Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  Holidays.

  Birthdays.

  Graduations.

  Anniversaries.

  Weddings.

  Flag Day.

  New Year’s Day.

  Mondays.

  Some of them are obvious, and some of them are hidden. Actually, most of them are hidden. Now that I think about it, most of them are not only hidden, but they’re also wearing ski masks and waiting quietly behind a bush, ready to take anything we have to offer.

  Milestones are complicated because they’re different for all of us and that’s part of what makes this journey so individual. Although we would all like to think that every widow goes through the same milestones at the same time with the exact same type of mental breakdown, unfortunately that just ain’t so.

  If that were the case, bars would only have to be open on certain days of the year and the world would only need one book about grief.

  Since Brad died during the summer, my first holiday hurdle was Thanksgiving. I know you’re thinking, “What happened to Halloween?” but he traveled all the time and was rarely around for Halloween. I was usually alone trying to get all three kids bundled up for Colorado-style trick-or-treating in twenty-degree weather. Anyway, during the first Thanksgiving without Brad, my parents made the decision that the best way for us to get through the holiday would be to pack everyone up and head to Louisiana to spend it with the rest of my extended family.

  Let me rephrase that.

  They decided it was a good idea to pack everyone up and drive to Louisiana. From Colorado. Locked in the car with my parents and my three children. Two days there and two days back with a four-day tropical vacation in the area of the world where they film Swamp People. The Texas leg of this trip alone would probably make the ordeal of Brad’s death pale in comparison.

  This was a good plan.

  Looking back, I’m not sure it’s the best idea to take someone in a state of extreme grief and manic confusion to a ten-block town with a drive-through daiquiri stand. This was a very risky move on their part. It sounds like the beginning of a bad reality series: “Widows Who Drink Daiquiris from Recycled Gallon Milk Containers and the People Who Love Them.”

  After spending two days in the car with the kids constantly asking, “How much farther until we stop for lunch-dinner-snack-world’s largest prairie dog?” while I tried to figure out what seemed to be an impossible algebra equation involving travel time versus movie time (“We’ll stop when Monsters, Inc. is done”), we stepped out of the car at my grandmother’s house and breathed in the sweet, fresh Louisiana air.

  Actually, we stepped out and breathed in the thick, chemical-filled Louisiana air.

  It had been a long time since I’d spent Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house. In fact, the last time we had been there was right after Brad and I got engaged. During that trip, he and Sean formed a tight bond, sticking together as the two Yankee future grandsons-in-law (and believe me, the way my extended family says “Yankee”…it’s not a compliment), which sealed their friendship from that day forward.

  Kind of like war buddies.

  They marveled at how the tap water fizzed in a mysterious way. They could drink twice as much beer below sea level. And although everyone seemed to be speaking English, they couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying.

  Of course, I didn’t realize that that was the last time I had been to Grannie’s until I got there. And from the moment I stepped out of the car, all of those memories came flooding back and threatened my already wavering equilibrium. That was my first lesson in how going places you’ve been to before with your spouse and then being there for the first time without them is tough. And it sneaks up on you. You don’t realize how hard it’s going to be until you’re there. And once you’re there, you’re stuck.

  With fizzy water.

  I spent what seemed like the entire trip walking. I left the kids playing in my grandmother’s yard with my cousins and parents on alert, plugged in my MP3, and listened to angry music while I pounded the cracked pavement. I probably walked three times a day for miles. I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish or where I was trying to go, but I had this feeling that if I could keep moving, I might just make it through.

  “Do you always walk this much?” my cousin asked me after a few days.

  “I do now,” I replied, expecting the fact that I couldn’t sit still for two minutes to make perfect sense to someone on the outside.

  By the end of the third day, I could give an exact house-to-trailer ratio in that town and tell you who was frequenting the B&B Bar at nine every morning. (And, no, it wasn’t me.) When Thanksgiving Day rolled around, I actually thought I had out-smarted, outwalked, and outmaneuvered my grief.

  Until the turkey was brought out and I suddenly found myself sobbing in my aunt’s childhood room, crushed by loneliness in a house full of people who loved me.

  After getting through that first Thanksgiving as gracefully as I possibly could, I could see Christmas looming before us. The holiday that had always been my favorite and so magical for me had suddenly turned into something that I would have sold one of my children to avoid.

  Not really. Well, maybe. But only if I get to pick which child.

  First on my to-do list was my Christmas card. Now, this is a challenge for new widows and most of them don’t take it on.

  I don’t blame them.

  But I had been so overwhelmed right after Brad’s death that I often found it hard to keep up with the people who called or emailed to see how we were doing. Not only that, but I was still stressed out about that whole thank-you note business and wanted to do something that just let everyone know that we were okay (or at least let them think that) and how much we appreciated the generosity of our friends and family that year.

  Hoping to take something off my plate in the weeks after Brad’s death, Kristi had suggested, “Why don’t you just send a Christmas newsletter in a few months and let them all know how you’re doing?”

