Pilgrimages

Different people react in very different ways to the loss of a partner. For some, being constantly reminded of their loss is too painful, so they remove reminders from their lives, doing things like taking down photos or moving out from their homes or even moving to different cities. That hasn't been the case for me. After Cara died I put up numerous photos of her on the wall of the living room in our apartment, in view of the sofa where I spend a very large chunk of my at-home, non-sleeping time. The memories do often make me sad, but all in all I find it more comforting than painful to live in the same apartment we shared during the last nine months of her life, and in the city we spent years exploring together and that is full of people and places and things that remind me of her. I'm not saying one approach to coping with loss is superior to the other, more just making an observation. Everyone has to find what works for them. For me? It's keeping Cara a constant part of my life.

Four weeks ago I traveled to Detroit to see another great Typhoon concert. I wrote extensively about Typhoon after seeing them in Portland back in November so this post will not be about the concert. I'm kind of obsessed with the band, so them playing a show on a Saturday night less than a three hour drive from me was good incentive for me to make that drive, but an additional incentive came from the opportunity for me to visit my friends Adam and Jackie in Ann Arbor on the same trip. Adam was the best man in my and Cara's wedding; years before, he was the first of my friends to meet Cara when I called him and he came to the rescue after Cara had taken a spill on a bike ride. He and his wife were great friends to Cara and me for years and have continued to be great friends to me since Cara's death.

It was a funny little coincidence that the Typhoon concert came almost exactly three years after the last trip that I - and Cara - had taken to Michigan. That previous trip was almost exactly three months before Cara's death. Naturally as I sat in Adam and Jackie's living room I thought back to January 2015 when Cara and I were there together.

Incidentally, on that trip we made a stop at the IKEA store in Canton, Michigan, where we bought the rug and four chairs that I have in my dining room. We bought those chairs thinking of how we could have people over for dinner in our spacious new apartment. It turned out that we would do this only a single time - hosting my parents, on Easter Sunday, less than three weeks before Cara's passing. (We still had no clue then that she had so little time left.)

On both the January 2015 trip and a previous trip to Detroit for a Godspeed You! Black Emperor concert in October 2012, Cara and I stayed at a hotel near the airport in Detroit suburb Romulus (a city that lends its name to a beautiful Sufjan Stevens song, I must note), and on both occasions, on the morning of our departure we enjoyed breakfast at local restaurant Romulus House. So as I made my plans for the weekend trip, it occurred to me that I could once more stay at a hotel near the airport (I considered the same one Cara and I had stayed at but decided a cheaper option would suffice - which turned out to be a mistake as I slept poorly due to a rattly heating unit that periodically came on and woke me during the night) and could once more have breakfast at Romulus House.

As I began the familiar drive from the hotel to the restaurant, I recalled that the road that made up most of the route had been very bumpy on our previous visits, and wondered if it had been paved within the last three years. I found that most of it had been paved, but a short stretch remained bumpy in a sort of nostalgia-inducing way. I parked in the familiar parking lot and entered the restaurant and soaked in the familiar sights of the homey little dining room. Thoughts of my visits there with Cara were, of course, with me throughout my meal. One might think that this would result in an overwhelming feeling of sadness. But for me, at least, it really doesn't. I feel sad, yes, but it's a feeling I'm used to and it's not one that consumes me. At the same time, I'm able to think back fondly on my memories of time spent with Cara. It's comforting, in a way, to make tangible connections with those memories. I realized that this has become a habit for me. Making pilgrimages, of a sort, to places connected with significant memories of Cara and me. Of course, I spend almost every day of my life surrounded by memories of Cara, but that's just part of my normal routine now. I realized that the act of traveling to a place I visited with Cara has gained symbolic meaning to me. Going to Romulus House when the opportunity presented itself was something I felt almost obligated to do.

And part of this symbolic act, I also realize, is sharing the experience with others. (I wonder if I would be so drawn to making these pilgrimages if social media did not exist!) So as I sat there, eating breakfast alone, I posted to Facebook a photo of my meal, checking in to Romulus House and writing, "Third time I've been to this restaurant. First time without Cara." I also shared a photo of myself that Cara had taken of me on our first visit to the restaurant.

I started to do this sort of thing not long after Cara's death. The first such "pilgrimage" I came across while scrolling through my Facebook was not a long trip at all. On May 10, 2015, little more than two weeks after Cara's death, I returned for the first time in a while to a place I've been to many, many times over the years, Roxboro Ravine and the site of our engagement:

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"This is the view from where Cara was standing when I proposed to her (except it was covered in snow at the time)," I captioned this photo.

Two weeks later I was in Columbus for Memorial Day weekend and went on a bike ride.

"I went for a bike ride on the Olentangy Bike Trail in Columbus today, the bike path that Cara and I rode together and she rode many more times herself back when she still lived in Columbus. I rode to Antrim Lake, which we went for walks at several times (there is a 1.2 mile path around the lake) and which Cara also went for walks at by herself before she had her bike. It was on the way home from work for her so she sometimes went there after work."

On the same bike ride, I remember, I also made a stop at Cara's old apartment on North High Street. I remember riding my bike up the alley through which I used to drive so many years before, stopping in the little lot at the back of the building, staring at the steps up which I used to walk and at the window of the bedroom in which we used to lie in bed together, and just feeling overwhelmed by it all.

