STEVE'S MANGO VANILLA SHAVE CREAM
"For someone who rarely wore anything other than work pants, ragged tees and flannel shirts, it was the most luxurious thing he owned."
My first husband was a woodsman—a trail designer and builder who spent many of his days hiking up mountains and traversing woodland paths—so he often smelled of dirt, sawdust and chainsaw bar oil. At some point he picked up a fancy mango vanilla shave cream, which left a faint trace of sweet beneath his usual earthy scent. For someone who rarely wore anything other than work pants, ragged tees and flannel shirts, it was the most luxurious thing he owned.
Steve and I had met on my twentieth birthday, working on a backcountry trail crew on the Appalachian Trail in western Maine. He was goofy and had a sarcastic sense of humor, and he knew just about everything about being in the woods. It didn’t take long for me to be smitten. About a year later we started dating, and a year after that we were married on Saddleback Mountain. We bought a small house with a bit of land and started building our life.
He was tall and slim, with a shock of hair that had started to go gray in his teens and stood straight up as it grew. Sometimes I would watch him shave. Standing at the bathroom mirror with a towel around his waist, he’d wipe the fogged glass absentmindedly, mango and vanilla in the warm air.
A couple weeks after our third wedding anniversary we went for a weekend hike, and when we returned to the trailhead, Steve’s speech became briefly garbled. The following day he was diagnosed with a massive brain tumor, which we would eventually learn was terminal.
When the chemotherapy dropped Steve’s platelets so low that the risk of bleeding was too great to use a regular razor, we bought an electric one. Later, as he lost his manual dexterity, I took over his care. We would joke that he was having spa days: I’d help him bathe, then heat towels in the dryer to wrap him in as I transferred him from shower chair to wheelchair. I soaked his feet in a warm basin and trimmed his nails, first his hands, then his feet. I cut his hair and shaved his face.
He no longer needed the shave cream, and he could no longer go into the woods. His work boots stood abandoned in the doorway, but the mango vanilla shave cream stayed on our bathroom shelf. I would take it down and lift the cap, breathe in the scent. Sometimes when I breathed it in, it felt for a brief moment like he wasn’t dying.
He died in my arms at home at the age of 31. Many years down the road, now in a new home, the bright orange tube lives in my bathroom closet, there still when I need to be reminded.
—Sarah Kilch Gaffney
Sarah Kilch Gaffney (www.sarahkilchgaffney.com) is a writer and brain-injury advocate who lives in Maine.
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Thank you for sharing your lovely memories. Being a widow myself, I understand the comfort found in litttle things left behind.
For someone who lost her back woods companion to cancer at too young an age, your story touched me deeply. How beautiful that you have that yellow tube still. Tears well up. Thanks for sharing.