Peripheral Visions

“And have you had a visit from your husband since he died?” Marilyn asks me this at the gym, on the recovery station between reps, after I divulge to my new acquaintance that I’m a widow. People generally respond to my story by anxiously trying to comfort me, quickly asserting that Rajiv isn’t really dead, or that he’s in heaven, or that he lives on in memory. But most don’t come right out and assert, as Marilyn does, that he walks the earth in some ghostly dimension. She tells me she can feel his presence right there by my side, one step behind me on the exercise mat.

I smile politely, but remain stubbornly uncomforted. I can’t believe in ghosts. As an atheist, and in allegiance to Rajiv, it’s been a moral imperative for me, and perhaps a secret source of pride, to live without magic and to refuse metaphysical anodynes. So I don’t tell Marilyn about my blue heron.

Rajiv was diagnosed with colon cancer on Thursday, July 12. The next day the liver scan and biopsy delivered his death sentence: metastases in all four quadrants of the liver meant (Rajiv asked the oncologist to tell him bluntly) that he had six months without treatment, a bit longer with treatment—if it worked. After the oncologist came and went, after I cried so violently that a nurse named Candy offered me a sedative, after Rajiv encircled me in his arms as if I were the sick one and warned me not to dehydrate myself, after I ran dry, I noted that it was Friday the 13th. “No,” Rajiv said simply. “We’re not going to fly off into the realm of superstition and magic.” Schooled in engineering, he was a true scientist at heart. His rationality anchored my instinct for air.

Though raised in India, Rajiv put his faith in Western medicine and faced his treatment like an adult. But the chemo drugs didn’t work any better than hope or prayer or the sheer unrelenting will to live. In the parlance of the oncologist, Rajiv “failed.” He died in the middle of the night on June 2, three days after his 38th birthday, ten months after his diagnosis. His mother, flown in from Calcutta, arrived just in time to stand on one side of him as I stood on the other. After hours of straining for breath, his face relaxed, and he became an inert thing.

One moment he was alive and grasping; the next, he was dead. It was inconceivable, unthinkable, as if all the known laws of physics had been suspended.

Two days after Rajiv died, a tremendous bird, gray and shimmering, landed on our backyard fence and perched for over an hour, staring at me unblinkingly as I blinked back at him from the bedroom window. He was astonishing—not just in his size, but in his presence, and in his disproportion with my suburban backyard. A seemingly fantastic creature, prehistoric and eternal, almost—did I dare?—otherworldly. I watched and waited. Then slowly I went downstairs to tell Rajiv’s mother. “That is Rajiv,” she said with serene Hindu conviction. We watched from the kitchen window for some time, and then Ma told me I should offer him food. But when I brought out a bowl of rice, he flew away.

Illiterate in ornithology, I studied the photos that came up on Internet searches until I identified the Great Blue Heron. The website said that the natural habitat of this wading bird was the Southern swamplands, where it fed on fish, but that it did appear in wetlands in the West and throughout North America. A migratory bird, it materialized near bodies of water—which my scorched, suburban Colorado backyard did not provide. Before I could stop myself, I matched fact with fact. A true Bengali, Rajiv did love his fish. His environmental engineering research was in cleanup of groundwater contamination, and particularly of leakage from munitions factories into swampland. He’d even done fieldwork in knee-high rubber boots in the swamps of Tennessee. What better avatar to...