I’m a geologist. We think of time differently where I live, where change cannot be tracked with the human eye, usually, though sometimes a cataclysm brings the underworld into the timeframe we recognize on earth.  When he was forty-two, my husband David drove into a tree a quarter mile from home, leaving me with three daughters to raise. Even when lifting my head was as far above the surface I could reach, they were the terrain I couldn’t ignore, no matter how hard, below, David was pressing against me.
     My mother had given it to me the previous Christmas, the black journal with no lines, no page numbers, and two days after the accident, my fingers knocked against it as I rifled through his jeans drawer, forgetting what I was looking for, though I could see from the other open drawers with clothes spilling out that it had been something important. Here would be the line I fed into the darkness, where he had fallen to an unreachable place. Every night I read it before bed, opened it to a page and let the suffering me out, so she could sleep. I have inserted pictures here and there, taking them from family albums, most of them, making copies so that the originals retain their place in our family history. Why is it that this journal records so much pain, when these pictures show so much laughter? Am I so morose as all that? Is it wrong to keep him tied to this dark and flickering light?
     I suppose we all develop rituals. When I repel to a lower point in a cave, I pause a moment, turning to each of the four other directions, the ones that, with feet firmly planted, make sense. I bow my head, bring me home safely. It’s dark, no one knows I do this, and have done this, for all my professional life. We all need a little bit of OCD so we don’t spin away, so we can place ourselves here, where the past and future come together, in ritual. Even our horses turn a certain way in their stalls, sleep with their noses in the same corner, whicker one way in the morning, another way at night. The girls are tucked in. The house is darkened, slumbering. I light candles, stack pillows against the headboard, set the books beside me: the old journals, the new one with a pen inserted into the page where I might write, if I feel moved. I say his name, once. David. Let the journal fall open. Sometimes I write in my current journal, referring to an older one, #4, page 17, correcting things: I must be remembering wrong. It wasn’t until we were married and I was pregnant that I first knew something was wrong with you. There had to be. Overnight, you had changed, my heartbeat, become silent, withdrawing. I blamed myself, tried harder—sex, cooking, conversation—sure I could lift you out of this blue blue, as you used to call it, “a particularly blue blue,” and rescue you from yourself.
     I’m sure there are other ways. Some people drive themselves into their work, fall into bed exhausted, numb the mind that way. I have done this, too, but the harder I pushed, the faster I saw it gaining on me, ready to cuff me in the back of the head, lay me out flat. No, I had to give him this space, every night. Even when I went to conferences, I didn’t share my room, and I carried a candle and one of the journals with me.
     For awhile, before I could begin writing, I read everything I’d written previously, so there was no doubt where I’d been, mapping my way to new places, until I fell asleep without writing a word. These first pages, then, are the most worn. I know them by heart.

     The end is the beginning of the end.
     I don’t remember much of the last two weeks. Dr. Keene insisted on valium because the back of my neck is a corkscrew catching my shoulder muscles and threatening to pull the entire fabric into it. When I got out of bed it was to use the bathroom. My head on fire, sweat pooling in my underwear.
     I don’t understand what’s happening. I know that David is gone but then I know he’s not. I lie in bed staring into the space between the bed and the dresser until the dresser and bed disappear. Wings are beating in my head, at my eardrums, and though I call for help the words can’t climb the barrier of my tongue, and so I crouch at the back of my mouth and listen.
     Under the beating he comes, close enough so I can sense him behind the great wings that make it impossible to move, even to call to him. But I can hear him call me.
     “Meredith!”
     He sounds impatient. I try to answer. The wings slow and the metallic beating eases and he slips away and finally evaporates into the space of silence, and then I am alone in the place where water flows uneasily over rocks that gradually rise above me, shadowing the light. It’s always this way, the metallic wings that he can’t penetrate to reach me, and me paralyzed behind my tongue, hearing myself calling back but knowing the sound is all inside. And then the coming water as he evaporates, and the rocks that tumble silently, crushing what little remains of his attempt to find me. Why can’t he find me? Why can I hear him and he not hear me? This morning I called for Diana, and she answered right away as if she was there in bed with me.
     How loyal she is. But there’s a want in her that makes me turn away. I want to go back to bed and find a way to get to David. I think if I can climb onto the wings when they start I can maybe see him and reach him.
     I chew the valiums now to go down there.

     It’s been two weeks and now I’m writing down these thoughts, catching up. Why not, there’s not a moment when you are not in my head, so I might as well tell you what your leaving has done to us. Last week, my first day out of bed since I went to it, after the funeral, I woke up to her trembling voice. “Mom?”
