Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  And let’s face it: all of this remodeling made me feel like I was taking control of something in my life.

  I learned a very valuable lesson while working on their bathroom. If what you’re looking for is control, don’t hire a contractor. Because nothing will make you feel more like your life is spiraling into the abyss than babysitting someone who said it would only take three days to finish a project, and then three weeks later, you’re still tripping over the contents of that bathroom that are spilling out into your hallway.

  When the bathroom was finally finished, I took a good, hard look at my family room. Brad had a sixty-inch big-screen TV that took up an entire wall of that room. And I’m not talking about one of those fancy-schmancy flat screens. I’m talking about the monster rear-projector that sits about three feet away from the wall. It was like having an IMAX screen in the comfort of my own home. When my mom came to visit, she had to take off her trifocals because she would get motion sickness just watching HGTV. But this TV had been great for family movie nights, and I’ll never forget watching the breast-pump instruction video with Brad on that thing right after we’d had Haley.

  I’m telling you, nothing makes you feel more inferior as a woman than a sixty-inch boob producing what looks like ten gallons of milk in one sitting.

  The day Brad bought that TV, we were young and still childless, and I had just been awarded a promotion at work. It was a Friday afternoon and I couldn’t wait to get the weekend started, celebrating with our neighbors over a few beers. I struggled through rush-hour traffic, and when I turned the corner onto our street, there was an enormous delivery truck in our driveway.

  “What the—?”

  I walked in the front door of the house and down the stairs to the basement. There was Brad, instructing two delivery men on where to center this monstrosity that looked expensive and—not to sound like the bitchy wife—that I hadn’t given my consent to buy.

  “Congratulations on your promotion!” Brad exclaimed as he gestured to the TV.

  I stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “Well, I know how much you love movies. So I thought this would be fun!”

  As you can imagine, I had a hard time finding words to thank Brad in that moment for spending my raise before I’d even earned it. I later found out, years after he died, that he and his buddy from across the street, who also happened to have the day off from work that Friday, had gone to look at electronics that morning just for the heck of it when this beautiful sixty-inch TV caught his eye.

  “I told him not to buy it,” Rod said, laughing at the memory. “I told him you’d be pissed. Then we went out to lunch and had a few beers. Next thing I knew, we were standing at the checkout counter arranging when the damn thing should be delivered.”

  This story made sense to me for a couple of reasons: Brad’s motto in life—through childhood, the military, and marriage—had been “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” And I never knew what that man would come up with after a pitcher of beer.

  Those two things together were a dangerous combination.

  Anyway, I just knew that it would make me feel better and grieve less if I got a new TV. I mean, nothing says “healthy grieving” like an expensive trip to Best Buy. The problem with this little project was that I didn’t have Brad around to research all of the options for me and I am electronically impaired. So I enlisted the help of Candice’s husband, Rob, who, as it turned out, was my kind of shopper.

  He researched televisions for a few days, and then we took a little field trip to make my purchase. And as we stood in front of an entire wall of flat-screen TVs, Rob turned to me and said, “Now, I could tell you all of the data I have come up with, but I know the way Candice shops, so I’m just going to ask you a few questions. What size do you want?”

  “Forty-seven inch.”

  “Do you want a flat black frame around it or glossy black?”

  “Flat.”

  He pointed up to the wall and said, “There’s your TV.”

  Done.

  As I’d learned with remodeling the bedroom, you can’t buy new without getting rid of the old. So I called the church and donated Brad’s old TV the day the new one was to arrive. I never thought I’d be sad to see that old eyesore go, that giant black box that I could never seem to effectively arrange furniture around and that was, I thought, a constant source of overstimulation for the kids when they were little and made them cranky. The young wife in me wanted to give it a healthy kick as the men struggled to get it out the door and into an awaiting truck. But the new widow wanted to cling to all of the old things, anything that Brad had bought and loved, even if she had hated it.

  On the day they hauled Brad’s pride and joy away, I walked back into the house and stared up at the new TV that had been mounted on the wall. It was sleek, modern, and took up much less room. For a moment I wondered what Brad would think of it, and then I suddenly felt like I wasn’t alone. It was almost as if I could hear Brad’s voice whispering in my ear.

  “That new TV is way too small.”

  11

  In addition to trying to take control of something, anything in my life when I felt so helpless, I was really diving into home-improvement mode because I was suffering from what I like to think of as manic confusion. I wanted things done, and I wanted them done now. The problem was that I wasn’t really sure what needed to be done, so I focused on the things I could see.

  I had always wondered, how I would react to extreme stress. Up until Brad’s death, I’d led a pretty low-key existence, and I had always wondered, if something completely life-altering should happen, would I stay in bed for years or would I feel a sudden urge to find a career that would land me on Barbara Walters’ Ten Most Fascinating People list? Would I hire a nanny or would I be the most devoted mother in the entire world? Would I balloon up to five hundred pounds or shrink down to nothing?

