The Empty Chair I Still Set Out Every Morning

Every morning I carry two cups of coffee out to the porch of our house above the water in Yachats, and I set one of them on the wide flat arm of the empty chair beside mine — the chair Walt sat in for forty-one years — and my daughter, when she visits and sees me do it, gets a careful, worried look on her face, because she thinks it means I'm stuck.

I understand why she thinks that. From the outside, a woman of sixty-nine pouring a second cup of coffee for a husband who's been dead three years looks like exactly the kind of thing you're supposed to gently intervene about. Ann has read the articles. She knows the word "closure." She has, very lovingly, and more than once, suggested I might talk to someone. And I have decided it's time to explain, to her and to anyone else who does some version of what I do and has been made to feel it's a symptom, what I have actually learned in that chair every morning for three years — because it is nearly the opposite of being stuck. It's the thing that got me unstuck. But you have to let me tell it properly.

Walt was a noticer

Walt was a mail carrier for thirty-four years, and the thing you need to know about him is that he was a noticer. He walked the same route in Yachats and then out toward the highway for three decades and he knew every dog by name and every porch light that had burned out and which widow on Ocean View hadn't taken her paper in and might need checking on. He came home each evening with the whole town in his pockets. And on the porch in the mornings, before his shift, he would narrate the world to me. There's your heron, Marnie, he'd say — I was Marnie to exactly one person on this earth — down on the mudflat, same rock as yesterday. The Oregon juncos are back, that means it's turning. He named the birds and read the sky and told me what the ocean was doing that particular morning as if it were news, which, the way he told it, it was. For forty-one years I received the morning through Walt. He taught me how to see the place we lived.

He proposed to me on that porch, for what it's worth, in 1982, though he did it so quietly I almost missed it — he pointed at a pair of mergansers on the water and said they mate for life, you know, and then he looked at me, and that was the whole proposal, a fact about ducks and a look, and I said yes to a man who couldn't quite say the question. That was Walt. He said the biggest things sideways, through the birds. When our daughter Ann was small he'd hold her on his lap in that chair before school and teach her the difference between a gull and a tern, and she'd repeat it back solemnly, and I have a photograph of the two of them from that porch, her small finger following his out toward the water, that I cannot look at for very long.

The mornings were the worst of it

When he died — it was fast at the end, an autumn, the doctors said heart and I say a heart, there's a difference — the mornings were the worst of it. Not the nights, which everyone warns you about. The mornings. Because the morning had been his. I would wake and come out to the porch out of habit and it would be silent, no one to tell me where the heron was, and it was like the world had gone mute. For a while I stopped coming out at all. I took my coffee at the kitchen sink with my back to the water, which is its own kind of surrender, and I think that was the closest I came to the thing Ann is actually afraid of.

The chair started by accident

The chair started almost by accident. One morning, some months in, I made the coffee wrong — I made two cups, the way my hands had made two cups for forty-one years — and rather than pour one down the drain I carried them both out to the porch, and I set his on the arm of his chair because I didn't know what else to do with it, and I sat down. And I said, out loud, feeling like a fool, "All right, Walt. Where's the heron."

And here is the first thing I learned, and it undid something in me: nothing bad happened. The sky didn't fall and I didn't dissolve. I looked down at the mudflat, and the heron was there, on its rock, because it is almost always there, and I heard his voice in my own head say same rock as yesterday, and I felt, for the first time since the funeral, not better exactly, but accompanied. The cup of coffee cooling on the arm of that chair wasn't me pretending he'd drink it. I never once thought he'd drink it. It was me giving myself permission to still be in his company. To keep the seat next to me open instead of slamming it shut in the name of moving on.

