On Breathing

The last month of the school is always very hectic for me. I have mentioned before that I am not a teacher in the traditional sense of the word, so it always means extra paperwork and headaches for me. I’ve often compared it to a race, with the finish line being the final day of school and always approaching much too quickly. This year was no exception.

So why, you may ask, am I finally addressing this topic when the school year officially ended five weeks ago? And what could this possibly have to do with my title regarding “breathing” anyway?

Patience, my friend. I’ll get to that.

This year I began working at a new school, which was much closer to home and was just the environmental change I needed. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my old school, but my total drive (partly due to my daughter starting school this year) went from an hour one way to twenty minutes. Unfortunately, during the last month of school I spent the difference sitting at my desk, or in meetings, or running about the school building collecting information, or… well, you get the idea.

And on top of that, I broke my cardinal rule and brought work home with me. Almost every night that month and every night during the last week or two. I even spent the better part of the last weekend before summer at this very computer typing one piece of information after another into the necessary forms. In fact, I spent so much time here that weekend that my back really began to ache. A lot.

By Sunday afternoon my back was so tight that it was actually painful. And this is from someone who prides himself on having a very high pain tolerance.

By Monday morning I was wincing whenever I moved the wrong way at work and was worried that co-workers would start to notice.

By Monday afternoon, it was evident that I needed to go to the doctor/med center. In addition to the severe pain across my upper back, I was also having trouble breathing. And that lump in my throat that I forgot to mention earlier, but had until this point thought was indigestion, had refused to go away.

So I called a friend to watch my daughter and headed to the med center, as my doctor’s office had closed by this time. As I sat there my head also began to hurt, but only as long as I kept my eyes open. It did not turn out to be a migraine as I had originally feared, but it did cause me to spend the majority of my time waiting (several hours’ worth) with my eyes closed unless it was absolutely necessary to open them.

And during this time it also became increasingly difficult to breathe. At one point I worried that it might be some sort of panic attack brought on by the overwhelming amount of work I had yet to complete. But I’ve been with several people who have had panic attacks in the past, and none of the symptoms really seemed to match up. So I sat. And waited. And worried. And tried to catch my breath.

They finally called me back to a room, but I waited there so long that I thought they had forgotten about me. Just about the time I was ready to climb off of the table and open the door, the doctor came in, all apologies about having to suture someone’s finger.

I guess open wounds trump the inability to breathe at this establishment.

The doctor said I had bronchitis and that I was to go with the nurse for a breathing treatment. They checked my lung capacity before and after the treatment and said that I needed to come back in the morning to get an x-ray. It was too late to fill my prescriptions, so I picked up my daughter and went home to bed.

Throughout this time I was a bit troubled by the diagnosis of bronchitis. I had bronchitis once in college and I remember it being accompanied by other symptoms much like those that come with a severe chest cold. A family member had also had bronchitis recently and had the same chest-cold-like symptoms. I felt fine other than the lump in my throat, the pain in my back, and the extreme difficulty in breathing just one single, normal breath.

So the next morning I put my daughter on the bus and headed back to the med center for my x-ray and follow-up. They said that I had “something suspicious” in my right lung (though it was the left lung that hurt when I took a deep breath) and that I should take my medicine and have another x-ray done in August (keep in mind this was early June). So I stayed off work the rest of that day and part of the next day (but that was prearranged as my daughter’s kindergarten program was that morning). But the work wasn’t going to wait any longer and I could breathe well enough to function at that point, so I went in. As it turns out, I made those days up as it took me an extra day and a half to finish all of the work necessary to end the school year (I just ended up doing it on my own time).

I’m still not entirely convinced that I had bronchitis. I think it was more likely pneumonia, or walking pneumonia at the very least, but I’m not a doctor, so what do I know?

What I did find odd is that I take the ability to breathe so completely for granted. As a widower, you would think that I would cherish every life-giving breath. After all, it was the cessation of breathing that made me a widower in the first place. And many of you reading this are here because your spouse or another loved one also lost the ability to breathe. And yet, I take that ability for granted.

I did not, at any point during this ordeal, think that I was going to die. I felt reasonably certain that the doctors would know what to do and that I would feel better in a few days’ time. But I felt reasonably certain of that on the night of February 25 and during the day on February 26, 2007 too, so I guess one can never be too certain. I can say that I haven’t taken the ability to breathe quite so much for granted over the last month though…

So that explains my absence from the Mother’s Day post to about mid-June. There’s another explanation for my absence this last month, but it will have to wait for a future post. In the meantime, please check out my Facebook page and be sure to click that you “like” it. The more people who like it, the faster my blog posts will appear on the page. (A special thanks to the three of you who have checked “like” already!) And the more interest shown in the page, the more interactive it will likely become.

Stay tuned for future updates.

And cherish your ability to breathe.

On a General Sense of Lethargy

I have been rolling the content of this post around in my head for about two months now. It was originally intended to be a summer wrap-up post, recounting many things that occurred, but were never committed to paper (or in this case, screen). But by taking so long to actually compose and post these thoughts, I have become a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. And I have lived up to the title.

