Transitions

                                                                       

You know you are a widow when you follow your nose into a seldom-used patio and spy the ripe carcass of a large rat, half-eaten and deposited precisely in the middle of the path between gate and stairs by a neighborhood cat. You hesitate briefly to consider whether it might be left until reduced to dry skin and bone. But, knowing this will not be the last dead animal you will have to dispose of, you search out the partly-used box of vinyl gloves, saved from the now disassembled sickroom, and pull on a pair for armor. Using its lid, you coax the slightly reluctant glob into a shoebox.  

You know you are a widow when the first freeze is forecast and your heart sinks at the thought of the outside water line. You hesitate briefly, but, considering the high cost of delay, you slip a lilac-colored, oxford cloth button-down, held out of the boxes of shirts and dark suits delivered to the Jimmy Hale Mission, over your clothes for protection and step into the basement mechanical room with the single bulb that reveals little but rows of artichoke jars filled with nails and screws and, easing slowly past the upright  ping-pong table standing guard over the croquet set with the green ball missing and three bicycles, walk resolutely into the alcove, where even the strongest flashlight will reveal the valve high on the wall but leave black the rubble-filled corners you imagine may be home to a brown recluse or temporary shelter for a copperhead. Stretching, eyes shut, you turn the knob to off and flee.

You know you are a widow when, crossing the living room at two a m, you are halted by the full moon perched on the top branch of a crepe myrtle, smiling, and the man’s v-neck tee you sometimes wear as a nightshirt for comfort is changed by the champagne moonglow into new silk, and you waltz back to bed with no hesitation, but there is no one to wake and tell.

All that comes later. First there is absence.

###

I was at a writing workshop in Iowa City in July,2005, when my husband died from complications of Parkinson’s disease seven days after our forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The previous summer Tom had been well enough to move to an assisted living facility for my writing week. It was a respite for him as well as me, allowing a change of scene and lively company. Although Tom’s weakness had increased over the past year, leaving again for five days seemed safe. Emily, a registered nurse, had been with us for a year, living in during my work week for the last six months. I consulted the geriatrician who had taken over Tom’s care when there were no more new drugs to alleviate symptoms and monthly trips to a neurologist became useless. He had taken a leave of absence from work to care for his partner through the last months of an illness. One day while he was on a quick grocery run, his partner died of a heart attack. “Living to be there doesn’t work,” he said. “Live as normally as you can.” Tom was eating a blueberry Eggo at the breakfast table and was in good spirits when I left on Sunday morning. “Tell Cynthia hello,” he said, referring to my traveling companion.  “Have a good time!”

When I made my evening call on Wednesday Emily told me that Tom had stopped breathing an hour before. While Tom’s kidneys were shutting down, Cynthia and I were enjoying dinner and the first bottle of a wine special at the Linn Street Café. As we ambled toward the Iowa House, relaxed and giggly, anticipating that second bottle and girl talk, he drew his last breath. My rationalizations for a week away from home played through my head as I tried to sleep a little before flying home to Birmingham at dawn the following day. From the airport I drove to the funeral home where I agreed to a recommendation for purchasing a Dignity Package as an economical alternative to “going a la carte,” and learned that I would have to return to identify my husband’s body before cremation after it was “retrieved from an off-site storage facility.”

I arrived at home to find all evidence of illness gone. The hospital bed with its trapeze bar was a memory compressed into scars gouged in the bamboo floor; the oxygen tank was gone. My cot was pushed into a corner; someone had placed a small table holding a vase of cut flowers beside it as if in welcome. The only other furniture in the room was the huge lift chair and a television set on its stand. The pantry fridge held no comfort meds. I would learn later that even the large drinking straws used for Ensure and ice cream shakes had been trashed. 

Holding to good friends and good times, Tom had little use for “stuff.” 

Holding to good friends and good times, Tom had little use for “stuff.”  He owned only clothes he wore regularly. He had no hobbies; he collected nothing. He loved to travel but bought no souvenirs. Books amassed over a lifetime as student, professor, lawyer, and bookworm had been culled severely when we moved ten years before his death. His favorite occasion was a family gathering with hours of storytelling or a delicious meal accompanied by political, philosophical, or legal discussion, peppered with argument. The few days required to dispatch his personal belongings would have pleased him. But within days of his memorial service, I found myself wandering around the house, wondering how I had allowed Tom to disappear so quickly.

