young widowhood

Write It and Weep


Having secured Rob’s interest and commitment to the memoir, I revisited the opening chapters because I have never been happy with them. I spent the week vomiting forth memories and have about 3000ish words between the first and second chapters. Wound picking aside, condensing a four year time period to three chapters and having them make sense has proved challenging.

The emotional assault has been a bit of a challenge as well. On Tuesday, Rob came home for lunch and as we sat down he looked across the table, sized me up quickly and asked,

“Are you doing okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why? I made good progress on the memoir updates today.”

“Which is why I asked because you have that look about you.”

The look that says I have been scraping scabs and peeling layers of flesh, figuratively speaking of course.

And it’s probably not the best time of year for such work with the date of what would have been a tenth wedding anniversary looming, but if not now – when? Like actually living my life, I can put off the memoir until memories don’t evoke deep feelings but just when the hell would that be? I just don’t buy into the idea that grieving is finite or can be done to death by focusing on it exclusively until it’s mastered. It has to be integrated and that can’t happen unless one goes about the task of living.

But you don’t have to write a book, do you?

Well, it seems to me that every bereaved person plus his/her dog writes a book, so on this score I can finally count myself among the normal and it’s not being widowed I want to focus on.

Although I have to tell some of that tale, I want to tell the story of me and Rob and our  rebuilding because  it’s the journey back that counts. Most everyone goes through hard times or horrific times, but not everyone comes back. I did. Rob did. I think that is a story worth sharing because there seems to be some misguided idea among those who’ve lost that there is a mythical and finite amount of happiness in the universe that is distributed in a half-assed and nonsensical way with the undeserving receiving more than their fair share.

I got slapped a bit on the subject this last week when I commented on a widow blog to the effect that our happiness and contentment are within our control and when we see others receive blessings we feel they didn’t earn that perhaps we don’t know the whole story. I really don’t believe that happiness  is a lottery thing. The times in my life when I have been “unhappy”, and I question the actual existence of the state positive or negative, is usually because I wasn’t trying to be “happy”. I was just waiting for it to happen. Like magic. Which doesn’t exist I am told.

Anyway, I was told that sometimes it’s too much to just hold body and souls together let alone look for “happiness/contentment”, so there you remarried lucky person. And though sometimes it is, it doesn’t change the fact that neither state will fall on a person like manna.

And so, I am almost done with the super painful chapters which is worth weeping over the keyboard a little for a while.

A Memoir Discussion


With Rob on forced rest as he recuperates from the abscess, we have had time to sit and discuss ideas for the memoir I have been threatening to write since pretty much the dawn of this blog – in its first incarnation. Because I had always planned to use blog entries, emails, message board posts (my own only – so down boys & girls) and photos to tell some of the story, Rob writing some of the book seemed an natural outgrowth of the project.

We sat for quite a while Monday evening after dinner with tea and memories and tried to figure out where we should each begin which brought up the issue of back story. Just how much do we include and how do I – mostly – tiptoe around the fact that my perspective isn’t very flattering where Will’s family, my mother-in-law in particular, is concerned.

Rob is always amazed when I share in-law stories. Shelley’s family is a family with all the flaws and foibles that you would normally expect, but they are kind and gracious, and they pull together when it counts.

I ended up telling Rob the story of MIL’s evil during the last few months. The day Will was taken to ER from the nursing home, I was in Dubuque with Dee. My dad was undergoing surgery to stem the TIA’s he was having. There was a good chance he would die and my mother was crumbling under the pressure which wasn’t making DNOS’ job any easier. I wasn’t sure at all I would be able to get away. I had to phone in sick for one thing and I had only just started working at the high school I was at, and Will had been sick all week. He was spiking temps and had a terrible cough. The nursing home DR’s were telling me it was bronchitis, but in retrospect, I know it was the beginning of embolisms and pneumonia. However, the night before Dad’s surgery, Will was doing better and I felt safe to make a dash for it. My plan was to be back early on Sunday but for some reason that I can’t remember anymore – I was probably exhausted and slept in a bit – Dee and I didn’t make it back until late Sunday afternoon.

The answering machine messages went from

“Will is spiking temps. Do you want us to transport him to the hospital?”

to

“Since we can’t get a hold of you, we are sending Will by ambulance to ER.”

which was followed by several calls from the hospital.

When I finally got to the hospital with a frazzled 3 year old on my hip, I found MIL and her annoying friend had been there all day. MIL had my cell phone number and had apparently told the admitting DR that she didn’t know how to contact me.

Fast forward 4 days and she was the one who was at the hospital when Will was transferred to hospice. I went ahead and made the call on that over her objections and she was seething. I was in bed with a migraine. I had to call my BFF to get Dee to preschool because I couldn’t stand up and was basically crawling back and forth between the toilet and my bed until the meds kicked in around noon.

