“So…how does this work?” I asked.
“I’m going to shuffle these cards, and as I’m shuffling, I want you to think of a question you want to ask,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, trying to decide what I wanted to inquire about. Widowhood seemed too complicated for a complimentary cocktail party tarot-card reading, and my mental state wouldn’t be able to handle anything bad about the kids.
“What about my job?” I said. “I’m thinking about going back to work someday and I’d like to know about that.”
“Okay,” she said, as she started laying the cards out in front of me while Tiffany peered over my shoulder.
“Your professional life will go where you want it to go,” she started. “I can see you doing something creative. You have goals in front of you that are perfectly within your power to achieve…”
And on and on. Rather benign answers that could be taken any way and could have probably been given to any person.
“Thanks,” I said to her, as I started to get up so that Tiffany could have her turn.
“Wait,” the tarot-card reader said suddenly. “There’s something else you want to ask me.”
I lowered myself back into the metal folding chair.
“Well, I’m widowed,” I said. “I always have questions about that.”
“I know you are,” she said. “He’s standing right behind you.”
I looked over at Tiffany, whose eyes had suddenly gotten as big as dinner plates.
“He’s…right behind her?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the reader. “He wants you to know that he’s okay. He wants you to know that he’s with you all of the time. He says that he wishes he could have done more financially, but that he knows you’ll be okay.”
And then she said something that I will never forget.
“He says that you have three children. He says that your youngest can see him, but your two older children cannot. They don’t want to see him. But that he and your youngest daughter speak all of the time.”
Now, no one else could have known that because I had been quiet about the strange encounters I had been having. But in the months since he had been gone, Sarah, who had started out as a lurching eighteen-month-old at the time of his death and had developed into a racing two-year-old at the time of the reading, would talk to him and about him all the time. It always struck me as odd that the youngest of my children, the one who really knew him the least and would have the fewest memories of him, would talk about him constantly as if he was still a fixture in her life.
I remember right after Brad died, I had been sitting with her completely relaxed in my lap, as she held her blanket and sucked on her pacifier, fighting sleep and not winning. Suddenly she bolted upright and looked straight at the wall.
“Hi, Daddy!” she said brightly.
Gulp. What?
Shortly after that, I was strapping her into her car seat in the minivan after church when she gazed at the ceiling of the car and started giggling uncontrollably.
“Daddy’s on the ceiling!” she exclaimed.
And then a few weeks later, I was battling tears as she and I were driving home from running errands. Sarah was sitting directly behind me and couldn’t see my face, and I was doing my best to keep my sadness a secret from her…when she suddenly started laughing.
“Daddy’s kissing you!” she said.
“He is?” I answered, trying to make my voice overly bright so that she wouldn’t hear it shaking. “Where? On the cheek?”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Right on the lips!”
The night that the tarot-card reader told me all of this, I knew it was true. I hadn’t solicited her services. I hadn’t offered any answers. The truth was…I was so shocked that I could hardly speak at all. I had always wondered how I would feel if I knew Brad was always with me. Would I feel self-conscious? Would I feel scared? Would the whole idea of it just creep me out?
But that night, when she told me he was always with me, a wave of comfort washed over me. And for the rest of the evening I almost felt like he was my date.
When I got home that night and told my teenage babysitter what had happened, she breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thank God. I’ve been a little freaked out about babysitting over here, in case something weird should happen, like your house is haunted or something.”
“Well, not to worry,” I replied cheerfully. “Sounds like he’s always with me.”
I wondered for years after that if it was real. If it had really happened. And I have come to the conclusion that, yes, it was real. It did happen. That woman saw him that night and knew things she couldn’t have known unless he was with me. And the reason I know this is because since then I have been to some really bad mediums.
Here is a tip: Don’t ever go to a medium because you got a 50 percent off coupon. That should answer your question about authenticity right there.
I went in to see my counselor not long after the experience at the fundraiser, and when I sat down, I said, “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but…”
And then I told her what had happened with the medium.
Now, first of all, you should never start a conversation with your therapist by saying, “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
You’re in her office. Crazy is a given.
And if your therapist responds with, “Yup. Crazy all right. Let me get my prescription pad and set you up with enough meds that will have you not only thinking that you see your husband…you’ll think you’re living with the entire cast from Eight is Enough”…then it may be time to find someone else who gets it.
That day, I was surprised when my counselor didn’t look at me like I was nuts. She said in her matter-of-fact way, “Of course they’re here. Where else are they going to go?”
I thought for sure that my dad and my brother-in-law would fall into the nonbeliever category. I hadn’t really told them much about all these little things, reserving my stories for my mother who might not have believed me but had the good sense not to say so. But one night right around Brad’s birthday, years after he died, I was sitting with my entire family at my parents’ house and explaining to them some strange things that had been going on.
