It is my father’s birthday today. Unimaginably, he is 76 years old, but like the rest of us, I’m sure there are times when he feels not one iota different from the handsome young man with a shock of black hair, smiling that smile at his beautiful girlfriend ~
I will send his birthday greetings via my mother’s Facebook page. He won’t want to admit that he likes the “new-fangled” social media – but secretly he loves it. After all, he can read his favorite passages from the Bible on my mother’s iPad or Google the answers to questions about the Japanese Maple trees he tends in his garden. Without question, he is one of those rural Derry men. Sure and simple, a craftsman like those who people the poems of Seamus Heaney.
Good with his hands and frugal, da’s artisinal handiwork is the kind that imbues the townlands he crossed on his motorbike. He tells me it began as a matter of economic necessity for them – the farming and the gardening, the turf-cutting and roof-thatching, the baking and dress-making all shaped by and shaping the place where they lived.
Older – and presumably wiser – I have a greater appreciation for their frugality and the way they fixed things. Today, knowing I haven’t fixed the dish-washer or the hole on the patio roof, I wish my da was just down the road. When he reads that I still haven’t done anything about the dishwasher, he’ll wish he was in Phoenix, to fix things for his grand-daughter and me, to paint the laundry room, to wind the Regulator clock, to make the windows sparkle with wads of newspaper and vinegar, mix cement to repair the brick mailbox again, or to show Sophie how to put windshield washer fluid in her car. Naturally, he won’t understand why I don’t understand his sense of urgency over why all these things need fixing. And naturally, I won’t understand why he won’t understand that they don’t.
The truth is that each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children will never experience something as minor as a flat tire or as heart-wrenching as the loss of those we love. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them.
With so many minutes and miles between da and me, it sometimes breaks my heart to have missed out on everyday conversations and cups of tea, all the bits and pieces of homespun wisdom from the heart of rural Derry, the gardening tips and home improvement projects that would have colored our lives had we lived just up the road. Indeed it is from too far away, relying heavily on photographs and phone calls, brown paper packages and greeting cards, texts and Facebook and Skype, that da has transformed into the grandfather he was so obviously always meant to be, eager for news of his grandchildren’s accomplishments that will be broadcast over hill and dale. Our virtual connection softens the blow of time and distance for him.
He’s sentimental, my da. Seeing the old black and white photos will bring a smile. I can imagine him standing over my mother’s shoulder, reading this with curiosity and anticipation twinkling behind his reading glasses. He will wonder aloud where in the name of God the past seven odd decades have gone and then, under his breath, a “Boys a dear,” before he falls silent, a lump in his throat . . .
Cleaning the leaves from the pool is now part of my Saturday morning routine. An exercise in futility, because as soon as I think I’m finished, a warm breeze rustles through the trees and Mexican honeysuckle petals and leaves cascade into the water like confetti. I “shock” the pool too, with a powder of chemicals, and for good measure, I add a capful of something blue. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure the pool isn’t shocked at all.
Sometimes I wish my husband had left behind a list of all the household chores he did, so I would know all the things that still need to be done after I do what used to be my share. I never bothered to take stock of his share which included pool maintenance and going to the grocery store to pick up those items I invariably forgot. He always took a list, from which he never strayed. I, on the other hand, just took my phone, knowing I would call and ask him to peek in the fridge and let me know if we needed more eggs or milk or tomatoes. Naturally, he’d always ask why I hadn’t brought a list with me, and I would remind him, “Because I have you!”
I know I need to back-flush the pool pump (whatever that means). I remember him doing so with some regularity, but I never took the time to find out why or how or when. I know I need to change the air-filters but I don’t know how often or where to buy them. Knowing my luck, it will necessitate an outing to Home Depot or the mom and pop hardware store up the street, places I avoid like the plague.
To familiar faces at the grocery store or the gas station, I look the same as I always did. They just don’t know that the rings sparkling on the fourth finger of my left hand no longer mean that I’m married. Nor do they signify that I’m a widow. Ostensibly, nothing’s changed. If you were to ask the people who know me as the woman who drops her daughter off at school every morning, everything is as it has always been. I leave the trashcan and the recycling bin out on a Monday night, so the man who drives the City of Phoenix garbage truck would have no reason to believe anything has changed in my house. I wonder if the mailman knows – surely he must – but still he delivers letters addressed to both my dead husband and me.
I have to hand it to the Victorians with their explicit rules and regulations for mourning so that everyone knew, based on outward appearances, the extent of one’s grief over the loss of a loved one. Were I one of the ladies of Downton Abbey, the Dowager Countess might give me permission to go “into half mourning next month and back to colours by September.” Except doing so would confuse even more all those people who already struggle over what to say to me.
