Three Years a Widow

Somehow, 3 years have passed since I talked to Willis and had him respond.

Three years since the kids have been hugged by their daddy.

Three years since we heard his overly loud laugh.

We don't talk about him as often, and we don't miss him with the same devastating rawness. But he's still as gone. We still go on with our lives without him. And we still miss him.

Where is he? Who are we without him? How can he be gone?

I don't generally ask these questions, nor do I really need the answers.

It is enough to know that he was here, that we were a family, that he loved us and we loved him. Still do, as a matter of fact.

Later today, we will take flowers to Willis's memorial plaque, and we will revel in the memories. We love you, Willis, and we remember.

Seething

This too shall pass.

Tonight, Rob received a scathing e-letter from his ex, absolutely trashing me, saying that the boys have nothing positive to say about me or our relationship. According to her, amongst my sins are wearing revealing clothing, having sex in the hot tub, making Rob’s kids refer to my children as step-siblings, being immature enough to make the boys cry by saying I am going to have a baby with their father, that the boys resent the amount of time Rob spends with my kids, that I often “crys and crys” and is very depressed... She ends saying that she finds it “frusterating” not to get a response back to Rob when she sends him an email.

Rob sent back an email, and talked with his boys, and I think that all is more-or-less well. I am left with echoes of anger, resentment, self-doubt; especially self-doubt.

I have enough experience to know that much of what Sarah is saying really points out her own inadequacies, as a parent, ex-wife and step-wife.

She is an exceedingly poor communicator. Her spelling, grammar and sentence construction are beyond atrocious (including spelling my name repeatedly as “Saly”); she is unable to address her concerns in an adult-to-adult forum, and certainly not a face-to-face one.

I am reminded of times when Cynthia, Willis’s ex, spoke with me or with me and Willis, when she had concerns about the well-being of her child while in our care. I never received those concerns well at the time, which I still regret a little, but I have made my peace with Cynthia, and now welcome her insight into parenting and co-parenting. The fact, though, that Cynthia was able to speak about her concerns in person with us, and that she made a solid effort, in the face of some opposition, to create an atmosphere of team parenting, tells me that it is possible.

In the meantime, I question my own performance. Are any of Sarah’s accusations, or the boys’, founded? Much of what she says is either entirely inaccurate or “ancient” history, but is there any part of my step-parenting which does need attention?

I suspect that the real underlying issue may be that the boys have not been getting enough of their dad’s time and attention. This is something I can do something about. I can take my own kids out to do stuff with just them, or I can encourage Rob to take his boys out. I’ve been feeling extra-homebody-ish lately, and I don’t look forward to having to go out, but this sounds like a pretty important reason to have to push my envelope.

A little piece of me is wanting to pull the widow card on this one. I wrote a tongue-in-cheek response to Sarah’s letter, which will not see the light of day, except for the brief excerpt here: "...they resent the amount of time you spend with her kids." "Would you like to take "Saly's" kids for a while? Or should she send them to be with their dad at the cemetery?"

Sometimes, I just like to point out the depth of my loss. Sigh.

Painful

I went to a Gathering in memory of Bruce today. I cried. 

I know Diane's pain, and today I felt it a little, too. It has been 6 weeks or so since Bruce died, and 2 years since Willis left us. Today both losses felt raw. 

Some of the folks at the Gathering knew Willis. Some of the folks, like Diane and her son, understood my pain. 

Diane did well today- brave and tearless. But the look in her eyes... the ineffable pain, the awful truth and depth of loss and bewilderment and agony. I had to look away. I wonder whether other people see what her eyes say. I wonder whether they can stand to look into the depths of that pain.

Diane had brought Willis's memorial bench to the Gathering, for extra seating and to have him close. It felt very right to sit on that bench, with my kids. I think my old neighbours, who loved Willis too, had been sitting on it when we arrived. 

Life and death. Pain and joy. Love and loss. Each is meaningless without the other, I think.

2 years ago...

I'm thinking of you today, sweetie, and remembering and missing you. 

I have really loved you, ya know? 

I hope you are doing okay and are looking after yourself and our friends from the co-op

- they miss you too. 

The kids and I are well, but ... it's not the same without you. 

Please, be well. Know you are loved and remembered.

Willis Lloyd Staples

December 12, 1965 - August 24, 2006

Postus Interruptus

I start so many more posts than I finish, or even attend to, and I want to be okay with that. My blog shouldn’t add a layer of obligation to my life- it’s supposed to be a helpful, joyful thing.

That said, let’s see if I can sneak some snippets of stuff into here:

•I missed my nephew’s birthday- he turned 9, and I haven’t acknowledged it in any way. I haven’t ever sent last year’s gift to him, either. I am so disorganized!

•I love my “husband”- he is a real gift in my life.

