“Is it for her or myself that I cry?” John Lennon was asking on my car radio in the Beatles Dylanesque classic, I’m A Loser. At first I was reminded of a bar bet I won at the long gone City Hall bistro on Duane Street. It was a trivia question: What did the first singles by Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones all have in common? I even offered three hints: Dylan’s first single, released in December 1962, was Mixed Up Confusion – the mashup of a Bo Diddley electric band backbeat behind a talkin’ blues Dylan on speed. The Stones first UK single, in June 1963, was a Chuck Berry cover, Come On. And, as John liked to encourage his mates, the Beatles were on their way to the “toppermost of the poppermost” with Love Me Do in October 1962.

But then I started pondering Lennon’s question vis-à-vis my own grief. Not coming up with a good answer, I reached out to my shrink friend Alyse. We hadn’t met since she reassured me I wasn’t going crazy for seeing a medium back in November. As usual we talked movies and old times at the Milk & Honey Café on Newkirk Avenue where I made sure to swipe my card for the delicious French toast with a fruit concoction she loves.

After a while, once I’ve demonstrated what a good listener I am, displaying as much concern as I can muster about her upsetment with a rare Yankees losing streak (two games!) and much genuine sympathy with the unconscionable rise in office rentals, I wait for her to stack a banana slice and berries on top of the challah and cut a bite-sized piece. When fork meets mouth, I begin.

“So I was wondering what you think about something…”

I can sense Alyse tensing up as her chewing becomes a lot slower. I imagine a thought bubble over her head: “Oh God, please let this NOT be about UFOs or ghosts again.” But she cuts another slice and simply nods. My words spill out in a torrent, wanting to provide as much information as I can, as if more words will provide a better answer.

“It’s been a year now and I’ve been staying active, socializing, going out, entertaining, volunteering, taking care of the house, staying on top of the finances now that half of the income we had is gone, so…”

“Alright, alright I’ll pay for the French toast.”

“No, that’s not where I’m going. What I mean to say is, I’m doing all the right things to move on but I still have these…these grief attacks. For instance, yesterday, I was digging into my wallet to put my wedding ring back on.”

“You keep it in your wallet?” She sounded mildly disapproving, caught herself and added, “I see you’re wearing it now.”

“Yeah, every time I take it off, a day or so later I wind up putting it back on. Crazy, I know. Same thing with her clothes and stuff. I try to schedule the donation, then hang up. Anyway, I slide the ring out and it’s tangled with a small plastic container for a pill that’s ripped open and the pill’s gone. I look at the back of the container and it was a Morphine tablet.”

“It was for Virginia?”

“Yeah. Seeing the wrapper brought it all back again. And so I teared up right outside the theater.”

“Where were you?”

“I was online to buy a ticket to Hamnet. Inside, the candy counter guy said, ‘Wow, most people only start crying during the second half of the movie. Maybe you should see Godzilla Minus One instead.’”

“Are you making that up?”

“Not exactly. I did tell him I cried at the end of Godzilla too. You saw that, right? The black & white version of course, when the hero is at his wife’s bedside in the hospital at the end?”

“Listen, Enright…” [I’m the only one she calls by their surname, something to do with some TV show where the cop’s name was Enright.]

“…It’s understandable that these grief attacks still happen. You were together 40 years!”

“Right and I got maybe 10 to 15 years left. Not enough time to build something even close to what we had. So now I’m trying to get used to the idea of her not being around when I die.”

“But you have family and friends who’ll be there for you.”

“I know that. But I always thought she’d be around. In going through her papers I found a note explaining why she divorced her first husband. He was a good guy and she loved him but he was mercurial and she wrote she could never depend on him to be there to take her to the hospital if something happened. But she could depend on me. And I knew she’d always be there for me at the end. But now she can’t.”

“Now you’re gonna make me cry.”

“Sorry.”

“Listen, I know it’s hard. When Julie died I told myself I’d eventually find someone. It’s true I’m a lot younger than you, but five years later, well, I haven’t come close. I’m OK with it, I accept it was a raw deal but there’s no fixing it. So many nights after Julie passed I wondered if there’s something more I could have done…”

“I know that feeling, Alyse. And I wonder if you felt something else too.”

Alyse pushed her plate aside and sipped some coffee. I thought the physical movements were girding herself for what might come next.

“Like Julie, everything happened so quickly. It was so difficult to do anything but make sure she was as comfortable and pain-free as possible. So we never had a chance to reminisce, to remember the good times, to talk about all we’d been through together. About how happy we were when Jamie was born, about all the fun we had in Fort Lauderdale, Cape Cod, the Rockaways, Broadway, London…”

Alyse took a napkin and dabbed her eyes. “The same here,” she said. “Until she went, I never thought she’d go.”

I got up and sat on the chair next to her and we had as awkward a hug as two people sitting down could have.

When we broke the embrace, I asked my final question. “Am I crying because I miss her or because I feel sorry for myself, that I’m alone in this big empty house that used to be so busy?”

“That’s an easy one, Enright,” she said, both of us sniffling to stem all the moisture we’d dredged up from a deep well of sorrow. “It’s both sides of the same coin. Heads – you miss her not being there with you, and tails – you’re lonely because you miss her.”

And with that, Alyse had to zip back to Park Slope and me to a blood donation, thankful somebody other than a corporation still wanted a piece of me. I didn’t get to talk about my brief experience with a dating app. On the plus side, I have learned that many single women my age in metro New York seem to want a man who likes sushi and international travel. Presumably to Japan for some toppermost Nigiri, whatever that is. No mention of Godzilla in any profiles though.

Which reminds me. The answer to the trivia question: their first singles all prominently featured the harmonica.