Death

It’s Probably Just Me


I don’t like being a “dance mom”. Two nights a week I haul the girl into town and pass time sitting on a cement floor while people I pay pretend to teach her to dance. Dance is just another version of those horrifying child beauty pageants. It’s all about outfits, costumes, hair and make up. Dance is incidental.

The ancillary stuff dominates. At the beginning of the year, the moms anguished over the ballet uniform: hair up in bun, black leotard, pink ballet shoes and ballet pink tights (yeah, it’s its own colour). Some of the girls weren’t dressed out properly and moms who’d been lectured on their own daughter’s dress code violations were stewing none too silently over what they saw as preferential treatment.

I’ll cop to being one of the privileged moms. Dee’s dance instructor doesn’t approach me with complaints on the odd day that I don’t get Dee’s hair into a bun, but that has more to do with my “who fucking cares” demeanor and the fact that I am 46 and  the teacher is just 18 than anything else.

“Why do you care what a teenager thinks about whether or not your child arrives properly dressed every time?” I asked. “Sometimes life gets in the way. The laundry didn’t get done or we didn’t have time to put hair up. It happens. No high schooler is going to lecture me on parenting.”

Unsurprisingly, none of the other moms had a response to that.

The current crisis concerns the costumes for the girls’ ballet festival performance. Festivals are weekend time sucks where dance schools gather and compete for bragging rights. I will miss both festivals this spring due to conflicts – yoga training weekends – thus saddling Rob with “dance mom” duty. He has been quite Dalai Lama about it.

Harry Potter inspired the choreography and it’s cute really. After 4 years of ballet, it finally appears as though Dee is actually dancing, but the costume is a mish-mash and two of the mothers aren’t pleased with the full effect. Every dance night there is a discussion about what can be done about the unacceptable costume. The poor little dance teacher keeps to the fringes because she’s afraid of simply scrapping and starting over – money has been spent and clothing purchased so far is non-returnable. She’s only 18, as I mentioned earlier, so I understand her reticence, but I am tired of the angst.

Who the fuck cares? It’s a stupid costume in a dumb festival that even a year from now, let along a hundred, won’t matter one bit.

But okay, I am not a girly, dancey, overly invested in my daughter’s hobbies kind of parent. It’s fine if you are, we all find our parenting level and rise or sink. I’ve, obviously, chosen the lower levels to dwell in, but I don’t aspire to motherhood as some kind of personal nirvana.

Against my will, I volunteered a few suggestions last evening when the discussion began to veer off into territory that might involve more personal involvement on my part. Interestingly, they were not dismissed out of hand.

More interesting, to me, was the jealous twinge I had a bit later as I sat and listened to one of the moms discussing the purchase of their new home.

In the newer suburban tract of The Fort, there is an attempt at upscale, executive type, homes. They bottom at about $500,000-ish, but keep in mind that housing prices in this neck of Alberta are stupid. Case in point, my home in Iowa – 1400 sq ft with sizable yard on a cul-de-sac sold for $163,900 at the beginning of the housing bubble burst. That same house here? Probably $350,000. People here pay, without a second thought, for slapped together shite on postage stamp lots in neighbors so choked with trucks, SUV’s and holiday trailers that parking is a nightmare in the residential areas. I will give Canadians this one kudo – they are fanatics about green spaces, bike/walking paths and parks, but neighborhoods might as well be tenements given the lack of space between houses.

The new home owner’s daughters are friends with Dee and the mom waxed on about the new home’s spaciousness – the exec housing is on three-quarter acre lots and have stupid amounts of square footage in addition to all the other superficial things like the upgraded flooring, counters, bath accessories and three/four car garages.

I don’t have counter top envy. Granite? Whatever. I do have space envy.

I’ve mentioned previously, and on numerous occasions, that in my last house I had very little furniture. I fought against the accumulation of it. My mother and MIL couldn’t grasp not wanting a living room set. But I have always preferred sitting on the floor and in fact, sitting on the floor is anatomically better for a person in the long run. There was so much space. Sometimes I would sit on the top of the landing and just bask in the openness.

As she talked about space and de-cluttering, as she is in the midst of packing, I felt jealous.