What prompted me to actually post these words now was a recent post by Supa, who has apparently been experiencing many of the same thoughts, feelings, and (lack of) actions I have. Ironically, I read this post while in the midst of cleaning house, but that may come into play a bit later on.

When I started this blog, I had visions of grandeur. I thought that I would post twice a week, or once at the very least, and then only when things became extremely harried in my daily life. I never dreamed I’d see months with only two or three posts. But this blog is an account of how grief has/is/continues to affect my life and that of my daughter. And the truth is we’ve had a lot of two-post months as of late.

It seems to have begun sometime in April. After an excellent trip to visit family over Spring Break, we settled into what would become the end of our now familiar routine - my daughter’s last few months at day care before embracing the world of “big school” and my last few months of school at the job I have held for the past five years.

In May we managed to take our first family trip to Disney World, which I wrote about here. Despite the rain and being acutely aware that we were supposed to make this trip as a family of three (not two) we had a great time. And the end of my school year was, in some ways, one of the smoothest I’ve ever had.

But sometime in May, I noticed that I had put on a few pounds. And that it wasn’t coming back off readily. Not a big deal for most people, but for me, it was a sign of things to come.

About six months after my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to do something about our “baby weight”. Those of you who have children know why it was ours, and not solely hers. When I stepped on the scale, I was amazed to see that I had gained twenty pounds since we’d been married, which was at that time only three years. So we set out on a regimen of strict dietary change and increased exercise. And the pounds came off. In no time at all I had lost twenty-five pounds, and my wife was within ten pounds of her goal weight. I ended up losing thirty pounds in all (I had thought I needed to lose ten going into it) and kept it off for four and a half years.

Now, I typically put on a few pounds around the holidays and any time we visit family (here or there) because my eating habits change. But I am always able to get back to my normal weight within a reasonable amount of time. The distressing part about the May weight gain is that it didn’t really seem to coincide with the trip home or the trip to Florida. I had just gained some unexplained weight.

But it was not so much that I couldn’t bear it. And I had other things to attend to. Like my daughter’s graduation from preschool and the emotions I endured in having to go through that alone. We had a nice visit with all of the grandparents during and after…

But then I sold the car and had to deal with all sorts of new grief-driven feelings.

Then within three days’ time we not only found out that my daughter had to have ear surgery, but she also had it. You can imagine what that was like (or read about it here).

I wrote about those three things. But at the end of June, I completed my first week of teaching Vacation Bible School at our church. It was a rewarding experience and not nearly as mired in grief as the rest of the month had been. But I never managed to share that experience here.

Within a week of that, we were headed to the Midwest for our annual summer trip to see family. We arranged for five days with each side of the family, with a five day side-trip in the middle. You may recall that while some of you were at the Widow/ers Conference in San Diego, I was in the heart of the country at a work related conference. It was my first time in that city, and I managed to add my twenty-third state to the list, while my daughter added numbers thirteen through fifteen to hers (she’s catching up too quickly!) I had big plans to record the exciting moments here, much like I did with the Disney trip, but alas, this is the closest I’ve come to doing so.

And only two days before that trip, I was doubled-over by the worst physical pain I’ve ever endured, which turned out to be a kidney stone. I had actually composed an entire post about that in my head and yet, it never made it to this small screen. Suffice it to say, I can now boast that I have driven halfway across the country on (low, legal doses of) painkillers though.

And as I’m writing, I realize I forgot to mention the garden. That beautiful, sad little plot that held so much potential. Strong tomato plants, evenly-spaced rows of bean seeds, hills of pumpkins, yellow squash, and zucchini… But the bean seeds never took, even with two plantings. And we had almost a week of hundred degree heat in June, when that is usually reserved for late July/early August. Then we had our ten days of rain (which is customary for June, but does not usually follow extreme heat). We did manage to get one small, hard, inedible piece of yellow squash and several undersized tomatoes. But I don’t eat tomatoes. And I’m guessing neither did the people to whom we gave them.

July is also a month with some hard dates for me, as is evidenced by this post and this one here. But as you may recall, I posted them in reverse order and the latter was posted almost three weeks after the date.

And then came August. We had out-of-town guests who inspired my first trilogy of posts on this site (see here, here, and here). And we increased our time at the beach, even though we had managed to make it down there more often this summer than we did the last.

Then my daughter started kindergarten and had her second ear surgery within three days of one another, but I didn’t get either of those posts up until September.

In the midst of all of this, I left the school where I’d worked for the last five years for one closer to my home. With the job change and my daughter starting school, my commute was cut by forty minutes each day. Yes, I gained almost an entire feature-length film’s worth of free time every day. (Not that I know where it has gone!)

The job change was an amicable one, but it’s been over two months and this is the first real mention I’ve made of it here. There have been some occurrences there, mostly dealing with having to reveal my marital status, that I will save for another post (here’s hoping it makes it to this screen sometime in the near future).