At the grocery store last Sunday, I managed to annoy the woman behind me in the checkout lane. There I was, in all my glory, in the 15 items-only lane with an overflowing grocery cart. I was oblivious to my mistake, perhaps because I had been so distracted by the realization that I would no longer need to buy men’s deodorant or razor blades or V8 vegetable juice. Of the three of us, only Ken had liked V8.
Unloading the more than fifteen items from my grocery cart, I was interrupted by a loud sigh from the inconvenienced woman behind me. “You do realize, don’t you, that this is the fifteen items only lane?” Well, no, actually. Had I realized the error of my ways, I would have been in a different lane. I apologized profusely for delaying her check-out, even as my mind raced with thoughts of all the things they don’t tell you about becoming a widow.
They don’t tell you how guilty you’ll feel when you tell the bank to go ahead and erase his name from the checking account or when you strike certain items of the grocery list because only he needed them. I wanted to scream at her that my husband was dead, that he was much better at doing the grocery shopping because he didn’t stray from the list like I do, that if he had been with me, we would have been in the appropriate check-out lane, that she was lucky to have her husband with her and less than 15 items in her grocery cart. I could have been petty and asked her if the six-pack of beer counted as one item or six, but I didn’t. They were in the right lane. I was not. But had we been going about our business in the Victorian era, with me in “full mourning attire,” I bet she would have given me a break. She would have somehow known that my heart was breaking over the fact that I had almost put the V8 juice in the cart but then realized I wouldn’t be needing it. Ever again.
There is no manual for this. There is no way of predicting when the grief will take your breath away and send you scurrying behind dark glasses or to the bathroom at work so nobody sees you crying. There are no rules about when or if you should stop wearing your wedding ring. My husband and I didn’t have a wedding with the exchanging of rings. We just got up one November morning in 1991 and decided to get married. We didn’t even tell anyone. It was just something we wanted to do for us. On a Christmas morning, twelve years later, my husband gave me wedding and engagement rings that I have worn every day since. I wear only a little jewelry, so I cannot imagine looking down at my left hand and not seeing those rings sparkle. Since there don’t appear to be any rules – although I’m sure someone has an opinion on this – I think I’ll just keep wearing them.
The ring question, however, is the least of my worries. I’m more concerned about what happens next. Obviously, there will be no resumption of normal activity because whatever normal was, it isn’t that anymore. There was the way I was before my husband died. I was on solid ground. One day stretched into the next with predictable routines and rituals that appeal to a creature of habit like me. Now there is an uncertainty, a kind of dread, about tomorrow and the next day.
Until I had to do them myself, I underestimated the number of mundane yet essential tasks my husband performed just to keep the house functioning. For someone with a lousy memory, he still remembered to take the garbage cans out; to open the gate for the lads who take care of the yard and to lock it again; to water the flowers that bloom madly in mild winters; and, when to shock the damn pool. He knew when to change the air-filters and the oil and when to renew the registration of our vehicles. He always fed the hummingbirds and checked the mail and did the laundry, and reminded himself to do so on post-it notes that accumulated in the basket where he kept his keys. He picked our daughter up from school every single day, and he was obsessive about being on time. He never wanted her to come out of school and not see him waiting for her.
Unlike me, he was punctual and practical and always put things back where they belong. He had a good sense of direction and, not to belabor the point, but he was always on time. My mother always said you could set your watch by him. Before you think he was a saint, he wasn’t. There were things he didn’t do and wouldn’t do and things he wasn’t good at, but that’s where I came in. Between us and for us, we made it all work. I can’t make it work the way it used to, because “it” is finished. A new and different stage of life – without him here – has begun. I have no idea where it will take me. If he were here, he would tell me not to worry, that I will do what’s best for me personally and professionally. He loved me and believed in me and even when I made mistakes – and I have made many – he remained in my corner. He had a way of turning my tribulations upside down to expose the humor in them, and he was quick to point out when I was making a shit-storm out of nothing. If he can see me now, he might be laughing at some of my recent exploits.
There was the night last week when my daughter wanted a tuna sandwich. Simple, right? It would have been except the can opener broke. Naturally, I immediately told her to Google “what-to-do-when-the-can-opener-breaks,” which led her to ask if by any chance we had a Swiss army knife. No. We don’t. Then she found a Youtube video on how to open a can without a can opener and, somehow, between us, with an ice-pick and a bread knife, we opened that can and scraped out every morsel of tuna. The good news is that I had the wherewithal to add “can opener” to the grocery list and for good measure threw in a new corkscrew as well.