“I know this is going to sound weird,” I told them, “but in the middle of the night last night I heard all the cabinet doors slam, one right after the other in the kids’ bathroom. It was really loud and I heard three really big slams before it stopped.”
I expected the story to be met with some eye-rolling from the men in my family.
Instead, I got something I didn’t expect.
“Cath…do you have access to Brad’s Yahoo account?” Sean asked suddenly.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t even know that he had one.”
“Huh,” he said, looking a little embarrassed about what he was getting ready to say. “I’ve always meant to ask you that. Because he and I used to chat on that all the time during the day while we were at work. And a couple of months after he died, I saw his chat icon go live, like he was logged in. I just assumed it was you.”
“Nope,” I said, relieved that someone else had experienced the Brad phenomenon. “Wasn’t me.”
“Well, shoot,” he said. “Kind of makes me wish I had typed something in…to see what happened.”
“Well, did Dad ever tell you what happened to him right after Brad died?” my mom interjected.
“No. What?”
My dad looked at me and said, “I had just gone back to work and I had to call on a customer. When I got to the reception desk, the secretary asked me to sign in on their guest logbook.”
He cleared his throat.
“The person who had just signed in before me was ‘Brad Tidd.’”
Now, that would make a believer out of just about anyone.
&nbs
p; The truth is…I didn’t really need a medium or a Ouija board to answer any of these questions for me. It didn’t matter if anyone else believed me when I said that I could walk down the hall and suddenly know I wasn’t alone. Or that sometimes flickering lights would follow me from room to room. Or that I could be driving in my car and get a whiff of his cologne. It didn’t really matter if anyone else believed it was real or not.
If I believe that it’s real and it gave me a sense of comfort, then that’s all that mattered.
Dreaming about Brad doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. For me, there are good and bad things about dreaming about him. I love those dreams. Absolutely love them. No matter what they are, it’s just amazing to have that feeling of being with him again. The bad thing is then I wake up, rub my eyes, and focus on the room. And realize he’s gone all over again.
Usually the days after I have a dream about Brad are the days that I miss him the most. I spend the day with an ache in my soul that just won’t go away. Even years later, when I have a dream about him, the way I feel when I wake up is like the loss is as raw and new as it was in the summer of 2007.
Most of those dreams involve us just talking. I’m telling him about the kids and what we’ve been up to. My favorite was one where we were lying in our bed, the bedroom looking like it did before I went through my remodeling phase, and we’re just talking about the kids.
The morning I woke up from that one, I just about couldn’t get out of bed.
But the dream that made me know that it was real, that he really was with me, was the first one I had about him.
It was in October, just a few months after he died. I vividly remember that it was October because the World Series was coming up, and even though I didn’t follow baseball at all (and neither had Brad), it would have been impossible to live in Denver and not know that the Colorado Rockies had a shot at getting there. Even though at that point I didn’t have the attention span to watch the news, the city was in baseball mode. We just didn’t know who we’d be playing against.
I dreamed that we were having a party at our house and all of our friends were there. Brad was wearing khaki shorts and a fleece plaid pullover that was one of his favorites. Everyone was mingling, drinking beer, and having a good time, which I thought was strange.
Because in my dream, we all knew that Brad was about to die.
He had had the stroke, and I remember dreaming that I was watching him like you would be watching a pregnant woman whose water had just broken. He was standing outside in our backyard with a few of his friends, on the other side of a huge window so that he could still see the TV, watching the baseball game with extreme interest, something he had never really done before when he was alive.
“Does your head hurt?” I kept asking him in the dream. “Is it time for us to go to the hospital?”
“Not yet,” Brad would say with a trace of annoyance. “I want to watch the end of this game.”
I looked at the TV through the window and saw it was the Rockies playing the Red Sox.
“Since when have you become such a Red Sox fan?” I asked him, turning to go back into the house. I flopped down onto the couch in the TV room next to a friend of mine.
“This really sucks,” I said, alluding to Brad’s impending death, which didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else in the room.
“Yeah, it really does,” he replied and went back to watching the game.
I really didn’t think anything of that dream. Honestly, I was just so excited that I’d finally had one of Brad. I filed it back in the corner of my mind and went on, trying to live day to day, moment to moment, without giving the significance of that dream any thought.
Until, weeks later, my parents happened to have the news on when the anchor announced who would be playing in the World Series.
The Colorado Rockies and the Boston Red Sox.
Now, if I had known that Brad was going to be giving me sports tips, I would have contacted my local bookie. And since then, I’ve been waiting for him to just pop in and give me the winning lottery numbers.
No such luck.
