Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  And as if on cue, when everything was going well, Fate stepped in yet again to test me.

  • • •

  It started out as a small limp. But then it grew into a bigger one. And finally the pain was so bad that Mike couldn’t sleep. He could barely walk. He couldn’t even sit comfortably, and his diet started including massive amounts of Tylenol just to get through his day.

  Mike had fallen in January during a NASCAR test in Daytona, Florida. When he described slipping on the oil, I couldn’t help but laugh and say, “Oh, how I wish I had been there to see that!”

  But then his hip started hurting.

  A couple of months went by, and finally he couldn’t take it anymore. He made an appointment with a workers’ comp doctor to have the hip looked at. When the initial x-ray showed nothing, the doctor told Mike to make an appointment to have an MRI. And when the film came back, it showed something.

  A big something.

  “Now, I’m not a doctor,” the technician told Mike, pointing to a huge mass on the upper part of his femur bone, “but in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  And then he said the words that completely turned our world upside down and shook it.

  “You need to make an appointment with an orthopedic oncologist immediately.”

  When Mike came to my house with the MRI results in his hand, my stomach dropped to my toes. As he held the film up to the light in my breakfast room, I could see a white blob covering the entire top of his femur, five centimeters in length…basically the size of a baby’s fist, leaving almost no bone. We pored over the results, looking at the film from every angle, hoping that between his engineering degree and mine in English we would somehow be able to say definitively, “Well, that’s nothing to worry about!”

  No one wants to hear “I need to make an appointment with an oncologist.”

  And, I daresay, a widow wants to hear it even less.

  Now by that point, I’d been hanging out in The Widdahood long enough to know that there is no quota on bad luck. I’d seen enough through the website to know that just because one bad thing has happened doesn’t mean that you are immune for the rest of your life. I’d read posts from people who struggled with the deaths of parents mere weeks after the death of their spouse. People who had lost children and were trying to figure out ways to cope because the person they would have leaned on—their partner—was gone, too. And just because you’ve lost one person you love doesn’t mean you won’t lose another one. Fate doesn’t look at your chart and say, “Oh wait. She lost her husband in 2007. She’s not due to lose another one for at least sixty years.”

  My hands were shaking so hard I could barely type as I sent a message to a friend who had just lost her husband the month before. And would you like to know how they found out he had cancer?

  That’s right. A tumor on his hip.

  Do you have the name of an orthopedic oncologist?

  Why? What’s going on?

  Mike has a tumor on his femur.

  OMG. Go see Dr. Brown. She’s the best. Keep me posted.

  With the doctor’s name and number in his hand, Mike left for work the next morning and called me around lunch to tell me that the first appointment he could get was in two weeks.

  Two weeks?

  I had no idea that time could go by so slowly. A million different scenarios ran through my head. What if this was cancer? What if it wasn’t and he was going to have major surgery and a long recovery? What if this was something that would leave him crippled?

  And what is my role in all of this? We weren’t married, but I couldn’t picture myself anywhere else but by his side. With him being an only child and his parents not financially able to come to Colorado and take care of him, chances were that the caretaking responsibilities would fall on me.

  What if I didn’t have it in me to do this?

  When the day of his appointment finally arrived, I dressed very carefully. I was petrified that the same thing that happened with Brad would happen again: that I would leave for a hospital expecting to bring someone home, but that something so bad would happen and that someone would never come back. I put on layers and comfortable shoes. I didn’t wear my favorite jeans—I wore jeans I thought I could sleep in if I had to. I packed my purse with a book, a phone charger, and a few granola bars…anything I could think of that I might need for the next twenty-four hours in case I couldn’t get home right away. I debated on whether I should wear a scarf that would look cute with what I was wearing and could double as a pillow later if I needed it.

  I tried to discreetly prepare myself for the worst while simultaneously trying not to scare the crap out of Mike. And it didn’t occur to me until later how sad it was that I couldn’t take him to a doctor’s appointment without worrying that he might never come back. I told the kids that Mr. Mike had to have surgery and was grateful for the fact that we had had so many surgeries within the family during the past year—knee replacements and minor foot surgeries—that they really didn’t think much about my making another trip to the hospital.

  I could tell that my parents were just as afraid as I was about what might be coming and as confused as I was about my place in all of it. My mother tried her best not to dig too deeply into my business, but every once in a while she would sneak a question in that let me know that they were concerned.

  “Now, who will be taking care of Mike after the surgery?” she asked.

  “Well. That would be me.”

  “Uh huh.”

  The day of Mike’s first appointment with Dr. Brown, I sat fidgeting in the waiting room as he filled out paperwork. Neither one of us said much, both of us afraid of scaring the other even more than we already were. But finally he looked up and asked a question that would forever, in my mind, change the nature of our relationship.

  “Can I put you down as an emergency contact?”