Then, there was the evening when I decided to water the plants in the back yard before having dinner on the patio with my daughter. I had bought a new five pattern spray nozzle for the garden hose and was doing a fabulous job soaking and spraying and misting, until I needed to turn it off. Simple. Except the nozzle would not cooperate. When I tried to turn the faucet off, the hose began to leak, sending water shooting into the sky, soaking me and everything else on the patio. My daughter came out to save me from myself, and tried to help, only to get soaked and somehow to make the water come out even more furiously. In the middle of this mini-fiasco, each of us drenched, she asked – and I am not making this up – if we should call an electrician. An electrician?? I would love to have been on the other end of that phone-call. Now, I realize this is one of those stories that loses a great deal in the telling, but suffice to say, we eventually turned off the water and had dinner, without the intervention of a plumber – or an electrician.
It’s not all slapstick. In exchange for pasta and wine, my friend Rhonda came over and taught me how to use an electric drill. I’m always hanging things on the wall and destroying the plaster, but hanging things on the external brick walls requires more than a hammer and nail; it requires a drill and a masonry bit (which I had referred to as a masonry bite giving everyone in the hardware store a good laugh). My first project was to hang funky junky letters that spell p-a-t-i-o – on the patio. I know. I didn’t need them – I know where the patio is – but I like them. And that would be my stock answer to the question Ken always asked about why I keep bringing junk home.
In all, I am just very busy. I’m preoccupied too, with thoughts of how I can mother my daughter in ways that make her feel as though has more than one parent. How can I be more dad-like when she misses fatherly advice not to mention his unique brand of humor. I can’t. I can only re-tell all the stories that prove how much he loved her and hope that something therein will lift her up.
If it’s hard for me to know what to say to my daughter, I can only imagine how tough it is for other people. They don’t know what to say, worried that whatever it is will be the wrong thing. I never knew about Being. A. Widow. until it happened to me. I don’t even know what to say to myself about it. It is the subject some people do not bring up; the massive elephant in the room. I want to tell them that saying the wrong thing is better than saying nothing at all, that ignoring the chapter of my life that just ended makes me feel a bit like the way I felt when the bank removed his name from the checking account. I just wish they would say his name every once in a while and ask me if I miss him. Do you miss Ken? What do you miss most? How long has it been now? It would be easy and less sad for me if I could just talk about him without making people feel awkward. Asking me about him would allow me to tell a story about him, something funny perhaps, like the time he drove to work with no pants on, because the dryer was broken and all his jeans were still in the washer. It was before 5AM on a hot Phoenix morning, still dark outside, so he drove down the freeway with his Levis hanging out the car window to dry. Yes he did. Thinking about it makes me laugh, and laughter is great medicine; it’s a gift.
One of the first gifts my husband ever gave me was a silver pocket compass. Having noted very early in our relationship my stellar capacity for getting lost – and notwithstanding the fact that I was then a novice driving on the American side of the road – my man intervened as he knew best. I hadn’t the heart to tell him that I was never one for “orienteering” or map-reading; I was more of a free-spirited “let’s-just-see-where-the-road-takes-us” kind of gal, a far cry from those students back home who earned Duke of Edinburgh Awards. WIth that kind of attitude, I got lost all the time. Devil-may-care on the open road frequently gave way to panic. I would fret over whether to turn left or right, then commit to turning right only to look over my shoulder and realize I should have turned left. And then I would call to report that I was lost. Again. Invariably, he would ask me if the sun was behind me or in front of me, somehow believing that if he helped me establish North, I would be just fine. Naturally, that never worked, and he always had to stay on the phone with me until I found a recognizable landmark. So for our first Christmas together, he gave me the lovely compass which is still in the blue velvet lined box it came in. I always thought it was too much like a piece of jewelry to be practical and, anyway, I didn’t really need it to help me find my way home. I relied on himfor that.
With factory-installed GPS navigation systems de rigeur and knowing there is most certainly “an App for that,” I am much better at finding my way around the greater Phoenix metropolitan area these days. It should be noted that if I have been somewhere at least eight times, I can get there without assistance. But until such times, I must count on either Google maps,Siri, my daughter reading directions from the phone that is smarter than us or those friends and colleagues who consistently “bring me in” by phone from my destination, where they are already waiting.
My daughter had never seen the compass. It was safe in a box with old birthday cards and Valentines from my husband. For her 16th birthday, I wondered what I could possibly give her to mark the occasion. What do you give to a teenager whose father died just three weeks earlier? For her birthday, there was not one thing I could go out and buy that would make her day any brighter or better. I don’t know why I thought of the compass, but it seemed perfect. In a rush – last minute, as usual – I had a local jeweler engrave the front of its case with her beautiful name, Sophie, and on the back, a perfect sentiment from W. H. Auden:
“He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest.”
