CHAPTER 4
Leaving Philadelphia
Caleb's final weeks in Philadelphia proceeded through the practical business of closing his considerable medical practice, transferring his patients' care to colleagues willing to absorb his caseload, and enduring a series of farewell calls from friends and former patients whose evident concern for his welfare carried, beneath its genuine kindness, an unmistakable undertone of relief that he had finally decided to properly address his obvious grief rather than continuing to simply endure it in increasingly hollow silence.
Edmund Whitcombe called on him the evening before his departure, finding Caleb's rooms already largely emptied of the accumulated belongings of a settled medical practice, and settled into one of the few remaining chairs with the particular gravity of a man about to impart significant counsel.
“I want you to know,” he said, “that I don't consider this departure any betrayal of Eleanor's memory, whatever guilt might tempt you to view it that way.
She loved you fiercely, Caleb, and she'd want you rebuilding a genuine life rather than remaining here, slowly diminishing yourself in a city that offers you nothing but constant reminders of what you've lost.”
“I worry, Edmund, that leaving somehow suggests I've simply moved past her, when the truth is rather the opposite — I carry her with me regardless of where I settle, and I fear this whole undertaking amounts to mere flight rather than genuine healing.”
“I think,” Edmund said carefully, “that flight and healing aren't always so easily distinguished from each other, particularly in the early stages of genuine grief.
Sometimes a person must first flee the immediate reminders of loss before they can properly begin the slower work of actual healing.
I don't fault you the flight, Caleb, only hope you'll remain open, once you've reached this new territory, to whatever genuine healing eventually presents itself, rather than simply trading one form of grief-management for another.”
This counsel, offered with the particular wisdom of a man who had himself buried a wife some years past and understood grief's complicated topology rather better than most, settled something in Caleb's uncertain resolve, and he found himself, completing his final preparations that evening, genuinely grateful for a father-in-law-that-might-have-been who had extended him such generous understanding despite his own considerable loss in Eleanor's death.
“I'll write to you,” Caleb promised, “and report honestly on how the position proceeds, whatever the reports eventually contain.”
“I'd expect nothing less, and I'll hold you to that promise, Caleb. Whatever else has changed between us, I still consider you rather like a son, and I'll want to know you're managing well, wherever this considerable journey eventually settles you.”
They parted with a warmth that belied the considerable distance about to separate them, and Caleb spent his final night in Philadelphia sorting through the last of Eleanor's belongings he had kept in his own rooms — a small collection of letters, a pressed flower from their engagement celebration, a photograph taken some months before her illness that showed her laughing at some joke he could no longer properly recall the substance of, only the particular unguarded joy of her expression in that captured moment.
He packed these few precious items with considerable care, understanding that whatever fresh start Wyoming offered, he had no intention of leaving Eleanor's memory entirely behind, only of finding some way to carry it forward that did not require his own continued professional and emotional paralysis as its constant companion.
He tucked the photograph into his medical bag, alongside his instruments and his careful notes on various treatments, understanding that wherever his practice of medicine carried him going forward, Eleanor's memory would necessarily travel alongside it, a permanent fixture of the physician he had become through both the joy of loving her and the terrible grief of losing her.
The train that carried him west the following morning departed from the same station where he had once welcomed Eleanor home from her own occasional travels, and he found himself, watching Philadelphia's familiar skyline recede into the distance, feeling an emotion considerably more complicated than simple relief at finally departing the scene of his grief — a genuine sorrow at leaving behind the city where he had loved her, mingled with a cautious, uncertain hope that whatever waited at this journey's considerable distant end might yet offer him a path back toward the confident, purposeful physician he had once been, before loss had taught him to doubt everything he had previously believed himself capable of accomplishing.
He had said his farewells to the remainder of his considerable Philadelphia acquaintance over the preceding fortnight, a process that had proven, in its own quiet way, nearly as difficult as the more dramatic grief of Eleanor's funeral itself, each farewell forcing him to properly articulate, to friends and colleagues who had known him only as a rising young physician, exactly why he was abandoning a practice most men would have considered the very pinnacle of professional achievement.
“You're a fool to leave this practice behind,” one former classmate had told him bluntly, over a final dinner some days before his departure.
“You've built something most physicians spend their whole careers striving toward, and you mean to simply abandon it for some rough mining town nobody's ever properly heard of.”
“I mean to abandon it,” Caleb had replied, with more conviction than the exchange perhaps warranted, “because I've discovered, these past months, that professional achievement alone cannot properly sustain a man whose heart has been thoroughly hollowed by loss.
I require something this practice, however prestigious, cannot presently offer me — the chance to rebuild myself entirely, away from every reminder of what I've lost.”
