Abandonment

by Katharine Niles

Blog Last Updated; 8/7/2009

This Wednesday I drove past a little non-town in Utah called Woodside, which rates an abandoned gas station and the usual sprawl of rusty car husks, rotting in the desert sun. Nothing redeems Woodside. No one lives there anymore and even when they did you would probably still drive by and wonder why. The country around it is relentlessly barren, overgrazed, and hot.

I was driving by it because I was on my way back from Salt Lake City, where I had spent the last 36 hours attending to the sudden and vicious death from esophageal cancer of my friend, some-time lover, and soul mate, Peter. He and I share a history that is riddled with a long absence of him from my life, and, in a way, when he cut off communication ten years ago, it was as if he had died then. He severed ties not because he didn't love me, I have since learned, but because he loved me too much. And one of my first thoughts when I heard his voice on the phone telling me he was dying was: Oh no. I have to go through your death all over again.

But I've learned that real death plays a far rougher hand. He looked like the proverbial Auschwitz victim by the time I arrived. I thought I was staring at a corpse on the couch. He had clearly taken a turn for the worse since talking with him, briefly, the night before. And his wife, Betsy, whom I have always liked, said ? and it meant the most coming from her ? "he was waiting for you to come." The grace of that is indescribable.

Many gifts rained down on me while there. When lucid, Peter made it abundantly clear that he loved me and always had. I think he wanted to rectify his behavior of ten years prior. But I made it clear to him, too, that none of that mattered. Discussions with his father, his wife, his friend Matt, all gave me glimpses into the life I'd missed out on for the past ten years, and validated much of my experience with him. It also made me realize that I knew Peter in ways no one else did, which left me honored and a little disconcerted and really lonely. How could you celebrate a life with others when that life had vulnerabilities only ever shown to one person? It was as if Peter and I knew each other's deepest suffering from some pre-birth place we carried into this life, and would carry into the next. It turns out I knew far more about those places in him than I had ever realized.

By the time I left, it was clear he had only a day or two remaining. He was off fluids, surviving on morphine, bouts of agitation, and sleep. And so, driving into the desert, I saw Woodside and seized. My first entry for this blog discussed how western landscapes evoke great and terrible love in me ? for my father, and for Peter, mostly ? but I tend do this with all special relationships. Woodside and the hundreds of other towns like it ? Pie Town in New Mexico, Ludlow in the Mojave Desert ? epitomize for me the utter abandonment of my father, and now, of Peter. I managed to avoid staying with this feeling too long during the drive, deliberately passing Woodside at 75 mph with a studious avoidance of its dilapidated presence. But home this afternoon I fell into an anxious nap and awoke out of it shaking in my chest and in complete dejection at that sense of emptiness. I began sobbing in earnest then, and called my husband for solace. Woodside had returned full force.

But other things happened, too, on that drive home. I got to Moab and was hungry enough to treat myself to a good lunch. I bought a commemorative ring for Peter in Monticello. And when I approached Cortez, it was as if the earth's crust buckled in a circle around my home turf. Severed was the landscape of Peter in Salt Lake, the landscape of my father in southern Utah, the landscape of my twenties and early thirties in New Mexico, the landscape of the Hopi and Navajo reservations in Arizona. Only Colorado remained a bit tethered to the east, because part of my establishment of this home turf has meant owning Colorado as, really, ground zero (see "Golden" blog) with Durango at my center. I realized, as the image of this breaking crust consumed me, that I would no longer be emotionally homeless, searching for the ruins of my father's heart, or the ruins of my love for Peter, in landscapes not fully mine.

Woodside still haunts. It may for a long time. And what I've written here feels woefully inadequate, disgustingly inarticulate. But it's what I have, as I continue to hold this loss in my hands.