He was my daddy for 5,809 days.
It is the shortest day of the year, when the sun will pause for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, outside Dublin, Ireland, they hold a lottery to decide who will get to experience the solstice the way it was intended by those ancient folk who built it over 5,000 years ago.
In its roof, is a little opening, aligned to the ascending sun. When that morning sunbeam shoots through the roof-box, it illuminates for seventeen minutes the chamber below, highlighting the geometric shapes carved into the stone walls. Out of 30,000 applicants in 2013, only 50, Irish weather permitting, will experience the solstice at Newgrange. It is a magic time, long before clocks and calendars and compasses measured time and the distance between us, signifying the turn towards a new year.
I am not ready for it. I am not ready for days that stretch out even longer than each of the thirty-six that have passed since the day my husband died. Thirty-six. I cannot bring myself to convert those days to weeks or to say it’s been over a month already. I’m not ready, not equipped to turn away from a life with him to one without him, even though the bank is clamoring for a certified copy of the death certificate so they can erase his name from the checking account and the mortgage, make things that used to be “ours” all mine.
From the outside, our house – my house – glitters like a Christmas card with its tree twinkling in the window and bit of whimsy – a painted wooden sign for Santa to please stop here. It’s no different than any other year, except everything inside has changed. In a pile on the kitchen countertop, sympathy cards mingle with utility bills and an accidental Christmas card from someone far away who didn’t find out until after she’d mailed it that Ken is dead. Recorded on the DVR are the unwatched episodes of “Alaska: The Last Frontier” and “The Daily Show” scheduled indefinitely. When he died, the television was on and tuned to the Comedy Channel. He would have appreciated the irony.
There are the movies he never deleted, like No Country for Old Men, probably his favorite after Goodfellas. He loved the book too, much to my chagrin – Cormac MacCarthy leaves me cold – and I think he may have even re-read it while he sat in the hospital waiting room for almost nine hours while they removed and reconstructed my cancerous breast. Still, it was much better reading material than any of that provided by the breast cancer industry people on how he should support his newly-diagnosed-with-breast-cancer-loved-one. Sophie made me watch No Country last week, fast-forwarding to his favorite frame in the coin-toss scene at the gas station when Javier Bardem‘s Anton Chigur tells the befuddled proprietor to call heads or tales even though he “put nothing up” . . . The candy wrapper un-crinkles on the countertop, the tension grows, and I’m hooked.
Yes you did. You’ve been puttin it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. You know what date is on this coin? …1958. It’s been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails and you have to say. Call it.
I can imagine Ken telling me he told me so. I wish I had watched it with him.
Most mornings now, I get in the car and play a guessing game before turning on the radio. Sophie plays along. We’ll look at each other in disbelief when a ‘Dad’ song comes on. Again. Never, in almost twenty-four years together, did his favorite tunes get such airplay. Even John Hiatt‘s “Slow Turning” came on the other day. I know Ken would have turned it up loud and stayed in the car until it was over. And he would have been mad if he’d missed his favorite line:
I’m yelling at the kids in the back, ‘cause they’re banging like Charlie Watts.
There’s a conspiracy at work. It reminds me of how it wasn’t until I was diagnosed with cancer that I began to notice the hundreds of pink ribbons and so many women with bandanas covering vulnerable, shorn heads.
I remember reading something about a woman who felt she had two distinct lives – the one before cancer and the one forever changed by the diagnosis – a turning point, by any other name. When I close my eyes to remember my own diagnosis, I can see myself get up and walk out the door, leaving behind the woman I used to be, offended by the nerve of that Breast Cancer Navigator telling my husband and me that I had cancer. Me?With cancer? Like an unexpected snow, the pronouncement fell from her lips and rendered me wordless.
I remember how she spoke. She was conspiratorial and quiet, talking to my husband in a knowing way that reminded me of the way we quietly speculate about the cause of a death when all the evidence points to hard living. On and on she talked, as if trying to soothe us even as she filled our ears with fear. So many scary words. Not to worry. She stressed that what we were hearing that day in her dimly lit office was not a death sentence.
Nonetheless, I heard a crack. The sound of a life altered that would have me pondering still and more how to handle poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question:
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.
I think it might.
I raged silently against cancer, indignant that it had barged into our lives, interrupting our plans to celebrate our daughter’s fourteenth birthday and Christmas. But we celebrated anyway. We decorated the house the way we always do. We had a party for Sophie and friends over. We remembered to laugh. We went to the Bob Seger concert on Christmas Eve. We scheduled the appointments, the blood-work and the biopsies, the mammograms, and the mastectomy. The healing began. Sort of.