  Ask any widow: their least favorite thing to do after the death of their spouse is to fill out paperwork that asks that question. We know that we have lost the person we can turn to immediately in our time of need, but there it is in black and white, staring us in the face. What that question seems to really be asking us is: “You’re completely alone, aren’t you?”

  “Me?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears. “You want me as your emergency contact?”

  If anyone around us was watching this scene unfold, they probably thought Mike had just asked me to marry him. And in my own weird widow way, it was kind of like he had.

  “Well, sure,” he replied, not really understanding the significance of it. “You’re the person I’m the closest to. If anything happens, I want you to be making the decisions.”

  Sniffle. “I’d be honored.”

  Mike handed his paperwork in and we made our way into the examination room. Dr. Brown, a woman who exuded medical competency, strode in and threw Mike’s film up on the light box.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “Right there. You have a tumor and very little bone left. My main concern is that if you fall again, the top of your femur could completely break off and you’d be in a whole mess of trouble. We need to get in there and take it out and rebuild the bone. Now, I won’t lie to you, this is going to be painful and the recovery won’t be easy. But if you don’t have it done, the consequences could be much worse.”

  “But…what about cancer?” I asked, surprised that she didn’t mention that right away.

  “I can see some fluid around the tumor and that makes me pretty confident that it’s not,” she said. “But I really won’t know until I get in there.”

  We immediately started pooling our calendars, trying to come up with a time that would work for the surgery. Mike knew that he could come off the road at any time and that the NASCAR team would understand. My schedule was a little more complicated, trying to work around the kids and
everything else I had going on as a one-woman show in my household so that I would have the time to take care of him when he was released.

  “All right, guys,” Dr. Brown said when everything had been worked out. “See you in a month.”

  We left that day feeling a little better, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I saw her walk out of that operating room and say, “It’s not cancer.” In the weeks leading up to the surgery, I did my best to keep my panic at bay by staying busy, but I know that there were times when I was short with the kids for what seemed like no reason at all. While they knew that his leg was hurting, I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them how worried we were about the Big C. I found myself constantly apologizing and telling them frankly, “I’m sorry Mommy’s so cranky sometimes. I’m just a little worried about Mr. Mike.”

  Which I’m sure made them worry a little as well.

  At night I would lie awake, envisioning the worst. I couldn’t help but think about those first few hours in the hospital with Brad, before he’d had the stroke and we thought he would just be coming home with a dislocated knee. Thinking about preparing the house for someone who couldn’t do stairs and putting my life on hold while he recovered, I couldn’t help but let my mind go to that dark place that wondered if Mike would ever come back. And during that time, I’m afraid that I had every selfish thought known to man.

  Why is this happening to me?

  What have I done to deserve this?

  Can I do this?

  Notice how none of those thoughts had anything to do with the actual patient.

  Mike went to work and was extra cautious, knowing that one false move could give him an injury he might never fully recover from. I kept going, doing things with the kids and explaining to them over and over again that they needed to be careful with Mr. Mike because he hurt his leg. Our conversations centered around benign topics like how our days were going and what was the latest gossip around the NASCAR shop. Neither one of us dug too deeply into what was really going on, but every once in a while, we would both look at each other with tired, watery eyes and pale faces, and I knew we were both feeling the same thing.

  Scared shitless.

  When the day of the surgery rolled around, I hired a babysitter to come to the house and watch the kids at 5:00 a.m. so that I could get Mike to the hospital and prepped for surgery. We got him checked in and tried to keep things as light as possible, given the circumstances. I took pictures of him in his “shower cap” before he was wheeled into surgery and threatened to text it to all of his coworkers. And eventually I gave his hand a hard squeeze and watched as the nurses wheeled him away.

  Hospitals. The smell. The beeping machines. The way they all have the same damn carpet.

  Without Mike still in front of me to jolly along, my worst fears bombarded my brain all at once, making it hard to breathe. I had been to several hospitals since Brad had been gone, almost forcing myself to “get over” my issues with them. I never wanted to be the friend, daughter, or sister who couldn’t help because she was too afraid. My first experience was during my dad’s knee replacement surgery the year before. My mother and my sister had assured me that I didn’t need to come, knowing that it would be hard. But I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to be the person who couldn’t be there for others. And so I went.

  When the nurses wheeled my dad into his hospital room after his surgery, hooked up to monitors with oxygen running out of his nose, he looked at my mother drowsily and said, “Can I have some Jell-O?” just as Brad had said to me years earlier before he fell permanently asleep.

  And I calmly went into the bathroom across the hall and threw up.

  There is a part of me that knows I will never be as useful in a hospital situation as I once was. Up until Brad died, hospitals had actually been nothing but a positive place for me. They were where I happily gave birth to my three children and where the people I loved went to get fixed. Brad was the first person who couldn’t be, and I’d seen enough of life to know that he wouldn’t be the last. And that day, leaving Mike in the hands of the nurses, I hoped that I hadn’t come to that next unfixable moment already. As I left Mike in the surgery prep area, I looked around at all of the patients in the room, getting ready for surgery, and wondered whose life was going to be changed.