But suddenly September was gone and within a week we’d make a weekend trip together to see family in a nearby state and a weekday trip apart (since she’s in school now), which I did manage to write about here a few weeks back.

I know what some of you are thinking by this point, but it’s not true.

Some of you are thinking that these all sound like classic symptoms of depression. And they do. But they are not. I have been depressed before (though ironically it was in college before my wife and I even began dating) and it was much worse than this. Precursors to depression? Possibly. I won’t rule that out at this point. But full-fledged depression? Not even close yet.

What I think this is instead, is simply grief manifesting itself in my life. Like other widow/ers I read, my grief has changed over time. Just when I figure out all the triggers, they shift and I have to learn the new ones. It’s a seemingly endless battle, but one I am destined to fight (or flee from at times) nonetheless.

And there is hope in all of this – namely that I recognize what is happening. So that’s where things like cleaning the house come into play. I usually keep a relatively neat house (especially for a single dad!), but over the last month I noticed that I was cleaning a few rooms here and there, but the entire house was never completely clean all at once. So this weekend I set out to do just that. And once I had accomplished that goal, I felt better.

And even though I’ve gained ten pounds in total since April and I keep eating junk food like someone is going to take it away from me at any moment, I’m starting to make healthier choices here and there again. Just last week while my daughter was at gymnastics, I spent some time walking at a nearby park. Baby steps in that department perhaps, but it is, at least, forward motion.

And in all of this I have managed to maintain the daily routine. My daughter’s homework is always completed, the laundry is never so far behind that we’re scrambling for things to wear, we’ve increased the number of meals we eat at home, my work hasn’t suffered… All important aspects of our lives that are being carried out in such a way that no one would know the relentless undertones of grief that are always there, just below the surface.

Day by day. One step at a time.

Forward motion.

On Distance and Conflicting Obligations

It is often said that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. And while I have seen that statement become reality in many situations in my life, none more immediately than in the years since my wife’s death, I did not expect it in my most recent encounter with absence.

But it happened, nonetheless.

At this time last week I was headed to bed in a larger city in a Northeastern state. Or rather, I was headed to my sleeping bag on the floor of my brother’s home office in said city/state. At that time, my daughter had been asleep, snug and cozy in bed, for about three hours. The only trouble was that her bed was in someone else’s house, several hundred miles away in our hometown.

It is also often said that “there’s a first time for everything”.

And such was the case last Wednesday night. My brother had asked me to come up for an overnight visit, the details of which I unfortunately cannot divulge at this time. But suffice it to say he asked me there for a specific purpose, and since he has not acted in such a way in the ten-plus years he’s lived there, I obliged his request.

I rather enjoy visiting my brother and exploring his city, which is so very different from my coastal corner of the map. I enjoy it so much that I am planning what will be our third annual winter visit in January (the details of which I will gladly divulge!) I do not, however, enjoy taking time off work. I do so when my daughter is sick or when we are out of town (though this is increasingly rare since she is in school now) or when she has a medical need (her surgery and follow-up appointments, for example). I even, begrudgingly, take the occasional day off when I am absolutely too ill to climb into the car and drag myself to school. So it was more than a big deal for me to take a day off at my brother’s behest, but I was also glad to do so.

The hard part was leaving my daughter. I was not so much worried about where she would stay, as our friends (who are getting an increasing amount of praise on this blog lately!) who always seem to be there for us gladly took her in for a few nights. As a single parent, it’s not only a relief to have people you can count on when something like this arises, but it’s an added bonus when you have people you can trust to the point that you truly don’t have to worry about your child while you’re away. But I was worried about telling her I was going alone, and then actually doing so.

So in a moment of genius, I made two bowls of ice cream and broke the news during a nice little father-daughter moment we were having. And she took it extremely well. She was, as I had hoped, very excited about getting to stay with her friend for two nights (two school nights, no less!) She was not thrilled about me going to see her uncles without her, but when I explained that I didn’t want to take her out of school to go, she seemed to understand. Plus, I gave her about a week to adjust to the news, so as to help decrease some of the shock a bit.

So last Wednesday, I put her on the bus at ten till seven like I do every morning, knowing I wouldn’t see her for two and a half days. And she hopped on just like she does every other day. No tears. No hysterics. No drama at all. Just my happy little girl hopping on the bus as if it were a normal day. It made leaving her a whole lot easier than I had thought it would be.

So after work that afternoon I flew to the airport a couple hours away (keeping the wheels to the pavement) only to find out that my flight had been delayed for almost an hour and a half. So my twenty hour jaunt turned into eighteen. And my big-city dinner in my brother’s neighborhood was replaced with an over-priced bagel sandwich alone at the airport. I had, at least, had the foresight to bring a book, so I was not completely bored while I waited for the clock hands to trudge forward. But the night had not begun as planned.

