Turning the Page

I know it's been a long time--nearly a year--since my last post, but I never wanted this blog to be a mundane account of day-to-day events.  When I look back to the beginning, the posts were fast and furious (38 the first year), but became less frequent over time (eight last year).  I suppose that as I began to heal and adjust to my new life, I didn’t feel as much of a need for an outlet.   

So, let me catch you up! I started a new job on July 1^st.  Another major development: anticipating my new job, I gave myself a three week deadline before my start date to get Bunny’s former office cleaned out and turn it into my new home office.  Gawd!  That was a massive undertaking!  Every evening after work, I’d head in with boxes and garbage bags, ruthless in my disposal efforts.  My mother would have been so proud!

The Salvation Army came by once, a trash hauler came by twice, and 50+ bankers’ boxes of books, several large containers of charitable donations, and 70 contractor’s clean-up bags on, I conquered the room that I’d avoided for so long.  Within a week’s time, I painted the walls, laid a new floor, and redecorated it just the way I wanted it.  

             

So, after much angst and several false starts, I made the room my own.  Of course, there were moments of sadness.  I would find notes Bunny had scribbled or photos he’d hoarded, and I would melt with sorrow that he’d been so sentimental.  Then I’d inevitably find a pile of grocery store receipts from 2006 and snap out of my tears.  I don’t use the room nearly as much as I’d like, but redoing it was a necessary and important step to moving on.

The drawbacks of my new job: I don’t get to see my beloved Atlanta friends anymore, and the commute to downtown Tampa. The county’s infrastructure just wasn't meant to handle the amount of traffic that goes from the extreme north of the county into town every day. Before school started, the issue wasn’t so noticeable, but since then, I’ve been spending a minimum of 45 minutes on the road every morning.  Anyone who’s ever ridden shotgun with me can just imagine how much I love bumper-to-bumper traffic. NOT!

I wanted to get a condo when we bought this house, a little over 13 years ago. Bunny, however, liked having a house with a yard, even though he never ventured into it. One of his arguments was that the resale value on a house was better than with a condo.  He also chose the subdivision where we lived, which is well-known in the Tampa area, but is fairly remote.   Bunny worked in St. Petersburg—well over an hour’s drive, each way.  He didn’t mind the long commute, though, because he was a big fan of audio books.  Occasionally, he would mention something he’d “read,” and I’d tease him that audiobooks didn’t count as reading, because even the cats could claim to have read something that way.

After my first year as a Wideaux, I decided I needed to be closer to civilization.  My plan was to find a new job, then work there six months before I started looking for a condo nearby.  My distaste for the traffic situation expedited my timeline: I was condo-hunting by mid-September.  After several weekends of searching and negotiating on two that didn’t pan out, the third condo I put an offer on will be mine just before Thanksgiving.  With some luck (and a little remodeling), I should be moving downtown by the end of the year.

No news on the dating front, but hopefully that situation will improve once I move. It's too hard (for me, anyway) to find single men in the suburbs. My last foray into online dating was such a disaster that I abandoned it within about 10 days. For now, I’m focused on my career, my granddaughters, and my move.   The girls are growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with them sometimes.  Trinity and I talk about Bunny often, and I think it helps us both to keep his memory alive.  I feel sorry for Sarita that she won’t be able to remember what a loving grandfather she lost.

My plans to move haven’t been all sunshine and roses: my excitement has been tempered by sudden fits of crying.  I suppose it’s natural to feel torn about moving.  After all, this was the last house Bunny and I bought together, and the last house he lived in.  We had many wonderful times here, and, towards the end, some very sad and difficult days.  I expect there will be more tears before it’s all said and done, especially since I’ve hit the dreaded winter months.  In the end, though, the move will be good for me.  Plus, I’ll have more new things to write about! 

The Ninja and the Tiger

It’s been too long since my last blog post.  My last one was about resignation and moving on, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet lived up to the goals I set in it.  I nearly breezed through Halloween, with only occasional moments of sadness on Bunny’s favorite day of celebration.  During Thanksgiving week, rather than sitting around mourning the holidays past, I went to Louisiana and had a great time visiting family and friends.  I kept Hanukkah in the holiday rotation, and caught up on my candle lighting when I got home.   I was doing well enough emotionally that I figured December would be a piece of cake.  Wrong!

This year, I at least mustered enough courage to celebrate Christmas.  I got a tinsel tree, something I’ve wanted since I was a child coveting my maternal grandmother’s.   It was gorgeous!  That’s as far as the decorating went.  I couldn’t bear to set up the manger, which had seen Bunny and me through many Christmases, so I gave it to Corey.   The stockings never came out of their box.  In other words, except for a few tree ornaments, I couldn’t make myself put out any reminders of what Christmas used to be. 

I was well into the second week of December when depression hit me like a freight train. If you’ve never suffered from depression, thank your lucky stars.  It runs in my family, so I’ve had a lot of first- and second-hand experience with it.  I can’t point to any particular event that triggered it, but that’s the beauty of depression—you deal with a series of small set-backs and think you’re getting by okay.  Then one day, you realize that all these little frustrations have secretly banded together to build into a big dark snowball that engulfs you before you even saw it coming.  Surprise!

By the end of the month, I managed to get back on course, just in time for the second anniversary of Bunny’s death, January 1^st.  Surprisingly--given the hellish month December had been--I had a fairly tear-free day of quiet reflection.  I think that by that point, I was emotionally healthy enough to be so over the incessant sadness. 