  Well, I didn’t get down to nothing. But I came pretty darn close.

  Being the impatient person that I am, I didn’t want to buy into that whole theory that only time will heal. I’d show those stinkin’ experts! I’d find a new career, remodel my entire house, sell it, move someplace new, and find the perfect man to settle down with—and I’d do it now. And concerned during the weeks immediately following Brad’s death with the fact that I felt I wasn’t grieving right, in my widow mind the solution to that problem was simple.

  I would try my best to not grieve at all.

  The denial that I was in, which surfaced in the form of manic confusion, made me want to do everything I could to make the people around me feel comfortable so they wouldn’t drop me like a hot potato. That meant nailing a smile on my face, answering with a chipper “Fine!” when asked how I was doing, and generally pushing everything I had bubbling inside me way below the surface until I was alone and could let it go.

  And I thought for sure that if I started emotionally running as fast as I could, the grief wouldn’t be able to catch me. I’d get this show back on the road! People will invent an action figure in my honor: Wonder Widow, complete with black catsuit and Kleenex in one hand, paintbrush in the other.

  So, in another attempt to channel some of this energy, I started exercising.

  Now, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s a healthy way to de-stress. But the way I went about it was a little excessive. After walking or jogging for an hour, I’d then head to my local gym and work out endlessly. I think I went through two pairs of tennis shoes in three months. Now, in my defense, I was training to be Wonder Widow, and a three-baby bulge does not look good in a catsuit. But even I knew I was going a little overboard.

  “Uh, I think you need to slow down on the gym a little bit,” my personal trainer said to me at one point. “Haven’t you been here twice today?”

  For the first time, I could understand what anorexics went through. I had lost comple
te control of most things in my life, but I could control how I was eating and what I was eating. Proud of myself for whittling down my food consumption to about one meal a day (and spending at least an hour a day, every day, working out), I proudly watched the pounds fall off. I would feed the kids their meals and sit and pick at my plate (about the same portion as theirs). Since they were so young, they didn’t think about how I wasn’t really eating anything. And if I knew that I would be meeting up with friends or family during the day, I saved my meal so that I ate it in front of them.

  “You look amazing!” I heard constantly, fueling my unhealthy habits. “How are you losing all of this weight?”

  “Oh, you know, just eating healthier,” I lied. “And walking a little.”

  It’s interesting to me that, during the worst time in my life, I received so many compliments about how I’d never looked better. Thoughts about dating were on my mind, and I felt sure that by doing what I was doing, I would find someone who would make all of this “alone” business go away.

  “This will make me attractive to someone,” I thought. “Who needs grief? I’ll be thin and pretty and desirable, and someone will want me.”

  It wasn’t just the stress of everything that was going on, although that did leave very little room in my stomach for food. It was more than that. It was almost like that gnawing feeling in my stomach was keeping me awake and functioning. Everything in my life suddenly felt so dreamlike (or nightmare-like) that I had a hard time believing it was actually happening to me. But that constant feeling of hunger was like my stomach giving me a wake-up pinch and confirming what I still didn’t believe.

  Of course, eventually the pounds came back. Months later, as I started coping better, I started eating more until I was right back where I started. And years later, frustrated by my weight gain, I told my sister that I should go back on the “diet” I was on after Brad died.

  “Catherine,” Kristi said to me in a firm, mom-like tone. “You were sick. Don’t you remember how upset your stomach was all the time and how you couldn’t digest anything right? You can’t do that again.”

  Losing weight wasn’t the only thing I used as a distraction in those first few blurry months of widowhood. In the middle of what I thought of as self-improvement mode, dropping four sizes in about three months and trying to make my imperfect house and life as perfect as I possibly could, I embarked on yet another very common phase of widowhood.

  Retail therapy.

  Now, some overachieving widows can also combine this with the remodeling phase. I chose to spread the two out a little.

  But that’s really a personal decision.

  Retail therapy is an interesting phenomenon. How does it make any sense to be thinking one minute about how much you miss your husband and then have a realization that you’d be a much happier person if you could find the perfect red purse? For me it was almost like busywork, because I didn’t actually keep a lot of the stuff that I purchased. I would buy tons of junk, decide to keep one thing, and then return the rest the next day.

  I know for a fact that salespeople in certain stores hated to see me walk through the door because they knew I carried with me the false hope of a good sale. They’d see me come in with a crazed gleam in my eye, receipt and merchandise in hand, the day after I’d blessed them with a three-hundred-dollar purchase, and they knew this would require them to go through a very complicated return procedure because I’d used a coupon.

  A couple of years after Brad died, I was having dinner with two new, young widows, and we looked each other in amazement when we realized that we had all done the same thing.

  “I realized at one point that I’d spent five hundred dollars at Banana Republic in about an hour,” Krista said.

  “That’s okay,” said Leslie. “I bought some Steve Madden boots yesterday, and I just figured out I don’t have the right jeans to go with them. I’m taking care of that tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got you both beat,” I said. “I bought a sports car that none of my children can fit in and it’s rear-wheel drive. Perfect for a mother of three in Colorado.”