Thankfully the rest of the night did not follow suit. The plane took off and landed on its adjusted schedule without incident. I managed to direct the cab driver to my brother’s place without incurring an additional fare. And I enjoyed a nice quiet evening watching tv and waiting for my other brother and his wife to arrive.

The next day was a blur of events capped off with a nice lunch at a local southwestern eatery, complete with drinks, and dessert at a nearby bakery. Then it was off to the airport to catch my return ride. I had initially thought that by taking the earlier flight I’d be able to pick up my daughter before bedtime and thus have to endure only one night apart, but when the drive home from the airport was factored in, this was not a feasible plan. We knew this ahead of time, so she was expecting to stay with our friends two nights, but that did not make the pain of that night’s phone call any easier to bear.

When you have spent nearly half of your young life being raised by a single dad without any close family nearby, you have a tendency to grow exceptionally close to said father. When you couple this with the fact that the only nights we’ve spent apart in the past two and two-thirds years have been the occasional night in the Midwest when she has stayed overnight with her closest cousins (and was thereby the one “leaving”) you start to get an idea of just how hard a night or two apart might be.

So when I called her just before bedtime from the airport city last Thursday night to let her know I was safely back in our state and would see her the next day, it seemed only appropriate that the tears would flow. She wanted to know why I couldn’t pick her up that night and told me how much she missed me. I tried to reassure her that I would see her after school the next day, but I had to choke back my own tears while doing so.

After we hung up I finished my sandwich from a local fast food chain and decided to try to do some shopping. I am not big on shopping without a purpose, nor did I have a purpose that night, other than pure avoidance. You see, I had prepared myself as much as possible for the separation from my daughter, but I had not prepared myself for a night alone in our completely empty house. And now that I was faced with the prospect of such, I opted to go shopping instead. I didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without, but I did manage to stay gone long enough that when I arrived home I was tired enough to crawl into bed and ignore my solitude as much as possible.

When I was in fifth grade I went away to camp for the first, and only, time. When I arrived home my mom asked me if I had missed her and was taken aback when I said “no”. And I had not. But what I was quick to point out was that I certainly appreciated her more now that I was back home.

It was the same with my two nights away from my daughter. I did not spend my time actively missing her, though I did think about her quite often while I was gone. But I was certainly glad to see her when I picked her up from after school care the next day. She was a welcome sight, running across the playground with her arms stretched wide and a smile to match.

She wanted to hear all about my trip, so I told her on the way to rescue the dog from the kennel. She was clearly very glad to have me back home, but seemed at ease with the idea that we were apart for a few days. It happened to be the week of our local fair (it’s too hot for the fair here during the summer months), so we finished off a hectic week with some corndogs and a couple of “prize every time” games. Then she decided to use all of her ride tickets on the merry-go-round and of course wanted me to endure the dizzying rotation with her.

It turns out she may have been mad that I left her for two nights after all…

On Single Parent Surgery - Round 2

The last Friday in August my daughter underwent Round 2 of her corrective ear surgery (a left tympanoplasty for those of you who like to call things by their proper names). As many of you will recall from this previous post, I had many mixed emotions about her initial surgery back in June, both before and immediately following that procedure. Her right tympanoplasty turned out well and healed just as it should, which was one of the main reasons for continuing with her second surgery so soon afterward (the original wait time was to be four to eight months to encourage maximum healing). However, the other driving reason for doing these surgeries so close together was that my insurance year changes on September 1st and I would have had to begin paying toward my deductible all over again.

What I did not know at the time was that this was a great idea for another financial reason. Unbeknownst to me, my insurance plan was voluntarily changed by my employer to the degree that if we had waited on the surgery, it would have ended up costing me twice as much out-of-pocket. Yes, you read that right. Twice as much for the same surgery performed in the same surgery center by the same surgeon. So, needless to say, I was happy that we were able to get it in before it would become an even more astronomical strain on my single-income budget.

Overall, I found that I was not as worried about this surgery as I had been about the first one. I’m certain it had something to do with the fact that she had her right tympanoplasty done only two months prior and that the healing process had gone remarkably well. It probably had a bit to do with the idea that I was preoccupied by some close friends during the first surgery itself and realized that this single parent surgery thing could be gotten through with a little humorous conversation. And I know it helped that about a week prior to the surgery another friend of ours had volunteered to come sit with me during the surgery, which was really great since most of my teacher friends had already gone back to work. And having two months’ advance notice of the surgery itself this time didn’t hurt either.

So the day before the surgery I started thinking about what needed to be done in preparation. Nothing to eat after midnight. Only a bit of water before leaving the house the next morning. Pack a pair of socks in case the OR is cold. Call the school and let them know why she would be missing her second full day of kindergarten. Read the surgery center book to her that night to ease her fear of surgery, even though she’s done this in the recent past. Bring a book in case there’s a lull in the conversation. Put in the old car seat so she would have better head support for the hour and a half drive home. I had pretty much thought of everything, and I was more than a little proud of myself for how thorough I’d been in my planning.

But nothing could have prepared me for how I would feel when the first wrench was thrown into it.