And now, another second anniversary looms: two years ago tomorrow, my mother died. I’ve said before that with her death so soon after Bunny’s, I feel like I hadn’t fully mourned her loss.  I made up for that lost grief in December, which may be one of the reasons the second Christmas was so much harder than the first without the two of them. 

I also starting wondering, for the first time, whether Bunny’s loss affected her to such an extent that she couldn’t bounce back from her own health problems.  She was in the hospital within days of Bunny’s death, and unfortunately, with all the trauma that preceded her admission, I don’t remember the substance of any conversations we had.  I don’t even remember whether we had them at all, although  my sister Julie assures me that we did.  Maybe one day I will recover those memories.

I’ve written so much about Bunny that even people who didn’t know him probably have a good idea what he was like.  I haven’t written nearly as much about my mother, until now.  She was a true Gemini, a study in contrasts.  By turns, she could be smart as a whip or dumb as a doornail, but usually the former.  She could be sweet as honey or fierce as a tiger, but mostly somewhere in between.  She rarely kept her opinion to herself but could also be maddeningly secretive.

Reading that description, I see a lot of my own traits, or variations of them.  Most of all, Mama was resilient.  I really don’t remember interacting with her very much as a young child. I hung around with my father, almost like his shadow.  Then, suddenly, he was gone.  I was nine years old, living with a parent I barely knew.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned many lessons from how she handled the fallout from her unexpected divorce.

At the time, no one else in my class had parents who were divorced.   I knew cousins whose marriages had broken, but they were city folks.  In our rural town, we were very much a topic of conversation.  She didn’t seem overly affected by being the talk of the town, but I’m sure that’s because she was putting on a poker face for her children.  Lesson: don’t be bothered by what people say about you—live your life.

Other than the first day or two, she didn’t mope around.  She had too much to do to let it slow her down.  Not that she didn’t give voice to what she was feeling, because she did, for what I thought was way too long.  But the lessons I learned were from both her positive and negative modeling: suck it up and deal, and don’t hold a grudge. 
  

When they were married, my father did all the home maintenance.  I don’t think my mother had ever so much as changed a light bulb, because I remember the first time she did it.  If she’d built a rocket from scratch, she couldn’t have been more pleased.  I also recall her doing some kind of minor repair that would have taken Daddy two minutes.  She could have asked my paternal grandfather for help—he lived right next door—but she didn’t.  Screwdrivers and wrenches in hand, she cursed and cried and banged around for hours, until she finally succeeded.  In the process, she taught me to never give up, no matter how frustrating or impossible the task seems.   She also taught me that I didn’t need a man to rescue me from a difficult situation.

Finally, there was the most memorable lesson, an episode she would recount with glee for the rest of her life. When I was about 13, my sister Julie and I were playing down the road with our neighbors, at a spot we called The Mountains.  This was, of course, when dinosaurs roamed and kids did not have cell phones and they only came inside when it was too dark outside to see.   There was a sand pit down the road—a cliff of crusty sand about 14 feet high with a patch of soft sand at the bottom.  That sand stretched for about another 12 feet and ended at a small body of water.

We didn’t even go near the water—it wasn’t the attractive part of The Mountains.  The fun part was climbing to the top of the cliff and jumping down to the soft sand below.  Sounds really low-tech, I know, but I’d still do it today if I could.   Mama knew where we were that day, because she had plans later and needed to know where to find us when she got ready to leave. 

We were having fun when suddenly, our grandfather appeared at the top of the cliff, irate and screaming that there was “forty feet of water.”  When my step-father Donald first heard the story, he burst out laughing, because he knew there was no way the water was more than six feet deep. Pops’ tone made it clear that we were in big trouble. Our grandparents’ house was between The Mountains and our house: Julie and I were to stop there so he could beat us.  Yeah, those were the days when you could still beat children.

As we got on our bikes, I told Julie and the neighbors I had no intention of stopping at Pops’ house, and suggested we all pedal as fast as we could past it.  Julie will deny to this day that she knew beating was in store.  Maybe she blocked it out, but Pops couldn’t have been more clear in his intentions, and this wouldn't be the kind of beating where you got to pick your own switch.  Anyway, she stopped and I didn’t.  I pedaled furiously all the way home, threw down my bike, and ran screaming into the house.

Mama was in her bathroom putting on her makeup and came out to her bedroom, expecting some disaster.  I started to tell her what happened, when my grandmother came into the room, quiet as a Ninja.  Some backstory: my mother and paternal grandmother had never argued with each other before.  My grandmother was a saintly creature who never even raised her voice.  She had a perfectly keen intellect, but she was from “the man is the king of the castle” school.  She would follow any and all of Pops’ directives, no matter how flawed.  Also, I believe that, at the time, my grandmother was my mother’s supervisor at work.

Grandma explained that we had been playing in “forty feet of water” and that Pops had already whipped Julie and that it was my turn.  My mother was not as soft-spoken as Grandma.

“No one is going to beat THIS CHILD!” she roared.  Note: if I’d been doing something wrong, she’d have been the first in line to beat me.  “I knew where they were playing.”

“But they could have drowned,” Grandma retorted.  Passive-aggressive implication: what kind of mother lets her kids play where they could drown?

“If they were playing in the water, then why aren’t her CLOTHES WET?” Ah, logic!  Grandma couldn’t muster a comeback to that one.  She left the room and the house.  Or so we thought.

Mama returned to her makeup application, bitching loudly about my controlling grandparents always in our business and talking about moving to the next town over.  Next thing we knew, Ninja Grandma had reappeared.  Not a word was said about the snarky comments; she had come to collect me to go to a nursery while Mama was out.  The lesson that day: stand up to authority if authority is wrong.

