I found a picture of you.
Those were the happiest days of my life. Like a break in the battle was your part in the wretched life of a lonely heart
For the first bit of time after my husband died, I didn’t cry. I liken it to the way in which, when you are driving on the highway, if you shift into neutral, you keep cruising for a while. Momentum. But when I started crying, it opened the faucet. Even when I moved on to other things in life, still, I cried quite a bit.
He died on January 25th 2015. I would assess my past self as being in shock until October 2015, which would be the anniversary of when his cancer was deemed untreatable, and he was sent home to die. I was preoccupied with the medical emergencies and subsequent issues concerning the dog we had adopted in 2009, Sophie, who decided that would be a good time to have her own issues. The summer of 2016 was really the time when it all came home and HIT ME. My memory consists of the following: hours spent wandering the streets of my neighborhood walking with her, for want of what better to do with myself; sitting by the fire by my backyard firepit; and drinking endless bottles of scotch, crying and crying and crying. Walking, drinking, crying. September 2016 saw me ready to face the world again (a bit), and I took a few courses as an independent student at university during the fall semester. Winter passed. I’d gone vegan that fall and become immersed in that world. Winter went by, I decided to apply for full-time status in a program at school to begin next fall. But even though had I shifted into ‘next phase’, gone back to school, had a new focus… the loss did not fade. In fact most often I found myself crying in my car driving to campus. This would be fall 2017 already. Through that semester. Winter 2018. Summer 2018. Fall 2018. Winter 2019. I would cry and ask myself, when will I stop crying? It’s been years already. Will I cry forever? When do you stop crying? But then the thought in my mind – as if it was playing devil’s advocate, was do you want to stop crying? The idea that a day would come when the fact of Mike dying would not make my cry was horrifying.
I was 26 ½ when we met (Feb 1998), he had just turned 44. At 43, I became a widow. Seventeen years of my life. I could not avoid the knowledge that by the time I reached the age at which he died – 60 (61, barely - 61 and three weeks), I would have had as much time without him, 17 years, as I had with him. I did not want to ever get to a point where I would not cry. But I knew I would.
And now I have. I am 50 now. It has been 7 years. And I already do not cry.
This is worse. Not crying is worse than crying forever. Maybe. Maybe?
I’m noticing, as I try to write up a very different time-period of my life from memory, that so much of my life is gone… gone from memory, never got recorded somehow, lived and disappeared forever… But there are a few punctuation’s. Some scenes, as if from a film, that are recorded indelibly in memory. That retain their crystal real-life clarity. One of these is of one of the final days of his life. As I said, he was essentially sent home to die. After a massive effort at treatment - chemo, surgery, more chemo, a remission period, resurgence of cancer… that time period during which there was nothing to do but endure the pain and wait for his body to die, there occured the night I am remembering. He had a favorite chair, and I sat on the floor at his feet. I put my head on his knee. I looked up at him. I asked him, “who will take care of me now?” He said “I am taking care of you. I’m leaving you a big pile of money”.
To be clear, the definition of a big pile is rather nebulous. The same way beauty is in the eye of the beholder, a big pile could be many things. (For some people, $50k may be a big pile, for some $500k might qualify, and others might laugh at a million and say anything less than 5 or 10 million wouldn’t qualify as “a big pile”.) It was a big pile in his mind - obviously it was all the money had amassed in the course of his life. Which at 60, looking ahead to dying in the next month, he was leaving to me. The point, the point is that he would be gone.
I think that night must have been a few weeks before he died. Regardless of what the measure of the pile was, its irrelevant. He is gone. And for all that I have a nice bit of intellectual functionality in some areas, I am not what anyone would call street smart. He was a Major in the Armed Forces. I have a grand total of 11 years’ worth of undergraduate studies. I read a LOT. But adept at the ways of the world I am not. No amount of money can shield me from the world. What has transpired over the past two years leaves me convinced beyond any doubt that the world that I grew up in, whatever order was established after WWII and was (relatively) stable for about 75 years, is going or gone now. A tipping point has been reached.
My mother came up with a brilliant metaphor the other day. Mike was my anchor. And for a few years following his death, although I was adrift, the seas were calm. The world seemed stable. Streetwise I may not be, but I trust my own brain. I know something is not right about what is happening now. The past two years has shaken me to my core. As I’ve said in probably every previous post in this Substack, I cannot escape the deep sense that something is very wrong in the world. A storm is coming. My anchor is gone, my navigator is gone, and a storm is coming.
image of Sarah Connor at the end of Terminator; she stops to fill up with gasoline and a local tells her, A storm’s coming. I know, she says.
N.B. the title of this Substack piece is a lyric belonging to The Pretenders. Not my own wording. I owe them the artistic rights.
It’s been almost 13 years for me, and I still cry. When I catch a glimpse of a red tailed hawk, when I’m listening to his music, which he gave me and is now mine, when I see him in my children and grandchildren. The missing gets easier, but doesn’t leave. Blessings to you. May their memories be eternal.
To know a storm is coming is it's own kind of anchor. It is vastly preferably to being oblivious. I have been noticing a change in me lately, like what happened after the credit bubble burst in 2008, when my whole world reoriented, in a way that left me more awake and prepared for difficulty. It seems to me like 2007, when there was a lingering sense that not all is well, but most people assumed everything would work out ok. Of course they "kicked the can down the road" then, that can has turned into something like a dragon, and here we are, talking about it. Most people assume it will all work out, we just kick the can down the road again. We know better. That is something.