For months I kept Tom’s voice on the phone message system.  He declared over and over, “824-6446,” those numbers and nothing more, but I did not want to lose this only recording of the voice of the real Tom, not the person made breathless by Parkinson’s disease. At first a few people asked delicately if I realized that Tom’s voice answered the machine. “I like to allow strangers to believe there is a man in the house” was my quick response. My delivery did not invite further comment.

One evening in December, after his admission to the bar in October, our son Noel called to tell me he had settled his first case. “At first,” he told me later, “when I realized that the machine would answer and that Dad’s voice would come on, I wanted to hang up, but I panicked and couldn’t move fast enough. Then I was glad to hear it. I felt like I was leaving my good news for both of you.”

Cremains remained. “Tom is in a box in the downstairs bedroom closet,” I would sometimes tell people who knew him well enough to know that Tom would enjoy that remark. “I can’t figure out what else to do with him.” In fact, he had left “instructions” that his ashes be stored in a restaurant-size, French’s mustard jar. His preference was that the jar be placed permanently in a highly visible spot, but, wherever it resided, it should be brought out for family occasions.

It was not possible to carry out his wishes immediately, as Alabama law requires that cremains be placed in unbreakable containers. In any case, the mustard jar did not please me.  I felt that Tom’s spirit was not suited for confinement, and I asked our sons to think about appropriate places to scatter the ashes, but I was in no hurry.

###

Several months before Tom died I had given informal notice of my intent to retire at the end of 2005 from my job as head of the legal department at the University Alabama at Birmingham, where I had been employed for thirty-one years. I felt I should be at home, but the decision had caused some anxiety. My body was already tiring, stiffening, and experiencing frequent pain from helping Tom’s six-foot frame through his evenings and weekends. What would it be like to be a full-time care giver, even with Emily’s help? She was tired too; how long would she stay? Would our income be sufficient? 

The reason for retiring had suddenly disappeared, but so had the anxiety about it.

The reason for retiring had suddenly disappeared, but so had the anxiety about it.  Except for about three years during which I was caring for two infants and a child in primary school, I had been a full-time student or employee since I was sixteen years old. I realized suddenly that walking away from my office would give me a degree of freedom that I had never experienced.

Wanting to leave everything in perfect order for my successor, I returned to work with renewed purpose after Tom’s memorial service. I arrived early and stayed late, completing or reassigning projects and cleaning out desk drawers. Bags of paper piled up as I shredded handwritten notes of privileged conversations, documentation of the often ugly or tawdry facts that lay behind sterile, public agreements, and the “cover your ass” memos to self.  

I even went to football games. From the beginning of her appointment, the sixth university president I had served made it clear that she expected her line and staff officers to support athletics, particularly the struggling and controversial football program, by regular attendance. I had attended home basketball games regularly, but football required a lot more time, usually Saturdays, and I simply ignored it. But that last fall I went to almost weekly tailgate parties and sat through the losing games to show that short-term did not mean less than fully committed and to thank my boss for her forbearance.

Every week colleagues took me to lunch. There were two elaborate retirement parties. I flew to Colorado Springs for a birthday party; I drove to Pensacola for Thanksgiving; Christmas came and went.

On January 2, 2006, I woke up to the silence of an empty house and had no place to be that day or any other in the foreseeable future. I continued the pattern of sleeping eight to ten hours each night that had begun while I still working; I read seven days a week instead of two. I was exhausted, but I felt that my grief was spent.  If this sounds cold, consider that Tom and I had been grieving together for the ten years since his diagnosis. In one year of seven deep brain stimulation surgeries and staph infections, we had taken time to make sure there was no unfinished business between us and to resolve or let go of any grudges and grievances of the kind that accrue over a long marriage. Tom spent his last six months moving from bed to wheelchair with the aid of a trapeze and wheeling to the kitchen or his lift chair, where he could watch television or gaze into the backyard. Concentration for reading anything more than the daily newspaper was no longer possible. Swallowing had become difficult, and, refusing a feeding tube, he allowed the bulk to fall away from his six-foot frame. Never morose or complaining, Tom made it very clear that he was ready to let go of the life Parkinson’s had left him. I decided to let go of my guilt for being away when he died and to accept his last words to me – “Have a good time!” – as a blessing,

I made no plans.

