The Golden Deathiversary of Arianne Marie

When you are twenty years old and you lose the love of your life, you do not realize that is what has happened. Not right away.

When you are twenty years old, the magnitude of all that is to come still extends outward in every direction from your center, the future's blurred horizons too distant to survey. To imagine that the greatest romance of your life might be already gone would be impossible; pure melodrama; the blackest pessimism. Even in the depths of your heartache, you do not seriously entertain it. Not right away. Not even a few years later.

Decades later – perhaps two, perhaps three – the possibility occurs to you for the first time.

For the duration of my drive down the Northeastern coast to my hometown, the flowers partially obstructing my rear-view stifle me with their odor, suffusing the interior of my ancient vehicle. I am seventy now myself, speaking of ancient things, and though I once swore I would never drive a car that was “granny gold,” some inevitabilities do overtake us. Or we stop caring, and we let them. The broken air conditioning, for which I have little enough use in northern Maine, doesn’t help my developing headache; the hot midsummer sun drenching my back seat only exacerbates the redolence of the gaudy orange and lemon-yellow blooms. Its character, while always sharp, is reminiscent of something different every fifty miles or so, seeming to age and mature on the journey like a cheese. Hot asphalt – first baked dry, then mingling with those first unmistakable, violent raindrops of a summer storm. Turmeric and white pepper. Freshly turned mineral soil. The bitter pith of orange rinds, as though I could peel back those acerbic petals and find sweet juice dripping underneath. Within all these iterations is a single consistent, feeble note of something unmistakably floral, like a thready pulse. Like the quiet, simple truth that whispers softly, ever-present beneath an intricate denial.

When you are twenty years old and the love of your life dies, you do not really believe that’s it. That you’ll never have another.

But by fifty years later, you know.

Arriving, I turn into the shady cemetery on Cedar Road. I haven’t been here in forty-nine years. I am afraid of what I’ll find – or, more precisely, of what I will not.

Nine months after her death, Arianne’s burial site had still lacked a headstone. The sudden loss of her eldest daughter had all but shattered her mother’s psyche, and the shell of a woman that remained had been unable to take that final step despite having asked me to write the epitaph. So I had visited a patch of dirt, until I had moved away for good. I never meant to be away so long. Dread of finding Arianne still buried in an unmarked grave had worked its way into my mind as the years had passed. This and the distance I put between us had prevented my making the trip until now.

Until I had spotted these flowers at the garden center – as if anyone could miss them. They aren’t a particular favorite of mine, and I do not know why I had paused to consider them a long while. Marigolds. Arianne Marie…Golden anniversary. Well, deathiversary anyway. I knew it was fast approaching. I knew, too, that in Mexico La Flor de Muerto is said to be capable of bridging the worlds of the living and dead, summoning spirits by its pungent aroma. I wondered which soul it was that needed summoning to this place; hers, from the otherworld, or mine, from...wherever I had wandered to since. Likely the answer was both.

When two hitherto heterosexual girls meet at their boyfriends’ party and fall in love, it takes all four parties awhile to realize what the hell is happening.

The night I met her, she had sat on the sagging, musty couch in that harborside shack and sized me up from a distance, unfamiliar and aloof. In doing this she had noticed the Ariat label on my otherwise nondescript paddock boots, which most mistook for regular work boots, and her first words to me were neither friendly nor flirtatious.

“Do you even ride?” A challenge, right out of the gate.

“Whenever I can, since I was a child,” I had replied, more coolly than I felt. She was fair-skinned and willow-slender, with golden red hair and eyes so blue I had noticed them almost immediately upon entering the dim, smoky room.

Weeks later we were inseparable. When the stars shone above the stable where I, too, soon worked, we drank bottles of cheap strawberry wine and left the bonfire circle in fits of laughter, swinging up bareback on the sleeping trail horses. They startled, and once they settled again we lay back on their haunches, gazing up at the vast night sky.

I knew that I loved her while she was still living. Knew it like I knew how to pronounce my own name, how to get lost in a good book, how to sit a smooth canter. As with these things, it came naturally. There was desire that resembled nothing familiar, so strangely unhurried that it seemed more romantic than sexual. What I felt for Arianne was a profound and constant longing that somehow made all lust I had known before, or would ever know after, seem vulgar and one-dimensional. That frantic, furious hunger never overcame us. But shyness did, and it surprised us both, who were anything but shy. We – who were the first to jump in pools and lakes naked, who as a pair were the life of any party – spent months skittering around each other like a pair of frightened fawns. Even after that, every physical contact was a thrill. Not for weeks or months, but for years. I never did learn how to breathe in the moments after she kissed me. I knew that I loved her in the sort of way that does not look for evidence, does not need any proof.

However, as the years after her death gradually became decades, I did question this at times. I questioned it the way an agnostic might wrestle with the question of God, even after a bewildering firsthand brush with divinity. Who was I? What were we? Where was she now? What did it mean? To say nothing of the inevitable – why?

In the end, I realized with no small measure of relief that Arianne was still to me exactly that which she had always been, and by now would surely always be: the purest, most significant love of my life. And here is how I knew – trivial though it might seem, this was my tether to truth: I cannot recall for a moment the particulars of any of my loved ones’ shoes. Not a single sneaker or slipper or heel. Not belonging to anyone among my friends, my family, or a lifetime of lovers. Isn’t that strange? Yet after fifty years, the memory of her small brown boots dripping mud onto the mat by the space heater, silver buckles hazy with yesterday’s dust, is as vivid to me as a photograph.

Vivid, because the sight at the time had filled me with inexplicable, overwhelming tenderness, as I lay on her lumpy mattress under a pile of faded quilts in the trailer behind the barn. She lay beside me. The grey dawn light was beginning to seep in. The horses were rustling hay, impatient for breakfast, making soft sounds as, one by one, they woke. She stirred in her sleep, drowsily kissed the skin of my back, between my shoulder blades.

I stopped writing poetry after she died. I told myself I had outgrown it. Looking back, I suppose that should have been the first clue. The last thing I ever wrote was not even a proper poem, but her epitaph.

The headstone I have never seen before is waiting for me where Arianne is buried. I expected to feel relief, finding it there, and I do. But I am not prepared for the way it makes this visit feel like I am reliving her funeral, the fresh sight opening an old wound. I suddenly understand why it took her mother so long to take that last step, and no longer begrudge her for it. Sinking stiffly to my knees, I set to work planting the marigolds – they are that towering-tall, African variety – to either side of what has become one more neglected cemetery monument, arranging the flowers to frame the words:

I am in all which is gentle, yet wild,

and in the hearts of those whom I love.

In their memories I will shine –

ever-radiant, unchanging –

golden, as light from the Sun.