  I just hoped it wasn’t going to be mine.

  I walked out and immediately got lost on my way to the waiting room. I find every hospital I have ever been in so unnecessarily confusing, and I hoped with all of my heart that we wouldn’t be there long enough for me to make sense of the maze. And when I finally made it to the area that would be my home for the next few hours, carrying my laptop and a million other things in my backpack, prepared for a long wait…I walked through the swinging doors and saw them.

  My parents were sitting there waiting for me.

  We have a rule in our family that no one—friend, family, neighbor, or acquaintance—should ever sit alone at a hospital. I’ve known my mother to give up days at a time, waiting with someone she may have only met once because she’d heard that they didn’t have anyone going with them for whatever procedure they needed to have done. And when I saw them there, my mother stood up and gave me a hug and said, “If you have to make a hard decision, we didn’t want you to have to make it alone.”

  God, my parents should be cloned and every family should have a set.

  Minutes later, Kristi walked in the door, armed with the latest People magazine to distract me, and the four of us sat there and waited for what we hoped would be the magical answer we wanted to hear. I looked at the three of them, sitting in uncomfortable waiting-room chairs, and had a flashback to all of us sitting in a hospital, waiting together, just a couple of years before.

  Waiting for the magical answer that never came.

  Two hours later, Dr. Brown briskly walked through the swinging doors of the waiting room, still wearing her surgical scrubs.

  “It went well. Couldn’t have gone better. The tumor is benign, and I’ve put in three screws and a plate. The cement I’ve put in will dissolve as the new bone grows. He’s going to be just fine. You can see him in about an hour up in recovery.”

  I’m sure that woman had no idea why I was shaking and crying as I shook her hand. Not only had Mike weathered this storm, but so had I. Months of waiting, worrying, and assuming the worst would happen because it had before had all led up to this moment.

  That this time everything would be okay.

  And even though I knew that could change tomorrow, on that day, I could breathe the sigh of relief I wasn’t able to years before.

  • • •

  I once asked a woman who had not only lost her husband, but also her fiancé (her potential second husband), if she was ever afraid of getting into another relationship. And while, at the time, she seemed as if she wasn’t actively looking for one, I was surprised when she said she was still open to it.

  “I was put here to love and be loved,” she said. “And every time I do it, I do it even better than before.”

  Bad things happen to good people. And we widows don’t have the luxury of pretending that they won’t.

  But life is meant to be lived. We are meant to be loved…and to love someone else in return. The fear of loss will always be there. It has to be accepted and dealt with. But the fear of loss should never paralyze the ability to love and live fully.

  And sometimes the key is to find someone who will help you both live your life…and love your past.

  I had no idea that I could have a relationship with two men. But now I do. That was a lesson that Mike taught me: that it is possible to love two people at the same time.

  I think of it as a very spiritual three-way.

  Brad will always be the father of my children and the first man I really, truly loved. By having that relationship, he showed me what was possible. And by
taking that relationship with me, I made it possible all over again.

  I grieve while I laugh. I laugh while I grieve.

  I’m happy.

  I cry because I wish Brad could be here to share this with me.

  Mike accepted that Brad would always be a part of my life. He wasn’t jealous and seemed to understand (and not take offense) when I missed my old life. He gave me space when I needed it and hugged me fiercely when I asked. He allowed me to have it all, in my heart, without feeling guilty or feeling like someday I’d have to let Brad go.

  At the beginning of our relationship, I tried to walk the widow tightrope with care, unsure of how Mike really felt about my life. I worried that he would be like the men I’d been warned about, who would have no patience for listening about my past and would feel threatened when I talked about my husband as if I still loved him.

  Because, even though he’s not here, I do.

  There are very special people in the world who have no problem accepting our past and present love of our spouses while accepting what we have to give to them…and I stumbled onto one of them. Mike let me know early in our relationship, in his own way, that my life was perfectly “normal” and that he was ready to be a part of it. And that moment came after we had been dating for about three months and had an uncomfortable milestone looming before us.

  Father’s Day.

  Mike was at loose ends for the weekend, and so awkwardly I said, “Well, the kids and I always go up to the cemetery for Father’s Day. I’m sure that’s not how you want to spend your Sunday, so we can just call you when we get back, if you’d like.”

  And he surprised me with, “Actually…I’d like to go.”

  So we packed the kids in the family truckster and headed up to Buffalo Creek to visit Brad.

  The entire drive up there I could not believe this was actually happening. Taking a date to the cemetery to see my husband? While I tried to make normal conversation, I worried for an hour and a half about what Mike could possibly be thinking, certain that this date (Can I even call it that? Three kids and a cemetery plot?) would probably be our last. I tried not to think about how Father’s Day was one of the hardest days of the year for me because I didn’t feel like I knew Mike well enough to have a complete nervous breakdown in front of him.