The good, the bad, the disappointment of a dartboard for Valentine’s Day, or the surprise of a car for Christmas—they made up a life. Our life.
My life.
• • •
In the beginning, every day was hard because every day was a milestone. Every “normal” day was a day I would never have again.
And I missed it.
The year before Brad’s death seemed to play in my mind like an old home movie as I relived what we had done, day for day, memory for memory, the entire first year he was gone. I still can’t explain it, but somehow my widow brain could remember an entire year in detail…yet I couldn’t remember what I’d had for breakfast (or if I had even eaten) that morning.
(Shaky sigh.) “One year ago today, we sat with Michael on the toilet for three hours straight, waiting for him to do a number two. What I wouldn’t give to relive that day!”
During the first year it seemed like I was in a constant state of emotional agony. The whole damn year was hard, and getting through every day was a milestone. As soon as night would fall, I would grab a chocolate out of my Days of Grief Calendar, grateful that I had made it through another one. I tried to keep myself as busy as possible so that I wouldn’t have time to dwell on what was going on, but it seemed like every night, I would sit with a photo album in my lap and flip through pictures of a man I just couldn’t believe was actually gone.
As I crept closer to the anniversary of his death, I felt proud. Yes! Proud. I had done it. I was almost there. All of those firsts were behind me. Never again would I have to say I hadn’t lived through a Christmas without him. Never again would I have to say I hadn’t made it through a spring without him. Never again would I have to say that four weeks was the longest we had ever been separated.
Three hundred and sixty five days of widowhood. And I was still standing. Most of the time.
As I was approaching that one-year mark, my friend Sally came to a session of group therapy for the kids puffy-eyed and looking like she hadn’t slept in weeks.
“Sally? Sally…are you okay?” I asked.
She looked at me through bleary eyes and said, “I’m trying to get off Prozac, and a part of me thinks that I’ve been on it so long…I’ve never really allowed myself to grieve.”
And then she said it.
“Year two is the worst.”
Ah, yes. The words that strike fear in the heart of every widow. That whatever year we haven’t gone through yet is “the worst”…when we can’t imagine anything worse than what we’re going through. And to think I was so proud of myself for making it through that first horrific year! I hadn’t totaled my car, gambled away my insurance money, or torched my house. The kids were doing well, and I was even starting to occasionally get them to school on time.
So when Sally said that, I sat there stunned, unable to imagine anything worse than what I was going through right then. Year two is the worst? Then what the hell have I been doing all of this time? If someone had told me that from the beginning, I would have just hung up my Kleenex box and retired as a rookie!
To distract myself from the impending doom of the second year that I now felt hanging over me, I began thinking about what I wanted to do for the first anniversary of Brad’s death. Did I want to be alone? Did I want to be with people? Did I want to be alone in my room with people downstairs? Did I want to lie in my bed and let people come up to my room one at a time to pay homage to a great man and the woman he left behind? Did I want to assign everyone their own pager so that they would be on call to bring me comfort, sympathy, or something containing alcohol?
Really. It’s a complicated time for any widow.
“I’m going to invite everyone over!” I told my mom. “Everyone I can think of! Then we’ll have a big balloon release in the backyard. It’s going to be so much fun!”
Pause. “Are you sure you want to do that? It sounds like a lot of work,” she replied slowly.
“No! It’s perfect! We’ll make it an annual event! I won’t go overboard. I promise!”
Ha.
It was as I was grocery shopping for the party that it suddenly came to me: I’m going to put a party together that involves everything that Brad loved. I started wheeling my way through the grocery store getting more and more excited about this idea, picking up huge bags of Snickers, chips, mozzarella sticks, pizza, and ice cream. Anything with grease, sugar, or marinara sauce made its way into my cart. It was overflowing by the time I made my way up to the cashier, and as I started loading everything onto the conveyor belt, he gave me a worried sideways glance.
I think if I had added a box of tampons and a gun to that order, he probably would have called security.
Okay. So now I’ve got the food. What else do I need?
Liquor.
“This is it,” I thought, completely rationally. “I’m going to get all of the stuff Brad liked…from the moment he turned twenty-one to the day he died! It will be a stumble down Memory Lane!”
Miller High Life, Mad Dog 20/20 (yes, we really were that classy), and Busch Light were dumped with a clank into my cart. Bud Light, Fat Tire, and Rolling Rock were piled on top, commemorating his later years when he could afford beer that was more than two dollars a case.
“Having a party?” asked the clerk as he rang up my purchases.
“Oh, yes!” I replied, brightly. “It’s the first anniversary of my husband’s death. We’re going to party it up big time!”
Silence. “Oh. Well. Have a good weekend, then.”
I raced home to get everything set up. I preheated the oven for the pizza and cheese sticks. I put all of the candy into bowls, opened up all of the chips, and iced down the beer. I brought everything out to the back porch table while trying to fend off my kids who were desperately trying to dig into the buffet of their dreams. And when I got it all set up, I looked at it, expecting to feel complete pride at the zit fest I had provided for my friends and family.
