The Leather Chair

Reflections from early widowhood & the evocation of the things left behind

Brad & the chair (surrounded by friends in his final weeks)

I’m sitting in his leather chair, my bare feet tucked beneath me, staring at the door and waiting for him to walk in. Waiting to hear, “Sugar, I’m home!” echo through the long hallway of our loft, even though I know it will never come.

I pick at the seams of the chair, the edges now cracked and worn. The smell - which once reminded me of a jacket I used to sneak out of my mom’s closet - has faded. All that lingers is the faint scent of a eucalyptus candle I would light for him when he fell asleep there. Those days, he spent more time napping in the chair than our bed - the cozy light-filled corner of our living room and his pain meds lulling him into a hazy slumber.

Sitting in the silence, I stare down at the hallway filled with a perfectly curated collection of black and white photos of a life that no longer exists. I run my hand over the many scuff marks of the chair, remembering when it was once supple and smooth.

I promised Brad this chair on our third wedding anniversary, when we lived among cheap Ikea furniture and hand-me-downs and were too broke to invest in anything so luxurious. Leather is given in year three because it represents durability in the relationship.

Warmth. Safety. Security.

I wanted to give Brad a gift that would sit in our home and remind us of the endurance of our marriage.

Over the years, we would flip through pages of glossy catalogs, dog-earring models we liked. An array of shiny, new chairs, waiting to be plucked off the page and dropped into our shiny, new life. Which one would we pick? The comfortable recliner? Or maybe an iconic Eames lounger? Or perhaps a tufted Chesterfield club chair? 

Each new chair offered us a different version of our life. A life that - at the time - felt limitless and full of possibilities.

It would be close to 5 years before we finally made the splurge, never imagining the version of life we would end up with would include a terminal diagnosis.

Even then, we didn’t really need the chair. But it was two months into his diagnosis and as Brad’s pain continued, so did my helplessness to lessen it. The chair was a quick coat of paint over crumbling mortar. A platitude. A useless distraction that allowed me, even for a day, to feel some sense of control over the outcome of Brad’s life. I was convinced that this chair would not only give Brad’s brittle bones a comfortable place to rest, but also give him the strength and durability of the leather that supported him.

I ran around town with a tunnel-vision determination to find this infallible chair - desperate for a pyrrhic victory after a withering barrage of losses.

“Bone fracture.” “Tumor growth.” “Progression of disease.”

Scan results and treatment options and doctor’s notes were on a continual loop in my head. Shopping for the chair was a brief respite from the one thought I didn’t dare say out loud: 

Brad is dying.

In the end, it wasn’t the recliner or the Eames or the stately Chesterfield club chair. Instead, I settled on a forgettable brand with a mismatched ottoman. All those other possibilities remained on the glossy pages of the catalogs for somebody else’s life and were replaced with one singular truth: That no chair could alter our current reality.

The chair in the "after"

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