The Cartology of Grief

Chapter One: Legend

Every map keeps a legend, a small boxed confession in the corner admitting what its symbols mean: this dashed line is an intermittent stream, this cross-hatching is marsh, this tiny black square with a flag is a benchmark, a fixed and certain point from which all other points are measured. I spent twenty-two years drawing legends. I never once asked what you were supposed to do when the thing you needed translated wasn't on any chart — when there was no agreed-upon symbol for a husband's body found slumped over a worktable at 4:40 in the afternoon, the pencil still caught between two fingers, a chart of the Maine coast half-peeled of its old, foxed backing beneath his forearm like a patient under anesthesia.

I am a cartographer. I want to say that first, before I say widow, because I have been the first thing far longer and because the second thing still doesn't sit right in my mouth, still feels like a coordinate I haven't plotted correctly, a point I keep placing on the wrong side of the line. For eighteen years I surveyed coastlines for the federal government — the ragged, drowned, glacially-gnawed shoreline of the Gulf of Maine, two brutal seasons in the Aleutians measuring how fast the land was rising out of the sea where the ice had let go of it, a year subcontracted to a firm mapping erosion along the Outer Banks. Then I went out on my own. Vane Cartographic, population: me, and for the last four years, my husband, unofficially, whenever a chart needed conserving rather than drawn from scratch.