remarriage of widowed people

In Sickness and Health



I wasn’t feeling well the other night. Running a slight temp maybe and achy. It ended up being a restless night with my husband up a few times to fetch an ice pack and ibuprofen for me. From my prospective it felt so nice to be able to be sick and not have to take care of myself. Having someone to rub my back and bring me a glass of water was such a change from years just previous when being ill was not any different from being well in that I was still having to take care of everything. This last spring I had a couple of sinus infections that flattened me a bit, but my daughter still needed to get to school in the morning and be picked up in the afternoon. Laundry didn’t do itself. Nor did the shopping or the house cleaning. And most of all, I didn’t get any of the real rest I needed to recover properly. 

Rob’s perspective though was far different.

He was very quiet all the next day, and we didn’t get much of a chance to talk until the evening as we were hauling furniture to Jordan’s new home in a little boomtown a about 2 hours south of us. But later when we did talk, he told me that my being sick had scared him, and that he couldn’t help but draw parallels between me and his late wife. I knew that anniversaries were coming. It is going on 11 months now, and he has been somewhat quiet about it all. From my own experiences, I knew also that the last weeks and days are etched on every fiber of your being and are more just memories. Your body remembers and reacts to the last days even when you have no conscious  thoughts to prod them. And I wish I could do something other than just listen. I wish I was more physically recovered from my own years of care-taking that a bit of missed sleep or a string of hot, humid days didn’t trigger my allergies or asthma. It makes him uneasy . Like most of us who lost spouses to long term disease, he thinks he should have seen the signs earlier or known enough to avoid the missteps that sometimes happen when you are navigating a healthcare system that sees the disease and not the person and is often more interested in the disease as a puzzle to solve and to learn from for the next time. It is hard to know that your loved one was just a another patient and is now just another statistic. You can’t turn off that need to be one step ahead and to be better this time. Faster. Smarter. In control. But the thing is that you were never in control, and the outcome had already been decided. You did exactly what you were put there to do. 

I don’t know how to reassure him any more than I know how to reassure myself. I have similar worries about him. I don’t know how a person could not. And I marvel at how we have pushed beyond these fears enough to risk losing again when it is still so fresh in our minds. But, life is inherently risky. Even if you never venture beyond confines of your own home, there is risk. You can’t cocoon yourself away from it, and who is the more foolish anyway? Those who stand back from the raging river thinking they are safer than those who take to the rafts to ride it. They forget that rivers can jump their banks and swallow land and lives for miles around them whenever they choose.

Today, we are back to our normal. Katy is dressed in her Tigger costume and watching cartoons. Rob is using an online crossword dictionary to finish yesterday’s puzzle, and I am blogging. There are groceries to get in town and dinner to plan because Farron is driving out for a visit. This is life most of the time, and we need to focus on the living of it more and the worry about the loss of it a bit less. Fortunately, we have a damn long time to do this.

My Husband and Daughter


I was watching Rob and Katy interacting at supper last night. We were out to eat, and Katy always sits next to Rob when we dine out now. Not because she has asked to however. Initially it was a strategic maneuver for behavior reasons. She just behaves better sitting next to him than she does next to me, but now she clearly enjoys sitting next to him. He helps her go through the kids’ menu and they color together. Last night she was telling him about a game she learned at kinder-camp this week. She loves it. It is called “What Time is it Mr. Fish”.  Rob remembered the game from his childhood but told her it was called “Mr. Wolf” instead, and when the time came in the course of the game to ask Mr. Wolf what time it was, he would turn suddenly and growl, “Dinner time!” My dear husband delivered the line in a deep growly voice and it startled Katy into a fit of giggles. She is at that age where scary is scary and an adrenaline rush of giggly fun at the same time. Of course she wanted to hear it again, and Rob obliged for quite a while with her giggling and clinging to his arm and begging, “Again, again.” For good measure he would throw in a growl and a snarl here and there, and it was just a pleasure to watch her have so much fun and being such a normal little girl being teased by her “daddy”.

She expects Rob to give her kisses and cuddles after I have tucked her in for the night. She likes to open the front door for him when he gets home from work in the evening and comes to give him a kiss and a hug before he leaves for work in the morning. On mornings she has slept in and misses him, she is visibly disappointed. She refers to him as “daddy” and has even addressed him that way on a few occasions already. But she has not forgotten her own father.

Will’s old recliner is in the living room, and she told me the other day that it has to stay there or he (Will) would be upset. Whenever she watches The Land Before Time, there are tears and calls for her dad (so we have stricken that particular film from the viewing list. Seriously, are kids’ cartoon-makers sadists?) And, she is frighteningly realistic in her views of mortality where fathers are concerned too. A couple of weeks ago Rob was working on his old white van, trying to get it running again because we needed two working vehicles, and she wanted to be outside watching, but since he had the van jacked up he told her it wasn’t safe. I was occasionally checking outside to make sure that he was okay and Katy noticed. I told her that I just didn’t want anything to happen to Rob, so that was why I was keeping an eye out and she replied,

“Yes because then we would have to get him a stone too and look for a third daddy.”

Cold-blooded? Perhaps, but children are mercilessly practical. When I told Rob about the conversation, he joked, “Well, now I know where I rate.” But he is as aware of the fragile nature of life and the people in our lives as I am and as, unfortunately, Katy is too.

It is interesting and a wonder to watch her change over the past few months and I wonder if it is just her age or an effect of my relationship with Rob and consequently his with her. Would she have been this child for Will too? 

My mother assures me she is a chip off my block though I don’t recall being as sassy or independent minded. Rob finds that amusing and I think, sides with my mom on this one. Still, it is good to see her being a child like other children (sassiness too) and not the somber, silent little one she was not so long ago.

 

Normal Life


Normal for Rob and I on a weekend morning is lounging about in our robes, eating a leisurely breakfast, checking out what is going on in the world via our computers and sharing what we find and think with each other. Is that everyone else’s normal too? Probably not. I have long suspected that what the world calls normal and the way people actually live are two separate things. The first is a fantasy perpetrated on us by the self-appointed arbiters of life, and the second is the way things really are and are supposed to be.

There is much talk among the widowed about returning to what they regard as normal life. I guess I was never much of an enthusiast for the idea because my normal before Will died was anything but that, especially when I looked at what most people consider to be a normal life. Even before Will was in the hospice, and the nursing home before that, normal was skewed by his yet unknown to us by name illness. I really have no basis for what is normal married life or normal family life. My own family and upbringing may have been typical for the neighborhood I grew up in, but an alcoholic father makes for a pretty unpredictable family life, and as I grew my younger brother’s drug addiction just made that life more turbulent. Is it normal to lie awake until your little sisters fall asleep so you can push the bedroom dresser in front of the door because your brother threatened to kill everyone as they slept? I am thinking not. Probably not anymore normal than spending Sunday mornings spoon feeding Cream of Wheat to your nearly vegetative husband in a nursing home while your two year old looks on.

What is normal? Is it one of those eye of the beholder things? Or does it really even exist at all? Is it perhaps one of those middle class ideals they sell you through TV shows and movies? I am not too concerned about whether or not my life is normal these days. It is what it is. And mostly what it happens to be is pretty darn good. But it was no accident or lucky break because I don’t really believe in those things anymore. Life changed because I did and continue to do so. I chose not to wait for the day I was happy again and went looking for it. 

Today while my handsome husband is at work, I will tackle the household chores and rearrange furniture, in a likely vain attempt to make sense of the blending of stuff, and then take my daughter to her first day of kindercamp. Normal enough? I think so.