     I turned away from her, but her hand squeezing my shoulder insisted. “Mom?”
     “Go see Grandma, Diana.”
     “Grandma sent me in here to bring you some dinner.”
     So it wasn’t morning, but evening.
     Other hands. “Come on, Mommy, me and Diana brought you some soup we made.”
     “Who’s that? Is that you, Molly?” I sat against the pillows they had stacked behind me. “And where’s Cecily?”
     “She’s outside somewheres.”
     “Somewhere, Molly, not somewheres.” (Who cares! I had the presence of mind to think.)
     “Somewhere.”
     “I think I’d like to get out of this old bed. It smells like old gym shorts.”
     Molly spoke solemnly, “Like Uncle Ned’s socks."
     Then, Diana, “I’ll wash them for you. You go sit in the kitchen.”
     I sat on the edge of the bed with a hangover that had my hands shaking.
     “Get her robe and slippers, Molly.”
     Molly bent over to slide the slip-ons onto my feet. Her striped t-shirt stretched over her narrow back, and her long braid dividing her back slid to the side. I grabbed it and filled my two hands with it, then put my face in it and breathed her in. Molly stood slowly.
     “Who braided your hair so nice?”
     “Cecily.”
     “She’s done it just right, not so tight that it twists.”
     It was a small thing, but when Molly’s face flushed and her chin quivered, I felt as if I’d been kicked in my stomach. Your chin has become Molly’s! Has it always been and I’ve only just now noticed, or has it become yours in the intervening days, jutting out with its longing for you?
     They helped me into the hall, as I was unsteady on my feet. I asked them how long I’d been in bed.
     “Since Friday. Since the funeral. Five days.”
     “And has Grandma been here the whole time? And Uncle Ned?”
     This time Molly answered. “Grandma’s staying in Cecily’s room because she’s acting funny, and Grandma says it’s better she sleeps with her.”
     “Where’s Cecily now?”
     “Outside somewheres.”
     “How is she acting funny? Diana?”
     “She’s okay, Mom. She’s not acting funny, Molly.”
     “I guess we’re all acting funny, aren’t we? Most of all your mom.”
     Now that I’ve seen my girls and know that they are suffering on my account, I have to make a better effort. I have to act like we’re still a family and that they haven’t lost us both.
     (Thank you, Mom and Ned, for loving my girls and for letting me sleep in.)

     I recorded conversations back then for David, thinking that he was listening, could read over my shoulder. After this last entry, I got the idea of inserting pictures, taping just along the top, so I could flip the picture up and read what was underneath. I inserted a picture over the last line that shows our family—our girls, Mom, Ned—David and I are outside the frame, of course. I took the picture, but I’m not there. Like David, I have left them to their own devices.
     If you look at the second year, will you see that I am getting better? I don’t see it, though I think maybe I held a grudge against David that began to show. Maybe I began to sense that I had loved too generously, given more of myself than I could afford. Was I wrong to tape a picture of my lover over this next passage? I look at his picture and can hardly remember the passion he had for me, bowling me over and making me forget how distant David had become. But at the time, he gave me something I needed. Tenderness. He folded me in his arms and inhaled me. I was grateful.

     I’m glad you never knew I once loved anyone else but you. David, maybe now, as you look down on us (are you watching us?), maybe now you can forgive me, because I know you never would have when you were alive. You would have made me leave. You would have been hard on me. The year Sam was here was the year you wrote your first book, the creative writing book you called The Write Stuff. That’s all you cared about, clever exercises and witty sayings, notes everywhere, tacked up around your typewriter—just before we got our first computer. You invited your students to the house, your protégés, trying out your exercises on them. Snarling at me. Ignoring Diana and Cecily. I couldn’t help myself. Sam came after me in a big way and I fell into him. We loved a few months and then he had to leave, his appointment had been only a year. He called me a few times, but by then I knew it was over. You had finally gone to the doctor, were trying meds for the first time, and most of all you had apologized. You held me when you cried that one awful night when you started loving me again. I remember thinking, is this all I needed to stay true—you, my love?
     Certain memories keep coming to mind. Last week there was one, and this week two. I go over and over them, as if they hold an answer that I can hear but not interpret. When I was little our phone line let us hear other conversations in the distance, we could pick up laughter, raised voices, intonation, but they were too far away to understand. I’d press the phone to my ear, tell whoever I was talking to to wait, then try to pick up a word or two. Who knows who these people were or where they lived? There was always a woman who laughed a lot. I got closest to hearing her, the child’s voice too high and the men’s voices too low to pick up more than a rumble, like surf. Once she was crying and the other voice was angry. I wanted to say, “Let her alone, you bully,” a sound if not words that would stop them cold, but they couldn’t hear me the way I could hear them. And I never noticed a listening silence on their end.
