The Sound (not Fury) of a Deathiversary

In early winter, the contract for my audio book was drawn up. While many authors have a strong urge to narrate their own book, the first 60 pages would be impossible for me to artfully record. There’s a reason I don’t read those pages aloud at author events: they come with mild PTSD’s accompanying flashbacks, hyperventilation and tears. 

I had a strong conviction that those pages would be better read by a professional voice artist who doesn’t remember what it was like to perform CPR on my dead husband or shut his casket or deliver his eulogy. So I negotiated the right to choose the narrator. And pre-coach her. And request do-overs (called “pick-ups” in voiceland) for any mispronounced words.

This past week, I received the rough cut of my audio book. I imagine that it’s surreal for anyone to hear their nonfiction book narrated by someone else: it distances you from the story and allows you to experience it anew. It also propels you back in time, resurrecting the visual memories associated with every thought and line of dialog.  

Reliving this story in early March—the same time of year that the book began and concluded—felt not unlike a cruel joke. Took me 48 hours to get through those first 60 pages—exactly why I didn’t narrate—and I had to skip food in order to finish my notes on the remaining 232 pages. Took every scrap of my Lent willpower to not open a bottle of wine at 11am in the middle of Chapter Four. (Anyone else notice just how much effing wine I drank in 2009? Finally understand why so many readers mention opening a bottle while reading this book.)

Reliving the year 2009 a few days before Alberto’s deathiversary has translated into refreshed memories and a deluge of dreams. But it’s also served as a nicer, kinder reminder that the girl who poured out this book is not the same girl I am now. Through its telling, through its publishing, through the opportunities it’s since provided, I’ve had the luxury of grieving in a community that…lets me do just that. The byproduct is a girl who’s worked through much of the shit with which this book struggles.

There are new, often unexpected struggles—parting with his storage units of memories, turning the same age at which he died, becoming a mom to a daughter he never met—but tonight, 30 minutes into the deathiversary, it’s an odd sort of relief to recognize that you’re less and less the panicky person who wrote this story. A bit more the brave one who flickered through at rare moments. 

Or perhaps this is just a public pep talk for a girl who’s doing something tomorrow—er, today—that she’s never done before: spread Alberto’s ashes in NYC.  Because strange that I’ve sprinkled him in countries he never traveled to and places he visited once, yet not the city in which we fell in love and lived.

But also, a thing that’s remedied as of tomorrow.