Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean was he on the clock?”

  I thought about it for a minute and said, “You know what? I think he was. He was on the clock any time he had to travel more than fifty miles away for a job. And that proposal he was working on was fifty-five miles away from the house.”

  My dad nodded silently, and in my grief-induced stupor, I was too out of it to ask why he wanted to know.

  Then, at the reception at the house after the funeral, Brad’s boss made a comment about how she would make sure that I received as much financial compensation as I could, a remark that mystified me at the time because I didn’t know how that could possibly be in her hands. At that point, I figured that what we had invested was what I had to work with and that, for better or for worse, any way my finances ended up would be because of the decisions we had made in the past.

  So, I was shocked when I heard the woman from the company in charge of Lockheed’s workers’ comp benefits tell me that, yes, I was supposed to receive that check. And that I would be receiving checks every month because he had technically been working when he died.

  I cried when I hung up the phone that day. I wasn’t wealthy, but I was going to be okay, at least for a little while—hopefully long enough to figure out my future without putting too much pressure on myself to get out of the house and start working immediately.

  By the time Brad died, I had been out of the workforce for five years, something that we had both agreed was the best solution when we started having children. When Haley was born, Brad had just started working for Lockheed, and even though he wasn’t a proposal manager yet, his job as an engineer had him traveling back and forth to Florida for weeks at a time. And before she was born, I had been traveling quite a bit for my own job with a large company in Denver.

  After graduating from college with a degree in English, it had taken me years to move up from being an administrative assistant for various helpless executives to working as a marketing manager and then finally landing my dream job as an event planner, planning corporate events around the world. And even though I didn’t travel constantly, when I did, the trips would usually be back to back for weeks. The job was time-consuming and stressful, perfect for a woman with no children.

  But not ideal for a mother whose husband traveled as well.

  I didn’t plan on not returning to work when I left for maternity leave. Actually, I didn’t really have a plan at all. We hadn’t checked into daycare, and we hadn’t looked at our finances to see if it was even possible for me to stay home. We were winging it at a time in our lives when, really, a firm plan would have been handy.

  I spent the first six of my twelve weeks of maternity leave getting to know this new little person who kept us up, made us smell bad, and was generally unaccommodating. And when crunch time came and we really needed to make a decision, I walked out of the first daycare provider we interviewed—a sweet woman with a lovely home, a dream for any working mom—looked at Brad, and said, “I can’t leave her. I can’t leave her with someone else.”

  Brad took this news in stride, and I think was a little relieved. We had both been raised by stay-at-home moms who had gone back to work when we were old enough to get into the house on our own. Even though we hadn’t really talked about it, I don’t think we realized until we had Haley how important it was to us both that I stay home.

  Brad and I fell into our roles seamlessly. I did everything to take care of the house while he was the primary breadwinner. I cooked, cleaned, paid the bills, took care of the kids, and did what was necessary to keep everything going. Brad worked hard and was always gone, his goal to rise quickly within Lockheed.

  “I want to be a vice president by the time I’m forty,” he said to me often. “I know I’m working a lot now, but don’t worry. It will all be worth it someday.”

  But that someday never came.

  It’s somewhat ironic to me how our lives turned out. I was the first of my friends to have a kid, but everyone soon followed. And as each one of my friends had a baby, they all went back to work when their maternity leave was over.

  “How can you stand being at home with a newborn?” I was asked more than once. “It’s so…isolating. You don’t have anyone to talk to!”

  “You have to be creative,” I would say. “You have to find ways to occupy yourself. There are groups for moms and all kinds of stuff out there. You just have to be proactive.”

  But the one question that I was asked that still haunts me was, “Aren’t you afraid of quitting your job? I mean, what happens if something happens to Brad? Doesn’t that make you nervous?”

  And with the naivety that comes with youth, I confidently replied, “What in the world could happen to Brad? Do you know what the chances of that are?”

  Well. Now we know.

  It seems cruel to me now, the work that Brad put in and the time he spent away from us. On the day that Michael was born, he started his new job as a proposal manager and then the traveling really began. Oh, he loved it and thrived on the long hours and hard work. If he was home for two weeks straight, in between jobs, eventually his foot would start bouncing and he would get antsy, ready to go after the next big fish.

  But he was torn. In his heart he was a family man and loved his children. And I think he had dreams of working hard, being rewarded by promotions and raises, and then eventually leading a more settled life by the time his son was ready to throw a baseball and his girls were old enough for father-daughter dances at school.

  And I didn’t think my stay-at-home status was permanent. I really thought that once our kids were at an age when they had their own lives and interests, I would have mine as well. I had hoped that by the time Sarah was in preschool, I would be able to find some sort of part-time job or even volunteer for a worthy cause. My mind was constantly thinking about what I would do when the kids were older.