So tomorrow I will celebrate all the things that Mama taught me, good and bad.  I’m sad that she’s no longer with us, and that I didn’t have just a little more time with her after Bunny died.  But I know she’s watching over us, and that gives me comfort: I have a tiger in my corner.

Changing Seasons

A few months ago, I reached a new level in my journey: resignation.  It probably sounds strange, but it took me that long to really, viscerally become resigned to the fact that my life was no longer about being part of a marital team. For instance, I noticed that instead of saying we—like “we moved from Louisiana to Georgia”—my accounts were taking on a more single perspective—“I moved from Louisiana to Georgia.”  The first time I caught myself doing it, I felt a tad guilty for leaving Bunny out of the story, but I felt less so as time wore on.  

Maybe what I call resignation is really the acceptance level of grief, but I don’t think acceptance adequately describes what I feel.  Can a person ever truly accept the loss of a spouse, or of any loved one?   A person can, however, become resigned to the loss, realize that life goes on in spite of it, and move forward as best as she or he can.

My grandparents’ home was a small, wood-framed affair, with two bedrooms and one bath.  They lived there for about 40 years.  It lacked central air conditioning for the sweltering Louisiana summers and was so drafty that the space heaters provided little warmth during the freezing winters.   Even with its shortcomings--or perhaps because of them--twice every year, my grandmother redecorated her house.   These home improvements usually involved enlisting my sisters and me to move the furniture around.  I also recall painting the kitchen cabinets several times over the years.  Another way she changed the environment was by getting new bedspreads or making rugs. 

Regardless of how much I complained at the time, Grandma’s s redecorating habits took root in me.  Over the years, Bunny and I continuously made changes to our homes.   His specialties were furniture placement and floral arranging, while mine tended to fall on the more extreme side of environment-changing, like painting and tiling. 

Up until yesterday, the living room looked the way it did when Bunny was alive.  In other words, by Grandma’s standards (and mine), it was long overdue for a change.   In my fairly new resigned state, I decided that I would redo the room the way I wanted it, since I no longer had to make compromises.  I started with the pictures.  Bunny loved to have framed photographs on every surface, and it seemed a harmless décor choice.  I like a more minimalist approach; now, there are two clean-lined framed photos in my living room.  Just making that simple change opened up the room a lot more.  Plus, it’s now going to take about half the time to clean the room as it did before.

I also eyed a book shelf that was taking up a lot of space.  I didn’t need something so big, and I had a smaller one in the house that would be just perfect.  The problem was, the perfect book shelf was in Bunny’s office, which I still haven’t gotten around to cleaning out.   I’ve studied up on this particular problem, and it seems I’m not alone: people who don’t absolutely have to clean out a departed’s special rooms generally don’t do it for a very long time, if ever.  There’s absolutely no logic to it; you just feel like cleaning out the room is like erasing your loved one, piece by piece.

I have, however, made several attempts at cleaning it, or at least going in it. I’ve mentioned it before—Bunny was a hoarder, and I tried to keep the majority of his “collections” confined to his office.   The first time I went in it was last summer when my sister Julie was visiting.  I needed  a DVD player, went in to get it, and came out a sobbing mess.  The clutter alone sends my rabid claustrophobia into overdrive, but last summer my grief, itself, was still fresh.

Then, last fall, Trinity and I took a stab at cleaning it.  We got about three feet in and made great progress, but I was slowly becoming unglued.  I tried to hold them back, but fat, hot tears trailed down my cheeks.  Trinity has an amazing sense of empathy for anyone, much less an eleven year old, and she patted my arm gently.

“It’s okay,” she said.  “Poppi would want us to do this.”  How sweet she is!  I nodded but laughed to myself, because I knew how Bunny hated people touching his stuff.  The last thing he’d want us to do was clean out his office.   Even before cancer, it used to make him extremely anxious if I so much as moved something of his.

“I know where every single thing is,” he’d say, waving a hand over stacks of papers, magazines, and God-only-knows-what-else.  “If you move it, I’ll never be able to find it again.”

Since then, I’ve only done little bits at a time when I had a chance.  In other words, most of the room is still like he left it.  I know that he’s no longer here to be upset that something’s been moved, but in the office-cleaning-out game, emotions still beat logic every single time.

Now, though, with my hereditary redecorating traits beckoning me like a siren’s song, I am making more frequent forays into the dreaded office.  Yesterday’s mission included emptying the bookshelf I wanted and boxing its contents.  Emboldened by my dry-eyed success, I brought out a plastic tub of miscellany and sat on the floor to go through it. 

One of the quirky parts of Bunny’s collecting was that there was no reasonable order to any of it.  A Publix receipt from 2007 would sit on top of a paper with important information, like account numbers.  In other words, I can’t just dump boxes and drawers into garbage bags, because there’s no telling what important information I’m throwing away.

So as I was going through this hill of paper yesterday, I found a Post-It Note with a phone number and an e-mail address.  It was the contact information for Bill, a co-worker from Atlanta.  John and Bill had worked together for years in the IT Department at the same hospital where I worked.  Bill was a little older than we were, and had a humorous, gentle, sweet personality.   I used to love to go up and visit them on my breaks, because they always seemed to have so much fun.  They’d stayed in touch over the years, because Bunny would tell me when he’d spoken with Bill.

I’d last spoken to Bill in December of 2011, when Bunny began his series of steep health declines. In all the shuffle of the day, I later lost his number, but I thought about him often.  So yesterday, I had the missing information in my hands, and called Bill.