Because of the staggered enrollment process in our local school system, my daughter started school on a Tuesday, then was off Wednesday and Thursday. Her first full day with her entire class would have been the Friday of her surgery. Because I also work in the school system, but am not on a staggered return-to-work plan I had to work the two days she was “off”. So I asked our friend who had volunteered to sit with me during surgery (and whose younger daughter is the same age as mine) to watch her those two days. When I went to pick up my daughter on Thursday evening, the woman casually mentioned that she “would not be able to make it tomorrow” and left it at that. Now, I tend not to show much emotion on my face, but I am certain that she must have seen some mixture of shock/surprise/concern/confusion cross my brow at that moment. If she did, she never mentioned it. When I got in the van I asked my daughter if she had mentioned why she couldn’t come and she said it was “because she had some stuff to do around the house”. I could tell she was upset, so I didn’t press it further. But something just wasn’t adding up.

Now, there is one thing that I despise perhaps more than almost anything else: I cannot stand it when other adults make false promises to my child. I don’t think this is a kind thing to do to any child, and I make every attempt not to do it to my students. Children should be brought up with the idea that adults remain true to their word. It is a good lesson in how to deal with children when they are the adults some day and it reinforces the idea that adults should be a source of safety and security in a child’s life. But my daughter has suffered a great deal more hurt than most children her age and though she’s taken it in stride much more than I ever thought possible, she takes adults at their word. So when her best friend’s mom says she’ll call to arrange a play date for a given day, my daughter takes her at her word. And when a friend offered to “come see” her before her surgery? You guessed it, she took her at her word too. So I was more than just upset about this friend breaking her “promise” to me. I was upset about her breaking her word to my little girl.

As we drove home, I started to ponder exactly why things didn’t add up in this situation. The first thought was obvious. This friend is a stay-at-home mom who home-schools her children, so anything that needed to be done around the house could have easily been done during the days prior to or following the surgery. It was a flimsy excuse, but what was the real reason for her sudden change of heart? I wondered if maybe she didn’t want to drive the hour and a half to where the surgery would take place. I know money is generally tight for the family, so I thought maybe the extra gas and probable meal out for three would put too much of a strain on their budget. Both legitimate reasons, but why not just tell me as much? The more I pondered the situation, the more irritated I became.

Then the true reason hit me like a ton of bricks.

So on the way home from dinner with some other friends of ours, I called my mom and told her that this friend was not coming the next day. Now, I realize that this is not a fair thing to do to a mother who is 800 miles away and is already worried about her youngest grandchild enduring her second surgery of the summer, not to mention the fact that her son is still the sole caretaker of said grandchild. But my mom and I have always had a remarkable relationship, so I called to tell her what was going on. When I told her that I would be sitting alone during the hour and a half long surgery, she confirmed what I had surmised. Her words were something to the effect of, “I don’t want to put bad thoughts into your mind, but do you think it could be the husband?” Bingo Mom. You have once again hit the nail on the head. My mother, with all of her women’s intuition, had drawn precisely the same conclusion about this man whom she has only met a time or two. And sadly, I’m certain it was the proper conclusion to have drawn.

I have always been overly cautious in my friendships with married women. I work in a predominately female field and have never had any difficulty maintaining friendships with women. It was something I talked to my wife about early in our relationship as I had previously dated a girl who was very jealous (one of the many reasons I refer to her as “the one who showed me what I didn’t want in a wife”). My wife always took it stride, and was, more often than not, friends with these women as well. (To be clear, these friendships never extended beyond work unless my wife was also friends with them). It was something we continued to talk about during our marriage as well. Not that either of us were worried about anything inappropriate happening, but typically those kinds of things happen when your guard is down, so keeping an open dialogue about it just seemed like a smart thing to do.

The level of caution I used when I was dating and married could not even begin to compare to the level I’ve used since becoming a widower. As with everything else, I suddenly became very aware of how it might look if I spent too much time with another woman regardless of whether she was single or married and whether the time was spent inside of work or out. For the most part this transition time was actually that in name only. I stayed friends with my two happily married, middle aged friends at work and became better friends with the whole family of one of my other friends who is thirteen years my senior.

Here I will take a moment to mention how much I have appreciated this friend and her family. I met this friend when I worked at my first school after moving to the Southeast. By the time our daughter was born a year and a half later she was one of the few people we trusted to watch her on those rare occasions when my wife and I got out for a date. She never let us pay her and always said that the best thing we could do for her was to let her watch our daughter again the next time we went out, which we did. After my wife died, she and her husband, who attend our church, started inviting us out for lunch on Sundays. Over time it became a standing invitation, with the understanding that if one of us couldn’t make it on a particular Sunday there would be no hard feelings. Through this I have also become better friends with her husband, which is no small task since he is not much of a talker. They are some of my best friends here now. And incidentally, she and her daughters are the ones who sat with me during my daughter’s first surgery this summer (her husband had to work).

