young widowhood

Last Days


There is this idea that floats around about adversity and tragedy bringing people together. That would be other people. People to whom I am not related.

It’s tempting to write specifically now about the melodrama surrounding Dad’s last days but another time. Suffice to say that my brother, CB has at last burned one bridge too many. He is stranded in a place that Mom and DNOS, especially, are fully content to let him be. He even managed to alienate BabySis, and since she has blindly worshipped him since childhood, I wouldn’t have thought it possible had I not witnessed it.

Did he step over any of my lines? Yes he did. He knows it. He has been extra careful with me all week because I am his only lifeline. I choose to withhold my charity from him for the time being. Instead, I carefully painted him into a corner and he was on the earliest plane back to Nevada this morning. I am still the oldest and I still, mostly, rule. However, I gave him money for the trip. I consulted with Rob first, because we had agreed not to be ATM’s for our dysfunctional siblings, but even he agreed that there was no good reason to be so cruel to CB.

“It’s funny but as a non-Christian, I am the most Christian person in the house right now where your brother is concerned.”

I was very angry with CB. His behavior while Dad was dying was appalling. What he said to me while our father’s still warm body was lying in the other room is not something I will forget any time soon. I am not one of those people who believe that grief is blanket permission to behave as one pleases. I heard many times during the latter part of my first year of widowhood that grief can cause a person to act out and that it was part of the “process” and therefore should be overlooked or at least tolerated. It was not okay, I was told, to call people on what amounted to shitty behavior for which a non-grieving person would be handed his/her soundly kicked arse.

That is bullshit.

Being in pain isn’t an acceptable reason to inflict it intentionally or to not apologize when it is done in a moment of thoughtlessness.

And there is no hierarchy of grief. Widowhood does not trump the loss of a parent, no matter the age of the child though, in the latter case, age dictates the level of personal responsibility expectations.

I really can’t say that I felt worse after my first husband died than I do now. The relationships I had with Will and with my father don’t compare. They occupy different spaces. I feel each loss in a different way with equal intensity. The point of view may change but the sorrow is the same.

I was not with Dad when he died. I knew it was coming but I chose to go with Rob and the two kids to McDonald’s for lunch. There is a play area there and, though all I can eat is the side salad sans dressing, I didn’t want the little ones around and I thought Dad might be more inclined to go if they, and me too, were out of the house.

It was a moment in time that hurt very much to give up, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

I went in to be with him when we got back. I had forgotten the waxen look a body takes on after death. The complete absence of animation in the face. Mouth gaping and eyes hooded and the stillness, the chest no longer rising and falling.

There were a lot of tears. It was easier this time because Rob was there to envelop me. It felt safe to cry and I have never in my life felt able to safely show my sorrow in such a manner. He was not a panacea but he was, and continues to be, amazing.

I helped the hospice nurse, A, undress and then redress Dad. Mom couldn’t. Neither could DNOS. I wanted to and was glad I was able. Truthfully, helping care for my father in his last few days was wonderful. Dad was not someone who said, “I love you.” Consequently neither was I for much of my life. His way was to take care of a person. Provide and do. That is why actions are so important to me. Words are good but without accompanying actions, they are meaningless.

“Dad didn’t say ‘I love you’ to me until just a week ago.” BabySis complained to me the day after he died.

Lucky you, I thought, because he didn’t say the words to me at all. He did love me. I know that because of the things he has done for me. For BabyD. For my late husband. I guess it would have been nice to hear the words, but he showed me in a hundred different ways and what more is there?

Taking care of him was a way to show him back.

It was hard. The death rattle was agony to listen to. I have written before that I heard the sound many times during Will’s hospice stay. He was in a six bed hospice for three months. One room had the same occupant the whole time but the other four changed over at least three times each during those months. I heard death rattling a lot. I saw death’s shadow more than I ever cared to. The sound, the look and the smell are all things I never wanted to encounter again. But I loved my dad more than I worried about the effect of his dying on me. I wanted to show him I loved him even though I could have simply said the words, which I did as well, and let someone else do the rest.

I don’t think I want to watch someone die of lung cancer again but judging from my siblings’ coughs, and their strange habits of taking a smoke break after watching our dad gasp, wheeze and hack up a steady stream of brown phlegm, I could easily be witness again.*

I would like to thank all of those who read and took the time to comment. I appreciate your concern and your friendship. I have more to write about but I am unbelievably tired and quite swamped with things that need to be done before we head for home. The exhaustion, I have to say, is every bit as awful as when one is widowed.

*I might be much more militantly anti-smoking from now on.

Signs


My first experience with a sign was when my Grandma C. received a bouquet of yellow plastic roses in response to a novena to St. Therese, The Little Flower. For those non-Catholics among my readership, St. Therese was a Carmelite nun who experienced visions and people who complete the novena in her honor are rewarded with roses if her intercession with God on their behalf is successful.