  One of the many fears rattling around in my head right after Brad died was, of course, money and the idea of going back to work. What was I going to do? I knew enough about the plummeting job market at the time to know that I really wasn’t marketable. Just weeks after his death, as Kristi and I worked to put my new financial puzzle together, I scrambled around, researching and tracking down old employers, telling them what had happened and asking for updated letters of recommendation.

  I had nightmares about going into a job interview and blurting out, “As you can see from my résumé, I haven’t worked in years and I’m probably not up on all of the latest technology. What it doesn’t say on paper is that I’m widowed. So if you hire me and one of my kids gets sick, there’s a good chance I’ll be out of the office for two weeks while I take care of them.”

  I wasn’t the only one with money on the brain. Even though they were so young at the time of Brad’s death, Haley and Michael still had questions about it. Because up until that point, the question, “Where’s Daddy?” was always answered with, “Daddy’s out of town. He works very hard so that we can have all of these nice things.”

  So, once he was gone, one of the first things they thought of was, “Well, if he’s not here to work for all of these ‘nice things,’ where’s the money going to come from?”

  It was hard to try and explain to the kids how investments, 401(k)s, Social Security, and life insurance work. The best that I could come up with was, “Daddy and I saved money. We saved just in case something bad happened. We’ll be okay.”

  That explanation seemed to alleviate some of their worry.

  So, as I hung up the phone that day after being informed that Brad was actually on the job at the time of his death, I somehow felt like he was still doing his best to take care of his family, even though he could no longer physically be there to do it. Like he was saying, “Stay home with the kids a little longer. I’m going to give you enough to take care of you immediately and allow you some time to figure ever
ything out.”

  “I feel so lucky,” I said to Kristi tearfully, a comment she quickly dismissed.

  “You’re not lucky,” she said. “Your husband died. You invested and you planned. Brad had a good job with good benefits. That’s a far cry from just being lucky.”

  In the months after that, I completely understood what she meant and would take great offense when people would imply that I was “lucky,” mainly because it usually meant they were asking about my finances—something they really had no business inquiring about. I would usually answer them honestly when they asked because I wanted them to know that the kids and I would be okay, that Brad and I had taken measures to ensure that we would be, and, in a way, hinting to them that they would be wise to do the same.

  But I also knew that I was lucky in many ways. Because until that moment I didn’t have a clear picture of how fortunate I was to have the people I’d had around me all of my life—my parents who were still my safety net and who I knew would never allow us to be left out in the cold. My sister who had helped us plan for a future we had no idea would be so hard.

  And Brad who made sure he’d keep taking care of us all, even after his death.

  As my financial picture began to develop, I was also made aware of a family fund that had been started on our behalf—a fund that, through the extreme generosity of our friends and family, had grown to a healthy amount. At one point, I found out that strangers had even contributed to the fund. And I’ll never forget that moment.

  I was walking in to meet Kristi, my mom, and a few other friends for lunch about a month after the accident. I was late, as usual, and slid into the booth in the middle of their conversation.

  “Guess what?” Kristi said to me.

  “What?”

  “I just heard from a massage therapist about Brad.”

  My stomach plummeted and I could feel the color drain out of my face. For some reason, in the back of my mind, I had been wondering if I would find out something about my husband after his death—something I didn’t want to know. Even though Brad had never given me any reason to suspect unfaithfulness, I feared that some other woman would show up at my door with two kids and tell me that he had had a second family across town.

  I know. The weird widow mind.

  When Kristi said that, I thought, “This is it. This is when I’m going to find out he’s been having it off with some massage therapist and I can’t believe Kristi is telling me this over Cobb salad and iced tea in front of our mother.”

  “What…what did she say?” I said slowly.

  “She said that she wants to donate a day of massages to the family fund. Isn’t that amazing?”

  I’m sure my sigh of relief could be heard around the world.

  The generosity of others amazed me. And since I had been brought up by a Southern mother who drummed into me that it doesn’t matter if someone gives you a diamond or a dandelion, thank-you notes are a must, I needed to find out who had contributed. I went to my bank, certain that they would have some sort of record of who had deposited money into that account. But my request was met with a confused look by the clerk and: “Uh. We don’t keep track of that sort of thing.”

  Great.

  Trying to figure out who had added to the family fund became a huge source of stress for me. My mom was trying to ask her friends, most of whom were too humble to take credit for anything, and for weeks we tried to piece it together. As I think back on it, I find it completely ridiculous that immediately following my husband’s death, thank-you notes were something that I was really worried about. I could understand how that acknowledgment was a must for any birthday, Christmas, wedding, or graduation present. But a death?

  Don’t we mourners have other things to do?

  As with all things, there was a lesson to be learned. Since then, if I’ve found myself in the position of giving money or a gift to someone during a difficult time, I specifically write in the card, “And don’t send me a thank-you note. I know you appreciate it.” I take it upon myself to make sure the gift was received by checking my bank account to verify that the check was cashed. I’ll ask other friends or family members if they saw a plant or bouquet being delivered. Never once do I think the person who is going through such a difficult time should need to muster the presence of mind to sit down and write a thank-you note.

