love and relationships

Running Errands with My Husband


Rob took the afternoon off today, so we could run over to Northgate Centre and visit the Service Canada Centre there. It’s amazing to me the number of  things one can find in malls here that have nothing whatsoever to do with shopping. At Northgate not only can a person apply for unemployment, Social Insurance Numbers (as I did today) and passports at a Service Canada outlet, so to speak, but there is an outreach high school, a fitness center for moms and kids, a doctor’s office, a dental office and an insurance agent. Quite a different take on such a faciality then I am used to being from the Midwest of the United States. Perhaps it is a big city thing, but I have noticed that Canadians make the most of their strip malls and malls. It’s not just a shopping thing. For example the strip mall we visit to shop at the organic grocery, Planet Organic, also contains a police station and a person can find registeries – for birth, death, marriage, driver’s, auto, hunting/fishing licenses and certificates just about anywhere as the government outsources those tasks to private companies. One thing the Canadian don’t have though is 24 hour service. That is rare. They also don’t get the American idea that Saturday should be as convenient as Monday thru Friday in terms of access. Saturday has many stores closing at 5 or 6 and the mail just doesn’t move. Sunday? Well, Canadians aren’t religious really but the day is still the Lord’s where work is concerned. Noon to five are the hours on anything that happens to be open for the most part.

So now that I have that digression off my chest, let’s return to my errand running with Rob. We got my SIN (social insurance number) to obtain for filing my taxes up here. No I haven’t earned a dime since coming here but every adult has to file and surprisingly we all file as individuals. Canada doesn’t recognize the concept of filing as a married couple. The SIN is just a temporary one. Once I have my residency, I exchange it for a permanent number. It works just like the SS#’s in the U.S. except they have numbers for permanent residents and citizens that start with a different prefix than those they assign to temporary residents and workers. Neat, huh? America could learn a thing or two from the Canadians.

I love spending time with Rob in the middle of the day – just the two of us. Even if it is as simple as a run to the mall, home improvement store and then the grocery for foodstuff to make pizza, it’s just nice to be together. Our conversation wasn’t extraordinary. We weren’t more affectionate than normal (because our PDA standards are above the norm for people our age anyway). It was just the spending of time, holding hands and talking about all the regular things couples talk about as they go from place to task to another place again. The normalcy and who would think that such a thing would be worth commentary? But it is.

 

Something in Common


I seldom buy The Edmonton Journal these days. I am a Globe and Mail girl. However this last weekend I was compelled not once but twice to grab it as I hustled in and out of the Safeway. The Saturday Edition featured the story of a young (very young) widower on the front page. His wife had been murdered by his brother and it inspired him to crusade on behalf of the victims’ rights movement which inadvertently has become the start of a promising political career. My friend, Marsha wrote a blog piece recently about finding the good in tragedy and this young man is a prime example of this idea. An idea that not everyone shares but I believe is true. Something good is meant to come from loss. Even it doesn’t then the lesson was lost and the tragedy is magnified. Lessons? Yeah, lessons. We weren’t put on this earth to accumulate stuff and make imaginary friends on Facebook. There is a higher purpose.

The Sunday Journal did not appear to have any widows hiding in it, but on the inside of the Culture Section there was an op-ed that first ran in the NYTimes by an author named Patty Dann. The piece detailed her relationship with another widower and how it went from the sharing of a mutual experience to friendship and love. He had written a review online about the novel she had written detailing her late husband’s illness and death. She sent him a note and they eventually became e-mail pals. The whole thing reminded me of Rob and I. How we’d started out on the e-mail and somehow what was just support and an opportunity to “talk” to a like-minded adult of the opposite sex subtly and suddenly became oh so much more. As often as I was told back then that it wasn’t possible to know something through their written words it’s nice to be validated by Ms. Dann’s story. Not that it surprises me. She and her husband to be are writers and Rob and I too. People who don’t know how to make themselves heard through the printed word or to hear someone in kind couldn’t be expected to understand how powerful a medium the writing is.

I am not sure why but I don’t relate to every widowed’s story. I understand the emotions because they are common to us as a group but the deaths themselves are so varied. The young man whose brother killed his wife had no warning. His brother was a drug addict with a mental illness who’d been released from jail on bond without any warning to his family despite his harassing them. That’s awful and too common but not something I can relate to. Just as I know that very, very few widowed can understand what it is like to care for a 29 year old man with dementia or be married to a non-responsive invalid you only see on weekends in the nursing home or hospice. I was widowed long before my late husband actually died and will never accept the idea that was so forcefully pushed at me that there is no such thing as anticipatory grief. It’s real. And I know that from ugly experience. So I find what similarites I can with others who lost spouses to long illnesses but know that I likely won’t find anyone who was emotionally and mentally cut off from their spouse for years prior to the end. One thing that draws me to some widowed people are tales of their loved one who changed mentally. Personalities flip-flopped by diseased brains. Ms. Dann’s husband had glioblastoma and lost his memory. My late husband’s memory was wiped clean by a neurodegneration caused by an inherited metabolic disorder called x-ALD. Her husband was terminal from day one. So was mine. It’s different when there is no hope. It just is.