Another significant bike ride came three weeks after that:

"I rode the Sunday in June bike tour in Burton today. Exactly six years ago, Cara and I did Sunday in June - it was my first bike tour and Cara's first bike tour in Cleveland (and also the longest ride Cara had done to that point by a whopping 20 miles). Cara rode 50 miles and I rode 62. Today I rode the same 50 miles Cara did back then. I'm not as fit as I used to be and this was my longest bike ride, by a wide margin, in over five years, but as I always did on bike tours I decided to push the pace rather than do it at a leisurely tempo. Near the end I was very tired, but giving it everything I had on a long uphill, and this might sound terrible but I realized that the sound of my ragged breathing reminded me of Cara on the night she died. As hard as she had once worked to get up big hills and ride fast in time trials, she was working that hard just to get enough oxygen to stay alive. She was the strongest and most courageous person I've ever known, and on this ride today she was with me helping me get up those last hills as fast as I could even as my body screamed for a reprieve."

With this I posted four photos: photos of myself and my new Cara memorial tattoo taken after that day's ride, and photos of Cara and me taken before the 2009 ride.

In August of that year I went to Lake Placid, New York for my family's annual Adirondacks vacation, and I went on a short but very meaningful hike.

"Left: Cara on Cobble Hill in Lake Placid, NY, August 15, 2013, eight days before she was admitted to the hospital with stage IV lung cancer. This was one of her favorite pictures of herself that was ever taken. (You might notice that it is her profile picture, which she set on March 13 this year.) Right: me on Cobble Hill today."

October brought a trip to Washington DC for a conference. The first trip Cara and I ever took together was to DC, to see our favorite band Ozma in August 2006, months before we started dating. I've been to DC many times in my life, and this trip was naturally full of familiar sights, but I went out of my way to revisit certain spots from that first trip with Cara. These particular pictures I did not post to Facebook (had I had a smartphone I might have; I actually decided to give in and get one after returning home from the trip), but here they are now.

This is a picture of the 9:30 Club, where Cara and I saw the Ozma concert. I vividly remembered standing next to that wall with Cara, eating a bag of chips purchased at the convenience store across the street (our trip was rather poorly planned and we failed to find somewhere to get an actual dinner before the concert) and drinking a bottle of juice that Cara helped me open because I had a broken arm.

And on the day of my departure, I met up in Arlington, Virginia with my friend Krista, an online friend of Cara's whose husband passed away from lung cancer just months after Cara did. I seized the opportunity to stop by two other "pilgrimage" sites.

Here's the hotel at which we stayed. I actually went inside too, and, more than nine years after my previous visit, it was so familiar and so surreal.

And here, the Subway at which we ate after checking out of the hotel.

Something just drew me to revisit these places. I feel like I hardly even made a conscious decision to go. It was an irresistible force.

As more time went on, my "pilgrimages" became less frequent, but did not cease. Here's one from November 26, 2016. Less than one month removed from the horror of Donald Trump being elected president, I was feeling more emotionally unsettled than usual, and in such times I tend to cling more tightly to memories of Cara.

"I am at the same Steak 'n Shake that Cara and I (along with our other online friend Jon who neither of us ever saw again in person) went to after going bowling on the night we met in person. I'm not sure but I feel like I'm actually in the same booth and same seat. Or if not the same, then only one booth away. Yep, last time I was here, Cara was sitting across from me."

So this ritual I've created is one of the ways I've kept Cara with me in the months and years since her death. I'm sure I'm not alone in doing something like this. But I wonder how common it is for someone grieving a lost loved one to feel such a strong pull to so many places they previously visited with that loved one.

I'm sure that my visit to Romulus House last month was not the last such trip I'll make.

And more recently, another visit to another (much closer geographically) place from my and Cara's past brought another addition to my long, long list of bizarre coincidences that have happened to me. I was at La Dolce Vita in Little Italy for my friend Rita's 40th birthday. La Dolce Vita is just down the street from the apartment in which Cara and I lived together from 2009 to 2012. Prior to that, Cara lived there by herself after moving from Columbus to Cleveland in September 2008. I recall that on nights Cara and I did not get together, she would sometimes go to La Dolce Vita to drink and hang out (hanging out in bars was not really a "thing" for me back then!).

The Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Minnesota Timberwolves game was on TV at the bar on the night of Rita's party. It was a very exciting game, with LeBron James newly re-energized no doubt by the knowledge that Isaiah Thomas and other players who were dragging the team down were about to be traded away. While watching the game, I recounted to my friend Sam how I recalled watching a particularly memorable Cavs game with Cara in the same establishment years before. It was in May 2009 and the Cavs were playing the Orlando Magic in the playoffs. That game ended with one of the all-time highlights of LeBron's storied career:

And so I told this story to Sam, while watching as the Cavs and T-Wolves went to overtime, and with the game tied and time in OT running down LeBron made a spectacular block, and the Cavs recovered the ball and called timeout with one second left, and then:

LeBron hit a dramatic game-winning buzzer beating jump shot while fading away from the basket and then turned and raced exuberantly toward the other end of the court to celebrate with his exhilarated teammates. It was remarkably reminiscent of that game against Orlando those many years ago (with Cedi Osman taking Anderson Varejao's place as the recipient of a LeBron chest bump) and as the post-game coverage began, the Cavs announcers echoed the thoughts that had already formed in my mind about being reminded of that classic playoff moment.

I went to a place that recalled a specific memory of Cara and me from almost nine years before. I told a friend about that memory. And then an echoing of that specific memory eerily unfolded right before my eyes. It was almost cosmic.

I often seek out memories of Cara. Visiting a place like Romulus House, I feel a sense of awe at the life we had and the life I still have with Cara's spirit helping guide me. When the memories seek me out? That's when the sense of awe is strongest.