  What sounded like a good plan during the summer became a huge source of stress in December. The upshot was that I finally had enough information about my year to write an entire newsletter, something that I’d never considered our lives to be newsworthy enough to do. The dilemma was, how do you write a cheerful Christmas card that includes the death of your spouse? I mean, who wants to read something like that while eating cookies and drinking hot cocoa?

  Of course, the crazy widow lurking deep inside me just wanted to write something like:

  “Hope you enjoy your holidays with your loved ones!

  My husband died and I now have a well-used loyalty card at the local liquor store!

  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!”

  Instead, I’ll give you a better idea of what I came up with:

  2007 has been an amazing year.

  In 2007, I lost an amazing husband, friend, and father of my children.

  In 2007, I learned how amazing the people around me are. The support I have received has meant more to me than anyone will ever know.

  In 2007, I figured out how amazing my children really are…

  And on and on with news about the kids and how we were doing. This, complete with a picture of all of us in which I look like there’s no way I could possibly concentrate on a camera much less my life, summed up our “amazing” year.

  Many experts suggest that, to make the holidays a little easier, you should take the traditions you had with your spouse and alter them a little. I don’t know about making it any easier, but I do think there is some truth to changing things so that the absence isn’t quite so glaringly obvious. Like, go get a different tree topper so that you’re not constantly reminded that it was always your husband who put that exact star on the top of the tree. Do a pork roast instead of a turkey. Switch from Bud Light to Coors Light for your beverage of choice while putting t
ogether all of the toys.

  Just something simple.

  When I set out to get the house ready for Christmas that first year, I was determined to make the most of my newfound single state and decorate the house my way. You see, Christmas decorations were always a source of tension between Brad and me. He was colored racing lights and I was stationary white lights. He was tinsel. I was bows. He was tacky. I was not.

  I’ll never forget our first Christmas as a married couple. We were living in Florida where Brad was working at Cape Canaveral on the Titan rocket and, because the Air Force is so especially helpful when it comes to scheduling, he had a launch scheduled right after Christmas. This meant that no one from the squadron was allowed to go on leave, and I think I can safely say that neither one of us was thrilled with spending Christmas away from our families. We were pretty tense and took to fighting about the pettiest of things, both of us wanting to carry on the traditions we had had growing up.

  The problem was…our traditions were polar opposites.

  We spent weeks arguing over what would top our tree. I always had a beautifully traditional angel when I was growing up, and he had a blinking star that looked like it belonged on the top of a Vegas stripper’s tree. To me, it seemed to say to Jesus, “We’re over here! Bless us! Bless us!”

  I remember standing in the middle of one of those nauseatingly Christmassy stores in the mall a couple of weeks before our first Christmas Day as a married couple and, in keeping with the Christmas spirit, arguing.

  “Why in the world would we get that?” Brad asked, looking in disbelief at the plain angel I held in my hands. “It doesn’t even light up!”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I don’t think that a traditional Christmas in Bethlehem was spent watching a star that spins, blinks, and plays ‘Jingle Bell Rock.’”

  I still have pictures of that tree. There’s nothing on top.

  I always used to tell guests over the holidays that our Christmas tree turned into the symbol of how we compromised and made our marriage work. I made a string of tinsel with fabric mixed in so that Brad had a little sparkle and I had a few bows. We found colored lights that had ten different settings, one of which was a faint fade in and out. We mixed those in with our white lights.

  When the kids were finally old enough to help with the decorating, they added their own touch by only decorating the bottom two feet of the tree that they could reach with ornaments. I finally gave up on the angel and we had a non-blinking star adorning the top of the tree. It was completely original and no one would ever know about the ten years of fighting that got us to that point.

  And it was the perfect definition of compromise because I don’t think either one of us really liked it.

  On my first Christmas alone, I was determined to decorate the tree how I’d always wanted it. I covered it in white lights and coordinating ornaments. I bought traditional decorations that I could picture in Martha Stewart’s home. Everything was spaced out perfectly and centered in the front window of my house.

  And I didn’t have nearly as much fun decorating as I had when there was someone there to roll their eyes and tell me that those decorations were flat-out boring.

  Haley, Michael, and Sarah had to come to terms with the fact that the main gingerbread-house maker was gone. Being an engineer, Brad couldn’t rest until the prepackaged, do-it-yourself gingerbread house looked exactly the same as the picture on the box. Believe me, if there was one gumdrop missing from that kit, he was probably the only person in the entire country who noticed that the path leading up to the house was incomplete.

  “Why does the gingerbread house lean to one side and have a crack in the roof?” Haley asked, eyeing the first gingerbread house I’d tried to construct on my own.

  “I’m trying to remember those affected by Hurricane Katrina,” I said, attempting to make excuses for my dilapidated house. “If you can go cut me a little piece of blue fabric, we can stick it on the roof and cover that crack.”

  Buying presents wasn’t quite as much fun after he died, either. When I used to shop for the kids, one of my requirements was to find at least one thing that would be impossibly complicated to put together. This was part of my Christmas gift to Brad. He liked nothing better than staying up until 1:00 a.m., cursing the packaging engineers put here on earth for the devil’s entertainment and constructing a toy workbench for a three-year-old with directions that only came in Japanese.