###

In the year before his father’s death our oldest son Toby, divorced for several years and living alone, came around often. (Named for his father, in his adult life Toby had become Tom to the world and to me when I could remember his preference, but reversion to his childhood name here prevents confusion.) He told work tales that amused Tom and did “heavy lifting” for me. After supper he usually searched our shelves for a book. After Tom died, Toby visited me most Sunday afternoons. He cooked for a living and often brought some new soup or dessert, but this was his day off, so he sat on a kitchen stool and entertained me while I chopped salad and coated a rack of lamb with a mixture of bread crumbs, olive oil, chopped garlic and parsley.

On one of the first Sundays, he asked, “Do you know what you’re making?”

“Mark Bittman’s rack of lamb.”

“No, rack of lamb persillade.” This delivered with a French accent.

“Surely that’s more complicated, has more ingredients.” I had never heard the word.

“Same difference; you taste only the garlic. Doesn’t it sound better?”

On February 28, my husband’s birthday, Toby called early. He was sick, he said, and needed help. Could I bring hot food, something easy to keep down? Throughout the autumn, I had sensed he was not well, but it was hard to tell. He had been rail thin for most of his adult life. I was pretty sure he was drinking a lot, but he never used alcohol in my presence or came around when he had been drinking. He brushed off any concern I voiced.

I rummaged in the freezer for homemade broth, heated it and poured it into a thermos, and drove to his apartment. Unable to keep the soup or saltines down, he agreed to go to University Hospital, but he was so weak an ambulance was necessary to transport him to the emergency room. The cause of this collapse, disclosed to the triage physician, was unimaginable  amounts of cheap vodka and no food for several days. After a few hours of intravenous fluids, he was visibly improved and was admitted for full evaluation.

Toby had abused alcohol since his first year in college, and he had reached this point twice before, each time allowing himself to get close to death before seeking help. The prior episodes had led to in-patient alcohol abuse treatment, and each one had bought him some years of sobriety. I left the hospital elated, thinking that he had another chance for some sober years with his family, especially his teenage daughter.

Over the years I had come to believe that alcoholism is a disease for which there is a genetic predisposition in some individuals. My father and my husband’s father were alcoholics.  Without thinking hard I can name at least ten aunts, uncles, and cousins between us who died as a direct result of alcohol abuse. The only remedy is not to drink. So, while hope for a lasting recovery for my son never deserted me, my experience told me to be happy for whatever periods of sobriety he could achieve.

Reports continued to be good. The only concern expressed was about evidence of disease in a small area of the pancreas. His doctors “guessed” it was caused by alcohol use. For two weeks Toby improved, but on the day planned for discharge from the hospital an abrupt change led to rapid decline, and he died three weeks from the day of his admission. He was forty-four years old. Autopsy showed advanced pancreatic disease.

The loss of my son blew a hole through my body, creating a narrow tunnel that I crawled into and that I would feel my way out of by inches over many months toward a life very different from the one I had lived for almost half a century.

When your heart is broken, it is a gift to be bone tired as well.

When your heart is broken, it is a gift to be bone tired as well. I added a two-hour afternoon nap to my long nights. I did not dream. During the days I read. I never started a book unless there was a second one waiting. Most of them were crime novels, page-turners reserved in the past for airplanes and beach holidays.

When your heart is broken, it is a gift to live near people who love you. My sons Noel and Clay handled all the sad chores and official business occasioned by their brother’s death. My sisters, one divorced, one a widow, were always available for company. A sister is the best kind of companion when you are grieving, because you do not have to talk; you may even read your crime novel while she works her crossword puzzle, or you may leave the room and take your nap. With my sisters, whenever and wherever, talking always leads pretty quickly to laughing, which never hurts, and laughing leads to crying, which helps too.

I continued my Sunday visits with my son. Sometimes I listened to Norah Jones, recalling the day Toby called to tell me he had put a CD in the mail for me.  Sometimes it was Cowboy Junkies or, drawing from a more distant time, Three Dog Night, whose songs we used to sing together. When emptying Toby’s apartment, Noel and Clay had collected at my request anything personal – notebooks, letters, books with flyleaf notes – and his cookbook collection and delivered them to me. One banker’s box was sufficient for everything except the books. I pulled one or two items from the box each Sunday, looking for clues to his life, especially his bent for self-destruction, or a memory trigger, unnecessary but useful for circumscribing the afternoon’s reflections or one-way conversations.

