young widowhood

Randy Pausch – The Last Lecture


He’s dead. I wrote about him last year when his “last lecture” was first making the internet rounds. Ironically I ran across his book Thursday when I was at Chapters. I didn’t buy it though. I don’t really need a book to remind me to live my life fully. Like Randy and his family, I discovered that through experience.

His death is a timely reminder to us all that life will not wait for us to create the perfect template or get the kids raised first or for us to “get over” whatever traumas and disappointments that hold us fast. 

Belated


This will sound strange, but I forgot my husband’s 27th wedding anniversary. Yes, that’s right. His wedding anniversary, not ours. Ours was last month. June 26th and it was our first.

Rob and Shelley were married in July. It was a hot day. He was hung-over from partying a bit too hardy the night before. The JP got lost and was late. And the band played the wrong song for the first dance. But overall it was a beautiful wedding.

I have been to the very spot where they wed. Met nearly all the principal players of the day. Seen the photos. Heard the stories. In some ways it has become a part of my history too. Not all that much different from the ancestors I claim on my dad’s side despite my being adopted and not really related to those people at all. Yet my Grandma Cox told me all the stories on those many Memorial Day jaunts around the various cemeteries around the Old Monastery where my Granddad and her family are laid to rest. Those stories connected me in the same way Rob connects me to his past and to Shelley with his stories.

All weirdness I am sure to anyone who is not widowed and remarried/recoupled but the way of it none the less.

Happy Anniversary then to Rob. It was a happy day that led to years and years more and should be remembered as such.

Revisiting the Past


Back in Des Moines and haunting myself in an Ebeneezer Scrooge kind of way has brought me round to a not so profound conclusion – moving on and away from the past is better than constantly, or even just occasionally, ruminating on the fairness or unfairness of the cards we are dealt.

What I hope I do more often than not is remember what I have learned from my not so long ago – good times and bad – put it into practice and remember that I am a very fortunate person all things considered.

All along I have told Rob that I wasn’t looking forward to coming back to Des Moines and seeing all the old sites and visiting Will’s grave. To me it seemed like a pointless scab-picking of my soul. I am not someone who buys into the notion that tragedy and grief should be ruminated about and given in to simply because it happens to be there and handy. But my daughter had need of seeing the headstone, visiting the old places and seeing people, and so I have sucked it up and picked a bit around the edges but not enough to draw blood. There really is no need for that.

Today we wandered the mall and did things that were familiar to BabyDaughter from the life she and I lived during the years her father was dying and mostly living apart from us. I think she was very surprised by the fact that things have changed and life here has clearly gone on without us.

Tears have been shed by all of us at different points in the last three days but not many and not hysterically and not without a realization that to be happy now – then had to happen and be survived, which for me is not as hard to reconcile as one might think or expect.

Life goes on. Mostly because it has to. The whole thing was designed this way and not by accident.

Rob asked me if I miss living here and the answer is no and yes.

I consider home to be where Rob is because people embody the idea most that people speak of when they talk about “being at home” or “going home”, but life in the U.S. is corruptively convenient and this makes it easier than living where we do in Canada. Things are abundant, relatively inexpensive and readily available. This does not make here home to me though. It just makes it easy and thoughtless.

I still feel a bit alien here even though I probably stick out more where we live in Alberta. Being back reminds me of how different I am and how much I have changed – hopefully grown – over the past year. It reminds me too of how far in the past the past really is and how quickly time moves forward when you allow yourself to live.