I am alive. My husband, Paul Auster, is dead. He died on 30 April 2024, at 6.58pm here in the Brooklyn house where I am now writing these words. He was diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer in January 2023. But before that, in early November 2022, Paul had a CT scan in the emergency room at Mount Sinai West hospital. The radiologist spotted a mass in his right lung and noted it might be cancer.
We all die, but only some of us know our lives could end soon. Although I had often thought about what it would mean to live without Paul, I began to imagine it more often. I imagined walking around the house alone. I imagined grieving. If your father dies, I said to our daughter, Sophie, I will lose my every day.
What I didn’t imagine is that after Paul’s death, time would be deranged beyond recognition. I remember and then forget what day it is. I remember it’s the month of May and then forget. The hours skip ahead but minutes often move slowly. I want to root my body in calendar and clock, those reliable, if ultimately fictional, markers of time, but I’m not making sense of their regular beats. I’m afraid if I don’t keep checking date, day and hour, I will lose my orientation, stumble on the stairs, and fall or float away ungrounded.
I have trouble breathing. My heart beats too fast, not all the time, in bursts. I have pains between my ribs, sometimes intense. My neck and head ache. My nerves buzz and hum, and electricity shoots up and down my limbs.
I sleep by pill.
I pick up a paper or an object that needs attention and then see another that calls to me. I put down the first thing only to spot it hours later, an inanimate victim of the unfinished gesture. A pile of unopened condolence letters and cards lie on the red table in the dining room. I cannot bear to open them. Not today. I will wait. Tomorrow.
Tomorrow comes. I open the letters, but I don’t always understand what I’m reading. The short, kind messages are best. There are also long, handwritten letters of many pages from people I don’t know. Paul must have belonged to them in some way, but exactly how I can’t always make out.
In the days that immediately followed Paul’s small graveside funeral, on 3 May at Green-Wood Cemetery, a compulsion to sort, throw and scrub came over me. When I’m distressed or anxious, I often clean. I get my own little world into shiny order. I exercise some control by getting rid of dust and fluff and blur. I was not going to be one of those widows who leaves her husband’s clothes in the closet for months or even years. A dead man doesn’t need shirts, keys, shaving cream. A dead man can’t be sick. He doesn’t take pills.
I’m amazed by the determination with which I attacked Paul’s study. He spent most of his days from morning into the afternoon writing in a small room at the back of our house near the garden. My guess is that there were at least 150 pens on the surface of Paul’s desk. He had a supply of typewriter ribbons for his manual Olympia to last him several additional long lifetimes. He had a number of well-used erasers and 35 Clairefontaine notebooks, the kind with graph paper inside them. Before he typed up his manuscripts on the Olympia, he wrote all his books in longhand in those notebooks.
We did not disturb each other’s workspaces. They were sacrosanct. He never touched my desk. I never touched his. I had no idea he owned so many pens, ribbons and notebooks. He always had at least one, often two or three, pens in the front pocket of his jeans. If poignancy is a feeling somewhere between slight tenderness and pain, then it was poignancy I felt when I saw the pens and discovered all the ribbons. Pens are still sold everywhere, but typewriter ribbons and Tipp-Ex sheets are not as easy to come by, so it made sense for Paul to be prepared for their possible disappearance, not just from New York City but from the face of the Earth.
I loved the percussive sound his typewriter made when he pounded on it, fast and then slower and fast again. I like the resistance of the keys on my fingers, he said. Paul kept time with his tools. In his writing habits, the young man lived on in the old man.
The typewriter sits on his desk just as it used to, a speechless thing that has now lost its place in the writing ritual. Habits, routines, rituals create meaning from repetition, and those repetitions can serve as a fortress against anxiety. Paul didn’t jiggle or chew his nails. He was never visibly jumpy, but anxiety coloured his life. We arrived hours too early at airports, the source of much familial humour. He was possessive of objects he regarded as extensions of his own body: pens, but also his house keys, his tiny datebook I ordered every year from Charing Cross, and his wallet – all three of which he kept in his right front pocket. These objects were not to be touched by anyone else. When he was in the hospital and suffered from delirium, the keys, book and wallet were stored in a plastic bag in a drawer beside his bed, but they were no longer on him. When he woke in the foreign bed and couldn’t find them, he would call me or our son-in-law, Spencer. He had scribbled down appointments he needed to remember. He had no money. How could he get a cab? How would he get back into the house?
The man couldn’t stand up from his bed alone.
“The object of anxiety is ‘nothingness,’ and nothingness is not an ‘object’,” Søren Kierkegaard writes in The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, the philosopher says, is like looking into an abyss. Paul used that word for death repeatedly in the last year of his life. I have spent a long time looking into the abyss, he said.