One Sunday, without opening the box, I remembered a summer Toby joined a Little League baseball team. Ten or eleven, it was the first time he had shown any interest in a team sport. He never hit the ball, and after the first few games the coach gave him few opportunities. Watching his growing discouragement was painful, and I was relieved when he quit before the season ended. During a routine school checkup in the fall, I stood behind him as he tried to read the eyechart. Farsighted myself and needing no corrective lenses at that time, I was horrified to realize he was struggling with all but the first line’s giant E. Why had no pediatrician checked his eyes before now? More importantly, how could I, his mother, have missed such significantly impaired vision? Clearly, I had been asleep on the job, just as I had been asleep this past winter while he was getting sicker and during his hospital stay.

Despite a lifetime of experience with alcoholics, it never occurred to me while my children were growing up that my family history or that of Tom’s family with alcohol had any implications for me or my children. Would it have made a difference if it had? What would I have done differently? This is the kind of arrogant confidence in our ability to control children’s lives that helps parents keep them safe when they are young and cripples us when we lose them, whether from unforeseeable causes or their own bad choices. It can only go on for so long before it eats itself, leaving a bad taste but giving temporary relief.

After exhausting my capacity for sorrow each Sunday, I ate a supper from the prepared food section of my local gourmet supermarket. (I have never cooked another rack of lamb.) I put the box away and tried to put my son away for another week, rationing my grief. When your heart is broken, ritual can be a gift.

###

Three times during the year after Toby died I left town. I fled first to Cape Coral, Florida, to the solace of my oldest friend, who had known and loved Toby since he was five but was too ill herself to make a trip to Birmingham. I traveled to Iowa City for a writing workshop when my friend Cynthia offered to go with me and help me back on the horse. I joined my son’s family again in Pensacola for Thanksgiving. I was not a recluse, but, except for the grocery store, the library, and a couple of monthly commitments, I stayed at home. For days at a time I went no further than the mailbox at the end of my driveway. Returning to my normal diet of poetry, nonfiction, and a few novels, I continued to read for a large part of every day; I worked in my yard.

It was a surprise, then, when in mid-December I fell for a description of a small boat cruise, “In Harriman’s Wake,” which offered twenty-five days of traveling with 119 others from Vancouver to Anchorage, southwesterly along the Alaskan archipelago to Dutch Harbor, then north into the Bering Sea, crossing the Arctic Circle before turning south to Nome and returning by rail to Anchorage. I had never taken a cruise of any kind, nor was I interested in daytime fun or nightly entertainment with three thousand people in the middle of an ocean. This trip appealed to me because the group would be relatively small and because the itinerary seemed to track my spare, inner journey since Tom and Toby had died. The remote villages of Savoonga, Providenija, and Yanrakynnot looked like personal way stations where I might drop my excess mental baggage just as finally as the bags of shredded paper left behind in my office and put my losses and opportunities into a productive perspective. I imagined that I might return purified and prepared at last to shape my pared-down life as widow, unaffiliated person, and invisible older woman into that of genuine free spirit.

I imagined that I might return purified and prepared at last to shape my pared-down life as widow, unaffiliated person, and invisible older woman into that of genuine free spirit.

Harriman’s Wake proved beyond my reach. The only space available was the most expensive, the President’s Suite, and, with the single supplement at that level of luxury, the cost of my imagined odyssey was about $40, 000. My travel agent, a friend for twenty-five years, felt no need to call me before telling the cruise agent that her client had not planned to buy the boat, and she negotiated a discount on the last available, ordinary stateroom on a two- week coastal cruise from Vancouver to Anchorage, which seemed a reasonable substitute – same ship, icebergs calving, whales migrating. I told myself that it was probably better to get my cruise feet wet, not literally, I hoped, on a more limited venture and allowed her to confirm the arrangement for the following May.

