by Diane Rehm
I told Susan what the nurses had told me when John died, that maybe those we love wait for us to be out of their presence before they die. She was in the next room. I was a mile or two away when John took his last breath.
“I wish I could hear his voice,” Susan says. “I talk to much younger people about this, but talking to you who’ve gone through it feels comforting. We would have been married fifty-three years. A marriage goes through so many phases. Lou took early retirement, and when he did, our relationship changed. I’d never seen him as happy as he was during those twelve years of his retirement. He’d worked in government in the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was very tense and wound up much of the time. In retirement, he flourished. He bloomed. He joined various boards. He became involved with WAMU. He formed a French conversation group. His stress disappeared, which made us closer. We began to appreciate each other in new ways. Even our son, Josh, said he’d never seen his father so relaxed and happy.”
Now that Susan’s on her own, memories of that wonderful re-energized relationship have made his absence even harder for her.
Like Eleanor Clift, Susan said work was crucial to her. She went back after a month rather than “hanging around the house crying.” She says she was “all over the place,” and regards her first on-air report as sloppy. Slowly, seeing other people made the difference. She began to travel like crazy. She accepted any invitation she received. She just kept moving, and that helped.
On the other hand, coming into the Washington airport or returning to her home, she grieved all over again, because he wasn’t there. “I do think I ran from grief. I wanted somehow to control it or put walls around it. When I stopped moving, it was all over me. I spent time in California with Josh. Lou and I used to go to Paris twice a year, and I was determined to go back, but it wasn’t the same.”
Coming home alone, she says, is the worst part. The Stamberg home is a cozy Sears, Roebuck house in Washington, D.C., in which she’s lived for forty-three years. She never had much feeling for it, but now, she says, “it wraps itself around me.”
I asked Susan her thoughts about heaven. She doesn’t believe in “an afterlife where we all sit around and play cards.” She says she wishes she did believe, and wishes she had a community and a rabbi to talk with.
I asked whether she actually talks with Lou, the way I talk with John. Rather, she says, she experiences Lou intervening when she’s about to do something that could be damaging to her. She feels his presence and hears his voice—reminding her to sign the bottom of the check, or not to forget to turn off that light.
Recently, on my balcony, I saw a hummingbird for only the second time in my life. The first had been at the farm when John and I stood at the window overlooking the valley and saw a hummingbird together. I called my son to tell him about the hummingbird on the balcony, and his words were “Dad’s spirit lives on!”
New Relationships
The other evening I was having dinner with a small group of women, all of whom were either widowed or divorced. The majority were younger than I. Marriage was the issue. Would any of them ever want to marry again? The answer: a clear and emphatic no. But to have another relationship was clearly a desire each of them had.
I had asked Susan Stamberg whether she’d ever want to date. “Lou’s been gone seven years now. I have a million women friends, but I miss the male presence. I actually joined JDate. It was disastrous!” After an article about her appeared in the Washington Post, a friend told her she would get tons of reaction because she had said she was lonely. There was just one letter to which she responded, a letter that began, “I can’t believe I’m doing this….” She met the gentleman for coffee, and their relationship has become very satisfying. Susan spoke about feeling “ready” now.
She met another man through friends, and began having feelings for him. He was “kind of closed off,” and not conversant with things she loved, but he was there. He was tall and he was steady and reliable. Though the relationship ended, Susan says, “I’m grateful to him because he made me feel alive.” But the way it ended, she says, “might make me more wary next time.” One more thing: she misses the intimacy of sex, being that close to someone.
Finally, she says, it’s important for her to have a place to go, to work or volunteer, to see people. “It was all lonely in the beginning, with and without people. Something was missing. I’d become the focus of attention wherever I went, but I wasn’t the most important person in anybody’s life anymore. When I go out for a walk, there’s no longer anybody in the world who knows where I am. I miss the mirror that Lou was.”
And what about the house? I ask. Do you want to keep it? “Josh wants me to sell it, and before he died, Lou said to get out of the house. Move to a condo. Since he died, I’ve looked a lot, and still look from time to time. There’s so much that’s nice in California, where Josh lives. But I have my network here. I have a few friends out there, but here I have a history, and nothing like that in California. It makes all the difference. My son has two children. He’s an actor. His schedule is crazy. I don’t want to bother him.”
As for me, I really can’t imagine myself having any other intimate relationship. Relationships take work, and, at this point in my life, I have enough to do just taking care of myself. But as they always say, never say never!
A Cutting Board
My Darling Scoop,
Last night I reached for a board on which to chop some vegetables. The usual small board was wet, so I pulled out another from the cupboard, one I hadn’t laid eyes on in many months. It was the board you used for years and years to cut the bottoms off asparagus. There was a deep indentation in it, at exactly the point you used to mark how long the asparagus should be. That board must be at least fifty years old. I know we had it when we moved from our tiny house on Saratoga Avenue to our home on Worthington Drive.