And then, another Christmas, the cancer contained, the promise of a better year. Relieved and ready to celebrate anything, my parents came to Arizona to help us bring in 2013. We set off fireworks saved for a special occasion and for good luck, we designated my dark-haired husband “the first footer” after midnight. Oh, such sweet relief to shut the door against 2012, a year that had skulked in and scared us, each of us terrified by the cancer and what it might do.
For me – and the woman I used to be – cancer became The Scariest Thing in my life. Like every scary thing that comes to fruition, it had never previously crossed my mind. No. My mind was too consumed with all the things that most likely will never happen. All that worrying. Why? It is such a waste. But the cancer did happen, and I wanted everyone to feel as sorry for me as I did for myself and howl about the unfairness of it all. I wanted sympathy. I even wanted the kind you get from an Irish mammy over endless cups of tea with reminders that there’s always someone worse off. Always.
I remember my mother cursing the cancer for the thief that it is but she’d temper her remarks with reminders that I was so lucky to be married to the best man in the world. “You could set your watch by him!” she’d say, and then she’d jokingly ask him how in the name of God he had put up with me for over twenty years. Not known for my punctuality or having a place for everything and everything in its place, she regularly wondered aloud how I would ever manage without him since he waited on me hand and foot. Without him. In our house. Now that would be a scary thing. Me? A widow?
But in the wee hours of 2013 on a magical New Year’s Eve, I was still Ken’s wife, one half of an “us,” and I was looking ahead and happy. Like mischievous kids, we set off fireworks at the end of our street. My parents’ faces illuminated by sparklers bought one July 4th in San Luis Obispo, my daughter toasting us with cider that shone in one of the good Waterford crystal glasses, it was a magic time, and I remember thinking, believing “All. Is. Well.”
When everyone went to bed on January 1st 2013, I stayed up, savoring the silence of our slumbering house and the opportunity to consider Ted Kooser’s bang-on assessment of life, that it is “. . . a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away …”
It is just like that. And on this shortest day when the sun stops for a moment, I find myself in between two cars, aware that I still have some distance to travel. Forward. Ready or not. A slow turning. From the inside out.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.
A friend, one who knows, told me the other day that it will take at least a year before the sharp stone of grief will shift from the very center of my being. She told me not to make any big decisions until I make it through all the “firsts” – the first Thanksgiving without him, Sophie’s first birthday without her dad, Christmas and decorating the tree, New Year’s Eve and not-quite-legal fireworks at the end of our street, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, my birthday, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July and fireworks over Morro Bay, summer vacation (will I ever be able to face Morro Bay again?), his birthday, Halloween and pumpkin carving, our Wedding Anniversary, and finally, the first anniversary of his death. His death.
My. Husband. Is. Dead.
And then she said, well, she texted me, which is a good thing because I would hate to have forgotten it:
. . . after a while that pain will feel like a friend. And you will be afraid to lose it because that will mean you are better and over it and not missing Ken any more.
~ just one of the mind games that Grief plays.
This grieving business has brought out the best in people who care about me, beautiful expressions of sheer humanity. It has also brought out the worst – albeit unintentional – in people who don’t know me and don’t love me but who are paid to deal with me, to deal with death for a living, to know what to say to new widows, to know not to say stupid things. (Recent days have brought me back to when I first landed in cancer country, but if you’ve visited this blog before, you know I have beaten that horse to death).
From the people at the mortuary, those with years of experience in the funeral industry, who called me with the first-time-I’d-ever-heard-it-details of Kenneth H‘s last wishes as opposed to Kenneth M’s which I knew like the back of my hand, to the automated email telling me about the online obituary and memorial page even though my husband, a very private man, had been adamant about no obituary and no fuss; to the doctor whose office assistant left a voice-mail telling me that there was nothing else she could do for me because I take four medications already; and then, my husband’s primary care doctor who wanted me to place myself in his position, to take a minute and see where he was coming from, regarding the whole debacle over who should sign the death certificate – hisposition, if you don’t mind – and then my oncologist (whose assistant didn’t return my call for help until after it was too late to call my primary care physician) who wouldn’t prescribe anything for me because, you know, the physical pain of grief has nothing to do with cancer, now does it?
I wanted to scream that if we were still in South Derry, there would be a very nice doctor on the other end of the line, telling my mother he was sorry for my trouble and that he would sort us all out with enough Diazepam to help cope with the shock, the journey back to America, the jet lag, the grief, the pain, the immeasurable sadness. The same doctor didn’t know my mother or me; he was merely the doctor on call, a kind stranger, and he had a heart of gold.
