Rob and Me

Conversations about Life After Death … and Sex


We went without the new air-conditioner the other night as the weather has swung hard toward fall. With the a/c and the fans off, we can hear the house creaking and groaning again. The upstairs is far less prone to otherworldly knocking and since Rob and the girls took Shelley’s ashes for scattering in Kananaskis last month, the house has had a psychically empty feel to it.

“How do you want me to haunt you?” Rob asked as he crawled into bed and I nestled into the crook of his arm, my head resting on his shoulder.

“Nothing scary,” I said. “You know I wouldn’t appreciate being scared.”

“No knocking and rattling?”

“You’ll have to think of something else,” I told him. “Something I would appreciate.”

“How about cuddling then?” he said.

“Oh, I would like that. Ghostly cuddles would not be scary.”*

“Cuddles it is then,” he agreed.

“But I am wondering,” I said, “if you are dead and on the other side, what would Shelley have to say about you coming back here to cuddle me?”

“Buzz-kill,” he muttered.

Only we could have a rational conversation like this.

* I realize that it’s a matter of opinion.

A non-Meme Monday


I don’t feel like meme’ng today and couldn’t find anything worth the effort of stealing for that purpose anyway. Today I want to hear from you, my gentle readers.

I am rewriting the first chapter of my memoir. I have the chance to pitch it to an agent who represents a friend of mine and I need at minimum the first three chapters written and polished. I am going to write some version of a recent post on Will’s last months in hospice. And I just want to say, I appreciate those of you who took the time to comment and offer your take on my disclosure dilemma.

Whenever I question writing and trying to publish the memoir, I hear from people who say “Write it. I want to read it.” but they never really say why or what it is they think I will be writing about that intrigues them sight unseen.

Rob is semi-busily composing his chapter in his head. His first months after Shelley died, I think. But as he pointed out, our lives have been intersected only a short time in comparison to the length of our lives overall and certainly our first marriages. What makes our story worth knowing? Worth the time it would take to read?

I remember a snarky comment – not here – that I read directed at Rob and I shortly after we married that went something like,

“I don’t need to hear about relationships and marriage from two people who’ve been widowed less than a year and been dating and then remarried for about a total of  two minutes.”

And though I think that sometimes “seat time”  is important, it does not necessarily make one an expert either. I have run across more than a few widowed people who believe that it is years out that gives when insight and the moral authority to speak to the generalities and larger truths of surviving a spouse, and yet some of the widows I most admire for their choices, compassion and wisdom aren’t even as far along in the journey as I am.

And anyway, my experience is atypical in terms of circumstances and the order in which I went through things, so I don’t see it as modeling for anyone.

At the conference I attended in May, I had a chance to sit with a publisher from South Africa and I quizzed her on the marketability of memoir. She said that from a personal standpoint the reason people read them baffled her. She found books on surviving tragedy more depressing than uplifting and a little bit voyeuristic, not in a good way. 

I suppose I have things to say in terms of dating after spouse loss, remarriage, family blending. I hesitate to get all “how to” though. I prefer the facts and how it played out personally with people taking or leaving it as they will.

So, here I ask again, what would you want to know – bearing in mind that I am as likely to really tell you as not – in terms of my memoir. Don’t be shy. But don’t be a snark either.

A Memoir Discussion


With Rob on forced rest as he recuperates from the abscess, we have had time to sit and discuss ideas for the memoir I have been threatening to write since pretty much the dawn of this blog – in its first incarnation. Because I had always planned to use blog entries, emails, message board posts (my own only – so down boys & girls) and photos to tell some of the story, Rob writing some of the book seemed an natural outgrowth of the project.

We sat for quite a while Monday evening after dinner with tea and memories and tried to figure out where we should each begin which brought up the issue of back story. Just how much do we include and how do I – mostly – tiptoe around the fact that my perspective isn’t very flattering where Will’s family, my mother-in-law in particular, is concerned.

Rob is always amazed when I share in-law stories. Shelley’s family is a family with all the flaws and foibles that you would normally expect, but they are kind and gracious, and they pull together when it counts.

I ended up telling Rob the story of MIL’s evil during the last few months. The day Will was taken to ER from the nursing home, I was in Dubuque with Dee. My dad was undergoing surgery to stem the TIA’s he was having. There was a good chance he would die and my mother was crumbling under the pressure which wasn’t making DNOS’ job any easier. I wasn’t sure at all I would be able to get away. I had to phone in sick for one thing and I had only just started working at the high school I was at, and Will had been sick all week. He was spiking temps and had a terrible cough. The nursing home DR’s were telling me it was bronchitis, but in retrospect, I know it was the beginning of embolisms and pneumonia. However, the night before Dad’s surgery, Will was doing better and I felt safe to make a dash for it. My plan was to be back early on Sunday but for some reason that I can’t remember anymore – I was probably exhausted and slept in a bit – Dee and I didn’t make it back until late Sunday afternoon.

The answering machine messages went from

“Will is spiking temps. Do you want us to transport him to the hospital?”

to

“Since we can’t get a hold of you, we are sending Will by ambulance to ER.”

which was followed by several calls from the hospital.

When I finally got to the hospital with a frazzled 3 year old on my hip, I found MIL and her annoying friend had been there all day. MIL had my cell phone number and had apparently told the admitting DR that she didn’t know how to contact me.

Fast forward 4 days and she was the one who was at the hospital when Will was transferred to hospice. I went ahead and made the call on that over her objections and she was seething. I was in bed with a migraine. I had to call my BFF to get Dee to preschool because I couldn’t stand up and was basically crawling back and forth between the toilet and my bed until the meds kicked in around noon.

I get to the hospice to find that Will was settled in and MIL and her irritating side-kick were occupying the seats on either side of his bed which forced me to hover at his feet. I hadn’t been to work in four days and still had the nursing home to deal with as his stuff was still there and there was the little matter of the fact that they had called his mother when they sent him to the hospital instead of calling me on my cell – a number they had too.

I filled out paper work. I got into an argument with MIL about funeral arrangements of all things and by then it was time to go pick up Dee.

I came back after dinner to find an agitated Social Worker who ordered me to leave Dee with MIL and follow her as she needed to talk to me right now.

In a small office off the nurse stations, she informs me that she is disturbed by accusations MIL has leveled in my absence.

“She claims you abused him and regularly threw him out of your home when he was ill.”

WTF?

I quickly disabused her of her faulty information. And then I cried. And I never cry in front of people I don’t know. 

I could have banned MIL from hospice at that point. The staff quickly came to know MIL for who she was and not what she pretended to be. But they put a lot of pressure on me to keep things civil and to work on repairing the relationship with MIL for Dee’s sake. The fact that Dee had never had a relationship with her grandmother was a fact that I soon got tired of trying to explain.

The story from here goes from awful to simply more-so and ends with MIL having a tantrum the night Will died, and so she was allowed to sit with his body until the ambulance came to take him to the hospital for the autopsy* and I went home. I was tired. I was sick with strep that eventually gave me shingles of all things. And I was done.

Is this the kind of thing people really want to read? But as Rob pointed out, “our story” is a short one and some of what brought us to the point where we met on the widda board – which is a whole other nightmare to try and tell yet not tell – needs to be written to bring perspective.

What, if anything, would you want to know if you were inclined to be interested.

 

*I donated his brain and spine to a university that specializes in research about illnesses such as Will’s.