Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  Kids found cracks in the crowd so that they could run figure eights through the house and then out the back door, only to run right back in again. Neighbors who I had never met before walked up the street and brought flowers and cards, and I shook their hands uncomfortably as I said hello to them for the first time at the reception for my husband’s funeral.

  Talk about awkward.

  I took off the shoes that had been threatening blisters all day (I’m always grateful for the first girl at any event who takes off her shoes, thereby giving us all permission) and continued to circulate. As anyone in this position will tell you, I have no idea what people talked to me about and I have no idea what I said.

  All I remember is laughing and crying. Mostly at the same time.

  When I finally made my way to my dining room, my dad was standing there talking to his best friend from college. He put his arm around me, hugged me close, and quietly said the words I thought I’d been wanting to hear all day.

  “Is it okay if we open the bar now?”

  I nodded as he reached for the bottle of Jack Daniels. Knowing that my dad rarely drank anything harder than wine was yet another reminder of the gravity of the situation. And while I longed for the numbness of a good, stiff drink, I was suddenly worried that if I had one, it would soften me to the point where I might break down in front of everyone. So I excused myself and walked over to some of Brad’s friends from high school who had flown in for the service. All of these people Brad would have loved to welcome to his home for the first time were standing in a corner, trying to make normal conversation.

  “Craig wanted to come, but he…he just couldn’t,” said Brad’s friend Chris.

  “I think this has all been too much for him,” his wife concurred.

  Well, I could certainly understand that.

  A moment later, I heard a burst of laughter coming from the other side of the house. I moved away from the Pennsylvania crew and made my way through the kitchen and into my family room. And there they were, Brad’s buddies from the Academy, ties loosened, laughing with each other and their wives.

  The ones who had helped Brad create some of his most memorable moments—Matt, Jason, and Steve—hadn’t all been together in the same room for years, and they sat talking and joking like they hadn’t missed a beat. Their conversations were like a secret language that the rest of us didn’t understand, as they began sentences with, “Do you remember the time…” and before it was finished, they were all laughing in unison.

  I couldn’t believe that he was missing this.

  We all sat on my oversized family-room furniture and flipped through my old photo albums of our college years together, marveling at Brad’s ability to drink three beers at one time and remembering his first love, his Trans Am. Formals, football games, and then weddings and kids…their passage into adulthood seemed to be bound tightly together.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder (and fear) that, now that Brad was gone, this might be where my story with them would end.

  • • •

  After the last piece of ham had been eaten that day and most of the guests had gone, I sat on the edge of my bed feeling physically exhausted while my brain worked in overdrive, thinking of everything and nothing at the same time. I tried to process all that had been said—the memories, the tears, and the laughter—almost wishing that I could have recorded the whole day so that I could replay it and remind myself of how important Brad had been to so many. But I couldn’t. Even though I could hear people moving around downstairs, I felt like I no longer had the mental capacity to tell my legs to get down there and help them clean up. And so I sat, blankly staring at the wall, having no idea that would become my favorite pastime for the next year.

  The sound of the phone ringing startled me out of my stupor, and when I looked at the caller ID, I saw a phone number I didn’t recognize. I hesitated to answer it, but I had learned that lesson before, hadn’t I?

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Tidd?” said a quiet voice.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Cindy. I…I was the witness to your husband’s accident.”

  There was a sudden roaring in my ears, and my heart started pounding a mile a minute. I clutched the phone so hard I thought it would break. Part of me wanted to slam it down because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear what she had to say.

  And part of me needed to know.

  “I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this,” she continued, “but your husband gave me your phone number while we waited for help. He was unconscious for a while, but when he woke up, I asked him if there was anyone I could call for him and he gave me your phone number. Right when I was going to call, the police arrived so I didn’t have a chance.”

  My mouth was completely dry at this point.

  “What…what happened?” I managed to get out, even though my throat felt like it was starting to swell shut.

  “I’m a courier for the hospital,” she started to explain. “I deliver blood. I was on my way down to Colorado Springs, and the driver in front of me slowed down and was turning left. Brad couldn’t see around my van and tried to pass me and hit him.”

  “How many cars were in front of you?” I asked. “The police said that he passed a whole line.”

  “Oh no, no,” she said quickly. “It was just me. He was just trying to pass me.”

  In that moment I realized how angry I had been for the last couple of days. I didn’t necessarily blame Brad for what I knew was just an accident, but I was so bitter that he would have done something so reckless like pass a line of cars on a two-lane highway. My anger at him was immediately transferred to the police officer who had barged into the trauma room, accusing my husband of doing something he obviously didn’t do and giving me that extra burden when, needless to say, I really didn’t need it.