In the twelve days since my husband died – my husband died – can you hear me now? – I have cried and cursed and ranted and raged. I have been irreverent and exhausted and delirious and despondent. I have even laughed about things that should make me cry. I went out today and bought lipstick. Honest to God. I actually got up, showered, put make-up on a haggard face and drove to a store the way I have done thousands of times before, and I bought a cheery lipstick called ninety-nine red balloons. Just like the song.
Floating in the summer sky
Ninety-nine red balloons go by
I also bought a too-expensive-even-though-I-should-be-watching-my-finances-now-that-I’m-a-widow autumnal centerpiece for a Thanksgiving table that will be missing a place-setting. At some point, I noticed I had already changed my Facebook status to “widowed.” I don’t like the ring of it one bit.
Some of these trifling things are great distractions – wondering who will show me how to back-flush the swimming pool or tell me what that even means, or set the timer on the sprinklers or develop that intuition my husband seemed to have about knowing when to change the oil, or rotate tires, or change air filters, or get gas (I always forget to get gas, usually I’m on “E” with the light on. I used to joke about how running on empty is my last stab at living dangerously). It may actually not be that funny.
In the past twelve days, I have learned how to comfort people whose husbands are still alive. I held in my arms the neighbor I don’t know but who brought cheery chrysanthemums to my door. She couldn’t stop crying about the tragedy that has befallen my daughter and me, and I had to get some Kleenex for her and nod that time will ease the pain. Hell, I even consoled the discomfited doctor after she realized that my situation was sort of “urgent” and that, yes, Xanax might help.
Of course Xanax helps. Just ask any of my family members back home, who have endured incredible pain and loss in recent years. At every wake, there’s always some kindly soul passing around the Diazepam the way we used to pass around a pack of cigarettes at the pub. No. I’m not saying that Xanax, Diazepam, or Ativan numbs the grief or takes it away or helps me avoid the reality of loss. It just dulls – briefly – the excruciating physical pain of the sharp stone of grief that’s stuck somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.
Here’s the thing. I was Ken’s wife for one day shy of twenty-two years. That’s a lifetime. When we met, we both knew something special was happening. I used to think we would have fit in rather handily on the cast of Cheers. Ken wasn’t Norm or Cliff, but he was a regular. When he came in to the bar where I was a bartender, I always had a beer ready for him. I would position myself behind the bar, right across from him and nonchalantly wrap silver-ware in paper napkins, exchanging quips and innuendoes with him without making eye-contact, because when I did, I blushed.
A bit of a cliché I was a twenty-something Irish immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and still had a broad Antrim accent. As such, I was the main source of entertainment for the men who had just come off the day-shift; they were easily enchanted by what they considered an Irish brogue, and the more alcohol I served up, the more they wanted to tell me all about their Irish roots. I often dismissed them as “Plastic Paddys,” which they considered a compliment. Now, this was before microbreweries were de rigueur, but I was still overwhelmed by the variety of beer in variously colored cans – yellow for Coors, the Silver Bullet Lite version, blue and white Miller Lite etc The regulars indulged me, “Hey Irish,” they’d beckon and to help me out, they ordered rounds of beer by color: “Gimme three silver bullets, one red and blue, two white and blue, and two yellow.” Ken said I always charged $11.50 a round, but none of them minded.
Ken wasn’t fictional Sam Malone, Cheers owner erstwhile recovering alcoholic and former Red Sox player with a little black book full of women’s names and numbers. Ken didn’t need a team of writers, and I never met a woman who didn’t love him; and, I wasn’t Diane Chambers (well, maybe just a little) but the chemistry between us was undeniable and made up for the lack of compatibility. For almost two years, we denied what was so obvious to everyone else. He loved that I loved music and that I could give as good as I got. I remember he was very impressed when I sneaked some of his favorite tunes on to the bar’s jukebox, a contraption that could be described as country thunder. When the bar-owner wasn’t paying attention, I added Neil Young’s “Ohio,” and The Rolling Stones “Sympathy for the Devil,” Bob Seger’s “Night Moves,” Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” and the Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Admittedly, I was a bit thrown when Ken told me one of his favorite songs was “All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards. He didn’t think I’d remember, so it pleased me no end when I went with the other bartender to a wonderful warehouse packed with 45-inch singles. It was our job to replace some of the records in the jukebox. To stay on the owner’s good side, I’d throw in some Hank Williams, and I never interfered with Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” – nobody in their right mind would get rid of “Crazy” – but every new record I added was for Ken. And he knew it. Bob Seger’s “Sunspot Baby” would start, he’d wink at me and then complain to the owner about how the new Irish waitress was ruining the jukebox.