My practical side, for which I can thank my Depression-era born father and my brush with bankruptcy during Will’s illness, can’t fathom buying a home in Fort Saskatchewan of all places for $630,000 when the house I live in is paid for. Especially at my age in these economically dangerous times and with my level of paranoia about “what ifs”.

Still – space – the temptation.

Must think more yogically – detach!

UB mentioned the Buddhist (and its yoga premise too) idea that attachment is at the root of what we term “unhappiness”. Our inability to accept the impermanence that is all things in life holds us fast. Attachment roots and not in a good way. I have struggled with the idea but not the practice ironically.

Occasionally I comment on widow blogs. It’s not smart because I am far removed from common grief-think. Someone wrote about how being in a new relationship does not make things better and I disagreed. Falling in love with Rob and marrying again did make things better. I shouldn’t have said so out-loud because it’s heresy wide-open for misinterpretation, but I weary of the doom and gloom about the future after loss. I was “attached”, if you want to put it that way, to Will but I never believed that our marriage was anything other than time and place. We were destined to have a time and a place together that at some point one of us would leave. Everyone dies eventually. The idea that we have more than just brief moments together here and there over the course of existence is not something I question.

Sadness can balance happiness over the course of a mortal existence or one can swamp the other. I think we know going in what the general outline will be and it’s when we stomp our feet against it that life is harder than it would have been if we’d merely viewed it as transitory.

Marrying again didn’t make the fact that Will died better, it made me better. It re-grounded me, gave me an outlet for love again and bolstered my faith (I won’t say “rewarded it” because I don’t really believe in the whole reward/punishment model of existence). I think if one denies the benefits of moving on – however it manifests – it ‘s just resistance to the reality that life is impermanent and that should be re-examined for one’s own sake.

But, it’s probably just me.

A Bit Down


“You look down,” Rob remarked after dinner last evening. “Anything wrong?”

I didn’t really want to go into it, but it’s no use trying to pretend with my husband. He reads me too well.

“I was just thinking about Wally’s son,” I said. “His visitation is tonight and funeral tomorrow.”

“Wally was Will’s best friend,” Rob reminded me, “not yours.”

“I know. It wasn’t my responsibility to keep him in touch or to make sure that he saw Dee,” I said. “But it’s not like I didn’t know Spence. We saw those kids quite a bit in the early years of our marriage. I knew that little boy.”

And he’s dead now – which went without saying.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that his death represents more severing with the past for me and it’s on that level that I am most affected. Cold? Maybe. And maybe not. I am sorry for Wally and Cherish’s loss in that empathetic way of parents. Losing a child is a horror that being widowed can’t even compete with, but I haven’t see Wally in over 4 years and the last time I saw Cherish, just before Christmas of 2006, I was handed a load of crap about Wally needing space still.

Okay, maybe not a full load of crap. As I mentioned, Wally did eventually reach out a year later. It’s not my fault he couldn’t deal with the fact that I had naturally gone on with my life. People from back in the days of Will expected me to sit and wait for them to catch up emotionally not remembering that I dealt daily and they dealt when they couldn’t avoid it. Definitely on different timelines.

And Spence’s death comes pretty close on the heels of the beginning of year 5.

Yes, I do keep track of the number of years my first husband has been dead. Sort of.

About a week before the anniversary in late January, Rob asked how I was doing with the date looming.

“It’s still a bit off,” I said, “but I’m okay. It’s not until the 26th.”

“23rd,” he corrected me.

“Oh yeah, the 23rd. I always forget.”

And I do. Always forget the exact day. With Will having been not really figuring in the day-to-day of my life for so long, his death was almost anticlimactic. I’d been on my own for over two years. In a lot of significant ways, I am really gearing up for my 7th anniversary though widow purists would not agree.

I think the events of this week have brought up, yet again, my sore points. Will’s friends. Their abandonment of him. The way they have rewritten history to avoid acknowledging the extent his illness mentally maimed him so they feel better about what they did, didn’t and continue to do. And the way that I am still maligned in their circles as though I could have done anything differently or better that would have changed outcomes.

I do so hate being spun around. I am not Lot’s Wife, after all, I don’t miss anything back there enough to turn around on my own.

Oh well.

Tragedy Makes Ya Think


My dead husband was an only child and as they sometimes do, he acquired friends and raised them to sibling status. Most of his picks for brothers baffled me, but I could see why he chose Wally*.

