Two days before Thanksgiving in November, 2008,  my wife of 43 years died of cancer. The short book that follows in this section traces my struggles to cope with that loss over the course of the year after her death. It contains a collection of haiku and a few longer poems. The accompanying narrative explains how things unfolded for me.


RETURNING: SORTING OUT MY LIFE AFTER THE DEATH OF MY WIFE

 

THE JOURNEY

It had been a long journey through repeated illnesses and problems. Twelve years of dealing with heart attacks (three), spinal surgery, a necrotic bowel, stents in blocked arteries in her groin, an aortic aneurysm with complications that lasted for over a year, a hip replacement, a shattered left wrist and right elbow from a fall in a K-Mart parking lot and , then, lung cancer.  Yet she never gave up on life and wanting to "be on the go." We traveled, including a number of camping trips with our daughter's family, made the inside passage trip from Anchorage to Vancouver on a cruise ship, and continued the Friday afternoon date for a movie and dinner that we had been doing for over twelve years. She continued making jelly from the local wild grapes, processing pears from our trees for her "pear-apple pies," and doing all the things she wanted and could do. Oh, sure, she would get frustrated and sometimes angry at having to deal with it all, but she knew she could get thorough it OK. And she did until cancer showed up the third time after she had been in remission twice during the previous ten months. This time, it appeared in her brain in three spots, including a very invasive and aggressive lesion in her Pons. They said to her, "You know we're not going to cure you, don't you?"  She said, "I've had a good life and I'm not afraid to die." Still, she seemed to believe she could get over this, just as she had everything else. Her brain started to be unable to send the proper signals to her body. She had trouble controlling her legs and didn't know when she had wet herself. Her hearing was affected and she had a hard time keeping focused. When we went to her oncologist--she, our daughters and I--and they told her it was time to get hospice involved, I could tell that she didn't hear or understand what they were telling her. As the girls stayed behind to make sure what they were hearing, I pushed her outside into the sunlight in her chair and said, "You didn't understand what they said to you, did you?" She said, "No, what did they say?" I told her that they said it was time to get hospice involved. She looked shocked and then crestfallen, before saying, "OK." It was the hardest thing I had ever had to do in my life, but I knew that she had to know clearly what was happening.  Just over a week later she was gone. In the meantime, she and I talked and cleared the air about some things that hadn't yet been dealt with. She talked lovingly to the kids and grandkids. She stayed alert and smiling through her seventy-seventh birthday party at a favorite restaurant on Monday. Her remaining sibling, her sister, was there as were all of the children and grandchildren.  She was able to see everyone for a last time when they were happy and celebrating. By Wednesday afternoon, she had passed, rather quietly, at home with the family and a hospice attendant there. The women bathed her, dressed her in a new white nightgown with stars on it and the mortuary people, whom we had called earlier, were there to take her body away for cremation. Her spirit had long gone. The Friday before, she had told me, "I think I'm ready to let go now." We said our goodbyes and pledged our love again. She died the day before Thanksgiving, 2008. We held a celebration of life ceremony for in February, 2009, and so many friends, colleagues and family members talked of how positively she had affected their lives that I know she would have had a few tears in her eyes to have heard them.

Hers was a life worth writing about, but that is not the purpose of this book. This book is about my own process of coping with being without a life partner that I had spent nearly forty-four years with and who was always my very best friend, my lover and my greatest supporter. She was the person who I could always trust and count on. Then she was gone. My dreams over the next months often contained vignettes of me being with her, somehow getting separated from her, looking frantically for her and awakening with the phrase running through my head "and she wasn't there." I felt disconnected and adrift. The almost singular focus of my life over the past few years (since my retirement) had been taking care of her. Everything we did required extra planning and effort to make it happen. I didn't realize how much effort it had taken until I no longer had that as a part of my everyday life and suddenly didn't have it to do anymore. My last thoughts before sleeping each night for years had been about helping her, as were my first thoughts in the morning. I slept with my "ears open." That was just a part of life. Having her in my life was the most important thing and I always felt rewarded for my efforts. Being with her for all those days over all those years sensitized me to what was happening with her and I knew long before she let herself know when things had begun to slide. I felt a deeper love for her each day, and a deeper appreciation for what she had brought into my life. I also felt that presence slipping away and felt helpless. We shared the same beliefs about the inevitability and naturalness of death, so we were not afraid of it, but it felt like being cheated out of the very core of my life when my wife died. There was so much that we hadn't yet shared that I had expected to share with her.