He asked how I was doing and how Joey and the kids were doing, and we made small talk.  Then he told me how much he’d enjoyed working John, and everything he’d learned from him.  His words were so reassuring and kind that they made me cry.  Fortunately, Bill is training to be a hospital chaplain, so he’s got a  good handle on dealing with grief. He assured me that John would want me to move on, even if that meant making a bonfire with his stuff. Talking to Bill helped me see that all these things can disappear and Bunny would not care. Bunny’s on to newer and better things, probably making new collections in the afterlife.     

Then he told me a story about how Bunny was doing his computer savant stuff, and Bill asked how he knew everything he did.  “He said, ‘I have a highly developed Pineal Gland.’”  I laughed so hard: it was a classic Bunny response.

I hadn’t planned to cry when I talked to Bill, but his admiration for John was so sincere, and Bill was from a time in our lives were we were young and relatively carefree and very, very happy.  So I cried like a big baby.  It was just so overwhelming to talk to someone we’d both known and loved, and hear that he’d felt the same way about us.  I told Bill that I thought Bunny had guided me to his number, and he agreed.

So now, with each new foray into THE ROOM, I should get stronger and stronger.  For right now, THE ROOM sits menacingly quiet, like a toddler who’s up to something.  I’ll plan clean-outs for a minimum of 30 minutes a night, and before I know it, I will have conquered it.  I’ll have a whole new room to decorate, and Grandma will excitedly smile down from Heaven 

Cat-astrophe

I thought that I’d gone through all the “firsts” since Bunny died, but there was one I overlooked: veterinary crises.  I suppose it’s a testament to my cats’ good health that that none of the four needed major medical care in the past year and a half.   That streak was broken Saturday evening, when I rushed one of my babies to the emergency vet.

My cats are Bono (male, aged 11), Kieran (male, 8), Sierra (female, 5) and Shiloh (female, 5).   I’ve had cats all my life, and though Bunny had never had a cat until we married, he loved them as much as I did.  The most we ever had at a time was five, when we lived in Georgia.  In May of 2008, the last of our Georgia cats (Penelope) died.    After a few months, we made a trip to the local animal shelter to look for a baby girl.  I’m not averse to adopting older cats—Bono was a year and a half when we brought him home—but I’ve found that the newcomer is better accepted if he/she falls at the bottom of the chronological totem pole. 

Even though Bono was considered older (by shelter standards) when we adopted him, he was a spring chicken compared to Penelope and Lilah, the matriarch of the Georgia cat family.  We used to joke that the three of them were like the cast of the old Cary Grant movie, Arsenic and Old Lace.  Bono was the young man and Lilah and Penelope were the elder aunts.

Of all the cats we’d lost over the years, Lilah’s death affected Bunny the most.  Lilah was, hands-down, the smartest cat who ever lived: I’m not exaggerating when I say she was more intelligent than most people.    Within a week after we moved to Georgia, Bunny had chosen her from the litter of cats one of his co-workers brought to the office.  She was the runt, and Bunny had an affinity for underdogs—or undercats, in this case.  Ever the nerd, he was also immediately impressed with her intelligence, and showed her an inordinate amount of favoritism.   She was 18 when she died—a respectable old age, by cat standards—and Bunny grieved her loss until his death.   He wasn’t happy to be dying, but he looked forward to reuniting with Lilah on the other side. 

Because he’d had such success at cat-picking in the past, Bunny always insisted on accompanying me when we added to the family.   It always breaks my heart to go into animal shelters—so many beautiful animals, all wanting a home.  How do you choose?  I never leave a shelter dry-eyed or empty-handed.   On that day in August, we walked into the cat room and looked for a kitten.    On what would prove our last shelter visit together, it didn’t take long before Bunny spotted a tiny little Siamese-looking fluff ball reaching an arm through the cage door to get his attention.   He called me over to look at her, and I noticed an equally small, solid gray, furry ball huddled at the back of the cage. 

“They’re litter mates,” the shelter attendant explained.

“Aw!  We can’t split them up,” I lamented.

“We’ll take them both!” Bunny said, with great authority.   I later joked that he sounded like the Rockefeller of cats.

We brought (Siamese-looking) Sierra  and (furry gray) Shiloh home a week later, after they’d had been spayed and vaccinated.  Kieran took to them fairly quickly, but not Bono.  He was NOT happy that we’d brought these two adorable little mischief-makers into his domain.   I was surprised at his reaction, because almost three years before he had immediately accepted Kieran and had even tutored him in the fine art of lizard-catching. 

Finally, Bono warmed to Sierra, but he’s always been a bit aloof toward Shiloh.  It’s almost like he decided that the boys would form teams, with Sierra on his side and Shiloh on Kieran’s.   The dynamic is like this: the boys will fight (wrestling that gets too aggressive), and each of the boys will occasionally hassle the girl from the other team, but the girls do not pick fights with the boys, or with each other.   Overall, though, they get along well.

Back to Saturday evening:  I had just fed the cats, and they were all fine.  After they ate, Shiloh and Kieran moved from the kitchen to the dining room chairs.  To digest, I suppose.  A few minutes later, Kieran came into the living room with Shiloh trailing him, limping.  Strange—she had been perfectly normal a few minutes before.

“What’s wrong with your leg?” I asked.  I watched her for a few seconds more; clearly, she was in pain.  Then she started wailing.  Sierra and Kieran rushed to help her, and she swatted them away.  Even Bono came to offer his assistance, but she hissed at him.   My sweet baby girl would never have done that under normal circumstances: she wants everybody to love her, especially Bono.