•I miss my husband- I wish I could recall more of his quirks to mind more readily. Yesterday, as Rob was leaning over the bathroom sink in shorts, no top and socks and slippers, I caught sight of his mid-section first. The body shape, posture, texture and pattern of hair, all said Willis to me- it was very disorienting to see Rob’s face on Willis- the mind is a funny creature that way. The socks and slippers were clearly characteristic of Rob, but the problem my poor, tired mind cannot solve is whatever would Willis have been wearing on his feet if it had been him? I absolutely cannot remember or picture it. And, much as I love Rob, I sometimes ache for one more hug with Willis- I love(d) him, too, and I never did get a final hug with him (lying my head on his lifeless chest in the trauma room doesn’t count).

•When I hug Rob, I get a powerful and profound feeling of “rightness” and “calmness”. We are clearly meant to be together, or at least, we clearly belong to each other. I love that a hug with Rob can often put my world to rights- how cool is that? (And Annie, just like with you and your Rob, it goes waaay beyond hugging. Note the title of this post? Bet you can figure out what interrupted this particular piece a couple of nights back... ;))

•The other day, I left Sam in the boy’s wear department, happily picking out some summer gear for himself, while Sydney and I were in the girl’s wear, a couple of aisles over. Turns out, Sam wasn’t actually paying attention to the fact that I had moved on, found himself alone, and got worried. He saw a cashier in the jewelry department, and thought about asking her for help, but was feeling a little too shy to go up to her. He took himself behind a rack of clothes, talked to himself reassuringly, then went up to her to ask for help. I was paged to pick up my “package” in the jewelry department, which I did with alacrity, and was able to greet my not-quite-grownup boy with a big hug. I’m so proud of him for overcoming his shyness and doing the right thing, and not panicking. I still believe that “free-range” (with shades of “attachment”) parenting is absolutely the best style for me, and my kids do okay with it, too, which is an added bonus.

•Sydney is a drama queen, and she is little, and the only girl in the family- this causes her issues sometimes:

•I think Girl wrote this: “The thing about recurring issues is that the better you get at spotting them, the better they get about subterfuge.  The same issues crop up constantly in our lives, in different guises, and sometimes it takes awhile to realize you’re dealing with the same old thing for the nth time.” I absolutely love this, which explains so exactly where I am in my life, and why I am talking with my therapist again. Tardiness, procrastination, avoidance, insecurity, self-doubt are constant issues, from childhood, and as I stand on the crest of my meno-pausal wave, I’d like to tame these issues a little. I’d like them to be familiar companions, rather than looming, scary monsters on the path beside me, as I walk/scamper/plod/skip down the road that is my life.

•Pretty soon, I’m gonna write my inner child a letter, as a part of the process of de-mystifying the terrors residing in my psyche. I know I can take really good care of folks, whether they be 5 or 41, two-legged or four-legged, and by writing that letter, explaining and demystifying some of the terrifying experiences of childhood, and reassuring her/myself that I can and will always be present with a calm, warm voice and a hand to hold in the dark, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to turn the monsters in my background into pussycats at the garden gate.

•I’ll probably write a loving letter to Willis, too. His death was sudden and traumatic, if not entirely unexpected, and although I have worked through many issues and talked to him a great deal since his death, we all know how extraordinarily powerful the written word is as a way to move through emotion and come to a place of love, light and understanding.

•I’d better go get my car- they’ve changed this parking lot into a 30-minute limit, and I don’t need another ticket, do I?

Random Rantings

I want to be in charge of my life, dammit- time to stop being late all the time!

My therapist called- I’m going back there next week- maybe we can get the tardiness/insecurity better controlled this time round.

They destroyed a dam, and drowned the dad beaver in Surrey- beavers are endangered here, and this reappearance of beavers so close to an urban setting should have been a good thing, no? There was a “danger” of “flooding”- wtf? There were wild creatures returning to co-mingle with us after we as a species had abused them as a species most heinously for centuries. Death by drowning? Goddamn people anyway!

I haven’t said recently that I hate that Willis is dead. I do hate that. But. I know he’s gone, never coming back. This is my life and his death, not the other way around. I WILL NOT give up on learning out to extract the juices from my life because of adversity, no matter how intense. I will not give that message to my children. I will not.
What I will do is remember Willis, be gentle with myself, channel as many of his finest qualities as I can... I will whine as little as I possibly can, especially about things I can change, and about things I can’t change (Serenity Prayer, anyone?). I am so proud of my widda friends who have seized the brass ring and embraced life again, and so impatient with those who continue to see their immense loss as giving them the right to whine indefinitely. Yes, this sucks: none of us deserved this, it is a profound loss and it is completely disorienting to lose one’s spouse and partner, BUT, our job as inhabitants of this beautiful planet is to GROW, cherish, be thankful, do less harm, honour the planet’s other inhabitants with our thoughts, words, feelings and actions. (I may be ranting, here, and I’m gonna blame PMS and the damn beaver story.)