The banter and badinage flew like electrical sparks between us, and we made those around us laugh and wink knowingly. We were the entertainment, and everybody knew we belonged together. Even before we did. I imagine had Dr. Frasier Crane been a regular, he would have had this to say about our performance:
“I know, I know. Now you’re going to deny it. Even though it’s ludicrously obvious to everyone around you, you two will go on pretending it’s not true because you’re EMOTIONAL INFANTS. You’re in a living HELL. You love each other, and you hate each other, and you hate yourselves for loving each other. Well, my dear friends, I want no part of it. It’s time I just picked up where I left off. It’s time to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. So I’ll get out of here so you can just get on with your denial fest.”
And then one day, Ken confessed. I always loved that he broke first. It was January 13, 1990, which I always consider our official anniversary. I ran outside to give him his change. After all, $11.50 for one beer was a bit much, even by my standards. When he had me outside and alone, he looked right at me, told me he was crazy about me, that he always knew I had been out there, and that he had almost given up waiting for me. Quite a pick-up line, but it worked. Then he asked me to plant a kiss on his lips, and I reverted to being coy and strategic. But that didn’t last.
Within a matter of months we had moved in together. He brought nothing from his previous life, just a lot of love for me, and I dragged the collected Shakespeare, my Seamus Heaney poetry books, my collection of Life and Rolling Stone magazines, and a lot of crazy love for him. Crazy love – like the kind Van Morrison sings about, especially with Ray Charles:
Yes it makes me feel righteous, makes me feel whole
Makes me feel mellow down into my soul
While I never convinced him that Van Morrison was, in fact, God, I managed to turn Ken on to tennis, and we watched Wimbledon and the US Open on a tiny black and white TV-radio-alarm clock combo in a tiny apartment that amounted to a shack in the back of an old ranch house in central Phoenix. Then one day when we were watching TV, I said, “Let’s go get married.”
I got out the phone book (remember those?) and found a wedding chapel in an old neighborhood in west Phoenix. The preacher reminded me of one of those old men talking to Ray Kinsella about Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams, looking at us out of the bluest eyes. We asked a stranger to witness the ceremony, and we vowed to each other that we would stay together in sickness and health. Health is easy, but sickness is a bitch. Madly in love, we had no reason to suspect that breast cancer (mine) or aneurysms (his) would move in and turn things upside down more than once and make us resent our own bodies. Thus, we filled up that ordinary November morning with a time-honored succession of extraordinary promises. We couldn’t stop smiling. We didn’t even tell anyone. Young and wild, it was as though we had eloped to Gretna Green. I think we probably even went to work afterwards. Along with all the other rituals we performed every day, the getting married was just something we could have done any day, at any time. No fanfare. No hoopla. Completely ours. Private.
We loved being answerable to only one another, doing whatever we wanted to without having to worry too much about other people. I remember one night when I was homesick for the smell of the sea. I just wanted to stare out at the ocean which seemed another world away from the desert southwest. It was a Friday afternoon, and we had nothing else to do. Still years before Sophie was born, we got in the car and started driving. No map. No GPS. No specific destination. Just ocean. That night, we were in Los Angeles, and I was inhaling the sea air. The next evening, we were in Pismo Beach, strolling along the pier. As if to put America’s vastness to the test, I asked him to keep driving. Eventually, we stopped by a lighthouse where we balanced the camera on the car, set the self-timer, and took a picture of ourselves, windswept and clinging to each other, completely unaware that a decade later, we would stand once again on that very same spot on the road to Monterey, smiling for a picture that would be taken by our little girl. Then, for a decade, San Luis Obispo County – Morro Bay – became our family’s vacation spot.
We created hundreds of lovely little rituals and routines over the years. My mother always said I could set my watch by Ken. True. I always knew where he was, what he was doing, how much he loved me, how proud he was of things I had done professionally. He was my greatest cheerleader and the person who once told the young me who used to get her feelings hurt easily and who cared too much about what other people thought, that she needed to grow some hard bark, because she would need it. Well, Ken, I need it now. I know you didn’t want me to harden; you wanted me to be tough. But, it is just so hard to be tough enough to fully absorb the blow of your death, to look up and expect you to walk in with another cup of coffee for me and ask what I’m blogging about and then wonder aloud – with a wry smile – if the woman I once was would be coming back any time soon. Each of us wrestled with the truth that cancer changed me, as a brush with mortality would. It wasn’t bad or good. It just was.