One thing I have always appreciated about our friendship is that her husband does not seem to mind that she and I are better friends than he and I are. He doesn’t seem to feel threatened or jealous or any of the other types of things husbands might feel in that sort of situation. (And rightly so as we are strictly friends).

Contrast this with the husband of the friend who backed out of the surgery. He is a prominent member of our church, and I mention this only because as such he should know better. Now, as I mentioned before, I know the importance of guarding oneself against any sort of impropriety in single/married friendships. But there has to be a level of trust involved as well. For him, that trust does not exist. Couple that with what I believe (and have observed on a minor level) is a complete and utter lack of respect for his wife and you have an idea of the dynamic that was involved in causing me to sit alone during what should have been a very scary hour and a half.

And more importantly, causing my innocent daughter to see that yet another trusted adult in her life was willing to let her down.

So that night, while I was getting her ready for bed and long after she was asleep, I did something very uncharacteristic. I got angry. And not only did I get angry, but I allowed myself to stay angry. I generally save my ire for social injustices and certain members of the local school administration (there’s a story there, but this has already waxed long), but in this moment I allowed myself to feel it for all it was worth. So I let it stew and fester for a good long while before I simmered down and headed to bed. But sadly, I lost whatever respect I had left for that man during those moments and have since been unable to bring myself to sit through his Sunday school class.

At this point I know you’re all hoping that things went well so this post will be over (if you’re still with me). And they did. My daughter was a bit more nervous than last time, but handled it amazingly well. I sat alone with my book, and was able to concentrate more often than not on the words on the page and not the images of what was happening to my daughter in the OR. When it was time to see her in recovery, her nurse (a man this time) did not ask me any questions beyond what was appropriate, so I was not forced to give an account of why I was there alone following her surgery this time. And I was facing a wall, so I did not have to see any other patients and therefore did not once have the urge to run screaming from the building. Which was good, since my daughter took about twice as long to come out of the anesthesia this time. We made it home safely (using the old five-point seat proved to be my best idea of the week) and our good friends brought us McDonald’s for dinner since we were confined to the house for the weekend.

If you can say you had a good experience with surgery, then I guess we did. Again.

But I still can’t help but be a little sad for the loss of respect we both suffered as a result of this experience.

On a Widower's Discussion

As I mentioned in my two most recent posts (see here and here), I entertained some friends from college the weekend before last. This is the third and final post in a series regarding events surrounding their visit.

Mr. K and I became friends near the middle of my sophomore year (his freshman) in college. Mrs. K and I had been friends for nearly a year at that point. Ms. T had joined the fold about six months later. So it was a nice surprise when I was introduced to him and found that he and Mrs. K had known each other (in passing) during their high school years. He and I became fast friends and often spent time together without the girls. (He and Mrs. K would not become an official item until after our falling out almost a year later. And even then, he and I remained on good terms until they actually began dating).

After our falling out, his friendship was, in a way, that which I missed the most. While he had played a role in those events, his role had been much more passive than the others. He had merely accepted things as they had become, without making any grand attempts to change them. As it turns out, his role and mine were quite similar, although I was not in a position that would allow me to affect any sort of change in the matter initially.

A few months after my wife died, I received an e-mail from Mr. K. We had all resumed some contact prior to her death (and with her encouragement), but it was the first time I had heard directly from him alone. He simply wanted to check in and see how I was doing. Now, even immediately following my wife’s passing I found myself reluctant to talk about how I was doing. But typically if someone asked I took it as a clear sign that they really wanted to know. More so than the now rhetorical “how are you?” we lob back and forth at one another in passing conversation. So I sent a brief message back which included details of how I was doing instead of the vague generalities I used to appease the “how are you?” crowd.

And I never heard another word from him.

Fast forward to last fall when we got together for the first time since Mr. and Mrs. K’s wedding. When we saw one another we immediately picked up where we had left off all those years ago. And it was a wonderful feeling. His friendship was as genuine as the smile on his face, and we had a great few days together.

And I never heard another word from him.

Now, in the months between the visits, I came to realize something about Mr. K. In this age of e-mail and text messaging, he is not a written communicator. And though the telephone has been around since before our births, he is not a verbal communicator. While most of us use many forms of communication (sometimes simultaneously), it turns out Mr. K is primarily a face-to-face communicator. And now that I have come to understand this, we are once again as close as we ever were.

Which brings me to the story of what happened in the ocean.

As much as I enjoy going to the beach, I don’t typically spend a great deal of time in the ocean itself. When my daughter was younger, the majority of my time there was spent near the edge playing and building sand castles. As she has gotten older, she has become more interested in being carried out into the water and bounced along in the waves. But the vast majority of my sea-bound activities revolve around my daughter. So it is a very rare occasion when I am able to sneak off into the waves for a few moments alone (since I can only do this if another adult is present to watch her).