In the months that followed my wife's death, I felt disconnected, not only from people, but from life. I"m sure that I was depressed, but mostly I didn't now how to fill the hours of my life. The main focus of all my efforts and thoughts had been being with and taking care of Dot. Of course, I was not alone in this care-taking; our children and grandchildren were always available and always helping in every possible way. They were tremendously supportive of me, both actively through showing their direct concern for me, and indirectly through giving me some room to recharge by being there to do house work, cook, run errands and go back and forth to doctor's offices, laboratories and the hospital. Nobody could ever fault our kids and grandkids for not being attentive and caring; they were (and are) wonderful people and I'm so grateful to them and so proud of all of them

However, I was adrift with no compass and no port to steer toward. Fortunately for me, our family had always been open to  including others into our group, and over the years, Dot and I had been "Mom" and "Dad" to many young people--friends of our children, nieces and nephews and students we had befriended and welcomed into our home. Many became part of our extended family and we kept in touch over the years and miles. Some of my "mentees" (I'm a retired university professor and was sixty-seven years old when Dot died.) made special efforts to reach out to me, including me in trips to museums, jazz performances, movies and restaurants. Among the people who had been part of our extended family group was a woman in her early forties who was, herself, a cancer survivor. She was still in the healing stages of some very invasive surgery when I first met her. She was (and is) a physician. In the few times I saw her prior to Dot's passing, I discovered that we shared some very similar interests and looked at life in some very similar ways. In fact, I saw in her many of the things that had attracted me to my wife. She as not only intelligent and perceptive, but was also easy to talk with and had a spirit of adventure that had led her to becoming a scuba diver, a skydiver and a world traveler. As I was wandering around trying to find my bearings in the months after I lost my wife, we had occasion to spend some time together. We had some meals together, went to a play, and talked a lot about pretty much everything. I found I could talk with her about feelings I wasn't able to let myself feel with anybody else. On one occasion, she showed a book of haiku she had in her library. In the margins of the book were haiku she had copied from other sources. I didn't read the book, but just looking at it struck a chord with me. In my undergraduate years at college, I (like so many young romantics!) wrote a lot of poetry. I even had some published in a college publication. I began to write poetry again that night, and found that it was very soothing and grounding. I was able to capture feelings that I hadn't even begun to formulate over the preceding months, let alone express. I felt like I was beginning to come alive again.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that I was not only mourning Dot's loss, but was also mourning the loss of so many feelings that I had been suppressing as we struggled through all of her medical problems. I also discovered that I was feeling more attracted to my friend than I had ever expected to feel toward anybody again. I discovered that I was falling in love. On reflection, after many months, It seems that I was most likely allowing myself to feel the possibility of falling in love again and was focusing those feelings on my friend. I found myself very confused. Could I really be desirable to someone again? Was it fair to be interested in someone twenty-five years my junior? Was I just being stupid? Would my kids understand? Did my friend feel the same way as I did? The answer to the last question was: No. Oh, It isn't that she couldn't love me; it is just that she loves so many people and feels no desire to be tied down in any one relationship. I had become a bumbling teenager again for awhile as I dealt with my feelings of attraction and rejection. I finally realized that I wasn't going to have the relationship that I thought I wanted at the moment. Almost a year later I had an epiphany that suddenly allowed me to realize that I was treating my friend unfairly. I had lived in the roles of caretaker and counselor so much of my adult life that I discovered myself relating to her as someone in need of help rather than as someone that wanted only friendship. My behavior sometimes felt oppressive to her and, although she tried to tell me so, I was unable to see it. I couched it for myself as being a friend looking out for the welfare of another friend, when, most likely, it was just me falling into my caretaker/counselor role without examining my behavior and my motives. I hope she can forgive me. I have come to realize that I'd rather have a good friend who I can do things with as time permits than to try to tie either of us to something that feels like a shackle.

(Continued on the next page: Revelation and Healing)