I picked her up to assess her leg, but didn’t see anything wrong.  No blood, no foreign objects, no swelling.  When I touched the leg, she screamed even louder.  I anxiously loaded her into a pet taxi and headed to a local veterinary ER.  This was hardly my first trip to a pet ER, but it had been several years since the last one.   To me, it’s much more traumatic having an injured pet than an injured child: the child can tell you what hurts, and understands that you’re taking him/her to the hospital, and can be comforted, at least to some extent. 

In the past, I’d very rarely gone to the pet ER without Bunny—if he wasn’t with me, it was because he wasn’t home at the time.   One of us would cradle the patient and the other would drive.   Now, without anyone to comfort Shiloh, I wove through what seemed an extraordinary amount of traffic as she wailed as loudly as an ambulance.  My ears were ringing and my nerves were badly frayed by the time we arrived.

From her symptoms, I figured she’d fractured a toe or two, though I couldn’t understand how. The x-rays proved me partially right—she’d fractured all the toes on her right foot.  She spent the remainder of the weekend at the hospital, comforted by kitty morphine.  She had surgery on Monday—the fractures were fixed and secured with a metal plate.  Yes, my cat now has a metal plate in her foot.

Some of you (and I know who some of you are) may now think I sound like the stereotypical cat lady.  You know what?  I don’t care.  Anybody who knows me knows that I am very attuned to how my cats—or any animals—feel.   While Shiloh was in the hospital, I was less worried about her than I was about Sierra.  The girls had never been apart in their lives, and they spend a good deal of their time together.  Sierra is the bold, adventurous, independent sister; Shiloh is the cautious, sweet, loving one.   When they were babies, Shiloh would watch anxiously as Sierra blazed trails, and would only attempt the new activity once she saw her sister complete it successfully.    

     

Sierra was unusually subdued while her sister was away, looking out the front door from time to time, as if she expected her to pull up in a cab.  Likewise, Kieran was more quiet than usual, and at bedtime he snuggled more tightly against me than normal.   I visited Shiloh several times during her hospitalization, bringing her news of how much her siblings missed her, even Bono.

Finally, she came home today.  My sister Jan, also a cat lover, had warned me that the others would probably hiss at her once she came back, because she would smell like the vet’s office.  I was already anticipating this response, so I reintroduced her slowly.  I left her in the pet taxi for awhile, so they could sniff her and kiss her through the bars.  After that, I moved her into her recovery suite—the master bath.

She is very slowly adapting to her cast—at first, she growled at it so much that I called the surgeon to ask whether she didn’t need more pain medicine.  As it turns out, cats don’t like casts.  She also has a Cone of Shame to wear when I’m not around to watch her, in case she tries to chew off the cast.   She’s nowhere near mastered the art of walking with the cast, and gets around mainly by rolling on the floor.  I know that because I peeked in the first time I heard the clomp-growl-clomp-growl combo of the cast hitting the floor and Shiloh growling at it.

Her siblings are being incredibly gentle with her.  I think they’re still a bit intimidated by all the growling.  We will slowly get back to normal, having weathered the latest crisis.   In fact, as I write this, Shiloh has rolled her way over to her favorite sleeping spot, under my bed.   Now, hopefully, any other firsts I haven’t thought of are only good ones.

Treading Water

Yesterday, I read a story about a recently married young couple who, in their 20s, had each lost a spouse.  It’s a really interesting story:  http://gma.yahoo.com/widowed-20s-couple-finds-love-again-212043491--abc-news-health.html.    Other than being a widow, one of the things I have in common with the couple is that they both blogged about their respective losses.    Just reading the article had me teary, and I should have known better, but I decided to check out the wife’s blog. 

Did I start at the happy, newly married part?  Of course not!  I went to the beginning.  Big mistake.  Even though she had lost her first husband in an accident (her new husband’s first wife had died of cancer), the things she described—the emotions, the problems, the interactions with other people—were nearly identical to mine.   I only read three or four of her earliest posts before I totally melted down.

Later in the day, I Skyped with my friend William.  I told him I was feeling blue because of the story I’d read, and gave him an abbreviated version.

“That’s a happy story!  They found love again,” he growled in his Larry King-like voice.  He was right about the happy ending, of course, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to appreciate that angle.    

“It’s not happy—they went through so much pain, and so young!”  I had fallen into a deep pool of empathy for these people, and it had spilled into the river of my own pain.  It’s impossible to explain how it feels to people who haven’t been through the loss of a life partner, but the wife’s posts had struck such a chord with me that her words could have been my own.

“Maybe you’re just sad because you haven’t stumbled over your next husband yet,” he teased.    He can usually manage to piss me off just enough to snap me out of a funk.

“What-ever!  I don’t even want a husband!”

“Then I’m not seeing the problem here.”  I’m going to have to get him some suspenders for his Larry King days.

Even before Bunny died, I said I didn’t want another husband.  He of course, fully expected me to re-marrry one day.  He didn’t want me to be alone and unhappy, and he was sure I would eventually change my mind.  If I had been the departed one, Bunny would have remarried in shockingly quick fashion.  He loved to have a constant audience for his musings and his nearly incessant chatter, and he wouldn’t have been able to tolerate the loneliness.  

My thought—at the time and now—was that marriage is hard work.  Don’t get me wrong—Bunny and I were very happy together—but the reason we were happy is because we worked at it.   On our twentieth anniversary, I told Bunny that on the day we married, I couldn’t have imagined loving him more, but that I had hardly loved him at all in comparison.  We both had our faults, of course, but we managed to work around them to make our relationship flourish. 

For example, when Bunny was ill--even with minor ailments--he demanded a lot of attention.  Kidney stones equaled child birth to him—there was a lot of loud moaning and groaning and lying around until the delivery, when he would proudly show off his newest baby.  When I was sick, Bunny would do things if I asked him to (usually after giving a big, put-upon sigh—which I promptly imitated), but he rarely did them of his own accord.