  And making Brad worry about something as trivial as getting sued during what he didn’t know would be the last hours of his life.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “I hope you don’t mind me calling you like this. I just wanted to let you know that I was with him and that he wasn’t alone. I’ve been calling the hospital and a friend of mine had given me an update a few days ago that he was okay. I just found out this morning that he didn’t make it.”

  And then she said something that I will never forget.

  “While he was lying on the road, you and the kids were the only thing on his mind. You were all he talked about. He sure did love you.”

  I don’t remember how the conversation ended. At that point I was so flooded with every emotion…even some I didn’t know were possible to have at the same time. Grief. Anger. Disbelief.

  And love.

  - Coping -

  an all-inclusive trip to the island of crazy

  9

  Because the funeral had taken place on a Saturday, it wasn’t possible to have Brad cremated until Monday. And since I had been told by my mother-in-law that they were planning on staying until they had their share of the ashes (or up to sixty days if I needed them to because they had open-ended tickets), I was in a panic to have him cremated as soon as possible.

  While I appreciated their offer to stay and help out, I needed my house back. I needed quiet. I needed to feel like I didn’t have to be “on” all of the time.

  I needed those ashes.

  Which was why at the crack of 8:00 a.m. on Monday, Steve, the funeral director, found me waiting in his office with a wild look in my eye, begging him to get the job done.

  I’ve often wondered if he’s ever had a widow plead with him, “Please cremate my husband, the sooner the better.”

  I stayed on top of Steve all day. I must have called him every hour on the hour, and every time he assured me that he was doing everything he could to get it done. I was a complete wreck until I got the call at 5:00 p.m. informing me that the deed had
been accomplished.

  I then called my mother and told her, “I have great news. Brad was just cremated.”

  I never thought I would say that.

  In a flurry of bag packing and tearful embraces, my in-laws prepared to leave with their share of Brad’s ashes, along with a certificate that would allow them to carry the urn on the plane. (Wouldn’t that have been an awkward thing to get stopped with by the TSA?)

  “You’ll always be our daughter-in-law,” Bonnie said, hugging me hard before she climbed into the rental car. And with that one sentence, a seed of uncertainty was planted. As I waved good-bye and watched the car round the corner of my street, one question flashed in my brain.

  Was I still their daughter-in-law?

  Any hope of giving that further consideration was quashed as I walked back into my house and was greeted by my three antsy toddlers and my mother, whose expectant look told me that she was there to listen if I was ready to talk. But I wasn’t. It was too much. Too much happening all at once that I couldn’t even begin to verbalize yet. I couldn’t worry about where my relationship with my in-laws was going to go or how everything would shake out. Not yet. That was an issue that, for better or for worse, would somehow take care of itself. The more pressing problem I had in that moment was broader in scale and seemed to be completely out of my control.

  Figuring out how life was supposed to go on and how I would be able to do everything alone.

  I took a seat in my living room with my mother, and as if reading my mind, she said, “Your father and I have decided that I’m going to move in here for the next couple of months. After that, I’ll just come every weekend for a while.”

  “Okay,” I replied, a little uncertain. After all, I was thirty-one years old and hadn’t lived with my parents since I was nineteen. But in the haze of grief, I was somewhat grateful that someone was just willing to take over. And I knew that if she left, she would be worried that she shouldn’t have. Although by staying she would worry that she was overstaying her welcome.

  My mom was in a position of support where she just couldn’t win.

  She was running on fumes at that point, just doing her best to keep the show on the road. And ever since that moment at the hospital when I was told that Brad was not going to live, I had been operating in such a fog that I was positive everyone else around me knew what needed to be done better than I did. In that moment, I was looking at my parents through the eyes of a child—their child—and was immediately accepting of their advice and suggestions.

  I should have realized then that they were in uncharted territory, just as I was. They had never been widowed. Single parenting was something they’d only read about or seen in the abstract. They had never been suddenly forced to look at the road ahead without seeing the person that they trusted the most no longer in the driver’s seat.

  In other words, I didn’t know what the hell was going on or what to do. But then again, neither did they.

  I was sure that I was crying at the wrong time, not crying when I should have, sleeping when I should have been functioning, and running around in manic circles when I should have been sleeping. I just knew that I was doing everything wrong and my poor, loving husband was looking down on the most mediocre widow in history. I didn’t know yet that coping doesn’t come naturally to anyone. It’s not something that we’re born knowing how to do. You can’t practice it, and it’s not something you can study. Unfortunately, it’s like the most horrible on-the-job training you can possibly imagine. You have to figure out what in the hell you’re doing while you’re actually doing it. It involves a lot of trial and error, and giving up on learning how to do it is not an option.

  In other words, you can’t tell grief to “shove it” and walk out the door when coping with it gets too hard.