I was nine or ten at the time and wasn’t as impressed as I was disturbed. The last thing I felt my grandmother needed was more unseen beings floating around her apartment. Between my uncle and grandfather, there was hardly a chair at the dining table I felt safe taking a seat on. I took to taking my cue from Grandma and avoiding the chairs that she’d most recently directed a comment toward.

It was around this time that I heard the story of the Fatima. Three young children who were visited by the Blessed Virgin. She shared with about upcoming horrors in the world and even told two of them that they were going to die soon. Heavenly visitations and signs in my opinion then became things you wished on other people.

Recently the topic of signs came up on a blog I read but don’t comment at too much anymore. The blogger wrote about witnessing a shooting star in response to her admission – to herself really – that she was lonely. She wanted to be able to say it was a sign from her late husband, but she couldn’t. She just doesn’t believe in signs.

I have written about “signs” I have received over the course of my widowhood, but not so much about those I have received over the course of my life that have nothing to do with my late husband or any other dead person.  Signs, in my opinion, are not specific to contact with the “other side”. They are road signs that point out a new direction, keep us on track or assure us that we are not alone in whatever difficulty we are facing or enduring. 

I have seen only two shooting stars in my life. The first was with my late husband Will as we were driving to dinner with my family for his first visit to my hometown with me. We both saw it and took it as a sign that everything was going to work out for us as it should. That he ended up dying seven years later doesn’t negate the sign. We had the time together that we were supposed to have. I was his happily ever after. He was not mine. 

The second shooting star shot across the sky early one morning as I was turning on to the 235 on ramp, heading to the daycare and then work. I had been thinking that I was tired of the status quo of my life and ready for a new beginning. And then I saw the star. It was not Will. It was whatever it is that we call God. The universe maybe?

I had barely started getting to know Rob* at that point, and little did I know he and our friendship were being heralded by that star, but shooting stars are not so common that their sighting can be discounted as the randomness of time and space. At least in my opinion.

My blogging friend daisyfae remarked once that she is glad to be psychically deaf. I could wish for that too sometimes in this spirit crowded home I live in, but she is on to something with the idea that some of us are just more attuned to the fine frequencies that resonate around us all the time and some are not.

Maybe as Freud once said, a cigar is just a cigar and the same can be said of shooting stars or songs that pop up on the radio at just the right time**, but I like believing in a benevolent universe that reaches out to reassure and give as much guidance as it can within the framework of the “rules”. It’s comforting, and there is precious little of that sometimes, so why not take it when it happens along? 

* When I told Rob I had written this piece, his comment was “And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply”.

** My radio has long spoken to me and it has not always been so supportive of my decisions and plans.

Sadness is the Monday Meme


My parents were the younger and youngest children in their families respectively. By the time they met and married, they had nieces and nephews in grade school. Due to circumstances beyond their control, they couldn’t have children and after seven years, they adopted me. So I was always one of the younger cousins. I was a child when many of my cousins married and started families of their own.

My oldest cousin, Dar, married at nineteen and her six children were more like first cousins to my sibilings and I then she ever was. Although I lost touch with my extended family when I went off to university, I did grow up, in a sense, with these second cousins.

Dar died a few years ago after a long battle with cancer. She was in her mid to late fifties. Young by today’s standards though my own widowhood has taught me that people are very unrealistic about what “young” really means. I think my late husband may have been in hospice at the time, so I didn’t get back for the funeral and never sent a note or card to her husband. At the family reunion this last June however I had a long talk with one his daughters and discovered that he has adjusted, as we all do, and was doing well.*

DNOS called me Sunday morning to let me know that Dad was not doing well. He’d had a rough night. His breathing was not good and he couldn’t get out of bed. But she had other news too.

Dar’s youngest son, who is thirty, came home after an outing with their two older children – aged 8 and 2 – to find his wife on the bed and not breathing. He discovered  her because their baby, born just this August, was crying. He and his father tried to revive her but she was already gone. She was just 27.

Twenty-seven is very young.

I called a cousin who is close to the family. She is DF’s godmother in fact. She filled me in on the details. Everyone focus’s on the details in the aftermath. The timeline of events takes on huge significance. The story is told and retold, passed from one person to another. It’s important, as validating as the life that is now over. And it will eventually make the loss real.

I reminded my cousin that DF will need support for a long time to come and to not let that be forgotten after the first few months, as it sometimes is.**

CousinA also talked with me a bit about Dad’s turn*** and how hard it is for us now too. But I didn’t agree. 27 is not 81. Young and healthy with a life ahead of you and small children is not old and ill with grown children. All deaths are not equal. Some are more tragic and more unfair.

I have no prompt today, but I invite you to share your tales of loss or memories of loved ones. It’s a good thing to tell the stories because they are reminders in these uncertain days of the other thing we have in common with each other – our mortality.

 

*How well a bereaved person is doing is never really known to anyone but the person. Family and friends always believe we are better than we are. It’s a very subjective call.

**She agreed and of course brought up that if anyone would know this it would be me. I don’t like being an expert on the subject.

***I am reminded was we speak that death often comes in threes. My uncle’s wife two weeks ago and now my cousin’s. And Dad has taken a turn.