One of our first arguments was over what it was he was thinking about. We never argued about that again. It went something like this:
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
Are you sure?
Yup.
So what are you thinking about?
Nothing.
Well, it must be something. I can tell. Are you mad at me? Is it about me? (I mean, isn’t it always about me?) Well, can you at least tell me what it begins with?
No baby. Just private thoughts. Private thoughts, my honey.
Private thoughts. Well, you can imagine how well that went over with someone who has to know the inner details, the finer points, the “how are you really feeling” details about everything. But he never told me. And the strangest thing happened. I realized over the years that we all have private thoughts, secrets never to be told, things that stay deep within us – not bad, necessarily, just private thoughts. Most people just wouldn’t say that out loud. But Ken did. He said it the same way he once told the cashier at a Pep Boys, after he’d paid in cash for new windshield wipers, that she couldn’t have his address. Not that he was a conspiracy theorist; he just hated his name and address being placed on some list only for it to be sold to someone who would profit from it. Annoyed because he was just not cooperating the way most customers did, the young cashier’s jaw dropped when Ken looked at her, deadpan, and with a twinkle in his eye, said quietly, “I just can’t do it. I can’t tell you where I live. The cops are after me.” And I had to walk out of the store because I was laughing so hard.
Then I learned to cook. It was before Food TV Network, and I relied on an eclectic group of chefs on PBS so there was lots of Cajun cooking going on in the early years. Our first Thanksgiving Dinner together was a foreign affair as far as I was concerned. Never mind the Food TV Network, this was before the Internet and Google, so I had to go out and buy a holiday cookbook from Williams and Sonoma to learn exactly what went into a Thanksgiving Dinner and what this quintessential American tradition was all about. I’m sure like most Northern Irish folk, I would have the natural tendency to ask, with just a touch of martyrdom “Sure what would we have to be thankful for?” And then there would be some hand-wringing and worst-case scenarios about what happened to your man whose wife took up with somebody else, or the state of unemployment or Maggie Thatcher and terrorists, or The Troubles in general, and the brain-drain with all our young people like me leaving for America, Australia, New Zealand – following the sun.
A quick study, I was soon fixing turkey and all the trimmings like a pro. I even made pumpkin pie and candied yams (nothing from a can), and amber colored side-dishes and butternut squash soup, fare that would never have shown up at a fork supper or tea after a Harvest Home service at a country church in Northern Ireland. As if there wasn’t enough food to feed a small country, I was compelled to assert my Irishness with Brussel sprouts which Ken hated and roast potatoes and, for good measure, a Pavlova or a sherry trifle for desert – I could only make sense of Thanksgiving Dinner if I considered it an early Christmas Dinner. As if I’m not confused enough about my cultural identity.
For tomorrow, I have ordered a turkey breast dinner. Just the breast, because that means there will be nothing to carve and no carcass for soup. Ken always carved the turkey, and he loved my turkey-noodle soup. Oh, how could I possibly brine and roast a turkey without Ken here to do the basting and the carving and telling me not to put apples or anything sweet in the stuffing? I always put apples in the stuffing. Why not? And when he wasn’t looking, I basted the turkey with maple syrup. I always add marmalade to the yams too and slices of clementines or even the syrup from cans of mandarin oranges. If it’s not sweet, what’s the point?
My parents are here, and already I am dreading the day they tell me it’s time for them to go back home to Castledawson and for me to resume living again. I hope they will stay for Christmas. My lovely irreverent friend in Tempe who hails from Ballynahinch and who knows about grief (as she will tell you herself, she is hands-down the winner in “The Sad Contest”) is going to bring a Pavlova and maybe even some currant squares and custard. And my mother will put the kettle on for us and make tea with Barry’s teabags and bring out a plate of Hobnob biscuits. I will complain if she puts too much milk in it, because I like a good County Derry cup of tea the way my Granda did, so strong “you could dance on it.’ Our meal tomorrow might feel a bit like a Northern Ireland Christmas dinner from days gone by. I just hope I remember to eat.
We have lots of food in the fridge – baskets of sympathy from near and far from heartsome people who ache for us. I don’t know what to say to them, other than thank you. And, my gratitude is heart-felt and genuine. But if I’m honest, I hate that it is these strange new gestures I am thankful for this year. It would be so much easier to give thanks that the turkey’s not dry.
Oh, Ken. Why did you have to die? There was something I wanted to tell you. It was important.
It doesn’t matter. By now, I have to believe you have run into Lou Reed, that the two of you have scored some really good weed from J.J. Cale, and you are feeling no pain. And maybe Seamus Heaney will raise a glass to you.