  Months earlier, in the throes of retail therapy, I had found myself casually researching new cars—not something to replace the trusty old minivan, just something fun that I could drive around when I didn’t have the kids with me. I had thought about buying a used (very used) BMW that would make me feel like a young woman in her thirties, not a widow with three kids. For weeks I searched on Craigslist, trying to find something cute within my meager price range, and then one day as I was searching under BMW, I stopped my scrolling and fixated on a car.

  A Mazda RX8.

  “I would love to get an RX8,” Brad had said to me two years earlier when he was shopping for a new car.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I snorted. “It’s rear-wheel drive. What are you going to do in the winter? Walk to work?”

  “My Trans Am in college was rear-wheel drive and I did just fine,” he argued.

  “It doesn’t even have a backseat!” I countered. “And the trunk looks too small for all three of the kids to fit in.”

  The fact that, four months after his death, I was looking for a new car online and my search did not involve the words “Mazda” or “RX8” in it and that that was the car that popped up—the irony of this was not lost on me.

  Brad wanted me to have that car.

  I brought Kristi with me, and we drove up to the Ford dealership that had listed it, about thirty minutes north of Denver. The moment we sat in those bucket seats, I knew I wanted it. It was so low to the ground that we sat beneath even the sedans we passed on the road. I shifted through the gears and whipped around corners, and I felt like I was in a life-sized video game. I felt a sense of freedom I hadn’t experienced in years as I looked around the car and realized that there was no room for a sippy cup. No space for plush toys. It could be a place—a mobile place—that was mine. All mine.

  I don’t know if Kristi sensed my temporary euphoria while we were taking that test drive. She must have. Because, even though I consider my immediate family some of the most money-conscious people on the planet, when we parked the car back at the dealership, she looked at me and said, “Get it. Just get it.”

  Then she followed up with, “But as soon as you write that check, I’m taking all that life-insurance money and putting it away for you.”

  Good plan.

  For a while, that car was the best therapy I could have had. It was where I could go and just pretend for a minute that my life was not actually happening. I could drive around and forget for seconds at a time that I had three kids at home who were in the throes of toddlerhood. I felt empowered that I had bought that car completely on my own. I would listen to music I liked, turning it up so loud that it would almost drown out the thoughts in my head. And the tinted windows would show nothing at a stoplight if I just needed to sit there and cry for a minute.

  I do think that sometimes my retail-therapy phase alarmed Kristi a little bit, but she handled it really well. Even though she had been in the financial industry for years, for the first time she really had a ringside seat to what happens when life catapults you to a place you’ve never been before. And this wasn’t something that could be easily explained, like downsizing or losing a job. Her compassion for me gave her insight that most financial professionals may not understand: that yes, I did need to be practical and plan, invest and save. But I also needed to live my life and find joy where I could. And sometimes joy costs money.

  But I know that, being my advisor, she cringed every time she heard the sound of metal against metal, as I flipped through a clothing rack at the mall while talking to her on my cell phone. I know that deep down inside, the financial planner within her had to be screaming, “Step away from the life-insurance money and nobody gets hurt!”

  But being the smart woman that she is, she never said anything.
She knew that if she did, I would be offended and stop coming to her for help and advice. Kristi was a master at planting a seed of uncertainty when I needed it so that I would come to the right conclusions on my own.

  “Are you sure you want to move right now? Remember that your house is paid off and moving will mean you’ll have another mortgage.”

  “I like all of your furniture. I don’t think you have to replace everything at once. Remember that looking for it is half the fun!”

  “You could buy that tennis bracelet with the matching earrings, but don’t you think you’ll get tired of them after a while?”

  She never judged and she never verbalized what would take me months to figure out: that all of the purses, TVs, new bedrooms, and sports cars were good for a temporary fix. That, while feeling good in the moment has its perks, it’s usually only good for that moment.

  And that there isn’t a credit limit high enough to fill the void of a dead spouse.

  - Changes -

  helping others cope with your loss

  12

  When I became a widow, I had to raise my parents all over again.

  Poor things. There they were, just moved back to Colorado from Louisiana to be closer to their grandchildren. (Kristi and I never really pretended that they made that move to be closer to us.) We were all so happy they were here, and my sister and I were relieved that we would finally be able to help them with my ninety-five-year-old grandmother who had moved with them. Mom and Dad had the long-term vision of growing old here, not in their favorite climate, but they knew it would be easier for us to take care of them, should something happen.

  Then something did happen. And they ended up taking care of me all over again.

  I don’t know what I would have done without them. My mom was the one who would get the 3:00 a.m. phone calls when I’d had an anxiety attack. My dad would come help me when I was panicking about which new tires to buy. They would both drive through the snow to my house to pick up my kids so that I could have one night to either sleep (if I could manage it) or cry until my body was dry.