young widowhood

Stage 4


When cancer has metastasized to sites beyond its origin, they call it “stage 4”. In my dad’s case that means that the tumor in his lungs has either grown into the heart muscle or aorta or that the size of it and the effusion it has caused warrant the dire level.

In any case, he is 81 years old and already suffering from pulmonary disease and severe osteoporosis. He would not survive cancer treatment. They are discharging him from the hospital tonight.

When I talked to my mother, the lung specialist had just left, and the nurses were getting Dad ready for discharge. They don’t waste time. Mom sounded very matter of fact. I remember that tone. I used that tone a lot myself. I still use that tone when I talk about Will’s illness or death. I have cultivated it and it can be a very useful barrier.

I have tried to remember what it felt like that day, the one nearly five years ago now, when the doctors gathered in that tiny exam room just off the lobby of the neurology waiting area in Iowa City and told me that Will was going to die.

Only that is not what they tell you.

They give you the name of the disease. They tell you that it has no treatment. They tell you that things will progress. Sometimes they have a time-line. Mostly they try to exit the room as soon as they can.

The day they told me that my husband was going to die, my Dad was in the waiting area watching BabyD, who was truly a baby then – just fifteen months old. I was too angry to cry. Angry with the doctors for not knowing more about what was wrong so they could answer my questions. Angry with Will for hiding so many of the early symptoms of his illness from me. Angry that I was alone and too grown up to just throw us all in Dad’s car and go home with him.

And my Dad said nothing. He didn’t chastise me for my reaction that day. He didn’t judge me like so many people would in the care-giving and widow years to come. He just helped me get Will and BabyD to the next waiting room for more tests and then to the parking lot and our vehicles for the trip back to our house in Des Moines that would never be our home.

Aside from my Auntie, Dad probably was the most consistent supporter I had during that time.

I asked Mom how he was doing, but I could hear him joking with the nurses in the background. He is quite the flirt when he is in the hospital.

I wonder what it feels like to be told you are dying when you were dying already. It’s like double-secret probation in a way.

Later when I talked with Rob, I told him that I feel worse knowing he has cancer and is dying then I did knowing he was just dying of the pulmonary fibrosis. And it doesn’t make sense because we all knew he didn’t have much time left anyway.

The doctors say a year or less which is nonsense. Even Mom saw through that evasion. And the doctor balked at hospice. What is it with doctors and hospice? Why do they wait so long?

I called my Auntie. I left a message for CB. DNOS called me, and we talked a bit. Mom told me not to come yet, but I think she is still in shock. DNOS agreed and is going to use her professional connections to get the real scoop on Dad’s condition. It pays to have a social butterfly sister who used to work at the hospital lab.

I asked her how she was.

She said, “Fine.”

But she choked on it a bit and when I asked again, she told me she would call me later after she knew more.

DNOS would have made a pretty good NOS.

Weekend Update: Movie, Organization and Ike


The weekend has flown by once again. Even without a 9 to 5 job, I still lament the relative shortness of the weekend in comparison to the rest of the week. I don’t get as much done of course in terms of my fiction writing but it’s a worthwhile trade-off because I have my husband around. There is much to be said for even the drive-by smooches and snuggles as we go about the domestic routine.

So this weekend’s Friday Night Flick was Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal with David Duchovny, Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener, David Hyde-Pierce and that guy who was the photographer on Just Shoot Me. 

Just a quick aside, has Duchovny ever starred in a motion picture (aside from his neutered alter-ego Mulder) where he didn’t play a sexual deviant of some kind?

Full Frontal is not one of Soderbergh’s recognized triumphs. It’s a film within a film that is ultimately within yet another film. It took a while but I eventually realized that the film within was written using elements of the life of the screenwriter whose life and that of those connected to him are being explored via pseudo-documentary and character interviews. The reviews complained the that film doesn’t go anywhere but it’s really about how life influences art and artists, and about the small worlds we all really live in.

We were better than half-way through the movie when Rob realized he’d seen it before thanks to a plastic sack and David Duchovny’s penis. Which you don’t see. Although you do see the plastic bag and wonder once again what attracts this man to characters like this, but the penis is prominent – I assure you. Even though I missed it the first time and Rob had to “rewind” for me.

But anyway, two hours of life – gone – when we could have had sex instead. But it is not an awful movie (Rob will beg to differ) just one that makes you work hard to figure it out. We in North America are not into thinking while movie watching.

Saturday was organizing. Rob is determined to have a garage sale in two weeks. In admiration of his sorting and purging zeal, I tackled my side of the pigsty office because it would be nice to write at my desk again instead of the dining room table (which is hell on my posture).

I nearly pitched my high school yearbooks but Rob thought they should rest in the basement for a bit until I am sure. 

I am sure I don’t know what to do with them. I haven’t cracked one open in BabyD’s lifetime and since I was too mousy and unpopular to rate much of an inclusion in them aside from a head-shot and the newspaper group photo, I can’t think why I should keep them. It’s full of people I can’t remember or have no fond memories of. And they take up shelf space.

I found Will’s old Sunday bible group bible too. Another space hog that holds no personal value for me, so I am thinking about sending it to his mother. She has been less her nasty self in cards and letters of late, and I have been thinking that it might be safe to cultivate a correspondence type relationship now. She found God after Will died – or so she claims* – and the bible has memories for her.