     So I’m listening to these snatches of memory for something underneath. Last week’s: After one of my bladder infections, maybe the third that year, I was sitting on the toilet groaning as the burning made my jaw clench down, and you came in. You ruffled my hair and said, “I feel bad that you’re always the one to get sick. How about tonight you rub my penis till I get a bladder infection?” This made me laugh and a new drop of pee sent chills up to my teeth. “Don’t flirt with me when I feel like this,” I said.
     Then this week, it’s just your arms around me as you used to do when you were feeling affectionate and would come up behind me and fold me in your arms, rest your chin on my head, and just rock back and forth, until one of us broke away, or made it into something more. . . . David, my love, I sleep alone now, and always will. That’s not just a sad song. I know it’s true all the way to my bones.
     The third memory is new. You’re calling my name from the barn, where you’ve gone to work on something, and I’m exasperated to have to stop what I’m doing. When I get there you say you didn’t call. I don’t remember this ever happening, but at the same time, it comes to me as something that happened long ago.
     I was in the kitchen, slicing some of Mary’s delicious cake for the girls yesterday, when this memory that never happened hit me again. I stared out the window at the barn. I could see your work boot then the cuff of your jeans, then the knee, your thigh, your right hand, and then you dissolved. I put the slices on plates and silently begged my girls to distract me. They did. Homework. A broken Snoopy lamp switch. SNL reruns.

     Does it seem as if he’d begun breaking up? Memories begin to sort into types. Specific events that I knew had really happened—some called up at will, others leaping from of an otherwise monotonous landscape of dulled feeling. Sensations—smells, heat, the weight of arms—hauntings that came and left unbidden, but slowed me down, sometimes to a standstill. Images that couldn’t have been but which I remembered nonetheless, shooting him into the present and then disintegrating. Three evolutionary arms had developed, and I followed one, then the other, into darkness.

     Last night at my grief counseling group, I told the story (again) of how you died, the suddenness, the violence, the senselessness of it. I said that while I know what our therapist has said, that making sense of random loss is not possible, I need an explanation that will allow me to face the days ahead with something that will lighten this ton of rocks I carry in my heart. It pulls my posture down in front and makes my back a shaft of barbed wire. What’s inside is outside, what’s out is in. The only way to put things back is to know where they go. Because it’s over a year and there is NO lessening of the pain. I walk through the motions at work, at home, a crummy mother and a crummier teacher. I must do better. I simply must! I can’t wait till they’re in bed and I can be alone with my thoughts. I promised you just . . . how many . . . five pages ago that I would do better with the girls, not let them be second place in their own home.
     She told us that the second year is often harder than the first, and that this surprises the grievers. And it surprises the watchers. Why doesn’t she get over it, they wonder, wallowing in it, making it a way of life. But she’s right, this year is worse in some ways because your absence has grown solid, definite. I can trace the edges and feel the carved roughness of limestone, here your shoulder, something I melted into, now cold and rigid. You have become the cemetery marker you wanted no part of. Cast me to the air, you told me, if I go before you. No marker, no funeral. I honored your wishes, the funeral our own, no body, no casket, just a roomful of pictures, your jeans and corduroy shirt draped over a chair, as if you had just slipped them off.
     I don’t want you to grow harder and darker, merging with the landscape.

     After three years the journal stops suddenly—except for this last entry, which I wrote last year: I went to the national conference last weekend and presented a paper on extremophiles. You used to say, “You geographers are really closet poets, making up words and telling stories. You’re not scientists like other scientists.” Snottite was the girls’ favorite term, yours, extremophile. You wrote a poem about them, those tiny microbes who survive 176 degrees Fehrenheit, even more, near the boiling point. I still remember the line, “living beyond the edge / in the murky pot / of earth’s bowels.”
     I stopped writing so suddenly because my journal was discovered, by our housekeeper Mary. She read it, and she even used part of it in a story she was writing for a class taught by one of my friends. It shocked me, the idea of a stranger reading my most intimate feelings, written only for David. It was as if she had entered the ritual, uninvited, and I could no longer perform the steps. I tried. Lit the candles, read the entries, held the pen over the page, ready to trace what I had felt that day. Nothing. I hadn’t wanted to be overheard.