Such was the case on the Saturday of my friends’ recent visit. After spending a great deal of time bouncing my daughter over and under and in and out of waves, I took her to the shore and asked Ms. T if she would watch her so I could take a quick swim. (Mr. and Mrs. K were still minutes away from returning from a walk down the beach). It was wonderful to spend a few minutes actually swimming alone in the ocean, and I hated to see it end.

Just as I turned to head back to the sand, I noticed Mr. K making his way toward me in the water. When I met up with him, I glanced at the shore to see that my daughter was still okay (with both girls now) and decided to stay a few extra minutes to swim with my friend.

Since I don’t ever wear a watch and refuse to get sand in my phone, it is anybody’s guess how long we actually spent out among the waves. But the time was well-spent, with the conversation drifting in and out of a variety of topics you can discuss with close personal friends. But the best part for me was when he initiated a conversation about how my daughter and I had been doing without my wife. And he called her by name.

There is one thing that has come to mean a great deal to me over the past two and a half years, and I may have mentioned it here before: I love it when people use my wife’s name when they talk about her. Now, my family (both sides) is very good about this. Friends who are/were close to both of us are good about this. But very few others will dare to mention her name. When someone mentions her by name, it validates her existence and her importance in my and my daughter’s lives.

So by his unwitting utterance of a single, five-letter name, my friend advanced a few steps in my hierarchy of friendship. And by not only initiating, but carrying on a lengthy conversation about her, he advanced a few more steps.

But hierarchies aside, what was most important in that moment was that, unbeknownst to him, he provided a sense of comfort to a friend who is still very much in mourning.

On a Widower's Discomfort

In my previous post, I mentioned that my daughter and I recently hosted some friends from my college days. And while my previous post centered on a situation that should have made me uncomfortable, but did not, this one focuses on a situation that should not have made me uncomfortable. But did.

Because of a falling out I had with these friends during my junior year of college, the reconciliation of which happened only a few months before my wife died, we did not spend any time together while I was married. And since the two currently wed friends in the group, Mr. and Mrs. K, were married a year after we were, I did not spend any time with them as a married couple until after I had been widowed.

During our first visit last fall, Mr. and Mrs. K would freely reference their sex life. Not in a way that was inappropriate, especially considering that my then-four-year-old was with us, but it still made me uncomfortable on a number of levels. Now, my wife and I made it a habit to keep our intimate life private, which is why you have not read even the slightest hint of a discussion about it on this blog. So I was a bit taken aback at the fact that they would make so many comments regarding their own. And during those moments, I opted to stay quiet.

But time has passed since then. And while I am still not going to divulge even the remotest piece of information about my own private dealings, I find that I am not as inclined to be quiet when others feel it necessary to remark on their own. Such was the case on the Friday night of Mr. and Mrs. K’s most recent visit. After my daughter had been put to bed, we all sat around my kitchen table to play a card game. Throughout the game, Mr. and Mrs. K made various comments about what goes on behind closed doors. Our single (never married or in a serious relationship) friend, Ms. T, was one part mildly amused, one part moderately repulsed. But I chose to take a different tack. I offered simple one or two word commentary, mostly in agreement or disagreement with the possibilities of whatever comment had just been made. We were all having a good time and no one was too uncomfortable. Or so it seemed.

As we were clearing our dessert plates and drinking cups after the game, Mrs. K made a comment to me in the kitchen to the effect that I shouldn’t be talking about sex since I presumably wasn’t having any now (I’m not). I retorted that while that may be true, I was married for five and a half years and left it at that. After I went to bed that night I thought about her comment, but could not put my finger on why the game-time conversation had bothered her so much.

It suddenly hit me the next day.

I am very sensitive about my house and yard. I go to great lengths to keep them up (weather-permitting with the yard) and maintain a nice home for my daughter and me to live in. And for some reason I am always nervous about what other people will say when they visit our home for the first time. Maybe even more so now that I am maintaining it alone.

Mr. K and Ms. T were very gracious guests and were at times even complimentary about my home (though they all three had something to say about the fact that the bedroom and bathroom accessories match a set of our dishes). Mrs. K had her own set of comments to make. She wondered why my kitchen and dining room (painted four years ago) were a less-than-masculine shade (they’re lavender). She got a lot more mileage out of the dishes/bedroom/bathroom combination than the others (it’s very outdoorsy. My wife picked the most masculine pattern she could find as a courtesy to me). She made comments about my furniture (which was all given to us. She would have really balked if I hadn’t sold the flowered couch and loveseat last fall). Ironically, she made no mention of the plants and flowers that adorn our front steps or the butterflies which can be found throughout the house and lawn, both of which are my own “feminine” touches.

It wasn’t until she made the comment about the place not looking or feeling like a bachelor pad (in a tone that clearly stated that she believed it should), that her comments began to make sense to me. I told her in no uncertain terms that there was no reason for my home to feel like a bachelor pad because it wasn’t one. It was our home, where I continue to raise our daughter. (And even if she had been a son, I would still not have suddenly transformed the house into some kind of bachelor pad just because my wife was no longer here with us. Regardless of gender, kids need to grow up in a loving home, not a bachelor pad, no matter how loving it may be.)