Now I have a clean desk and a surprisingly small pile of papers to assign to folders. I even have my calendar updated and all pertinent dates marked for the next little while. So why am I still writing at the dining room table?

I also began a rewrite of Kumari because what I am trying to do isn’t clear to readers yet, judging from a new review I received yesterday. I am liking it, so the reviews have been a plus. I wish, though, that the site was more like a message board because single reviews are only so helpful. I really need a give and take forum.

I also ventured over to the widda board and signed on. Something I haven’t done since February. I noticed that I was getting referrals from my profile there – something that has never happened. It made me curious. To my surprise I had a message waiting from a board member who’d found this blog through a google and traced me back there. She wanted to talk about remarriage/recoupling because she thought I might have something valid to say. That I can understand if the only sounding board she’s had is the widda board. There are probably only a handful or better of people there who don’t have an agenda when it comes to this topic and will listen/share their experiences without spouting absolutes. The board is really a singles haven and that is what is pushed – mostly by people who haven’t found a new partner despite their efforts or those too frightened or traumatized to try.

I did find one interesting thing in the short perusal I made of the active topics. Someone who used to jump all over me with both feet about my opinions of moving on and remarriage requested a new forum for remarried widowed – because she got married again recently. Funny how that can swing a person 180, eh?

Although the remarried thought this was a great idea, the other vintage widows nixed it. Remarrieds, in the general opinion of the board, have a duty to grieve for the edification (and probably entertainment) of everyone else. End of discussion.

And finally, Rob and I took great interest in watching the reports on Ike. If Rob hadn’t turned that transfer down last spring, we would have been losing our hurricane virginity this weekend in our new home somewhere in the Houston area. Actually, Rob would have been doing this most likely with me worrying at my folks in Iowa. We are not so attached to stuff (and honestly are well enough off financially that we don’t have to be) to ride out a hurricane. 

I will take a Canadian winter over the balmy, hurricane prone Gulf coast any day.

*And it might be true. She was nastier than she had ever been while spouting religion at me in the aftermath, but I have found that “coming to Jesus” brings out a rather substantial amount of bile and intolerance in some people.

Is Lisa Kogan Dead or Something?: And Other News of the Day


Over the past three days I have had an incredible amount of traffic on an old post inspired by a Lisa Kogan column from O Magazine of a year ago. 

In the article, Kogan ponders the possibilities of losing one’s mate. Not literally. She just wonders, as many of the more morbid among us do at some point, what it would be like to be widowed. 

She was trying to be funny and I didn’t find her subject or style too amusing. Not because I don’t have a gallows humor gene – I do. Once, when my late husband was lamenting how much being dead without me was going to suck (he had dementia, remember), I reminded him that time probably flew by much more quickly in the ever-after and that he would eventually have my second husband to keep him company anyway.

He didn’t laugh. Neither did my co-workers when I related the story to them. Probably you aren’t laughing either. 

I suck at the humor thing as much as Lisa Kogan.

But getting back to the sudden surge of her presence in my search terms, I decided to google her to see if anything was up. Maybe she died? Or perhaps she wrote a book and is making the rounds of the talk shows and morning “news” programs. Doug and Annie Brown, the couple who had sex for 101 straight days and then wrote a book about it, (and why I didn’t think of doing that I will never know) show up in the search terms whenever a news article or review about the book turns up. Lisa, however, doesn’t appear to have done anything of late aside from her latest column in O. Which wasn’t that good. In fact, I found it annoying and thought that The Bloggess could have done a better job with the topic.

But I digress – often, yes, I know – there just seem to be an awful lot of people interested in Lisa Kogan. And so far as I could ascertain, she hasn’t died. Which would definitely explain people searching for her. People who read O anyway. But she didn’t. As far as I know.

And why am I writing about search terms?

Because I am still working on Kumari!

Yeah, I know I said it was done. It is, but the revising continues because it’s not quite right. So I signed up for an online writer’s workshop for sci-fi, fantasy and horror writers (I think horror but I can’t remember exactly), and posted it for review. Only one review as yet and it confirmed my opinion that the story is still light and far too staccato as far as flow goes.

Revising is one of those things that either takes off like a brush fire or feels like mental constipation. There is no middle ground. 

I can almost feel the direction I need to go but can’t squeeze the right words out. Once I find the chink in the wall, I know the meat of the story will pour out, but I am not quite there yet. 

Hence this post. Which is my alternative to cleaning or baking or blanching veggies for the freezer. I could have attempted to tempt my husband into a nooner when he was home for lunch instead but we are into day three of a “cleanse” and things are getting fragrantly ugly. No constipation there. Anyway, we just had a nooner, and a nooner habit could become an impediment to say – employment – and we don’t want that. 

What I need to do is re-order a few sentences and paragraphs for flow and tone down the royal “we” of the story’s language and flesh out the character’s parents and the priests a bit. I also need to play up the global warming theme of the setting. I don’t think that is coming out although I don’t want to “go there” in terms of explaining what is happening specifically to the climate/geography. I am not a techie when it comes to sci-fi. More like a Bradbury.

Off to stare at my draft some more. Perhaps it’s like meditation? If I let my mind focus and then drift, it will come to me.