Cancer made him, at times, nearly impossible to live with.   I welcomed visiting family members with more than the usual amount of enthusiasm, because their presence gave me a respite from being Bunny’s only source of attention.   During what would prove to be the last week of his life, my sister Julie came to visit.  Within hours of her arrival, I became violently ill with a stomach virus.

As soon as we got home, I took to my bed, head pounding and stomach churning.  Bunny was happy to have a fresh set of ears to bend, and I was quickly forgotten.  I fell asleep almost instantly, and was awakened about an hour later when Julie tiptoed into the room and placed something on the nightstand near me.  She slunk out again, unaware that I’d seen her.  As soon as the door closed, I opened my eyes to see a tall glass of Sprite (one of our grandmother’s go-to remedies for upset stomachs) waiting for me when I woke up.  It was such a simple gesture, but I couldn’t have been more grateful: someone was taking care of me, unasked.  It made me feel like there was hope that things would get better, even if only for a little while.  Of course, we all know how the story ends—Bunny took his final turn for the worst a few days later.

It’s possible that I’ll change my mind about marrying again, because I’ve done it before--which Bunny well knew.  Back when I was a young divorcee, I told everyone who would listen that I was done with marriage.  Never again, thank you.  When one of my good friends, Cheryl, sang the praises of her organic chemistry lab partner (Bunny), I cut her short.  For weeks, she badgered me to meet him.

“He’s perfect for you!  Just come to dinner with us once, please.  People are going to start talking about this married woman out with this young, single guy all the time.”  I knew how easily gossip flowed in the community, so I relented.

“Fine.  Just to shut you up, I’ll go.  One time.  Then I don’t want to hear about it again.”   We were married 11 months later.

The difference in my attitude about remarrying now--aside from the hard work involved—is fear.   I never again want to love another man so much that I’m left this scarred by his loss.  We’ve all heard stories of elderly people who die a short time after losing a spouse, and now I know why: their hearts literally break.  There is no way to adequately describe the grief: how, even a year and a half on, I will suddenly be seized by fits of despair so overwhelming that they leave me breathless.

Imagine your worst break-up ever: you are in love and content with your relationship, and then, with no warning, it’s over.   You are powerless to stop the ending, and you can do nothing to get the relationship back.  The other person—your other half—is irretrievably lost to you forever.  Your heart would feel as though it were thrown out of a car going at full speed.  Now, multiply that pain by a hundred, and you have some idea of how much it hurts sometimes.  It’s no wonder some people’s hearts simply can’t take the strain.

Since I jumped back into the dating pool, I’ve made it clear that I’m not interested in marriage--maybe a little too adamantly at times.   For now, at least, my no-marriage disclaimer is a defense mechanism to keep anyone from getting too attached.  Realistically (God willing --knock on wood, three times), I’ve probably got another 30 or so years left to figure out if I ever want to dive back into the marriage pool.  Until then, I'm just treading water. 

The Final Frontier

To say that Bunny was obsessed with space travel is about as huge an understatement as I can make.    From childhood, he studied every space flight—U.S. and foreign--and knew minute details about each one.   If anything happened in space, he knew more about it than any reasonable person should. 

Space was one of the interests that Bunny and I did not have in common.  When we were in the second grade, I was writing protest letters to President Nixon about the space program cutting into the Saturday morning cartoon line-up.   Hey—Saturday used to be the only day of the week when cartoons were on!   Meanwhile--a town away--Bunny was writing letters to astronauts, asking questions and making suggestions. 

Over the years, he met real astronauts and actors who played astronauts.   Once, we went to an event in Atlanta where several of the Gilligan’s Island stars were appearing.   As we stood before Bob Denver (Gilligan) and I shook his hand, Bunny raved about his work in Far Out Space Nuts.  I’d never even heard of that show, but Mr. Denver was clearly pleased that someone knew him for a role other than Gilligan.  For years after, Bunny would brag that he’d made Gilligan say “Wow!”

In the days before cell phones had cameras—even before everyone had cell phones—Bunny used to keep a disposable camera in the glove compartment of his vehicle.   The camera wasn’t there in the event that he got into an accident and needed to document the scene—it was there in case aliens landed anywhere near him.   His plan was to snap photos and then either try to capture an alien or jump onto the alien ship and fly away.  If he disappeared without a trace, at least the camera would be left behind to show where he’d gone. 

The original Star Trek was his very favorite science fiction show.     I’d grown up watching it and enjoying it as well.   “Space, the final frontier…” William Shatner’s voice would boom from the television, and my sister Julie and I would sit mesmerized for an hour.   Bunny’s love of the show was extreme; he knew the name, number and plot of every episode of the original series and of Star Trek, The Next Generation.  Saturday Night Live once did a skit about Star Trek fans (Trekkies) at a convention, and I teased Bunny for days afterward, because they acted exactly like he did.

Back in 1997, I heard about Celestis--a company that was sending cremated remains (or cremains, in funeral industry-speak) into space.   The cremains of Gene Roddenberry—Star Trek’s creator—were on Celestis’ inaugural flight.  Later flights would launch Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett (Star Trek’s Nurse Chapel) and James Doohan (Chief Engineer Scott).   Long before cancer came calling, Bunny knew that when his time came, he wanted his cremains on a Celestis flight.

After he died, I sent away to Celestis for the transport capsule that would take a portion of Bunny’s cremains to space.  I booked him on the first flight out—in October, 2012.  I even started making plans to go to the launch site—New Mexico—to watch the launch.  About six weeks before the planned launch, the company notified me of a delay with the NASA approval.   