I get to the hospice to find that Will was settled in and MIL and her irritating side-kick were occupying the seats on either side of his bed which forced me to hover at his feet. I hadn’t been to work in four days and still had the nursing home to deal with as his stuff was still there and there was the little matter of the fact that they had called his mother when they sent him to the hospital instead of calling me on my cell – a number they had too.

I filled out paper work. I got into an argument with MIL about funeral arrangements of all things and by then it was time to go pick up Dee.

I came back after dinner to find an agitated Social Worker who ordered me to leave Dee with MIL and follow her as she needed to talk to me right now.

In a small office off the nurse stations, she informs me that she is disturbed by accusations MIL has leveled in my absence.

“She claims you abused him and regularly threw him out of your home when he was ill.”

WTF?

I quickly disabused her of her faulty information. And then I cried. And I never cry in front of people I don’t know. 

I could have banned MIL from hospice at that point. The staff quickly came to know MIL for who she was and not what she pretended to be. But they put a lot of pressure on me to keep things civil and to work on repairing the relationship with MIL for Dee’s sake. The fact that Dee had never had a relationship with her grandmother was a fact that I soon got tired of trying to explain.

The story from here goes from awful to simply more-so and ends with MIL having a tantrum the night Will died, and so she was allowed to sit with his body until the ambulance came to take him to the hospital for the autopsy* and I went home. I was tired. I was sick with strep that eventually gave me shingles of all things. And I was done.

Is this the kind of thing people really want to read? But as Rob pointed out, “our story” is a short one and some of what brought us to the point where we met on the widda board – which is a whole other nightmare to try and tell yet not tell – needs to be written to bring perspective.

What, if anything, would you want to know if you were inclined to be interested.

 

*I donated his brain and spine to a university that specializes in research about illnesses such as Will’s.

Things


I have two friends with husbands who are ill. Both have been in the hospital recently and I have been following progress and sending notes via Twitter, Facebook and blogs. I remarked to Rob that I hoped this sick husband thing was not contagious which, of course, just invited the jinx right through our front door. There is feng shui in our thoughts and words and I should have taken more care.

The original issue was a sore lower back. Rob’s back is his Achilles’ and he has been seeing the chiropractor and our massage therapist for all summer only to quickly undo any good they were doing with his insistence on death march renovation practices. While I understand the time pressures that the nano-bit of warm weather places on many of the things that need to be done, I still think he pushes himself too far too often. And he knows this.

Issues came to a literal head after the camping trip he and the older girls took over the weekend after Canada Day. He had a sore tailbone that went from red looking to inflamed and bulging. When gutting it out – Rob’s preferred method of dealing with illness – didn’t work, he went to see our elderly Chinese doctor who was horrified enough by what he saw to make Rob sit up and take notice (though not literally, sitting was decidedly difficult by that point).

“It’s a pilondial cyst,” he told me. “And please don’t blog about this.”

And I didn’t. I caught many a Facebook friend unaware when I announced that Rob needed to go into the hospital for what turned out to be minor surgery in the ER (though we had no idea how slight or extensive a procedure he was in for until we got there and the DR on call took a look). I was sorely tempted to blog. Unbelievably amusing moments arise when one is called upon to pack one’s husband’s bum crack on a daily basis. At one point I was peering to get a better look and he said,

“Could you stop with the inspection, please?”

“I’m just trying to get a good look, ” I said. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

“That’s because you are a woman. You’ve had a baby. You’ve no dignity left.”

Which is a good point, but I was howling with laughter. It’s not about dignity but that as a woman, I am oddly more comfortable unclothed and being examined than I am dressed up and wondering who thinks I look fat.

Dr. Foo wanted Rob to go to ER on Friday night. Just go straight there and I could bring him anything he might need if he ended up being admitted. Dr. Foo was pretty certain that a major carving and scooping out of sinus cavities at the base of the tailbone was called for and that Rob would be in the hospital for at least a week and be home another month after, dealing with wound care. They do open wound with packing for these types of things.

Rob was quite sober when he called to explain what he’d been told. I was too.

Fortunately, Dee’s sleepover was easily switched from our house to her friend’s, whose mom offered to take Dee for the day Saturday too if needs be – which was awesome considering I only just met her, but some people are wonderful like that.

Rob spent the evening informing his work, his daughters and mother, and schooling me in the basics: insurance and benefits contacts, passwords for important accounts and reminders about where the personal directives and the wills were. 

“Do you want to know what my wishes are? Just in case?”

Yeah, that conversation. One that we’ve been having on and off all year because neither of us wants to end up in the basement storeroom with Shelley’s remains.

“I’m sure I will figure something out,” I said.

“As long as I don’t end up in the basement.”

“Oh, you won’t,” I assured him. “I have a thing about dead husband remains in my basement.”

“You do? I thought you buried Will’s because that’s what he wanted?”

“He did,” I said, “but I also couldn’t stand the idea of having him in the house with me.”

Later he remarked that he thought only two widowed people could have the kinds of conversations that we do sometimes. I am not so sure but maybe.

So now he is upstairs resting. I have some wound care on the agenda for later and I am tired. Worry is exhausting.