  Not that he looked at the directions anyway.

  During my first Christmas without Brad, it suddenly occurred to me, as I was doing my shopping, that it would be my father and me putting together whatever toys I bought. And if there’s one thing my dad and I have in common, it’s impatience with anything that has directions, no matter what language they’re written in. Finding toys that needed to be constructed wouldn’t be considered “fun”…it would be more like an excuse to open that next bottle of merlot.

  The kids got a lot of stuffed animals that year.

  The other difference was not having a present on my Christmas list for Brad and knowing that there wouldn’t be anything special for me under the tree. And let me tell you, that was a big deal. Not only have I always been a big kid around Christmas, but Brad was the best Santa Claus ever. Actually, he was the best Santa Claus with a huge penchant for procrastination. This was something I knew was hereditary, because very often we wouldn’t receive our Christmas presents from his family until around Easter. And the one year he didn’t put off shopping and got it done early, I ended up with an Oral-B toothbrush and a collectors’ set of CDs that he wouldn’t let me open and play because they’d lose their value.

  Clearly it worked out better for me if he shopped under pressure, with a sprinkling of guilt for good measure.

  The fact that Brad was such a procrastinator in purchasing gifts for any occasion both irritated and intrigued me. I hated feeling guilty every time he’d rush out the door at the last minute to go get me something, but I was always curious what he would find at the zero hour. It got to the point that his presence at home wouldn’t be expected on Christmas Eve. I swear that if the stores were open Christmas Day, he would have waited until then.

  He was the kind of customer that retailers count on to make their last-minute Christmas quota and the entire reason they stay open until midnight. Believe me, I’m sure the salesmen were salivating as he ran through the dealership door in a panic the Christmas that he surprised me with a car. I’ve often wondered since then if he actually went out to buy me a sweater and realized they were out of my size so he got flustered and exclaimed, “To the Honda dealership!” in the middle of Macy’s.

  Until he died, no one could convince me that there really wasn’t a Santa. Because until he was gone, Santa always visited me.

  • • •

  When Christmas was over and the rest of the world had gone on their normal, merry way, returning to work and back into their routine, I stripped my house of all of the holiday decorations that made me cry every time I looked at them and tried to do the same. While most everyone else had the post-holiday blues, I actually felt a little lighter, knowing I had gotten through that first Christmas without him. I looked at the calendar and thought, “Smooth sailing until Easter. I got this.”

  And then I got broadsided by Valentine’s Day.

  I’ll never forget it. I had just stopped at the intersection of Winter and Spring, and then—wham!—it hit me from behind.

  I guess part of me knew it was coming. I had just finished helping my kids put the finishing touches on their Valentine’s Day cards, so it’s not as if the day was a complete surprise. They were at home with a babysitter the afternoon of Valentine’s Day while I ran a few errands, and at the last minute, I decided that I should stop at the grocery store and pick up a gallon of milk.

  I stood completely still at the entrance of the store, watching men hurriedly pick up flower
s on their way home from work to bring to their significant others. I was overcome by a feeling I just can’t explain. It was kind of like a combination of sadness and abandonment…mixed with an urge to trip every one of those guys as they walked out the door.

  So I skipped the milk and bought a bottle of wine instead.

  The truth is, I don’t even know why I cared. Brad had always hated Valentine’s Day. The thought of some executive at Hallmark demanding that he show affection for his wife on February 14 every year just really chapped him. I remember having many conversations with him about how he didn’t need anyone else to remind him to give me flowers or send me a card.

  Of course, his end of the argument would have held up better if he actually did things like that any other day of the year.

  I’ll never forget our first Valentine’s Day as a married couple. I was on the phone with my mother, sobbing to her about how I’d made a huge error in judgment by getting married because my husband had abandoned me on Valentine’s Day to go to happy hour with his Air Force buddies.

  “I’ve made a huge mistake!” I hiccuped to her. “What was I thinking? How could he not come straight home on Valentine’s Day?”

  “I know, sweetie, I know,” she said soothingly. “Men just don’t think of these things. But if it makes you feel any better, you’ll get used to it.”

  By the time Brad actually stumbled through the door, I was about ready to draw up divorce papers and stick them in his Valentine. I didn’t feel much better when he handed me my Valentine’s Day present, which consisted of a dozen wilted roses, a twelve pack of Bud Light, and a dartboard. Little did I know that as the years wore on, that would be one of the more romantic Valentine’s Days I would have.

  When Brad decided to rebel against something, he did it big time.

  That was when I began to figure it out. It wasn’t just the holidays we enjoyed that I missed—it was everything. All of the memories of times past and the knowledge that we wouldn’t be making new ones together. To actually feel nostalgic for that first Valentine’s Day that we were married, the one when I was so annoyed with him that I thought for sure I wouldn’t speak to him until the next February 14, made me even sadder. I had no idea that not only would I miss the great days we had had together, but I would miss the bad ones as well.