This conviction, however genuinely held, had not entirely quieted his own private doubts regarding the wisdom of his considerable undertaking, and he found himself, watching the Pennsylvania countryside give way gradually to less familiar territory as his journey progressed, wondering more than once whether he was embarking on genuine healing or merely trading one form of paralysis for another, considerably more geographically distant variety.
He had visited Eleanor's grave one final time before his departure, standing alone in the quiet cemetery on a gray morning that matched his own somber mood, and found himself speaking aloud to her memory in the particular manner of grieving people who understand, rationally, that the dead cannot properly hear their words, yet find the speaking necessary regardless.
“I don't know if I'm doing right by you, Eleanor, in this leaving.
I hope, wherever you are, that you'd understand it as I mean it — not abandonment, but the only path I can presently see toward becoming, again, the man you loved, rather than the hollow shadow grief has left in his place.”
The cemetery had offered no answer beyond the ordinary rustle of autumn leaves and distant city sounds, and Caleb had left that morning with no particular sense of resolution, only the continued, uncertain hope that whatever awaited him in the Wyoming Territory might eventually provide the clarity his grief-fogged judgment presently could not manage on its own.
His final evening in Philadelphia was spent packing the modest collection of belongings he intended to carry west, a process considerably simplified by his decision to leave the bulk of his furniture and household goods behind for his successor's use, retaining only his medical instruments, a small library of essential texts, and the few personal items carrying genuine sentimental weight.
He found himself, folding a stack of carefully preserved letters from Eleanor into his trunk, wondering whether he ought to leave them behind entirely, a clean break from the correspondence of a courtship now permanently concluded, and found, in the end, that he could not properly manage the leaving, however symbolically appropriate such a gesture might have seemed.
“You'll want these, someday,” he told himself, packing the letters carefully alongside her photograph, “if only to remember, on the harder days, exactly what you're capable of feeling, when you finally permit yourself to feel it again.”
This small, private acknowledgment, offered to an empty room on his final night in the city that had shaped the whole of his adult life, marked perhaps the first genuine step toward the eventual healing his considerable journey west would require, though he could not have properly recognized its significance at the time, understanding only that he needed, somehow, to carry Eleanor's memory forward rather than leave it entirely behind.
He slept poorly that final night, waking repeatedly to check the hour against his considerable anxiety regarding the morning's early departure, and found himself, in the small hours before dawn, reviewing one final time the whole considerable arc of decisions that had brought him to this threshold — Eleanor's death, his gradual professional decline, Edmund's patient counsel, Josiah's evocative notice, and now this final morning's departure toward a territory he had never seen, in pursuit of a healing he could not properly guarantee would actually materialize.
He rose before dawn finally, unable to manage further sleep, and spent the remaining hours before his coach's departure simply sitting with his packed trunk, watching the sky gradually lighten outside his window, understanding that whatever came of this considerable undertaking, he had at least finally chosen action over the paralysis that had characterized his preceding months.
Mrs. Fairweather arrived early to see him properly off, bringing a small basket of provisions for the journey's early legs and offering her own heartfelt farewell.
“You've been a good employer, Dr. Ashworth, whatever grief has shadowed your time here these past months.
I'll pray for your safe journey, and for whatever healing awaits you at its considerable end.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Fairweather, for everything. Your steady care these past difficult months has meant more than I've properly managed to express.”
This small, genuine farewell, offered by a woman who had faithfully served his household through the whole considerable duration of his grief, settled a final measure of gratitude into Caleb's departure, and he climbed into the waiting coach that morning with her kind words carrying him forward alongside his own uncertain hope.
The coach pulled away from the curb with a lurch that felt, to Caleb's considerable emotion, almost symbolically decisive, and he found himself watching through the small window as his familiar Philadelphia neighborhood receded steadily behind him, each passing block carrying its own accumulated memory of the life he was leaving.
He did not weep, though he found himself considerably closer to it than his usual composed reserve generally permitted, understanding that whatever waited at journey's end, this particular morning marked an ending every bit as significant as whatever beginning it might eventually prove to represent.
He rode in silence for the first hour of the journey, his fellow passengers apparently sensing something of his considerable emotional state and extending him the particular courtesy of undisturbed privacy that travelers sometimes instinctively offer a companion evidently working through some private difficulty.
He watched the familiar Pennsylvania countryside give way gradually to less recognizable terrain, and found himself, somewhere around the second hour, finally permitting the tears he had held carefully in check throughout the whole difficult morning, weeping quietly for Eleanor, for the life they had planned together, and for the whole considerable uncertainty of whatever future now awaited him in a territory he had never properly seen, understanding that this private grief, finally and fully expressed, represented its own small but genuine step toward the healing he had traveled so very far to seek.