  Learning how to manage grief is a very individual process and has a lot of elements involved. What works for one person may not work for another. So, you can’t necessarily talk to someone who has been through something similar and know for sure that the path they found through it will also be yours.

  It’s hard to explain to other people how, when you’re starting out on your journey as a new widow, you don’t have a clue about who to turn to for help. Everything about life is so overwhelming that it becomes impossible to make any decisions, even ones you know might help get you out of this hole. I knew that some people found comfort in prayer, but things were so bad that I didn’t know what to pray for. I knew that counseling would be something I would need to look into (for myself and the kids), but that required research and an attention span I just didn’t possess anymore. I knew I could call friends and talk to them, but what was I going to say?

  “I’m really depressed because Brad’s dead.”

  Well…that’s not new information.

  Even though I craved my mother’s help and comfort, a part of me needed to be alone. I felt like I was constantly being watched and silently evaluated by everyone. While other people were around, even the people closest to me, I was trying so hard to act normal and take care of things that needed to be taken care of so that they wouldn’t worry that I felt like I could never let loose with my grief. I needed the freedom to sob while I was doing the dishes or sit on my bed and scream into a pillow for five minutes while the kids were watching cartoons downstairs. And I needed to do this without feeling like I was making someone else uncomfortable.

  Having never gone through a tragedy even close to this magnitude, I had been thrown into the deep end of the emotional pool and there was no lifeguard on duty to fish me out. That rescuer had died. Oh, sure. I had had my share of minor upsets and worries, some that I’d shared with Brad and some that I’d dealt with on my own. But I’d never been a person who allowed sobbing to catch her by surprise or who suddenly felt like the world was closing in so fast she couldn’t catch her breath. And now, I was not only liable to cry at the drop of a hat or laugh at inappropriate times, but my ability to control these outbursts had died with my husband.

  So at that point, part of me was just happy to have someone at least attempt to take the reins of my runaway life, even though I really should have had more confidence in myself and what I was capable of. And if I had been able to think like a normal, rational person at that point, I probably would have realized it.

  After all, Brad had been out of town for a good portion of the kids’ lives, leaving me to keep things running. I knew more about being on my own and keeping things going than I gave myself credit for. But my sudden insecurity about every inch of my new life was overwhelming and I needed ways to channel the nervous energy that I had.

  I had a constant feeling that I was coming out of my skin, which was one of the worst sensations I have had before or since. It was like every cell I had was bouncing inside the confines of my shell. I felt like my grief and nervous energy were on the verge of rocketing out of my body and going into orbit. I couldn’t move fast enough or do enough stuff.

  And even though I wasn’t alone to have the breakdown I probably needed, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to do it anyway. There was no way I was going to slow down and feel what was going on. So, in that regard, it was a huge comfort to know that, with my mother around, I would have the babysitting backup I needed to be the manic person I had become—walking endless miles and running meaningless errands—during the course of those first few weeks.

  It was also handy to have my mother on hand to watch the kids while my sister, Kristi, who was a Certified Financial Planner, forced me to deal with one of the more concrete issues immediately—my financial future. I was already thankful to her for any financial security I was about to have because years earlier, when Brad had gotten out of the Air Force, Kristi had hounded us about retirement funds and life insurance since we were no longer under the military umbrella.

  “You will max out your 401(k),” she had said in a voice that left no room for discussion. “And
I want you to make sure you have enough life insurance to at least pay off your house if something should happen.”

  Now, she was helping me settle Brad’s estate so I could see how long that money would last and when I would need to go back to work.

  Brad had had no will, something I was initially worried about, but she assured me that under Colorado law, it shouldn’t be a problem. She started talking about things like “rolling over” funds, health benefits, Social Security, workers’ compensation…all things I had no idea about and was relieved to just hand over to her. Kristi scheduled meetings, made phone calls, and handled a bunch of stuff I generally had no attention span for at the time, making me eternally grateful that I had someone I could trust in my corner.

  After all, she knew that if she somehow screwed up my investments, there was a distinct possibility that she would find me on her doorstep with three kids, suitcases in hand, looking for a permanent place to stay.

  That would get any financial planner motivated.

  Kristi was the one who was with me the day that I spoke with Social Security and we figured out that, thanks to her insistence on having enough life insurance to pay off the house, I would be receiving enough every month to cover most of our living expenses. She worked through finding me the best deal on health insurance. And she was with me the day I called a company I had never heard of before to find out why they had sent me a check in the mail. As I dialed the number, I was positive that someone would tell me that it was a mistake and that I needed to send it back.

  But once again, I was in for a surprise. Thankfully (and finally), a good one.

  In the days following Brad’s death, my dad had asked me, “Catherine, do you know if Brad was on the job during the accident?”