     And now I have grown brazen, trumpeting my private thoughts for a reading public , most of whom I’ll never meet. I read with them, commenting on the passages, interpreting, dissecting. Someone said, “You seem to be making an industry out of loss.” Once, I would have carried that insult around like a bur under a saddle, allowing it to make a sore spot. But I understand. His office is across from mine, I’m a shifting plate in his landscape, and he prefers the familiar, even in his colleagues, and especially in his work. It’s not his to understand why I took to opening my private pain to a public gaze.
     It began a few years ago, well after I stopped writing in the journals, when a colleague who is a lead researcher in the Lechuguilla Canyon near Carlsbad invited me to join her and a small team of explorers. I had been dropping hints, and now they wanted to invite a few geologists and microbiologists from elsewhere in the country to view for ourselves the most beautiful gypsum formations ever seen. Microbes in Carlsbad had fed on oil, producing hydrogen sulfide gas as part of their metabolism. This gas was released, mixed with oxygen, and formed sulfuric acid. Over time, the sulfuric acid ate the limestone, leaving the sparkling white gypsum formations. Now the cave is dead, the original healthy eaters long gone, but dead only means there’s no new cave being formed by sulfuric acid. New microorganisms are eating the walls, creating rust patches that speak of life.
     Getting there was hell. At the entrance, the wind blows up to 50 miles per hour, but once the door is slammed shut, it shudders to a murmur, then silence vaster than any I’d known rushes in. Caves don’t just throw back voices in echoes, they listen. This cave was a great ear, and I could feel it pressing itself against my skin, reading me. There was no hiding. I was terrified, plummeting hundreds of feet with a thin rope and a hand brake all that kept me from a fall that could be as easily up as down, so black and suspended space had become. We repelled down pit after pit, communicating in quick exchanges. “Okay, made it.” “More line.” “Careful.” A rock slide below left me dangling for thirty minutes, and though I could hear the voices of others as they checked for damage and re-established the safety lines, they were far away, like the sound of traffic on a distant highway. In perfect darkness I waited, suspended in the great throat of the cave. My line turned me slowly and now I heard it. A breath, a low sigh, a loneliness so deep that it had lost the awareness of self that loneliness usually heightens. I reached my hand out and the sigh rose. My lips opened, and the sigh shot up from the depths, swirling me in its vortex.
     Once on solid ground, a light flashed across my face, expressions of concerns followed, a hug. I realized my face was wet with tears, and knew they assumed it was terror. I shifted quickly to the researcher they’d invited. I photographed everything, but especially the u-loop formations that colleagues had surmised were calcified snottites. Studying them in another cave, Villa Luz, in Mexico, they’ve deduced a similar life story for Lechuguilla. The mucus-like substance dripping from the snottites is stronger than battery acid, dissolving clothes and burning if you touch it. At Villa Luz, the walls of the new cave are alive with dripping acid, and yet living in its midst are communities of mites, worms, tiny bugs, spiders. For these extremophiles, life is good, their environment extreme only to us. Back in Villa’s older sister cave, a mile in, we stopped and drank from Lake Labarge, a body of water so clear it might as well be air you drink. No one spoke. I pointed my flashlight at the water, saw the circle of light hover on the surface, then dive to the bottom. Air and water might have been the same substance—reduced to the essentials, they were, just as we all were.

     I had gone to see a different cave formation than the ones I grew up with in Kentucky. I wanted to step outside of what had become home. I have been there three times now and co-written two papers trying to help untangle the mysteries that fascinate us. It happened in the midst of writing that second paper, the sudden certainty that I was telling only half the story—writing the surface of life beneath the surface—and so I took to writing travel pieces for non-academic magazines, essays about life in the extreme. Except for the suffering, few people would call my life extreme, and yet, who’s to say?
     One day several months ago I ran into my old grief counselor, Shannon, who asked if I’d like to attend again. “Your experience will be beneficial,” she said. After the fourth meeting, I invited them to my house. I led them into the living room, where light pours through the windows. Cheerful, I’d thought. I had pulled enough comfortable chairs for everyone, into a circle. Donna had been in the group longest. Her son died in a traffic accident that wasn’t discovered for two days. Always fragile but resolute, Donna made a beeline to my 300-pound geode. “That’s a mighty big Easter egg,” she said. I told her I’d always thought of it as an egg as well, though David called it “G”nome, the Ge-ode. “David bought it for me on a trip out west, and our oldest daughter sat next to it in the backseat across the country, each of them strapped in. She described everything as we went, saying he was too short to see out the window. David was ready to throw it out the door by the time we hit Kansas.” Charlie walked up and looked over her shoulder, but said nothing. Our newest member, he was grieving his wife of thirty years, who had died of cancer a year before. “I don’t know how to be with people anymore,” he said. Ida’s and Karen’s husbands died in the Iraq war, and they were angry and scared. Though they hadn’t met before joining the group, they now seemed inseparable. Our last member, Parker, was a tall, gaunt man whose son had died of AIDS.