Then, another proposed date came and went.   I wasn’t worried—I knew that, eventually, the flight would take place.  Normally I’m as impatient as anyone can be, but I just knew that the flight would happen.  Some of my friends weren’t so sure, and weren’t shy about telling me so.  Undeterred, I insisted that Bunny would eventually make it to space. 

Finally, about two months ago, I started getting notices that the flight was set for June 21, 2013.  I wasn’t going to get all psyched up again, but as the date got closer, I grew more excited and optimistic.  Yesterday, with no launch cancellation on the horizon, I posted the flight details on my Facebook status.    In no time, I was flooded with love and support from my friends and family.  I was more teary than I’ve been in quite a while, overwhelmed with the knowledge that Bunny’s fondest wish was finally coming true.

So now, as I write this post, Bunny’s cremains are circling the Earth.  He truly has reached the final frontier.

Competition

Last year, I wrote about my trip with my cousin Bonnie to my hometown for Mother’s Day weekend (Country Comfort, 5/17/12).   I hadn’t seriously entertained the idea of returning to Mansura for the Cochon de Lait Festival this year until my friend Kelly called a few weeks ago.   I’ve mentioned Kelly before—she’s a classmate and one of my oldest and dearest friends.   Our hometown is small, but we lived at its outskirts, down the winding, roughly horseshoe-shaped Petite Cote Road.   The “‘Tite Cote,” as it was called, was as rural as rural got.  Kelly lived about two miles from me, and today she lives right next door to the house where she grew up.

Over the years, no matter where I’ve been, Kelly has always kept track of me: she knows everyone in town--or if they’ve moved away, where they are and what they’re doing.  “Are you coming?  You have to come!  You have to defend your title.  I’ll get a bunch of people together.  We’ll have fun!”  Kelly is great at organizing—I think she’s been on every class reunion committee we’ve ever had.   The next day, I called her back to let her know I’d made my plans.

Word traveled quickly—the next night, I found myself Skyping with Michelle, another friend, fellow classmate, and ‘tite Cote native.   Michelle, newly divorced, had moved away from Virginia and was living with her dad, two doors down from Kelly’s parents.   Michelle and I have kept in touch sporadically over the years, but haven’t gotten to see much of each other, since we were usually in different parts of the country.   One of my favorite of Michelle’s traits is her outspokenness—like me, but totally unfiltered. 

We plotted our takeover of the Hampton Inn: I would have a room for me and whatever cousin I could wrangle into coming along, and she would have a room where she and Kelly would stay, as close to mine as she could get.  We hoped more friends would follow suit, but regardless, we were all-in.  The Hampton Inn is right across the street from the casino, which is the social hub of the parish: we could ride the shuttle, walk, or crawl back to our rooms when we were ready to go back.  Side note: the casino has done more to develop the parish than anything I can think of--it was built in the early 90s on pasture land.  Bunny and I used to joke that it looked like a space ship had come from Mars and just dropped it there.  Now it looks less foreign, because national brands have sprung up a presence around it.

Last Thursday, Kelly called and instructed me to meet her at the ice bar as soon as I got to the hotel.  I’ve noticed a pattern over the years--everyone meets at the ice bar, then moves to another bar or restaurant, if necessary.  The first time she ever told me to meet her there, I spent a good 30 minutes looking for a place called The Ice Bar.  It doesn’t exist: the meeting place is actually called the Atrium Bar.  Like most people and many things in Louisiana, it goes by another name; the actual bar is made of ice—like a mini skating rink. 

I got to the ice bar after driving hours through torrential rain, then the most pitch-black darkness I could remember seeing.  After you’ve lived away from The Country, you forget how dark it is there: miles and miles of feeling like you’re immersed in a giant vat of tar, except for whatever meager path your car can illuminate for a short distance in front of you.  When Kelly called at one point to find out where I was, she laughed at my complaints of how dark it was: “You in The Country now, girl!”

I got to the ice bar, where none of the usual suspects were to be found.  Finally, I caught sight of them at a table away from the ice bar, but still in easy distance: Kelly, Michelle, Cindy and Joel.  The same crew from my last casino get-together (see I Know Why the Irish Drink, 2/2/12), with Michelle substituted for Greg, who Kelly hadn’t been able to reach.  

Cindy isn’t technically from the ‘Tite Cote, but she had grown up right across the far point of the horseshoe, where it intersected with the highway.  She lives about a mile from where she grew up.  She, Kelly, Michelle and I (plus two other girls) had carpooled to practical nursing school during our junior and senior years of high school.  We graduated from high school in May, and nursing school in June.  Cindy was generally the most serious, most quiet of the bunch, but she was always down for a good time, and she has a wicked sense of humor. 

Joel (pronounced Joe-El) grew up in town.  He’s sort of the male equivalent of Kelly: he keeps tabs on the boys and some of the girls, and he’s on most every reunion planning committee.  Now, he found himself with four women for whom no topic was off-limits.  Most guys might have shrunk from the task, but as I remarked later in the evening, he kept up with everything we threw his way, and threw it right back.  We started with the serious topics—aging or deceased parents, grandchildren, family—and quickly progressed to the light-hearted, boisterous banter that you can fearlessly have with people you’ve known all your life.  We talked and laughed and carried on like we always do when we get together. 

Early on, we discussed the ladies’ beer drinking competition, to be held the next day at the festival.  Joel hadn’t seen my medal, but I won the contest last year, when Bonnie and my step-father, Donald, had dared me to enter.  This was the title I was defending.  Michelle had seen my medal when she asked me about it during our Skype session.

