Embracing Insanity

By M. Willow

Strange thing about insanity is that sometimes it’s down-right comforting. Joe Green discovered that after his wife Laura died. She’d been a sweet woman, the apple of his eye. Then one day she was gone. Just gone, and he had been left with an empty hole in his heart. At first he’d grieved—he’d wanted to die. It had gone on for three months, until his boss called him in the office one day and suggested counseling. Joe knew that what the boss really meant was pull it together or you’re out of here. That was the day he learned to act like everything was okay. Joe deserved an Oscar for his performance. He was dying inside and smiling on the outside, but the smile was not real.

Just yesterday Joe had attended a company picnic. He’d sat there laughing and talking, playing volley ball and soft ball, and yucking it up with the boss. Then he went home and cried.

Joe called himself an agnostic. He knew something was up there but it could have been a space alien for all he knew. He really didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Laura had been born-again nearly ten years ago and spent a great deal of time trying to convert him to her way of thinking. She was fighting for his soul, believing that he would be lost if he didn’t accept Christ. She never gave up. Even when cancer was stripping her life away, she tried to save him, often quoting from the bible. She was a sweet woman and Joe knew that if God really existed she was up there having a ball.

Right now, Joe Green, the rational man had taken to embracing insanity. It was a strange term that Joe had heard when he was just ten years old. An old man had said it of a woman who’d lost her husband. That woman is embracing insanity, he’d said. It turns out the poor widow had taken to ironing her husband’s shirts and setting a place for him at the dinner table. At ten, it hadn’t made sense. If her husband was dead, surely she had to know he wasn’t coming back. Now he understood because he’d taken to embracing insanity himself.

Now at two o’clock in the morning, he was embracing insanity big time. It had started when the telephone rang, waking him from a sound night’s sleep.   Laura had been a sales rep and took lots of trips out of the country. It was customary for her to call him in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes forgetting the time zone she was in. So when the telephone rang a few minutes ago, Joe had awakened confused, thinking it was Laura calling.   He was about to answer it when he remembered that it couldn’t be Laura. She was dead and never coming back. He’d lain there feeling the pain of it when something happened: he let himself believe it really was her. It felt good.

The dead didn’t pick up the phone in the middle of the night and call folks. In fact, he didn’t know one single person who’d call him at this hour. His parents had died twenty years ago and he and Laura didn’t have kids. At sixty, Joe was on his own. He didn’t even have friends; who needed them when he had Laura. Probably a wrong number. He didn’t bother to answer it.

Joe swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there, staring at the silver telephone. He was almost willing it to ring, seriously embracing insanity. He stared at it for at least ten minutes, recalling how it felt to imagine Laura calling, and then he dropped his head and cried.

When had it started—this momentary need to imagine Laura alive. Was it the time he’d seen a woman from across the street who looked like his late wife? Was it the time he’d seen a woman sitting at the table and from behind it looked like Laura? Either way, Joe got his spurts of happiness and it was during the times he imagined Laura out there somewhere still alive. Trouble was this was no soap opera. Laura wasn’t gonna show up one day, telling him it had all been a mistake. The thought of that was like a knife through his heart. There was no hope. He’d spend the rest of his life missing her, living in misery. Yet the escape from that misery was so easy. All he had to do was pretend that she was still alive. All he had to do was embrace insanity.

Joe thought about the widow woman from his youth, the one who ironed her husband’s shirts and sat dinner for him. Well, he wouldn’t go that far. He’d just picture Laura somewhere else. Maybe Paris or some exotic locale. What could be the harm in that? No one had to know.

Ring

Ring

Ring

The sound of the telephone nearly made him jump out of his skin. Joe stared at it then let his imagination run wild. A late night conversation always started the same way. She would ask what time it was there, then apologize for calling at such a late hour. He would tell her it didn’t matter, that she could call him at any hour and that he missed her. He would listen to her soft sigh, melt in the imagery of her—the long, blonde hair, soft opal- green eyes, the sweep of her brow.  She was still a beauty at fifty.

Joe closed his eyes, recalling her soft voice, remembering the way she breathed, the way she touched his soul. And she was alive again, and waiting for him to answer.

Ring

Ring

Ring

And he sat there till he lost track of how many times it rung. He listened like it was a symphony, the conversation still running in his head. They would talk about retirement, how they would live in Tuscany. They would talk about the money they would use to buy a little house there, live out their lives surrounded in beauty. He saw her redecorating the house, all smiles as she planted a garden. He laughed at her attempts at Italian.   Insanity allowed him to see her as she aged the beauty of her lined face. The face that mesmerized him when she was a young woman, but held him still all these years later.

Ring

Ring

Ring

Joe saw them walking through the countryside, hand in hand, more in love with each passing moment. Now, her back held a curve, and the lines of her face grew deeper, and the beauty that was once laid bare in her youth was now glowing from within. Joe trembled with the intensity of the moment. He cried out, sanity gripping him and dragging him back to the cold, dark place he’d known over the past year. He fought, hanging on to the sound of the telephone, until he was back in insanity’s grip. Laura was alive.

Then a silence followed as deep as the grave. He stirred, looking at the telephone, his mind wildly begging Laura to call back. But there was nothing, nothing but the beat of his own heart and a need for her that was almost physical.

When Laura died a part of him had died. It could not be brought back. And in the darkness of the hour he realized that. He rolled over to her side of the bed, drawing in a deep breath, trying to recapture her scent. It was gone and so he lay there, quietly sobbing, his whole body racked in pain. “Help me, someone, please help me,” he screamed.  Again the silence, but this time his eyes traveled to the bedside table. He reached over like a man seeking a lifeline and opened the drawer. Inside lay a bible. Laura’s bible. It was worn, the pages fragile. He recalled her telling him that her grandmother had given it to her when she was only a child. Laura had read it every day. Now, he opened it, flipping through the pages, his eyes glancing over the red and black print in the New Testament. He came to her favorite passage and stopped.

John 14:2 

 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Joe sat there reading the passage over and over until daylight peeked in through the window. He’d never been a religious man, but now, seeing his life, the hopelessness, the loneliness he’d faced since losing Laura, he came to realize that it did not have to be.   He did not need to embrace insanity to find happiness, for Laura really was on a trip. No it was not Paris or Tuscany. It was someplace better. It was the Father’s mansion—a mansion that was there for him and everyone else who believed.

Joe put the bible down and stared out the window. The sky was orange, illuminating the garden and the flowers within. He looked up to the sky and felt the hand of God touch him and for the first time in over a year, he smiled, he truly smiled.

                                                        Fin