     When Shannon called at the last minute to say her car had broken down, I felt a surge of confusion, which I didn’t hide very well, though I busied myself with serving cookies and tea. Ida suggested we get started. I was surprised at how dependent we were on Shannon, so gifted in getting us to share, prompting now and then when we slipped into dangerous areas—denial, blame—though most of the time she just listened. Without her, what we were doing seemed artificial, and since it was my house, the superficiality was mine. What could a grief addict offer a small group of unhappy people except the assurance of more misery?
     Suddenly, in the midst of an uncomfortable silence, Charlie stood up and pointed. “There’s a horse trotting by.”
     “There’s another one!” cried Parker.
     They jumped to the windows, as if they’d never seen horses before. I tried to tell them it was no big deal. “Babe knows how to open the paddock door. They like to see what’s going on when we have company.” I looked from one to the other. Space had sucked me away and I stood aloof, stunned, as their pretences peeled away like extraneous skin. They didn’t know they were being watched. Each one stood rapt, smiling, even Donna. Though she usually cried through meetings, her lips lifted in a half-smile. I realized, then, that my seeing them exposed this way—open, unprotected—didn’t matter to them, only to me.
     “Would you like to help me put them back?”
     They practically ran to the door, and I followed them into the yard, where Babe and Iago were stepping among them, nuzzling their hands for treats.
     “Hold on! I’ll get some carrots,” I called, turning back toward the house, but not before I saw Charlie run his hand appreciatively over Iago’s shoulders. When I returned with the carrots, our other two horses had arrived, knowing that where there was Babe, carrots would appear. Donna had pressed her forehead against Hasbeen’s face and I could see her shoulders shaking.
     After treats we led the horses back to the barn and groomed them. I showed them which brushes to use, how to follow the direction of hair, around the swirls at their hips and shoulders. They learned names—muzzle, whithers, chestnut, cannon bone. Ida and Karen braided manes—individual braids, a French braid, mock dreads. Charlie and Parker worked the hooves, cleaning them with the hook. “I used to have a horse,” Parker said, “but I haven’t been near one in thirty years.”
     It was evening when Donna, the last to go, finished sweeping the barn. She hugged me as she stepped into her car, a long hug, a hug I released her from twice and still she held on. When she finally pulled away, tears stood in her eyes. “You’re blessed,” she said.
     Shannon has asked that I co-facilitate first one then another group. We meet in my living room then we go to the barn—and sometimes we meet in the barn. Occasionally, we ride, but touch is best, and so they groom the horses and feed them treats. We meet with a group of refugees from Bosnia, still blocked from expressing in a foreign land and a foreign tongue what they never needed to know about the depths of suffering. One woman originally from Korea cries and laughs simultaneously as equine lips nuzzle her open hand. “Oh, that tickle,” she says. “But it feel so good.”
     Why do I tell you this? I don’t know what work you do, where you teach or write or count or file. I am a geologist. I study caves. But I’m shifting, exposing new layers. A counselor, a writer—like David was, who sought in words the mysteries of the world.
     Who have you lost? What betrayal chips away at your chance for happiness? I lost a husband. I came close to losing my middle daughter. She almost died twice, pushing herself toward danger as though by running toward it she would protect herself from it. Then one day she came to me. My head was full of work, but something in her face made me set it aside. You see, my tender-hearted daughter whose armor people have so often mistaken for coldness, came to confess, to tell me she had been on the floor behind the driver’s seat when David died. He heard her move and reached back to touch her. Then he drove into the tree. She was sure that she had killed him, and for thirteen years she scraped herself against that knowledge, despite avoiding it with all she had. She is a nurse now, working in the ER, helping others hold onto life. She says to me, after I let her read this, after I tell her it’s hers, oh,let them have it, if they want it, it was mine for long enough.
     I have a collection of rocks, labeled and lined up in neat rows. They lie in drawers that pull out for easier viewing. I have a new drawer now, where creatures who died in caves I visited are meticulously positioned. Some are too small to see, so I capture them with a microscope and photograph their startling shapes and colors. I set these 1” square photographs next to their larger cousins. You can see their tiny legs, their knock-kneed clumsiness, the spot where the eye would be if the eyes hadn’t devolved thousands of years ago from lack of use. They are cave-colored, cave-determined, cave-creators. I admire them. They remind me of the dark places where life goes on.