She was luckier than me though. Most people with determined outcomes are. Her Willem understood what was wrong with him, and my Will never did. He was able to help her make final arrangements for himself. I had to do that alone, guessing at what he would have wanted as we’d never had a whole conversation about it. I dug through my memories for anything I thought might help. The only thing he did give me was the headstone. I knew that he wanted one and a place to put it. She got to make love with her Willem again and I did not. Will was uninterested in anything but pacing in circles and Mountain Dew, which he would have consumed non-stop had I not hid the cans. He didn’t know who I was. He called me “Babe” and called to our daughter as though she were a puppy  “SweetiePie. Here Sweetie Pie.”

Ms. Dann wrote a book about her experiences. It seems to be what widows do, if they have any inclination or ability (and even when they don’t have the latter at all). I honestly haven’t read anyone’s first-hand account of widowhood in book form even though I know that I need to write my own story and might benefit from seeing how others have done it. Or not. 

For now though, I have found a widow with whom I feel a bond. We fell in love again with men who wrote us e-mails.

Writing and Marriage


Rob discovered another blogger for me to add to my blogroll for you – my sporadic audience – because I don’t maintain the blogroll for me people. I surf blogs when Rob clues me to new ones that are interesting or funny or really out there in the zone of WTF and then if they seem worth the effort, I link them. But I seldom go back unless I have some sort of personal connection and even that won’t hold me if the blogger is one of those who only writes when they have something to say. The point of blogging is to say something regularly. Even if it is dumb and poorly written (okay, I don’t mean the last part really – try to be well-written). The blogger is a woman who makes a real living blogging and is now inches away from being a published author. Her name is Heather and the blog is called Dooce. If you think of me as being embarrassingly TMI, then you will be truly appalled by her. Personally, I am in awe of such fearless writing and self-exposure. You can’t be a blogger of note and not be willing and able to do this, which is why I am not a blogger of note. That and the fact that I don’t think I am as left of center as she is. Again, total awe of people who can live their lives in such a manner, but my Chinese astrological sign rules me in regards to such things. It will simply not allow my Greek nature to get out of control. Water rabbits absolutely trump Archers every day of the week. Besides even when my life was most like a soap opera, I was still more “normal” by white people suburban standards than Heather seems to have been. But go and read about her for yourself.

 

The post I have linked to is about her publishing – of which I am in envy and her analogy for her marriage. I don’t know that I have given my marriage enough thought as of yet to find some cultural analogy that epitomizes it. I am pretty sure that it would not be an MTV reality show about a too rich kid and his bodyguard, but that is just how I don’t roll. Though I often compare myself to Scarlet O’Hara the truth is that while I can completely empathize with her exasperation at the silly morays of society when it comes to women’s behaviour in particular and I get her abhorrence of those who would rather wallow than help themselves, I am not as swallow or blinkered about myself. Her lack of depth is the whim of her creator. Margaret Mitchell cleverly made Scarlet the persona of the Southerner of her times. But for me it is her feelings of imprisonment and constraint that ring most true. Rhett is my Rob and when I told him this he was a bit surprised “Why? He walks out on her in the end.” Which is true but not what I see in the character that reminds me of my husband. Rhett is the realist. He is amused by Scarlet’s impatience and her lack of understanding that while society can have all the rules it likes when it comes to personal choices and behaviors, the bottom line is that they are personal. We are in control of ourselves – reactions and decisions. We can’t be caged without our consent. Furthermore, it is pointless to rant about things we can’t control. There is do or do not. Accept or decline. In the end we sleep with ourselves and the ones we love most and best. My Rob has is moments but for the most part he is not worried about what others think or about societal rules that exist for the many and are indifferent to the few. He is unflappable and has an acerbic take on much of passes for civilization. Not that I think that one literary couple can serve as an analogy for a real flesh and bones relationship. There are too many aspects of a person and that multiples when you join with another. The ways we complement each other. Our love. Our lust. Our friendship. I don’t even know where to begin. How to find tangibles that could explain “us” to us let alone to people who know us only through me and my writing.

 

Rob and I were talking about the puzzle that is marriage as we walked earlier this evening. How some people grow and learn the give and take and others just don’t seem to get it. It can’t just be love. Can it? There has to be more to the fact that some people can see to the heart of who they are individually and as a team while it escapes so many of the rest. Maybe it is as easy as being able to see yourself and your mate in the antics of a TV characters or the lovers in the pages of a novel written before either of you was born.