I met a young widow today at the clinic- 3-4 weeks out. Her cat is sick, she has no $ and her world is shattered. Do all you widdas remember how disorienting that time was? I barely do remember, but I know that the first few weeks were astonishingly raw, and the disbelief was huge. This girl surprised me by saying that she was grateful to hear that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and that things would get better. I guess that makes me “vintage” and able to mentor someone newer than me on the widow-road. It’s an odd feeling, and I hope that I truly can help her a little, if only by example and compassion, and that my tendency to impatience, as noted above, will not scar her more. Less than a month? Ouch. A very painful time, and I like to think I have all the patience in the world for her, and that I will not put her on a timeline (which I hated to have done to me).

Okay, enough ranting. Time for family and supper and joy again.

Widow fallout? SOS fallout?

I pretty much live my life without much reference to having been widowed. I have a “new normal”, complete with husband and family, and life is good. When I occasionally get slammed by an emotional response that seems out of proportion with the precipitating event, I wonder whether I have hidden layers of under-resolved trauma from having been widowed by a suicide-like event.

Willis’s death was not classified a suicide (nor an accident) by the coroner, but he was very suicidal in the months leading up to his death, and he was particularly suicidal on the morning of his death. My take is generally that he was very ambivalent. He was reported to have been pacing back and forth on the bridge near where he was killed- I imagine that he considered throwing himself off the bridge onto the highway below, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, for which I am very grateful. There are also reports that he was hitch-hiking on the highway below- it is easy to imagine him turning his back to the traffic that was not stopping for him and drifting into the path of that big truck. It is also possible that he stepped deliberately in front of the truck, which did its best to avoid him.

He was struck from behind, which makes me prefer the inadvertent scenario, but the effect is the same- he is dead, my children don’t have their dad, and I am left with questions and repercussions about why someone would appear to prefer death to living with me and the kids. This is, of course, an over-simplification. Suicide and mental illness is not really a choice, and the pain that Willis was experiencing was profound and unbearable. He certainly believed we would be better off without him, and I ache for him that he believed that was so.

I have spent hours in therapy, addressing all sorts of issues arising from being widowed and surviving the de facto suicide of a spouse. Like I say, mostly this is a part of my history, and not really a part of my present.

But...

Rob and his boys went to Vancouver this weekend to visit Rob’s sister. The boys haven’t seen Trish in a couple years, and it was time for them to make a road trip, as a family, as in times past. Me and my kids weren’t invited along. This is appropriate- logistically and for the emotional well-being of Rob and his boys. My head knows this. My heart and psyche have been aching, crying, raging, writhing about this. I hate the feeling of being rejected and excluded. The boys are 10 and 12- of course they want to have some time without their new family, and with their dad all to themselves.

We will go to Vancouver next weekend to visit with Hannah, Willis’s other daughter, and her mother. Rob is cherishing the idea of time alone at home. He is reveling in it, and why not? He was a half-time dad before we came along, and a bachelor the other half of the time. Much as he began to get lonely after 4 years of this, and much as he loves us all, it can be taxing to a fifty-year-old to be suddenly raising a 4-year-old daughter full-time. He is an introvert, and needs some quiet time alone to recharge. Sam is an extremely active, extroverted boy- much as Rob loves Sam, he finds him taxing sometimes (as do I). Of course Rob relishes the prospect of some time to himself. My head understands this and delights in the chance to offer this to Rob. My heart and psyche cry with feelings of rejection and loneliness that Rob can hardly wait for us to be gone.

After several anguished and stormy conversations with Rob about how painful I was finding the prospect of these two weekends, and how bewildered he was at my response, that references to Willis began to seep into my consciousness. Rob and I had not come back to equilibrium after one such conversation, and he was heading of in my car to pick up the babysitter. I told him not to crash the car, and added, in an angst-filled voice, for him not to take that as me condoning him crashing or harming himself. On the morning of Willis’s death, as we were preparing lunches for the kids, he told me how he couldn’t stop thinking of “it” (suicide), and how he couldn’t stop thinking of driving into something. My response? “Just don’t use my car to do it.” I will probably wish forever that I had added that I really didn’t want him to harm himself either, but it is doubtful that he would have heard it anyway.

After that comment, Rob came back to finish the conversation. In further discussion, we agreed that the emotionality of my responses was likely to be about my experiencing echoes of the ultimate rejection of suicide, and the terror of not knowing whether I would have a husband at the end of the day. The whole damn thing hurts. I may never forgive Rob if he doesn’t outlive me, and the separation of these two weekends and my upcoming conference in Florida is a terrifying prospect. This relationship better last a damn long time, because I don’t want to prove that I have the moxie to outlive another husband.