But I have no doubt that he was there, and I have no doubt that he’s visited my subconscious since then. Many times, he’s just a bystander, and in every dream, I know that he’s dead. But it’s still just nice to see him every once in a while and catch up. (Remind me that I said that when I’m eighty years old and he still looks thirty-four in my dream. I don’t think my subconscious is smart enough to age him along with me.)
But the thing that happens to me most often is a meaningful song being played on the radio when I really need to hear it. The Christmas before Brad died, he was stuck in Washington, DC, desperately trying to get home. Colorado had had three major snowstorms back to back, which had delayed and canceled hundreds of flights. So, on December 22, Brad called me at nine at night and said, “I’m not waiting on the airline anymore. I still have my rental car, and I’m leaving right now and driving home. If I drive straight through, I’ll make it home by Christmas Eve.”
He drove through the night, racing west to spend Christmas with his family. The next morning, worried that I hadn’t heard from him, I tried calling his cell phone to see where he was.
And I didn’t get an answer.
Knowing how exhausted he must be and not crazy about the idea of him making that long trip by himself, I began to worry about him. I had no idea how far he had driven the night before and where he could possibly be in his trek across the country. I sat down at the kitchen table, wondering what in the heck to do next.
And then the phone rang.
“I’m sorry I missed your call!” Brad chirped from the middle of Ohio. “I had the windows down and the radio cranked up and I was singing that Rascal Flatts song ‘Life is a Highway’ at the top of my lungs. I didn’t even hear it ring!”
Months later, after he died, I still had that image in my head. Of Brad sailing down the highway, coming home to us and gleefully singing as loud as he could. A song that talks about how life is short and how you should live every minute of it. A song that talks about survival.
A song that tells us that life is a journey.
And so, when I’m feeling down or like I can’t take this whole widow thing anymore or that if I have to make one more decision, my head is going to explode…and suddenly that song comes on, you bet your ass I believe it’s him telling me to hang in there. And that I can do it.
Because I can.
14
Picture it. Colorado, 2007. A new widow goes to pick her dog up at the kennel where she (the dog, not the widow) had been boarded to be out of the way for the funeral. The sun is shining. The air is crisp and clean. And the widow is in such a fog that she probably shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.
As she waits for her dog to be brought to the counter, one of the groomers strikes up a conversation.
“I heard that the dog had to be boarded because of a family emergency. Did everything turn out okay?”
“Uh. No, actually. My husband died in a motorcycle accident three days ago.”
The groomer then proceeds, to the horror of the young widow and the people surrounding her in the waiting room, to tell a detailed, gruesome story of how one of her friends was decapitated in a motorcycle accident years earlier. And as another groomer hands the widow her dog’s leash, the woman behind the counter ends with, “So if you need anyone to talk to, give us a call. ’Cause we all know what you’re going through.”
And although the young widow may have been relieved to know she could always call her local kennel for sympathy and support, she was rendered speechless by the story and could only manage a “thank you” as she stumbled out the door.
That young widow was me. And that kennel is no longer in business.
I think about that story quite a bit…mainly because now, years later, I
find it hilariously funny. But I used to wonder why. Why didn’t I tell that woman off? Why didn’t I tell her that what she was saying was completely thoughtless? Why didn’t I bill her for the therapy I later had to go through after listening to her motorcycle decapitation story, right after burying my own husband (who still, thankfully, had a head)?
And now I can tell you why.
Because she meant well.
I think it took me a little longer than most people to notice that good intentions often come in the form of stupid comments. That’s probably because I’m a pleaser and would rather walk on my hands through burning hot coals than make someone else feel uncomfortable in my presence. And my widowness was usually enough to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but responding “What the hell did you just say?” after they’d made a comment they thought was comforting would really seal the deal.
It was exhausting, the effort I put into making other people think that they’d said the right thing. My body tensed up, my jaw got tight, and I suppressed the urge to scream while all of my mental energy was concentrating on saying, “Thank you for your words of comfort. You have no idea what they mean to me.”
When what I really wanted to do was yell, “You idiot!” And then run away and submerge myself in a bubble bath like the widow’s version of a Calgon commercial.
I’ve had friends say to me, “You’re so strong. You’re like Superwoman!” And I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking that they’re paying me a huge compliment by telling me that I’ve gotten my life back on track so well.
But what it really feels like is, “You’re so strong. So don’t break that facade now because then everything will completely fall apart.”
Or the people who would tell me, “This is part of God’s plan.”
Well, peachy. But it wasn’t part of mine. And since God isn’t here to help me put these kids through college, I really wish He had consulted me first.
Or how about “everything happens for a reason.”
Now, what I do when I hear that is smile and nod. But what I’d really like to do is say, “You know, you’re right. Everything does happen for a reason. I’m a little unclear about what the reason might be right now, but if you could explain to me why my husband is dead at thirty-four and I’m now raising three children on my own, I would love to hear your theory.”
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 15