.
Jackson had said goodbye to his dad at 4:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 18 when he took off to catch a flight at LAX. I’m still mad that Jack didn’t get out of bed to hug him, but they had talked often while Jackson traveled from Dublin to Paris to Cannes with a friend. When Jackson and his friend had a fight on the Eiffel Tower, Jackson called Jack at work to ask what he thought he should do. (It’s okay to split up and do your own thing for a while.)
Jackson came home from his trip at 10:00 p.m. Monday, August 5. They had traveled by train from Cannes to Paris, then by plane from Paris to L.A., then two hours in a car back up to Santa Barbara, all in one day, and he was exhausted.
The morning of Tuesday, August 6 at 7:20 a.m. I was laying in bed thinking about the day ahead when my phone rang.
I just went back to look at my list of calls and found four old voicemails from Jack that I’d saved. Two of them were butt dials, and I find it hilarious now that i have two fairly long recordings of him just noodling around in his truck. The other two are purely informational. One was, “I found the hide-a-key [self-deprecating pause] don’t come home.” And the other was him at the grocery store: “They’re out of bucatini . . . so I’ll make an executive decision” about what pasta we’d have that night. That one keeps making me cry.
When my phone rang the morning of Tuesday, August 6 at 7:20 a.m. I was surprised to see it was Jack’s friend, Jim, calling. Jim was in shock, and a moment later so was I, and a few minutes after that so was Jackson.
There was no autopsy, but the authorities who decide these things eventually decided Jack had had a heart attack. Just like his dad: boom, dead. He was 60 years old. He still had a lot he wanted to do, but he didn’t suffer. Great for him, as Jackson said, but not so great for us.
A few weeks later, a box holding ten pounds of ashes came in the mail. I put a Yankees cap over it. It’s now sitting next to the ashes of Peewee and Katie Potatie. Just three dogs, together again at last.
Willy hopped right up there.
My friend Erin offered to make a memory quilt out of some of Jack’s old clothes, when I was ready. Last weekend I took a pile of his t-shirts and cut off the backs and sleeves of them all to make packing them up easier. But one piece of clothing was missing. I had already taken a bunch of his stuff to the thrift, and I’d thrown this one pair of hideously preppy shorts into the bag, thinking that I had a photo of them, and I had already posted a story about them, so why did I need to keep them?
Yesterday I went back to the thrift, dumped three bags full of Jack’s old shoes, and then went inside to check the men’s rack to see if the shorts were there. I’ve now bought them twice from the same store. I don’t think I’ll give them to Erin, though, I think if I sew up the leg holes and the waist, they’ll make a good pillow, and if I leave the pockets open, we can hide things inside them.
I have found a wonderful therapist, and an apartment for us to move into right after Thanksgiving. Jackson had already planned to take off this semester just to work, so he starts City College in January. It’s been an unbelievable amount of change to be put through without our consent, and the support we’ve received from family, friends, work-family, and strangers has been a crucial part of helping us keep it together. In all honesty, yes, it’s still just one foot in front of the other some days, and it will be hard for only god knows how long, but there’s nothing I’ve had to face that isn’t also normal and sane and ultimately do-able. Jack always had my back, and I still feel that.
So that’s what happened.