Snapshot

It all happened so fast, I still am not convinced he is gone. I expect at any moment, still, almost a year later, to hear his keys in the lock of the front door, for it to turn, and for him to enter, dropping the keys on the radiator cover. I can hear them fall with their familiar weight. The dogs will scramble down the stairs to greet him, their old legs slipping and catching on the painted stairs, and he will call up to me in my study. He has just been away, to the studio, to the grocery store, to teach.

He will come in the house, and we will cook a meal together, savory and rich. He will crack the ice for his bourbon by holding the cubes in his hand and hitting them with the handle of a spoon, the way his father did. Mostly, I will cook for him. I mastermind the meal, delighting in finding new things for us to eat. If the meal is good, he will take a bite and say, "Oh, Andie." We will talk of ideas, of pictures, of the unsure progress of the Red Sox.

If we are alone and have drunk the right amount of wine, so that we are neither too tired nor too untouched by it, we will walk the stairs to our room and undress with little fanfare, sharing the bathroom sink, spitting and peeing and washing beside one another. We will climb into a bed made with worn cotton sheets and musty feather pillows. If we are neither too tired nor too drunk, we will slowly touch each other, softly and familiarly, with the lack of attention a married couple shows each other's bodies. In winter his skin is so warm it seems to glow; in summer, it is cool and sheltering, almost clammy, but never hot the way mine is.

Last August, when his stomach ailment was still unsolved, his legs got sore, a pulled muscle, perhaps. (Later we would learn that the soreness was blood clots, and this fact would be used to diagnose the cancer.) He used crutches to hobble around, trying to finish work for a show. I took to driving him to the printmaking studio, some days working in his office on writing of my own while he printed. One afternoon I walked through the empty, cool halls of the university to meet him at the studio.

Days that he worked printing, he would come home smelling of oily, thick, and heavy ink, its perfume rising from his hair, the ink worked hard down into his fingernails and the skin of his nailbeds, ripped and bleeding from worry. Sam in his work apron, coated with an impasto of ink, layered so heavily that I am not sure it will ever dry, the fumes rising up all around him. He stands at a waist-high table and mixes ink with an expert hand. Fine, repeated gestures of the hand, holding a putty knife and kneading the colors together. At home, I always saved the small glass jars that herring and salsa came in, "perfect size for storing ink," he would say. I still set them aside.

"He seemed to be having stomach trouble," is the way I begin. "Pancreatic cancer is a particularly aggressive cancer, with very few treatment options," I hear myself say. "In the end he had jaundice, a sign of liver failure. When the liver stops working, it can no longer cleanse the blood, and so he became more confused, hallucinating, dreamy."

I am removed from this story, the details clinical, detached, so as to fit into a neat and clean narrative, as if it happened to someone else. I do not know where to put myself in it. The nights at the hospital, sleeping in a cot beside him, curling my body against the rail of the hospital bed, trying to get as close to him as possible, as if that closeness could cure the disease, stop all this from happening. The determined grilling of doctors, the steely patience learned from staying at the hospital. The oncology floors, with their moist air, smelling somewhere between still pond water and wet leaves, reminding me of a childhood fish tank.

What I do not say is this: from where he lay in our bedroom, he looked at his grandfather's painting of Duxbury. A sailboat, caught by the eye just as the sail is coming down. Sam loved that moment caught by his grandfather's brush. His father, dying of the same disease, saw a flock of birds rising up over the same marshes.

In the inside pocket of my date book are tucked two photographs: one, nine years old, of Sam. He is standing on the road on the far side of Assisi, where we walked on our trip there during our honeymoon, after we had seen the Giotto frescoes. It is a kind of heat I have felt only in Italy, where a dry breeze feeds olive trees, sunflowers, and poppies, seemingly without rain. To get to that spot we walked through a small piazza thick with pigeons; the water in the bottle we carried was warm to the throat. He has taken off his straw hat and is running his hands through his hair. His middle fingers skim the center of his head, so that thumb and pinky finger hit right at the two sides of his receding hairline. He is looking at me. When I chose this picture from the few I have, I realized that the clothes he wore in it—the thin, pale green shirt, the honey-colored leather belt with the worn notches, the gray pants, and the broad brimmed hat, remain in our closet.

The other photograph is of our son, Jacob, before I knew who he was. A thin, slippery piece of paper from the ultrasound machine. That day, with the probe running over my belly, the radiologist moved quickly from image to image: brain, heart, intestine rushed past my sight so quickly I could hardly follow, as if someone were turning the pages of a photograph album without really looking. I wanted her to stop and read the images with me, to decode them and tell me what they meant. But I couldn't seem to form the words to ask her and tried instead to make her words into answers to my unasked questions. "Brain looks good; organs are on the right side," she said. I wondered if there was any way for her to look at the pancreas, to know now if it would go bad, cells out of control, spreading without telling anyone, to the liver. If I would outlive my child. She used a button on the keyboard to mark and measure the length of bones. She slowed her pace only to look at the baby's genitals. She paused, finally, the screen hovering over a little nub, "it's a boy," she said.