But instead I felt…defeated.
I sat down on my back porch chair with a thump, tears rolling down my face as I looked at all of Brad’s favorite food sitting there on the table.
Why isn’t he here? Why am I doing this alone? Why don’t I feel better now that the first year is finished?
What is that smell coming from inside the house?
And at the time, I could only answer one of those questions.
That smell was a year’s worth of dust burning in my neglected oven.
• • •
In many ways, holidays are the easier milestones to get through because there are usually traditions surrounding them that we know are not going to change. Christmas trees usually still need to be purchased, Easter eggs need to be hidden, and sparklers on the Fourth of July still need to be lit.
But birthdays and anniversaries (wedding and death)…those are a different story.
The problem with those milestones is that there isn’t a set of rules that outlines how we are supposed to acknowledge them. I would say that beyond the dating questions, what widows ask each other the most is how we “celebrate” those days.
Because we have no idea what the hell we’re supposed to do.
We can always try the typical balloon release, where we go out to the destination of our choice—an open field, a cemetery, or the parking lot at McDonald’s—and each person lets go of a helium balloon. Now, most widows have done this at one time or another, whether they have kids or not. And I’m sure there is a good, therapeutic reason for doing it, but I think the main reason why most of us release balloons is because we can’t think of anything else to do.
While we excel at grieving, we’re not the most original bunch.
I truly wish that whoever came up with the balloon release had decided on something else, mainly because I’ve had very few go smoothly. And I worry every time one of these goes awry that I
will have to take out a second mortgage on my home to pay for the therapy that my kids will need in the future.
Balloon releases can go wrong for all of the obvious reasons. You know…trees, electrical lines, and just the random pop. And all of these obstacles impact our need for healing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a children’s book that deals with the loss of a balloon after the loss of a parent. I could really use something like Daddy Still Knows You Love Him Even Though Your Balloon Is Caught on the Neighbor’s Satellite Dish.
Now, the good news about the whole balloon idea is that every time we pass a Toyota dealership and they happen to be advertising a sale with tons of balloons, my kids get excited and think that the manager is remembering their dad. But when the kids were little, balloon releases seemed to be unreasonably complicated. I’d always have to have a big build-up as I jollied them along and convinced them to let go of a helium balloon they’d rather keep anyway.
“I know it’s a pretty pink balloon. But don’t you want to send it up to Daddy and let him know that you love him? And no, I can’t explain why you get to keep the balloon you get from Red Robin but I’m making you let this one go.”
As the kids got older, they started writing notes to Brad and sending them up with the balloon. Now, I thought this was a great idea but eventually I started worrying about the fact that they were so fixated on it. I began wondering if the note attached read something like, “Help! You left us here with this crazy woman and she has no idea what she’s doing!”
I’ll never forget one Father’s Day a couple of years after Brad died when I packed the kids up for a trek to where his ashes are buried in Buffalo Creek. I stopped at the local grocery store (the last piece of civilization before we hit the official Middle of Nowhere), and after I’d waited…and waited…and waited for someone in the floral department to come along and help me with our grief balloons, I finally made it out to my minivan where I carefully opened the back hatch to put our purchase away until send-off.
As I let go, a gust of wind blew through the car, sending one balloon up in the air. This, of course, sent me into a panic, so I quickly slammed the hatch shut, popping a second one.
The wails of my children could be heard across the parking lot as I desperately tried to comfort them.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” I said in my brightest voice. “Daddy will be happy with just one family balloon! All he wanted this year anyway was for us to make a big family wish and send it up to him!”
Quick thinking, right? Yeah, they didn’t buy it, either.
We’ve also always released balloons on Brad’s birthday, and not once has it gone well. Actually, when I think about it…very rarely does Brad’s birthday go smoothly at all.
You see, I came up with the idea of Brad’s birthday being “Daddy Day.” Daddy Day consists of me taking the kids out of school for the day, doing things that are completely frivolous and fun, and eat as much junk food as we can get our hands on.
Now, I know that therapists around the world are shuddering at the idea of doing something so flippant to remember something so significant. But I know that playing hooky to go bowling and eating fried cheese is something that Brad would be proud of. So I’m sticking with it.
The best part about Daddy Day is that it has made Brad’s birthday something that the kids look forward to. The bad part is that usually when you merrily anticipate something so much, it very rarely lives up to expectations.
It wasn’t until our third Daddy Day that I started wondering if Brad was trying to mess with our day for his own birthday enjoyment. Up until then, I just thought it was such an emotional day for me that it would be impossible for it to go perfectly. But on that Daddy Day I realized—you can’t have a day that screwed up without getting a little help from above.
We were heading up to the mountains yet again to visit Brad’s headstone, the kids blissfully silent thanks to the in-car DVD player that I rarely let them watch. I was happily sipping my Starbucks, enjoying a moment of peace, when there was a burst of noise from the third-row seat of the minivan.