  Now, that’s a gift.

  • • •

  With my mother looking after my kids and my finances being dealt with by my sister, I started looking for something that would just make me feel good in the moment. And what I stumbled upon as my immediate self-help cure made absolutely no sense to anyone else but me.

  And that would be the almighty pedicure.

  Before Brad died, I had had one pedicure in my entire life. But, with my mom at my house with the kids during those first weeks, if you listened closely, you could hear my tires screech to a halt at the sight of that one magical word.

  Nails.

  Now, I realize that not many people may understand my brand of coping. And that’s okay; we all have to do what works for us. When I look back at how I dealt with the beginning stages of widowhood, I’m surprised that my toenails didn’t just surrender and fall off. Because if I had a spare forty-five minutes without an appointment to go to or something pressing that needed to be done for the kids, you would find me in a chair, feet soaking, contemplating if I just wanted to vibrate or if the day was bad enough that I needed the back roller.

  Initially, getting my feet “did” was about making a decision—nail color—and feeling like I’d accomplished something. And if I didn’t like my choice, I could go back the next day and change it.

  Very few decisions in life can be changed with a cotton ball and some alcohol. So that was a big comfort.

  But, it was deeper than that. In most nail salons, they don’t talk to you. They don’t even ask you how you’re doing, and if they do, they don’t really expect you to answer. Any place else you go—the grocery store, the mall, even the hair salon—they’ll ask you how you’re doing and expect the perfunctory “I’m fine,” because they don’t want to hear, “Well, my dog pooped all over my house, the school bus never showed up this morning, and I spent the better part of my day talking to the phone company trying to get my dead husband’s name off my caller ID so I don’t make people immediately start crying every time I call.”

  I could sit there and have someone touch me in a nonsexual, noninvasive way—but touch me all the same. Contact with another human being was something that I wasn’t getting enough of and something I craved. Just having someone rub my feet and then work their way up my calves relaxed me, and I could feel the pressure of widowed life being scrubbed away with the exfoliating salt.

  Getting my nails done wasn’t the only activity I turned to for instant gratification. In the weeks following Brad’s death, when I wasn’t sitting in a vibrating chair getting my toenails painted “Hooker in a Red Dress,” my parents and I started working in home-improvement mode. Even though Kristi and I had figured out that I would probably be able to stay in my house, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to.

  I fluctuated between feeling like I could never leave all of the memories we had made there and wanting to get away from remembering things all the time, which could be agonizing in its own way. Not only that, but I itched with a nervous energy that couldn’t be scratched. So working on the house not only provided me with mindless activity I desperately needed, but meeting with patient Realtors to look at houses also gave me something else to do. Both activities had me looking toward the future and trying to picture an environment I could live in with my new life.

  So it was somewhat of a gift that Brad left me in a house that had been built in 1979, that we had half remodeled, and that still needed plenty of work.

  Home improvement isn’t such an abnormal thing at the beginning stages of widowhood. Of course
, I didn’t know that at the time since I didn’t really know any other widows. But I’ve since learned that most of us go through what I like to call the “remodeling phase” of grief at some point or another.

  I recognized this unofficial stage one night about two years after Brad died when I was having dinner with a widower who had lost his partner a month earlier. I asked him, “So are you going to stay in your loft?”

  He replied, “Oh, yeah. And I’m going to repaint the entire interior, rip out the bathtub so I can have a huge shower, and put in new kitchen countertops.”

  I saw that crazed gleam in his eye, checked my watch, and thought, “Yup. Right on time.”

  I’m telling you, there’s probably a newly widowed woman in Africa who is re-thatching her roof and rearranging her cot as I write this.

  My first unintentional foray into widowed home renovation was about two weeks after Brad died. The funeral was over; everyone was prepared to go back to their normal lives; and I had no normal life to go back to. Thinking about the big picture was too overwhelming, so I was trying to just focus on what was right in front of me.

  Literally.

  I was sitting on my bed, blankly staring at the 1980s flower pattern that covered my bedroom walls. Now, it wasn’t obnoxious paper, but it certainly wasn’t my style. And although we had updated most of the house from its 1979 glory, our bedroom had been the last thing on our list.

  I looked over and saw a little corner of the wallpaper coming up, and without even really thinking about it, I leaned over and pulled.

  Rip.

  There is no better therapy in the world than ripping paper off the wall. It’s somewhat destructive and messy, and it offers instant satisfaction. If your spouse is currently suffering from a long, drawn-out illness, I highly recommend wallpapering a room now in a hideous pattern so you have something to do the week after the funeral.

  After that initial wallpaper tear, I ran downstairs to get the stripping chemicals, old towels, my scraper, and the pressure washer I had used to drench the walls when I stripped the miles of wallpaper (three layers thick) on the main floor of the house a couple of years earlier. When my mother walked into my room, she found me completely focused on the disaster area I had created, surrounded by misplaced furniture and shards of ripped paper.