In the picture she gave me, the image is manipulated so that his face is in profile, as if he was a head on a coin. His upper lip juts out dramatically, and for months I worried that this planet-of-the-apes proportion meant that something was wrong. But then a friend showed me a picture of her daughter, taken at the same stage of pregnancy, and I realized it was part of the iconography of normal development.

On one of my first times away from Jacob, I walk with my favorite cousin of Sam's to the photograph store. I choose the route carefully, measuring my steps. It is a luxurious postpartum errand, walking three blocks to pick up reprints of a picture that will go in the baby's birth announcement. Along with the baby's picture I have left at the photo store a roll of film of unknown provenance. If I am bad at taking snapshots, I am even worse about developing the film I do shoot, and I do not remember what is on that roll. Sam's death has cured me of none of this carelessness.

At the store the young woman behind the counter hands me the envelopes of pictures. The first I open is not the portrait of Jacob, but that mysterious roll of film. I lift the envelope, prepared to flip through them quickly. I try to form words, to tell Randall what I am seeing, but I find myself crying: they are pictures of Sam, alone, and the two of us, together posed on the front steps of our house, in the weeks before his cancer diagnosis was confirmed.

The girl behind the counter doesn't say anything; she moves quickly to add my bill and take my payment. I am just standing there crying. In the days after Sam's death, I grew accustomed to crying anywhere, in a supermarket aisle, walking down the street. I do nothing anymore to conceal it.

I never saw how sick he was. In one picture, from "when we had hospice," which is what we say rather than "when he came home to die," he is with his friend and artistic collaborator, Johnny, and they are signing an artists' book they made together. I shot the picture with the lens Sam had given me the previous Christmas, so that I can center on the two of them, concealing the fact that Sam lies in a hospital bed, and that the books they are signing rest on a hospital table. His neck is gaunt and the skin is loose, so that his head looks out of proportion to his body; surely, he is sick. Finally, now, I cry for what I see on paper that I could not see at the time.

In others, he and I sit together on the front steps of our house. He looks resigned, patient, tolerant of being pictured by the camera. I hardly recognize myself. I seem to be holding back no emotion, it seems obvious to me now that I am letting my love for this man be seen by the camera's eye, and it is an unfamiliar sight to me.

I have looked at these pictures only once, and despite the fact that they are just downstairs in the cupboard of the china cabinet, I am writing about them from memory because I cannot bring myself to look at them again. They are, for me, the antithesis of snapshots, which commemorate some conventional moment—a first this-or-that, a trip to such-and-such a place, with us before its beautiful you-fill-in-the-blank.

I see the images and I am overwhelmed by regret: that I could not will a cure for the cancer, that I somehow made him pose for the pictures, to be the sickly subject, the dying subject. He and I both knew that I was trying to hold onto something with these photographs, in a desperate way that was uncomfortable for both of us. I am discomforted now because I needed them so much, and he, always, needed so little.

We never spoke about his dying. He was both determined and resigned to his death. I was fierce in my care of him. Questioning doctors, directing nurses. My analytical mind always at work: "What are the side effects?" "What are the choices for pain medication?" "This is the one we want," I would say firmly. I look at the pictures and realize all that was left unsaid, deferred, side-stepped, as if we were only commemorating a moment, the way snapshots are supposed to do. These photographs are the goodbye we never said, the last rites of a couple that believed in pictures and ideas, a wife in love with words, a man whose spirit was worked into paint and ink and paper.

Two moments when we seemed both to acknowledge what we were about to lose.

One: the doctor sits at the end of Sam's hospital bed to talk to us about a DNR order. He explains the choices: to do everything, or to do nothing.

"But," I ask, "isn't there a way that I could just say goodbye?"

"Andie . . ." Sam's voice trails off. He shakes his head softly.

"Okay," I whisper.

Two: "we have to decide on names," I tell him, when we are alone together in the hospital room. The residents and interns have rounded, we have a brief respite from visitors. We each take a scrap of paper, and write down children's names. I make one column for a boy's name, one for a girl's. For a few minutes, there is silence, and then we consult. "A boy should have his own name," he says, as we consider a family name, but decide against it. There is a single name remaining on both our lists: Jacob.

My husband was a man of little need, who thrived on the everyday routine of life. Mornings, he would rise before me, at ten of seven, and slip from our bed into the shower. Mornings now, I lie in that bed and can still hear the sound of the water rushing from the shower head. If I listen carefully, I can hear the distinctive way he swished and rinsed his razor in the red plastic top from the shaving cream can, pulling me out of my sleep. I have stood, these last few months, in the shower, filled that plastic lid with water, and swished the razor in it myself, trying to find that sound. It doesn't come.