If the universe has a calm, soft middle, Wally originated nearby. Nothing flapped his feathers and his vision – with one notable exception – wasn’t wont to be clouded by emotion or easily prejudiced by he and Will’s peers, who spun like seedlings from a maple tree in the fall.

Will had a temper that sparked easily and burned as hot as it did slowly, and when that happened, Wally was the extinguisher.

I don’t remember when we met exactly. It was after our engagement. Wally and his wife, Cherish, were in Kansas City and traveled back one weekend specifically to meet me. We went out for dinner, shot pool after, and – as I remember it – I passed muster.

They had three children already. The girl, who was about 6, and the reason they ever married in the first place, and two boys – a toddler and a baby. The baby arrived after Will had moved in with me in late fall of 1998. I remember the phone ringing late one night after we’d been in bed a while and answering it to hear Doug asking for Will.

Will had his doubts about Cherish. Actually, all of Wally’s friends had their doubts about her, but Will was probably the only one who kept most of his objections to himself. Still Cherish had kept the two apart as much as she could until I came along. Apparently, she approved of me and my influence, and as a result, we visited them several times over the next couple of years. We even helped them move from K.C. to St. Louis and then from there to Davenport and from there to my hometown of Dubuque – which is where they were living when Will was diagnosed with his illness.

I wouldn’t say I got to know them all that well, but we spent time together. I spent time with their kids.

The little boys were sweet, like toddler/preschoolers are. The littlest one was full of the devil, but in that boyish way that makes it okay.

Wally took Will’s death hard. He could barely stand to be around Dee and I. During that first year, I heard from him once. He called for directions to Will’s grave. Because he was Dee’s godfather, he sent a Christmas gift (he forgot her birthday) via Cherish when she came back to Des Moines in December of 2006. I didn’t see the kids on that visit.

And then I didn’t hear from him again until just before Christmas of 2007. He called and my number was no longer in service as we’d moved to Canada – which he didn’t know because I never bothered to contact him and tell him I was remarrying.

I suppose I should have. Wally was Will’s best friend and my daughter’s godfather (something I argued against and lost because I knew that godfathers who weren’t relatives didn’t have the same stick that relations did – but Will was adamant). But I didn’t contact any of Will’s family. It’s not as if they made an effort to stay connected to Dee and I, and honestly, I just didn’t want to deal with Wally – or any of them. I was tired of other people’s grief needs. They were an imposition and really, not my problem to fix, and I really resented Wally’s avoiding us. Will would have done whatever he could have had the situations been reversed. He wouldn’t have let his feelings get the better of his sense of duty and obligation. I was so tired of people who’d basically jumped ship during Will’s illness laying claim to greater grief rights than Dee and I had. We sucked it up and dealt. Why didn’t they?**

Wally called my mother and asked for my new number, which she gave him minus the details. He called but got our machine, and I called back and got his voice mail. I told him where we were and that I was married again. And I never heard back.

Today, my best friend called to let me know that Wally’s youngest son died last night. He was eleven. He’d had the flu and collapsed in their bathroom. Wally tried CPR, but he was gone before the EMT arrived.

I know what Will would have done. He’d have dropped everything and he would be there with Wally right now. Because they were best friends – brothers and that was just how Will rolled.

But I don’t know what to do or why I am crying even. I remember this olive skinned six year old with the biggest chocolate brown eyes and lashes that brushed round cheeks that sat like little apples on either side of the shyest sweet smile. A mop of hair that bounced when he was in motion, which was always. It feels like a long time ago. And it was.

My friend was in tears when she called. She must have wondered at how calmly I took the news, but I have no connection to these people anymore. I haven’t really since Will got sick – almost 7 years ago.

I think what makes me most sad is knowing that I have let Will down by not staying in touch – making the effort that would have allowed me to reach out to Wally.

I’ll send a card and a check which is, believe me, the very least a person a can do. Wally and I aren’t friends but I can do that little.

*Not using real names but they are close enough that anyone who knows Will can figure out who I am talking about.

**I have come to realize that I am made of way stronger stuff than a lot of people are, but at the time – and sometimes still – I had no patience with those who were built of softer stuff than  I am.