How can a simple wooden board contain so many memories? Not only did you use it for cutting asparagus but, on the many weekends we cooked together, that board was always the first to come out. Whether we were making lentil soup (your favorite for at least five years), chicken stew, or veal-shank stew, chopping carrots, making ratatouille, or slicing celery, that board was always on the counter, by your side.
How precious were our moments of cooking together, listening to classical music, watching a football game, listening to the news on NPR, sometimes talking, sometimes not. You taught me to cook, my love. I came to the marriage making, according to you, “the best scrambled eggs” you’d ever tasted. Other than that, my skills were thin, to be kind about it.
From the start of our relationship we began shopping together, selecting foods (some, like veal kidneys, oysters, clams, I’d never tasted in my life), and then cooking them together. I began as the sous chef, doing most of the preparation leading up to the actual cooking. But slowly our roles began to reverse, and I took over the major part of the cooking itself.
We experimented with a variety of foods. I remember one particular disaster we had when we were first married, living in your aunt’s home on R Street NW. You were determined to prepare tripe (defined by Oxford as “the first or second stomach of a ruminant, especially a cow”). I’m game, I thought, and off we went to the French Market on Wisconsin Avenue. You began cooking the tripe and I began smelling it. In fact, the smell overwhelmed the entire house, an absolutely awful, almost putrid, smell. You finally conceded that something had gone wrong in the preparation, and you disposed of the sad remains.
By contrast, we learned to make so many good dishes together, and always with such careful preparation. Tomatoes stuffed with spinach and pine nuts, blanquette de veau, English trifle. I remember how, for parties, I’d always leave the decoration of the food platters to you, whether it was Easter, Christmas, or an anniversary. And people raved. You were so artistic, and I depended on you for your brilliant eye. I think Jennie got her artistic ability from you, while David inherited your methodical approach to problem solvin
g.
It’s the times when we were cooking together—and working in the garden—that I remember most vividly. They were two activities we both loved and enjoyed helping each other with. Whether it was digging a hole in which to insert a new azalea, seasoning a stew, testing out the sweetness of my Christmas baklava, you always made sure things were just the way they should be.
It was so distressing that one of the effects of your Parkinson’s disease was that your taste buds went dull. Parkinson’s also took away your sense of smell, so you could no longer enjoy the wonderful aroma of my sour-cream coffee cake baking in the oven.
Toward the end of your time here at the apartment, your back began to hurt so badly that you could no longer stand long enough to cut, chop, or slice vegetables, so you would sit in the kitchen with me as I did the chopping and slicing. As time went on, your food choices narrowed, and with that narrowing we lost another aspect of the joy we’d experienced early in our married life.
Now, my darling Scoop, food without you beside me to enjoy it with is not the same experience. I eat because I must, and I dine on foods that are easy to prepare or, indeed, already prepared. I miss sharing meals with you. I miss watching you take a bite of something and smile your approval. I miss the memories of preparing food with you. I miss your stopping to hug and kiss me in the middle of food preparation, to put your hands gently on my breasts and caress them. Food meant so much to both of us, back then.
New Friendships
Last night, for the first time since John died, I invited a few friends in my building for dinner. For the past couple of years, several of us have gotten together periodically to share dinner in each of our apartments. Since it’s late August, near the end of summer, I told them I’d be serving my favorite easy supper: Popeyes spicy fried chicken. We all love throwing away our diets for playtime, and that’s what this was.
One friend made divine deviled eggs, another brought tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella on skewers, and a third contributed a delicious chocolate ice cream. Also on the menu: black bean salad and hot-spicy coleslaw. It was a feast we enjoyed out on my balcony. The weather, though it had rained during the day, was clear and comfortable.
How important these new friendships have become in my life. I’m so thankful to have connected with so many people here in my condo after moving here in 2008. How does one find new friends in a condo after living in one neighborhood for forty years? Sometimes it happens accidentally. In my case, I was talking to Bridgit Fitzgerald, a woman I knew who was working at Neiman Marcus, and happened to mention to her that we were looking at condominiums, and especially liked the one where she herself lived.
She promised to be on the lookout for me, and indeed she kept that promise, calling me urgently one evening to tell me that the apartment we eventually purchased was about to come on the market.
That first connection helped connect me to other people in the building, a number of whom have become social acquaintances and some good friends, though forming new relationships at my age is no easy task. Some of these people are younger than I am, and have already retired. I served on our board of directors, and through that activity became involved in the life of the building and its residents.
I know myself to be an outgoing person at heart. At the same time, however, John’s death has created a greater need for quiet time, away from all friends, activities, and involvements. I am increasingly seeking solitude, something I would never have imagined myself doing or enjoying. When I was writing my first book, Finding My Voice, I remember feeling a sense of dread when I was surrounded by quiet. Now, on Saturdays and Sundays, I recall John’s saying that, for him, silence was like a drink of water. I’m feeling that same sense of wholeness these times when I can think and reflect for hours, without talking to a single soul.
