Feeling a little lost

Having a spouse/partner/significant other is kinda like being a Democrat living with a Republican. Not that politics really has anything to do with your relationship but you come from different backgrounds with different thought processes and life experiences. Their YIN, your YANG. Their YAY, your NAY. You get along but sometimes you wonder what it would be like to NOT have that constant "governor" in your life. Now I know. It's empty, hollow, sad.

There's nothing in my way now to do whatever I want to do but there isn't anything I really want to do. My inventiveness is limited. I react. I didn't think of spending my 20th anniversary in a hot-air-balloon, but he did. Or going Christmas shopping on Santa Catalina Island after a helicopter ride there, but he did. Or touring Alcatraz Penitentiary, with a short lock-up in one of the tiny prison cells, but he did. I remember when we flew to NYC to have dinner and flew back home that night. I thought it was too expensive to take vacations in the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, and El Salvador, but he didn't. He gave me so many singing and talking stuffed animals/characters, from two frogs singing "I Got You Babe", a bear singing "I'm Sexy And I Know It" to Stuart the Minion laughing and farting and rolling on the floor.

When will I stop crying at the thought of all the great places we will never go, all the new restaurants we will never try, all the conversations/debates we will never have again? Today I filled out a form and had to check that box, widowed. It's like slamming into a wall.

I had to shred all his old bank records and looking at the payee's name brought back memories of when we were going to counseling. We had separate therapists and I think he was enamored with his. She is a lovely person. I wrote her about his passing and she sent me a warm and thoughtful message, remembering that he was her first patient. I know she helped him. On those checks there were all the addresses of places we lived, from Birmingham and Greensboro, to Atlanta and Los Angeles. I shredded the checks, but not the memories, from our first 22 years of marriage. I realize that the day he died is the one anniversary I will never forget. It's the only one I have no pictures of except the ones in my head. Too early now to predict how I will deal with it.

TRUST ME, TAKE LOTS OF PICTURES

Take lots of pictures AND video. Document life events, places visited, emotions experienced, anything and everything. Everyday for the past two weeks I've been scanning photos, taken before digital photography was the norm, for my three step-children. Their father, my husband, died suddenly in January of this year and there are so many anniversaries, trips, pets, homes, parties, that they never got to see because they lived in Ohio with their mother and step-father. Once or twice a year they came to visit us for a couple of weeks. I documented each visit by snapping as many images or filming as much footage as I could without missing out on the event at hand. Of course, with today's "cameras" (usually a smart phone with a multi-mega-pixel-digital-camera/video-recorder) I can hold the "view-finder" away from my face and I am able to see and participate in what's going on more fully than I did when I had to close one eye and look through a single lens view-finder.

I got in on the beginning of the digital age. That's when I bought a digital photo and a digital video camera. I am so glad I did. The enhanced quality has helped me remember the man I shared 32 years with way more clearly than I ever could with the ancient equipment I had before. He took some pretty good pics/video of me too. One day, those may be of some interest to my son and grandchildren. I have few images but no audio/video of my parents so I cannot remember much about them. What photos I do have of them are in black and white and all of them have that slightly fuzzy appearance that was typical of the photo processing from the 1940s through the 1970s. Color photography gradually got more affordable. But video equipment was still too expensive. I splurged and got my first video camera in 1989 but I didn't get my first digital video camera until 2003. Today, most of my video and photo capture is on my smart phone and a tiny dedicated combo camera I bought that has a slightly higher mega-pixel count than my smart phone.

But I digress. The point of this post is to convince you of the importance of taking pictures. When someone is gone, it's too late. I still wish I had taken more video of him and us. My memory is great but I cannot transfer that into viewable images for my step-children to see. Memories fade eventually but digital photos and video will last forever in the cloud, are easily retrieved, and able to be enjoyed by all.

Becoming a Widow

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The death of my partner, husband, other half, or whatever you want to call him does not “automatically” make me a widow. Maybe legally and socially it does. Becoming a widow takes place for me in increments, by degrees, with each unpleasant realization that I am alone, without the familiar presence I had grown used to over decades. Nights are the most difficult to process. I lay awake listening for the once regular sounds of snoring, anticipating the familiar odor of his body accompanied by those nighttime vapors, evidence of his processing my latest culinary effort.

The thought of eating is distressing to me. I know I need to take in enough calories and liquids to fuel and hydrate what is rapidly becoming a never-ending stream of tears and frenzied house cleaning. I breathe deeply and sigh often with overwhelming feelings of grief, emptiness, and despair. I don’t want to see anyone but there are many neighbors and friends who are grieving his loss too. I see tears well up when they tell their stories of how he made them laugh, what an inspiration or comfort he was, how he always greeted them with a smile and a joke. My son said he was a real mensch.

I picked up his ashes yesterday from the funeral home. His remains are in a simple, elegant bronze urn with his full name on it and the years he lived. I sat in the car with the urn in the passenger seat and cried and screamed. Too stark, too final an end. It was what he wanted. It is what I want when it’s my time.

It’s been four days. My sister is coming today to help me sort out his clothes and other personal items. Her church supports a lot of needy people in Dallas, TX and I thought it would be best to give her the contents of his side of the closet to distribute. Suddenly I realize that his empty half will create a bigger hole in the pit of my stomach. Eventually, evidence of his presence in our home will be physically gone. I am keeping some of the clothes he wore that were my favorites. I can’t let his existence be totally erased.

Our dog is acting strangely. When I prepare her morning meal in the usual way, she won’t eat it. Now I have to give her a small portion and wait with her till she eats it then give her another small portion and wait again, till she is full. She is grieving too. I called the vet and they told me that she would eventually settle down. Her sense of a void where he used to be on the sofa doesn’t keep her from taking her place there to wait for him.

When everyone has gone home and I no longer have his affairs to settle is when my emotional health will get its ultimate test. I hope I didn’t make him wait too long to die by trying a non-invasive medical approach. I just wanted him to try. It wasn’t my place to try for him though. I hope I didn’t cause him any extra pain. I hope he didn’t hate me before he died. Too much to sort out right now. Becoming a widow is not immediate, it is painful, and that’s the way it happens. I know I will be asked to fill out forms with check boxes: single, married, divorced, widow. I’ve only been single, married, and divorced, till now. When I have to mark widow, that’s when I will slam headfirst into that fourth category. There is no preparation for becoming a widow…it is a process. I’m not there yet.