“MOM! She drew on the seat with marker!”
Sure enough, I would find out later, four-year-old Sarah had decided to make her own permanent seat covers by doing some sort of abstract drawing of a “zebra playing catch with a fish while driving a semi.” Now, what I was expected to do about it while going seventy-five miles an hour on the highway, I still do not know. But it sent Michael into a frenzy of reprimanding her, never mind that he had actually stamped his own name (in permanent ink) on the backseat the previous year.
But in a super-mom attempt not to let a little artwork get in the way of Daddy Day, I decided to let it go. The kids went back to their movie and I went back to my Starbucks, and as we neared our final destination, I thought I should be proactive and stop for a potty/lunch break, even though Michael had assured me that if he had to go to the bathroom, he could find an obliging tree. Feeling that peeing in the middle of a cemetery might be frowned upon, I pulled off the highway and spotted a Qdoba, the only restaurant in town that didn’t involve fries.
“Can I sit next to you?” Haley asked as we waited in line for our food.
“Sure,” I replied, not seeing the shit storm that was building. Because at that exact moment, Michael suddenly decided that sitting next to Sarah was akin to having lunch with fifty pounds of plutonium. And he proceeded to throw a complete fit.
And I mean a fit.
“I don’t want to sit next to Sarah!” he yelled in the middle of the restaurant. “I want to sit next to you!”
“Haley asked me first,” I said, trying to defuse the situation. “But you can sit across from me and that way we can talk to each other easier!”
Nice try, Mom.
I learned a very valuable lesson that day. My desire and determination to “make it a good day” was no match for the temper of a six-year-old boy. He yelled. He cried. He stomped his feet. I gave him “the look.” I gave him that scary mommy-angry under-the-breath voice. People stared. They shook their heads, knowing they could handle this situation better than I could. And unaware of the embarrassing situation he was creating and the nervous breakdown he was about to make me have, Michael screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
“Can I help you to your table?” asked the woman behind the counter, trying to be heard over Michael’s tantrum.
“No, thank you,” I replied, trying to stay as calm as possible and handing Michael his lunch. “He can carry this and I’ve got the rest.”
At which point Michael gave his feet a final stomp.
And his lunch slid to the floor.
Seeing what I’m sure looked like my eyes spinning around and smoke coming out of my ears, the wonderful woman at the cash register looked at me and said cheerfully in a thick Spanish accent, “We can clean this up! Here’s a free quesadilla! And here, chips and guacamole! It’s okay! I have children!”
Michael sat at the table, all cried out and hiccuping. The girls were silent, knowing that one false move could send me over the edge. And I sat at the table, next to Haley as promised, a lump in my throat so big I couldn’t even eat.
What was I doing? Were the “powers that be” trying to tell me that I couldn’t do this alone? Was some divine force trying to make me miss him even more?
Why didn’t I pick a restaurant that served wine?
Later that afternoon, after we had released our balloons at the cemetery in Buffalo Creek and, thankfully, only one of them got caught up on a telephone pole, we made our way down the mountain. I felt drained and weak, as I always did on Brad’s birthday, and was somewhat zoned out as we made our way into downtown Denver.
You see, in order to make it the perfect Daddy Day, I had promised the kids that we would go see the new 3D IMAX movie on the Hubble telescope, and I knew it was playing at the Denver Museum of Na
ture and Science. With our day pretty much wide open, I felt sure that we would be able to make it to the 4:00 p.m. showing with plenty of time.
I just had no idea that the entire downtown work force was going to be released at exactly 3:00 p.m. that day.
I sat in gridlock traffic, watching the minutes tick by on the clock on my dashboard. I inched my way closer and closer to the theater, willing us to get there on time, knowing that you can’t breeze in late to an IMAX. Those educational people are real sticklers about promptness.
I squealed into the parking lot and pushed the kids out of the minivan. We ran through the entrance of the museum, and I breathlessly said to the man at the counter, “Four tickets to the Hubble show.”
“That started two minutes ago, ma’am. Last show of the day.”
Really?
The kids and I walked slowly back to the car.
“What are we going to do now, Mom? Where are we going? Daddy Day isn’t over yet! What can we do now?”
“Just be quiet for a second while I think,” I said, as I laid my head on my steering wheel.
“Can’t we just go to a different movie?” asked Haley from the backseat.
Deep breath. Pick up head.
“Okay. Just let me look at my phone,” I said, punching in a movie website. “Well, you guys have already seen the only kids’ movie that’s playing right now. But…wait…what is this?”
That’s when I saw it. Another IMAX was showing the Hubble telescope movie. And it was closer to my house.
Choosing to ignore the fact that I was dumb enough not to check this in the first place, I felt for the first time like Fate was offering me her hand and saying, “Here. Let me help you. I’ll make the traffic heavier going the other way and I’ll even get you there early. You can grab some pizza with the kids before the movie starts. In fact, let me buy you a Bud Light for your trouble.”
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 22