young widowhood

Self-Definitions


Last evening as we were driving home from city, Rob and I got to talking about how widowhood should not be an experience that defines us. He is feeling a little angry about how Shelley’s death has impacted his life and changed its course. Understandably so, we all feel, or have felt, that way from time to time. It’s impossible to silence the “what ifs” and “why me’s” completely. Human nature is such that we usually take situations that upend our lives as personally. I can honestly say that I didn’t spend much time asking “why me”. I don’t see Will’s illness or his death as something that happened to me. It happened to him, and Katy and I were impacted because we shared his life. I know many people who have let tragedy completely make them over. Some positively. Others negatively. Life is about change and we are the sum of our experiences, but no single experience should dominate to the exclusion of all others. Letting widowhood hog the center stage for too long is a recipe for stagnation. At some point, Will’s death should recede to it’s proper place in my life’s history and memories. What that place will be is something I am still working out, but I am closer every day. I think all people who suffer tragedies spend time putting the event into perspective and taking from it the positives that will add to who they are. Or at least they should. Still it’s not easy.

One of the more galling lessons of a tragedy is that we are not always allowed to chart the course of our life independently and free of interference. Destiny allows us free reign only up to the point where what we want clashes with what it has already decided. It’s difficult not to resent that. After all, what was wrong with the plans I had that made God’s or Fate’s so much better? I think though that it is not a question of better. Will’s time was up and that had nothing to do with me even though it effected me greatly. I am okay with the fact that I am not where I planned to be not almost eight years ago when Will and I were married. Where I am at is every bit as good. That doesn’t mean I don’t have as yet unrealized dream and plans. I do. I think most everyone does. Complacency, in my mind, is the worse kind of getting stuck. I don’t want to let that happen, and I know it is far too easy to do. 

Ten days from today would have been our 8th wedding anniversary. I had hopes and dreams that day. Heading into the second month of marriage with Rob, I have new hopes and new dreams. It would have been easier to lament what I have lost. To not hope or dream again. Let my pain and loss become who I am. What is gained by doing that? I don’t know. I do know that much would have been lost.

I was a widow, a mom and a teacher, and though I will always be widowed, now I am a wife, a mom, and a writer. While I can’t control all the events in my life. I can always decide who I am. 

At the Movies


Last night was date night. I highly recommend dating your husband by the way. There is nothing better than cuddling and engaging in all the sweet things that should never get lost in the day to day of life. We seem to have found a sitter with staying power and we are making the most of it. I have watched more movies in the past couple of months than I have seen in the last five years. Which is sad because I used to love to go to the movies. Off beat and subtitled even. There is an old time theater in Des Moines called The Varsity that shunned Hollywood fare for the most part and offered a steady stream of foreign and independent films. I like these types of movies but I really loved going to that theater. It has one of those big screens that make you feel as though you are truly experiencing something as opposed to watching television in your living room. Newer multiplexes are nice. It is wonderful to have movable armrests, be able to see over people’s heads, and I will never complain about the abundance of cup holders. I miss that feeling of wonder however when the curtain rises and the house lights dim. Sinking back into the upholstered foam of seats that rock a bit too much and are a bit too easy to annoy your neighbor with. I miss staring up at the screen and the feeling that I am entering whatever world is up there as opposed to simply staring across a room at it. The theater last night reminded me of days gone by when the old Orpheum, a converted vaudeville theater back in my hometown, would shoehorn as many kids as possible in for the Saturday matinee of the latest Disney flick. There would be so many of us that sometimes it was necessary to sit on the steps in the box seats off the balcony.

Last night’s film was You Kill Me with Ben Kingsley and Tea Leoni, who Rob says I remind him of though I don’t see it really, and was about a hitman with an alcohol problem and his journey to sobriety. It also featured death. Funny but many of the movies we have seen lately have had their “dead” moments or more. In last night’s film Kingsley’s character works in a funeral home. The Matador, which we saw on video, was about a man whose young son has died and he gets involved with a hitman. The Wedding Crashers (a supremely bad movie that just proves that vulgarity and meanness continue to pass as funny for too many people) had scenes near the end describing how Will Ferrell’s character was crashing funerals to find horny widows. Children of Men is awash in grief images and references. The 300 is a deathfest.  I asked Rob if he thought that the movies had always been like this and we just didn’t notice, and he thought that was the case. I guess he is probably right. Even the kid’s movies we have taken Katy to like Shrek the Third and Ratatouille  managed to slip such images (tasteless ones in the case of Shrek) into the storyline.

Film is no different from any other aspect of life. I cannot read the paper without finding articles about people’s loss. Books and magazines are often the same. Death is the only inevitable in life as one’s birth is not always assured, and it is the one thing we all have in common regardless of circumstances. 

Happy Birthday



Tomorrow my daughter will be five years old. It also marks the day that I realized that there was something horribly wrong with her father. A unfortunate collision of anniversaries. The latter half of my pregnancy was marred with increasingly frequent “incidents” that I suppose had I not been pregnant and sick and preoccupied, I would have picked up on. I don’t talk much about the specifics of the early days of my husband’s illness. Partly out of guilt because I didn’t see what is so obvious to me now, but mostly because I know that the things he said and did were a result of the damage that was being inflicted on his brain and thus changing his personality and ability to reason.

I went into labor the night of the 26th. It was about 10:30 when I realized that the rhythmic tightening of my belly was actually regular and close enough to be early labor pains, and of course my water breaking about 15mins later confirmed that I was right. We had been out to dinner earlier, and Will had had a bit to drink. Another thing I didn’t know at the time was that his ability to metabolize certain chains of acids found in food and drink was nearly gone. His illness was a metabolic disorder. His body had stopped producing a particular enzyme it needed and as the acids built up it triggered his immune system into attacking the coating around the nerves in his lower back and the dura matter that protected his brain. The disease also triggered a hyper response from his adrenal glands that was slowly killing them as well. Alcohol is largely composed of the type of acid that he couldn’t metabolize any longer. Even small amounts triggered erratic behaviors because it was like a poison building up in his system that his body could barely eliminate. Long story, but the short of it that night was that he was not much help to me. On the way to the hospital, the stress of the situation caused one of his increasingly more frightening memory lapses where he would get lost in surroundings he had know all his life, much like an Alzheimer’s patient. His stressed adrenals meant that he reacted out of proportion to a situation, so he was angry and a bit scary. Once we were finally in the birthing room at the hospital, his overwhelmed system just shut down, and he spent the rest of the night and into the morning before Katy was born wandering the halls of the hospital in kind of a daze that had the nurses more concerned about him than me at times. Aside from the nurses who periodically checked in on me, I went through the first eight or so hours of labor on my own.

I don’t like to think about any of this really. There is no point anymore. He was sick, and I was too busy to notice, or what I did notice I chose to rationalize away. Though it still bothers me that I failed him so utterly at a time when he needed me so much, the worst of it now is that my daughter’s birth is not a happy memory for me. She is my child. The only child I will ever have and all that I have left of Will, and her birthday is tinged with regrets and sadness that unfortunately I have never managed to completely hide from anyone. Time and distance hasn’t made much of a dent in this of yet, but I have hopes that someday it will.