   

Kelly works with a woman named Allison who had won the two consecutive years prior to my victory.  Her cousin, Jeff, had gone to school with us, but wasn’t coming in until Saturday afternoon.  Allison hadn’t competed against me, so she had peppered Kelly with questions all week about my technique, my time, and anything else she could plug into her strategy.   Kelly didn’t know any of the details—I didn’t even know those kinds of details—but at any rate, Allison was undecided about entering.

I mentioned that my sister, Julie, was considering challenging me, but she drinks about as much beer as I do—practically none.  If my cousin Norman came up from New Orleans, though, I was going to try to talk his wife, Lisa, into competing.   I had been talking with Norman for the better part of the week as he decided whether he was going to make the trip. 

One of the beauties of Facebook is that you can keep up with people you rarely see, and get to know people you’ve never met.  I hadn’t seen Norman in at least seven or eight years, but he’s one of my Facebook friends.   I’d never met Lisa, but from getting to know her on Facebook, I knew she drank beer and that she looked to be the competitive type.  If she showed up, my money was on her.  All the talk of the family competition seemed to create great excitement in the group.

The next morning, I met Julie and her family at the parade.   Donald’s daughter, Lisa, had come up for the day.  Another potential competitor!  She demurred, but said she’d do it if Julie would.  Julie was still on the fence, but her husband (Todd) and I were able to swing her over to the competing side.  Now we three sisters would compete.  I knew Norman and his Lisa were on their way, because I’d talked to Norman about an hour earlier.

Toward the end of the parade, they joined us, with their son, Harley, who is a year younger than Trinity.  This was the first time I’d met Harley, too.  Typically, my first questions on meeting a new-to-me family member don’t involve beer drinking competitions, but this was a special occasion.  I explained the contest to Norman and Lisa—two cans, as fast as possible, and boom!  Family competitor number four was on board.

I’d been running into classmates and Facebook friends all morning, which was fun.  Everyone wished me luck.   It had rained a lot the day before, so the humidity was quite high.  As we walked around after the parade, Harley told me I’d have to win.  I told him I didn’t expect to—last year’s win was just a fluke.  He is such a cute kid—much quieter than his dad at that age, and very polite and smart.  Since I wasn’t really serious about the title, he hoped his mom would win.  I love this kid!

Finally, 1:30 p.m. rolled around and we took the stage.  Twelve of us sat down initially, and were joined near the start time by two additional women.  Julie and Sister Lisa sat on left side, and Cousin Lisa and I sat in the middle of the table.  From the crowd, Kelly caught my eye, pointed to one of the newcomers, and mouthed “Allison!” I leaned forward and looked to the right side, where a young woman in a blue shirt was doing the same thing, looking my way.  We waved at each other, then made fighting gestures and laughed.  I told Cousin Lisa it was on!

We got our beers and listened as the rules were explained: drink two beers, one at a time, as fast as possible.  Turn the cans over as you finish each one.  No spitting, no spilling, no excess beer from the turn-over.  Cousin Lisa made a remark about not swallowing, which the MC overheard and repeated.  I loved this cousin, even though I’d just met her!

Before I knew it, we were off.  The beer seemed even colder and more carbonated than I remembered it.  I finished the first one with only one pause, turned it over and started the second.  At this point, my focus was laser-like: I didn’t look around at all—not at the big crowd, with lots of family and friends, and not even to Cousin Lisa, who was right beside me.  For me, there was only one person in the world, on the stage, and I was sitting in her seat.  The second can was much more difficult: much, much more difficult.  I stopped several times, but pressed on, turned my can over and began to stand.  I felt Cousin Lisa doing the same, a fraction of a second before me.

I looked around, and four women—Allison, a young woman near her, Cousin Lisa, and I--were standing.  Slowly, others stood.  The young woman near Allison was disqualified—she’d left a big puddle under one of her cans.  Allison was first, Cousin Lisa was second, and I was third.  Third place!  Yea!  Two of the three placers were Chatelains.  Even bigger yea!  Cousin Lisa and I hugged. 

We stood before the now huge crowd to get our medals and be introduced. When the MC said her last name, Lisa looked confused.  She’s from New Orleans, so she’d only heard the city pronunciation: Chat-a-lane.  In The Country, it’s Shot-Lan.  Harley Shot-lan reached up to the stage to high-five us.  As I came off the stage, he was the first person I saw: “You see, it wasn’t a fluke!”

Michelle, Kelly, Cindy and Joel had all been in the crowd cheering for me.  I ran into Greg, who’d come with his father, sister and daughter.  His daughter goes to school in Tampa, so I’d met her last year when he brought her back to school.  His dad told me that they’d all been rooting for me.  I saw all my family there—cousins, niece, nephew, step-father, brother-in-law—who’d had divided loyalties, perhaps, but were supportive and proud of us all for competing.  I’m having a ggggrrrr moment as I realize that we should have taken a group photo of the four of us: fierce women warriors of the family.

As I was leaving a message for Daddy, Julie said, “Tell him I’ve shamed the family.” We laughed so hard over that!  Norman, Lisa and Harley were going back to the city that night, so we said our good-byes.  Then, we all parted ways to rest up for the evening.  There would be a street dance at seven, and everyone was sweaty and hot and tired. 

As I showered before climbing into bed for a well-deserved nap, I reflected on the day’s events.  I hadn’t won the contest, but I had placed. The family honor was safe.  Even more importantly, though, I’d had all the support I could have asked for—and that’s better than any medal ever hoped to be.