moving on after the death of a spouse

Long Distance Relationships


Long Distance Relationships

“We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its urgency, here and now without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.”

Jose Orgeta y Gasset

That was the quote that Rob came across in his Franklin day planner that tipped the scales and began our journey to where we are today. There is irony in the fact that someone as random as I am have organization to thank for my soon to be husband. I have been reading emails and IM transcripts from the earliest days of my relationship with Rob. I tend to do this when it has been a long while since we have been together and another visit is nearing.

When one considers the physical distance between us the actual amount of face time we have had is remarkable. By the time he arrives here in early June to help us pack and move to Canada, we will have spent about 24 days together. In not quite 6 months. Better, I think, than some couples who live on opposite ends of the same city.

Between us we have sent nearly 800 emails and spent literally days on the phone and IMing if the hours were calculated. There really isn’t any point during the day when we can’t reach each other. One of the things that experts recommend for long distance relationships to be successful is communication, so in light of all this I would call us uber-successful.

The early days emails are interesting in retrospect. There are the odd moments when our interest in each other is clearly not “just friends”, and I wonder now how that was overlooked, or if it was really. In our conversations of late we have admitted to each other that the attraction was early and mutual, and I wonder how that can be because each of us was still clearly not ready, consciously anyway, to love someone other than our late spouses.

I did an Internet search last night to find the predictors for long distance relationship success. The first was communication, and letter writing was the chief factor in romances prevailing whether it was email or the snail variety. Talking on the phone was just not enough. I can understand why. Writing frees a person from constraints, and it is a deliberate medium in which you can take the time to phrase and frame your thoughts. The phone is fraught with the same problems of speaking in person and worse, robs the speakers of the visual cues that verbal communication ironically relies on.

Establishing ground rules for the relationship early and sticking to them was another predictor for a relationship’s longevity. I don’t recall if Rob and I did this in so many words. When our needs were not being met, we simply told each other what was wrong. Which I suppose is the one rule we did have and still do, and that is we tell each other when something is wrong, or we ask when we don’t understand where the other is coming from. This though, I think, goes back to communication.

Another factor for success is the amount of face time a couple schedules. After spending about 10 days together over my spring break in March, we both realized that there was no way we could get to June without seeing each other. We had barely survived the two and a half weeks between our first face to face meeting in Idaho Falls and Arkansas. So, a new plan was hammered out with regularly scheduled visits. It hasn’t made the time apart easier, but it has given us something to look forward to and eased the longing to be together a tiny bit. One of the things the articles didn’t address, but I will, is that how much face time a couple needs is going to vary and has to be talked about and adequately addressed. Rob and I in a word…..suck…..at the physical separation part of this long distance thing. Some of it can be attributed to widowhood, but I think also it is just our personalities. We need to be able to physically connect and show our affection, need, and love for each other. I was no different with Will, and I would guess it was the same for Rob with Shelley.

Deciding how long the distance will be a factor in the relationship and who will be the one to relocate was cited as well as a predictor for success. I am moving to Canada in June. And this is no small thing at my age and given my circumstances. It means selling a house, resigning from my teaching position, pulling up stakes in Iowa and emigrating to another country. And I am doing this with a four year old in tow. However, it made the most sense when looked at from a practical standpoint. I will be able to teach eventually in Canada but it is not as easy for Rob to find work here in my neck of the Midwest. He has the better job. But honestly, and all practical matters aside, I was okay with going to him. He feels like home to me, and wherever he is that is where I am supposed to be.

Another important point in maintaining a distance relationship is keeping things “spicy”, and they suggest everything and the kitchen sink really. To be blunt I don’t see the appeal of phone sex, and webcams are beyond nasty in any context I can imagine. Erotic emails on the other hand, while not a substitute, make for good foreplay. Whereas Rob is adamant that some of these emails of ours need to be purged from the “record” so to speak, I will not be deleting them anytime soon. I have nothing of Will. No record of his thoughts, pure or otherwise, and so I can’t bring myself to destroy anything that Rob has written to me and probably never will. I guess only time will tell whose version of our early days will be the one of record.

Back in the day when marriages were a matter to be arranged rather than something born of preference and personal choice, distance and courting by mail weren’t viewed so suspiciously. One of the mp3’s that Rob sent me over the course of our communications was Prairie Wedding by Mark Knopfler. The lyrics aptly fit our situation. Rob used a verse of that song in the following post on the YWBB in response to someone’s query as to whether or not two people could fall in love over the Internet:

I am saddened that our society has made us so bitter and jaded that we look for subterfuge and ulterior motives everywhere. I’m not saying we shouldn’t use our heads and know what we are doing…..but I, for one, appreciate that there can still be magic.

The start of my relationship with my fiancee was kind of described by the beautiful song “Prairie Wedding” by Mark Knopfler, which starts like this:

We Only Knew Each Other By Letter

I Went To Meet Her Off The Train

When The Smoke Had Cleared And The Dust Was Still

She Was Standing There And Speaking My Name

I Guarantee She Looked Like An Angel

I Couldn’t Think Of What I Should Say

But When Adam Saw Eve In The Garden

I Believe He Felt The Selfsame Way

I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic.

I guess I am too and every day I count myself one of the luckiest people on the planet to have been found by this amazing and remarkable man with whom I am going to spend the rest of my life.

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Meanness


moving on

Image by alexdecarvalho via Flickr

From the beginning, I mean the very beginning when Will was first diagnosed and I knew he was going to die, I wanted… needed… to believe that the whole light at the end of the tunnel thing was real. I fixated on the hope that someday there would be happiness again. I put all my trust in that one idea and amazingly it seems to have carried me through to the place I am now. But it is not that way for everyone I am coming to learn. Rob reminds me from time to time something to the effect that widowhood does not create saints out of sow’s ears. If you were not an optimistic person before being widowed, you are very unlikely to become one, and the same holds true for being kind and compassionate.