Paul’s courage as he looked into the abyss astounded me.
The four-storey house in Brooklyn where Paul and I lived for 30 years and where our daughter, Sophie, grew up, and where Daniel, my stepson, lived when he wasn’t at his mother’s, became vast overnight. The two of us occupied this space for a long time without children, and the house felt roomy but not huge.
When we first lived together, in 1981, we rented the top two floors of a house at 18 Tompkins Place in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. I owned very little at the time except books. We gave away our duplicate copies, of which there were many. We picked the best edition to keep. I remember thinking to myself: This means we really have to stay together.
Sophie lives in her own house now, in another neighbourhood in Brooklyn, with her husband, Spencer, and their baby, Miles, who was born on New Year’s Day 2024. It would be wholly reasonable to donate a few rooms from this house to the three of them if such a thing were possible, but it isn’t.
Paul loved the library on the third floor of the house. I want to die in the library. I imagine putting a hospital bed in here, he said to me long before the hospital bed arrived and well before we knew the cancer had returned. He knew he wanted to die in that room filled with light. Light became more and more important to him as he neared death.
I have been sleeping on my side of the bed. So far, I haven’t found myself taking up more room than I used to. When I wake, I do not expect him to be beside me. I do not expect him to walk into the room. I know I cannot conjure him, as much as I would like to. I dreaded his imminent death for far too long. I occupy the same space in the bed where we coupled and slept, year after year.
We slept together in that bed for the last time on 28 April, two nights before he died. Spencer wheeled Paul into the room and helped me lift him on to the bed. He, Sophie and Miles had come to stay with us. After I crawled in with Paul, he stroked my hand and arm for what seemed like a long time. We talked. He wanted me to live on, live long, to write more. I woke up several times that night and reached out for him to make sure he was breathing. I used to do it with Sophie when she was an infant. Sophie does it with Miles now. She checks. I just want to hear that he’s breathing.
When did Paul say This is going faster than I thought? “This” being dying. Maybe a week before.
He thought he had more time. He believed he had months. I felt sure he didn’t, but I said nothing. No one can know for sure how long a person has to live, after all. Why should I advertise a hunch? In March, Paul had begun what he hoped would be a small book, Letters to Miles. The 35 pages that exist are mostly devoted to stories about Miles’s parents. He was going to tell stories about the two of us and other family members, but exactly what shape the letters were meant to take, I don’t know.
He wrote the last letter to his grandson in early April 2024.
The house, the bed, my body are out of whack. This is the house of our calling out to each other from one floor to another; of reading each other’s manuscripts aloud in the green chairs in the living room; of sitting in the garden, of my pointing to newly opening tulips or to the roses at peak bloom in the garden because I’m afraid he might forget to look and miss the moment. The roses are blooming now without him. They are pink and lush and bursting open without him. This is the house of our short talks and our long ones, of our disputations and declarations of love, the house of our suffering over events we couldn’t control or prevent. Lightning strikes. It strikes again. This is the house of a long ongoing dialogue about little things and big ones, a dialogue that has now ended.
From the beginning, the doctors confessed that Paul’s “case” was “difficult”. A “tumor board” met to evaluate his situation. Except for his history of smoking, the doctors never asked about his life story. I feel confident they didn’t know what he had suffered the year before he started having fevers. Despite the fact that the immune system, which regularly kills cancer cells in everybody, is highly sensitive to the assaults on a person now widely known as “stress”, the standard biomedical model in the United States excludes these narratives from the clinical picture.
After all the horrible things we’ve been through, Paul said to me, if I die of cancer, it will make a bad story. For Paul, the bad story was a predictable story. The plot machinery fulfils conventional expectations and leaves the listener or reader unsurprised. He didn’t want his own story to fall into that dull category.
I never answered him. Gloomy Guts kept her fears to herself.
The truth is I gag on our “antecedent trouble”, what Paul called the horrible things. Even putting into words what is a matter of public record and was publicised by countless media outlets in lurid stories around the world continues to feel nearly unspeakable to me. Paul’s 10-month-old granddaughter, my step-granddaughter, Ruby Auster, died on 1 November 2021. Six months later, when the medical examiner determined that the cause of her death was heroin and fentanyl, Paul’s son, my stepson, Daniel, who was alone with Ruby when she died, was arrested and charged with manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child. He was sent to Rikers, released on bail, and hours later overdosed on heroin and fentanyl. He died on 26 April 2022. He was 44 years old. It’s impossible to write about Paul without writing about Daniel, but that story also involves other people in Daniel’s life who cared for him and have their own perspectives and their own grief.