A monument, or a doorway

That's the distinction Ann doesn't have yet, because she's forty-one and hasn't needed it: there is a difference between a chair that's a monument and a chair that's a doorway. A monument is where you go to stay in the worst day. A doorway is where you go to keep something alive that's worth keeping. For the first while, if I'm honest, the chair was a monument — I sat and I wept and I stayed in the loss. But it slowly, morning by morning, became a doorway. I noticed it change. I noticed that I was talking to him less and less, and just sitting with the morning more and more — receiving the heron and the juncos and the turning weather directly now, the way he'd taught me to, as if he'd spent forty-one years installing his eyes behind mine and then left them there for me to use. That was the second thing I learned. When you love someone long enough and pay attention, they don't only leave a hole. They leave a way of seeing. The chair is where I go to look through his eyes at the world he loved, and on the best mornings I don't need to say anything at all.

The Thursday I didn't cry

There was one morning — a Thursday last spring — that I want to tell you about, because it's the one that finished the lesson. I came out with the two cups and I set his down and I sat, and I drank my coffee and watched the light come up gray-gold over the water, and I finished the whole cup, and I went back inside, and I was halfway through washing the mug before I realized I hadn't cried, and that I hadn't spoken to him, and that it had been, simply, a good morning. And my very first feeling was guilt — sharp, awful guilt — as if a good morning were a betrayal, as if the goal had been to keep it a wound forever. And then I stood there at the sink and I understood the last thing, the thing I most want to hand to you: the point was never to stop missing him. The point was to let the missing turn gentle. To let it change from a wound that takes from you into a companionship that keeps you company. Grief, if you let it, and if you build it a place to live — a chair, a cup, a morning — slowly stops being the price of having loved somebody and becomes, instead, just another way of loving them. A quieter way. One that doesn't hollow you out.

What I told my daughter

So when Ann sits with me now — and she does, some mornings, she's started to — and she watches me set the second cup on the arm of that chair, I've told her what I'm telling you. I said, Ann, I am not waiting for your father to come back. I know exactly where he is. This isn't the chair where I got stuck. It's the chair where I learned that I could go on being married to the memory of a good man without it costing me the rest of my own life. It's where I keep him without being kept by him. She's quiet when I say it, my noticing daughter, so like him, and I think she's beginning to understand that the empty chair is not a sign that I couldn't let go. It's the proof that I found a way to hold on that's actually livable — that has room in it for a good morning, and a bad one, and the heron, always, on the same rock as yesterday.

The first morning Ann actually sat with me was this past June. She'd come out, I think, to keep an eye on me, arms crossed, ready to be worried. And I poured the two cups and set Walt's on the arm of his chair and I didn't explain myself, I just handed her the other one and sat down and said, low, "There's your father's heron, right on schedule." And she looked down at the mudflat and there it was, and I watched her face change — watched her stop watching me and start watching the water the way he taught us both to — and she was quiet for a long time, and then she said, in a small voice, "He always found it first." And I said yes, he did, and now we do. She didn't mention closure. She just drank her coffee. When she left two days later she hugged me longer than usual and said, "Set one out for me too, sometimes," and I understood that she'd finally seen it wasn't a symptom. It was an inheritance.

If you have your own version of the empty chair, and someone who loves you has made you feel it's something to be fixed, I hope you'll keep it. Not the monument kind — please don't stay in the worst day. But the doorway kind. Set out the second cup. Say good morning to your heron. Let the person you loved keep showing you how to see the world they left you in. That is not being stuck. That is just love, carrying on in the only direction it has left to go.

People will tell you that grief is a thing you're supposed to get through and come out the other side of, cleaned and finished, like a tunnel. I don't believe that anymore. Three years on that porch has taught me that you don't come out the other side of a great love. You just learn to live inside it differently — to keep a chair in it, and a cup, and a morning, and a heron on its rock. Walt is not a chapter of my life that closed. He is the window I look at the rest of it through. And every morning that I carry two cups out to the water, I am not failing to move on. I am doing the truest thing I know how to do, which is to keep loving a good man past the reach of his own life, gently, and out loud, and without letting it take me down with him. That is what I learned in the empty chair. I'd wish it on anyone who's lost the one they can't imagine living without.