 

I read a column by Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald today. It was about the Virginia Tech murders, but the central question of his piece was “Can you fix meanness?” And he was talking about the soul. Some people just seem to have this meanness at their core and nothing touches it. It’s there and it shows through no matter what they do or their circumstances in life. Nothing changes that core personality.

 

It’s hard not to go through the widow journey without hitting patches of anger and resentment and wanting to lash out whenever an opportunity presents itself. I have been there myself. It wasn’t fun though. I felt just as awful when I was in that mode as I had before I entered or even after I exited. There was no release from the anger, and it was wrong to purposefully bring negativity to a place, like the YWBB, where people were doing their best to rise above pain and hurt.

 

I left the board today*. It was time. And it may seem cowardly or defeatist to walk away from trying to help those who are truly in need of solace or advice and reassurance from someone who understands, but there is an underlying negativity about the place, that actually may have always been there and I didn’t notice, and a meanness in the loudest voices that can’t be overcome by just one person. There are dead and dying souls there. People who will never be whole, maybe because they never were.

 

Mr. Pitts posed an interesting question in his column “How can you fix a deadness of the soul?”. I wonder about that too. His reply was that there are days that you can find the answers and fix the problems and then there are those times when the answer is that you must simply accept what is. The living dead wander among us. There is negativity and meanness in the world that cannot be overcome by simply handing out hope and understanding. There are no answers, just more questions.

 

It reminds me a bit of the musical by Steven Sondheim, Into the Woods. There is a scene in the second act where the Baker leaves the others to the mercy of the Giant who has invaded their land because he is overcome with grief over the death of his wife and the belief that his baby son would be better off without him. The Baker encounters the spirit of his recently deceased father who reminds him that running away is not the answer to any problem he sings,

 

Running away, go to it.

Where do you have in mind?

Have to take care.

Unless there’s a where

you’ll only be traveling blind.

Just more questions.

Different kinds.

 

There is meanness in the world. I don’t have to be a part of it. I have a where. Canada. A new life with Rob. And, there are different questions to be asked and answered more in tune with the forward momentum of my life now.

 

I am sure I sounded self-righteous and judgmental in my last two posts today. It was hard to keep a neutral tone, though I did try. There are many people there who are wonderful and thoughtful and positive. They are the majority actually, but like many majorities they are largely silent when meanness rears its head. They are cowed by its shrillness and reduced to its ugly tactics and means when they object.

 

I don’t have answers. I only know what is best for me. To move forward. To acknowledge the sadness when those moments arise and refuse to step back into the darkness.

 

*I left and returned a few more times before I just deleted my posts completely. You will only find my a sign in name and a handful of vague references.
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‘Til Death


"The Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranac...

Image via Wikipedia

Most married couples have this romantic expectation of spending eternity together. Buried side by side. Reuniting in heaven. It’s the kind of thing Hollywood makes movies about and Celine Dion warbles at us. But, what if there isn’t an eternity. No physical possibility of lying side by side. And heaven isn’t anymore real than the Garden of Eden?

Something I read on the YWBB got me thinking again about being buried. Someday. After I am dead. I have always maintained that my daughter should be the one to decide the final resting place of my earthly remains. Where I am will matter most to her after all. But, that was before Rob. Where I rest would matter to him as well now.

Dee’s father is buried in a little Catholic cemetery in a little town in Iowa where the bar that he played pool league out of is located. Will didn’t want his ashes scattered to the wind, even if I could have found a way to place him in the end zone at Heinz’s Stadium, because he didn’t want to be ashes. He wanted to be buried. He never specified where though he ruled out a few places most emphatically. Like Pella, where both of his parents are from and his father is buried. He hated Pella, and he didn’t much care for his father either. And Norwalk. The bedroom community he grew up in and considered a splat on the map for the most part – though I suspect he knew if he was buried too close to where his mother lived, she would cover his grave in death swag and bling. He loathed the idea of becoming a shrine like the ones you see along the side of the road.

Economically, a full burial was never an option I could promise him. It was partly luck that I learned of St. John’s and was able to afford to intern his ashes there. His name alone is on the headstone though there is room for mine, I suppose if I planned to stay in Iowa. But that was never the plan, even before Rob, I didn’t see myself here in another year or maybe two.

Will believed that a person’s soul went to heaven when he/she died. He believed that you met God. He told me once that he it would “suck” having to wait all those years for me because he knew I was going to be very old when I died. I told him not to worry that he would have my second husband to keep him company. He didn’t think that was funny, but I never could make him laugh. “You’re just not that funny, babe,” he used to tell me. Ironically, Rob holds much the same opinion of me.

I didn’t save any of Will’s cremains. I buried the container unopened. I literally buried it. With no money it was just me, Katy and the sexton standing over this little hole in the ground. The sexton, a very nice old man who had showed me his own plot the day I went to pick out Will’s, recited the “Our Father” and I placed the urn in the ground myself. I am a bit sorry now that I don’t have some of the ashes to take with me to Canada, but there is nothing to do about it now. As I told Rob when he asked, I am fairly certain there are laws against digging up your dead husband’s urn simply because you’re moving to another country, but to his credit, Rob offered to sneak out there with me under cover of darkness and help me dig Will up. Being arrested for unearthing my dead husband’s remains was not high on my bucket list, so I declined.

Truthfully, I feel only a sense of failure when I visit his grave anymore. It will actually be a relief not to feel obligated. In the beginning I went simply because it was something tangible to yell at or complain to or beg for help. Now it’s just a rock. He isn’t there. He was never there.

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