Neither Paul nor I knew how Ruby had died until the day of Daniel’s arrest. Paul was cut open by the death of his granddaughter and enraged by Daniel’s negligence. The media attention, some of it cruel and dense with unfounded speculation, insinuation and outright lies, made the wound worse.
In February, Paul showed me where he had stored personal letters, including many letters from Daniel addressed to “Dad and Siri” and others to “Dad”. I want the story to be told, Paul said. Letters and personal writings can be sealed from curious eyes for years, but years is not for ever. Paul’s wish was that nothing be destroyed. I will not burn any papers.
In a letter to Martha Gilbert Smith in 1884, Emily Dickinson wrote: “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer.” There is that, too. How to articulate abyss?
As I said to Paul, a tumour is not a tree. Dating its inception isn’t possible and, despite the long history that links cancer to emotion and loss and the many recent medical papers that take up the same question, the studies are mixed and there is no scientific consensus on the subject. There is agreement that stressors of many kinds affect the immune system, however. Malignant tumours keep growing because at some point in their development, the immune system fails to recognise them.
I will never know what role the horrible things played in Paul’s cancer. The scientific mantra “correlation isn’t cause” is worth remembering. I can testify with certainty that we were both anguished for many years, and it was worse for Paul because Daniel was his own child, and he had lived with more hope than I had. A moment came when I felt that if I remained open to Daniel, I would be hurt beyond repair. As a step-parent, it was easier for me to withdraw. Paul hoped life would get better for Daniel. His hope was dampened by Daniel’s lies, thefts and betrayals, but he hoped nevertheless. After he knew how Ruby had died, that hope was extinguished.
When Paul died, the bad story came true.
But I am not writing a biography of abyss. This is about Paul and me, and I am writing from a need to bring something of the man back on the page.
June 15 2024. You are with Sophie, Spencer and Miles in a roomy house. The sun has been shining. It rained only once, hard. The breezes blow. This morning that small, fierce, glorious person, your grandchild, fell asleep in your arms, his tiny fist gripping the neck of your sweater. Bliss. The bliss of yore. Sophie in your arms. Your arms remember your infant, now a woman, just as they remember Paul, now dead. Look what we made, you said to Paul, gazing at the baby. Can you believe it? Look what Sophie and Spencer made.
The wondrous and the horrible mingle in many people’s lives.
Paul has been dead for 46 days. Can this be possible? Where are those days? On Thursday, I told my new therapist that I’m trying to keep time but failing. And yet one word follows another as I write. The sequence is in my head and fingers, a verbal gait, as if my feet hit pavement but are also spinning in air. “The Feet, mechanical, go round – / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – / A Wooden way.” Dickinson again.
I want my sentences to pull me towards the Earth. As I write, I listen for the old music, the music we made together, sad, sweet, joyous, calming, wild. Our music, our attunement, our dissonance. It wasn’t all harmony.
The ghosts swarm the page.
On 27 April, Paul said he wanted to come back as a ghost.
I am telling ghost stories.
The letters he wrote are ghosts, too.
Letter from Paul Auster to his grandson, Miles:
April 2024
Dear Miles,
It turns out that I have less time than I thought. I finished radiation for lung cancer on November 2 (’23), and after a required two-month wait, I was given a CT scan on January 4th (just days after you were born), which brought the encouraging news that the radiation therapy had worked and my cancer was in retreat. A part of me began to hope that I might live for another year if the next scan (April) and the one after that (July) continued to show progress. Last week, I had the second scan, and contrary to expectations, the pictures revealed that the cancer had spread from my right lung to my left lung and other parts of my body. There will be no cure, no recovery, no nothing but the certainty of death within a matter of months. How many months is unclear, but whether it is one or two or four or five, I aim to live them out here in the house, perched in the sun-filled library on the third floor. Your grandmother is arranging for home-care hospice, which means that I won’t have to suffer the indignities of dying under the fluorescent lights of a grim, green-walled hospital room. I will be here in the light, surrounded by your mother and father and my beloved Siri. Morphine will be administered, if necessary. If I had my choice, I would prefer to die telling a joke.
Among my many regrets about this encroaching departure, dear Miles, is that you will go through your life without any conscious memories of me. Until last week at least, I imagined that I would be able to write you enough letters to fill a short book, a little thing of 100 or 200 pages, but now I understand how foolish that dream was. There will be no book, no letters about your ancestors (what stories I was planning to tell!), no reflections on the contemporary American scene and the fraught national elections we will be facing in the fall. I have little hope that I will be alive in November, and therefore I will never know if the Republic is dead or still breathing. On life support, perhaps, but still breathing. Nevertheless, I promise to forge on as best I can for as long as I can and to see if I can’t come up with a few more before I am too weak to continue.
Your Papa