The balance between involvement, activity, and time for myself is what I’m learning to capture. It’s in that balance that I think I can bring some harmony into my life. For so long I’ve been rushing—to do everything, to be everywhere, to join everyone. Now I’ve become far more selective, desiring to spend more time in the quiet of my apartment, while still spending enough time with friends to maintain the relationships.
To my mind, there’s an apt comparison to the consumption of food. I think I’m moving to greater sensitivity in finding what satisfies my appetite rather than my cravings. I know I tend to consume more food when I’m with others—perhaps being in company enhances the appetite. But I also know I’m happier when I consume less. My whole body feels content with less.
In the months before his death, John was eating almost nothing. He had no appetite even for his beloved salmon but chose to combine various vegetables, followed always by a big dish of ice cream. We laughed together about his being the only person we knew who could eat ice cream twice a day and still lose weight.
As for friendships, John had very few, and that kept our circle of friends relatively small. Once Parkinson’s disease set in, he manifested an even greater reserve when I would introduce him to new friends I’d made or persuade him to go out to dinner with people just outside our inner group. It was as though he couldn’t afford to allow people access to him, as if he would have to expend too much energy to be receptive to an unknown entity. My good fortune has been to be able to rely on old and dear friends like the Busbys, while making new friends like Trish and George Vradenburg.
The Vradenburgs are cofounders of USAgainstAlzheimer’s, a nonprofit organization they’re funding on their own to help wipe out the dreaded disease that is striking so many of us. Our meeting was totally serendipitous. The three of us, George, Trish, and I, had been invited to participate in a fashion show at Brooks Brothers on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, to benefit the campaign against Alzheimer’s.
Each of us spoke casually, exchanging names, humorous words about what we were doing, but nothing very personal. When the show was over, I was about to leave the store when George followed me out to say that they would very much like to have my e-mail address. I readily gave it to him, and several days later Trish contacted me, and we had the first of a series of lunches together, forming an immediate deep bond of friendship.
As our friendship began to blossom, Trish, a former scriptwriter for Designing Women and other television sitcoms, told me she’d written a play about her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. The play, called Surviving Grace, had been performed off-Broadway in New York, and now she wanted to stage a reading of it at the Phillips Collection in Washington as a fund-raiser for the organization she and her husband had established. She asked whether I might take a look at it and give her my thoughts. And so I did.
I thought it was a wonderful play, mostly telling the heart-wrenching story of her mother’s slide from being a politically and socially active woman in New York and Washington to being one whose descent into Alzheimer’s prompted her then husband (Trish’s father) to have her institutionalized, divorce her, and marry a much younger woman. It was a heartbreaking story.
After I read the play and told Trish how much I loved it, I suggested a few changes that I felt would make it more adaptable to a Washington audience. We spent several afternoons going over it word by word, phrase by phrase, which was a brand-new experience for me. I enjoyed every minute of it. After we’d finished, I was astounded when Trish asked me if I would take the part of the mother for the reading at the Phillips. I was thrilled to be asked, and thrilled to accept.
Around that same time, the actress Marilu Henner, who had appeared in several television productions, including Taxi, published a book about her phenomenal gift of memory. After she came on my program, I wondered whether she might agree to appear in the play. She did, and we were on our way. Our reading of the first act of Surviving Grace raised $150,000 for USAgainstAlzheimer’s, and since then we’ve read the play to audiences in Los Angeles and San Diego, in Raleigh and Indianapolis and then Boston.
This is really a dream come true for me. Several years ago, a large co
ffee-table book of photographs was published consisting of prominent women each stating her most-fantasized achievement. I was one of those women, and I was dressed in a long gown, holding a fake Oscar. Who knows? Who says dreams can’t come true?
However unlikely an Oscar, this new experience has fed my soul. Appearing onstage, reading this extraordinarily moving and funny play, has allowed me to think in new ways about the future and its possibilities. The folds of my life are still opening.
Healing
Speaking with those who have lost a spouse or partner or someone else to whom they were very close seems inevitably to come around to the same question: How have you managed to heal? In several instances, the answers were similar to my own approach: work, travel, reach out to old and new friends. Steady activity seemed to be the response I got most often.
Susan Stamberg wrote: “It really is work that has been most healing. Work, and a tremendous amount of travel in the first year or two after Lou died. Steady activity is what I was after. I felt if I stopped, I’d be overwhelmed by grief. I wish I had a wiser answer, but I don’t. Friends, family, work. That’s it.”
But what about those who aren’t working—who may have retired or, indeed, have never worked outside the home?
For Roger Mudd, who retired from his radio and television work several years ago, the answer was a reflective one: “Our life together was so rich, so deep, so respectful of each other that I would be letting E.J. down if I didn’t carry on as before with our family and our friends who so admired her. What I found totally surprising was how I learned from her friends, through their stories and reminiscences, qualities and strengths that were quite different from what I remember. That made her all the more alive to me.” Roger does indeed “carry on.”