But the reason her comments made sense to me was as disheartening as it is disconcerting. Simply put, she is uncomfortable with my being a widower.

Now, I will probably never be privy to the reason or reasons she feels this way. It could be that she is upset about the way she treated my wife and me in the early days of our relationship. It could be that she sees that at this point there is no chance of me dating Ms. T and thereby closing the circle of friends. It could be that she doesn’t understand how I can live day-to-day in the face of such adversity and still make it all work.

It could be. But I really don’t think it is.

I think what’s going on instead is that she realizes how easily this could happen to her. It’s easy to read books or watch movies where a spouse dies and remove oneself from the situation. But when someone you know, someone you care about, someone who is too young to have already had and lost it all is widowed, it suddenly forces you to think about a lot of very uncomfortable what ifs.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned on this Widower’s Journey, it’s that people don’t want to face their grief or those questions unless they are absolutely forced to.

And even then, the results are generally not very pretty.

On a Widower's Dance

I am a nice guy. A nice, Christian guy. And while I’m certainly no Adonis, I’m also not exactly grotesque. I try to eat right and am in decent physical shape, even with the extra ten pounds I’ve put on since last spring. I’m fairly book-smart and possess at least as much common sense as the average person. I take care of all aspects of the house and yard. I recycle. I make sure the dog is fed and taken out. And I am a good father. Maybe even a really good one.

So it should come as no surprise that I am viewed as somewhat generally attractive to a certain thirty-something subset of single ladies. This actually does surprise me most of the time when it comes up, although I am learning to remember that the rest of the world has forgotten that I am still grieving and may not be thinking much about dating again at this juncture. But clearly there are certain afore-mentioned ladies that are.

Or at least appear to be.

Such is the case with my neighbor’s out-of-state sister. We’ll call her Ms. D. She and her daughter come for a visit each summer, and while our daughters have played together (said neighbor does not have any children), she and I have gotten to know one another a bit. I am always careful not to send out any unnecessary signals that might make a nice, young single woman think I am attracted to her when I am not, but I’m also not sure that I’m very good at that. And in her defense, I’m not sure she’s attracted to me either. But it certainly appears to be so.

The weekend before last, we entertained some friends from college who now live in two other states, neither of which being the one where we all attended said college. Two of the friends, Mr. and Mrs. K, are married to each other and the third, Ms. T, is single and seeking. Now, to set the stage, it is important to know that both of the girls in this friend group had self-acknowledged crushes on me during our college years, but I never dated either of them. In fact, I was virtually excommunicated from the group when I dared to date outside the circle early in my junior year. (On a side note, this girl was actually the one I dated before my wife. I did not date much, but I tend to refer to her as “the one who showed me what I didn’t want in a wife”). They still weren’t too happy when I started dating my wife about six months after that break-up, even though they knew and liked her. In fact, had we not reconciled the friendship shortly before my wife died (and with her encouragement), I doubt I would presently have any sort of relationship with these three friends.

Now, to be fair, I have good reason to think that Ms. T may once again see me as a viable candidate for her husbandry. And I have heard Mrs. K encourage such things, though in the subtlest of ways. How much is coming from Ms. T and how much is coming from the suggestions of Mrs. K is anybody’s guess. But needless to say, I was a bit apprehensive about their visit. Especially as it was to take place at my house.

As guarded as I try to be, however, I could not have been prepared for what happened when they arrived.

My friends arrived late on Wednesday. My neighbor’s sister arrived early on Thursday. Suddenly I was forced into a position where I would have to guard myself against sending signals to two very nice, very different women for whom I have no romantic inclinations. Normally this sort of situation would send me into a panic, complete with cold sweat and stomach knots. But not this time.

In a rare moment of widower humor, I instead stood back and watched the dance unfold.

There were several moments over the next few days when I would find myself talking to one of these ladies and the other would suddenly materialize as if out of nowhere, only typically in closer proximity to me than the other. It was like those scenes from “reality” dating shows where one woman cuts into the conversation/date/make-out session so as to get her own time with the man whose affection she is so desperately vying for. Only I was under no obligation to stop conversing with the one, simply because the other had made her presence known to us. So they joined in the conversation each time, but were seldom successful in drawing me completely away from the other. However, as we stood and talked, I was very aware of the body language and physical repositioning between the two of them and also with regard to me. It was a very slow and subtle, yet also seemingly very deliberate, dance.

Now, for those of you who have read even one of my previous entries, you will note that I am generally a very humble man. I do not attempt to blow my own horn and try to relate very honestly how grief over my wife’s death has affected my daughter and me. But during the course of the grieving process, I have also learned that it is okay to see situations for what they are (or at least appear to be). And if such situations call for humor and/or laughter, then so be it.

So during those few days, I stood and watched a dance that I believe was apparent only to me. And inside, I allowed myself to chuckle a bit.

Looking back on it now, I continue to chuckle, if but only for a moment.