Having reached the bottom of Toby’s memory box, I scheduled an appointment with a psychologist I had seen in times of extreme stress. She had written me when Tom died; she knew Toby’s story, and I felt a need to tell her its ending. Sharon was loving and sympathetic; she understood my purpose. When our hour was almost gone, she said, “I can’t let you go without knowing that you have something delicious in your life.” I told her I could imagine nothing more delicious than a life of reading and writing, but I also listed my children and grandchildren, my deepening relationships with my sisters, the trip I had planned, and my yard, including the patch of wildflowers that appeared each year from seed she had given me. It was enough to make her smile and stand to hug me.

For years I had experienced occasional episodes of intense pain in the right side of my lower abdomen.  It could usually be relieved within an hour by lying down, and post-episode exams never revealed a cause. Very late in the evening on May 7, 2007, after a grueling day of pain and nausea in the ER, I had surgery to remove an obstruction in the small intestine. The first question I asked the surgeon, when she explained the procedure necessary to relieve my pain and prevent a rupture that could cause life-threatening infection, was whether I could go to Alaska on May 30. The question surprised me, because what was uppermost in that part of my consciousness that existed apart from the warm glow of Demerol was how many such procedures this apparently competent, take-charge stranger, no older than my daughters-in-law, had performed previously. She answered unhesitatingly that such a trip would be inadvisable, if not impossible, so soon after major abdominal surgery.

The question was foolish.  One does not go to sea on a small craft with limited medical facilities three weeks after having her insides rearranged.  She does not climb down and into and out of small rubber boats to hike nature trails two weeks after the removal of large metal staples that have been holding her midsection together. But there it was: the adolescent hope that the trip might not be lost, that the personal transition might not be stilled. 

When I returned to my house after six days, I saw that the family of blue jays that had nested in my carport for several years were gone, and, seeing no piles of feathers or little beaks and bones, concluded that the fledglings had escaped the neighborhood cats and other hazards without my intervention this year. For an hour I watched birds through the triple windows at the rear of my living room in the aviary formed by the parallel ells of the house, their gutters rich with food. Dots of white in waxy green at the edge of my vision told me I would not miss the perfume of my gardenias this year. I could take several trips, some in one day, in the stacks of unread books around my house. There was surely a book somewhere that would sail or otherwise power me through the whole of Harriman’s Wake.

My attempted plunge into deep, cold water had been thwarted, but I felt that I had at last come up for air. The sun seemed brighter; I could breathe deeply without pain.                                                                                                                                                                        

Two months later on July 5, my mother died. Please relax; this is not yet another sad story.  She was eighty-seven years old with a full share of life’s joys and disappointments behind her. She had been showing signs of dementia for a while, and, during the week before her death I stayed with her in her home. After spending each day in a senior center, she was visibly anxious until she could have her dinner and go to bed. She responded when I spoke to her but initiated no conversation. I noticed she no longer read, and she was not interested in television. She surprised everyone by laughing and making jokes throughout the July 4, family barbeque. I think she had received advance notice.

I am happy that Mother died while she knew all the people who loved her and was able to take care of her personal needs. Still, the day your mother, especially one like mine, leaves the earth is a very dark one. In all of my adult life I do not remember a single unkind remark or rebuke from her. She was the most constant champion I ever had. She was also the last person who depended on me for anything, and she was gone.

Sometimes I drive by the Tom Leonard Center…It is a tribute to Tom’s countless hours of advocacy on behalf of the population it serves.

Sometimes I drive by the Tom Leonard Center, opened by the ARC of Jefferson County, in April, 2006, to house day programs and a sheltered workshop for developmentally disabled adults. It is a tribute to Tom’s countless hours of advocacy on behalf of the population it serves.

Each year I get a holiday card from a man Tom mentored in 1965. “A few people, some of whom I only knew for a short time, had a significant effect on me; Tom was one,” he wrote on the first card. I remembered John, a serious student but mischievous and stealthy enough to steal, on a dare, the Hamm’s clock from a bar in Grand Forks. He was one of Tom’s favorites.

Noel, a lawyer, and Clay, a teacher, carry on Tom’s commitments to providing legal services to people in need and to dedicated teaching.

Toby left little but his beautiful daughter. She lived with me for three months after her first year at college. She has her father’s smile and his sense of humor, but I do not need reminders, nor do I seek closure for my loss. I carry his spirit; most days it is a warm light instead of a stone.

One evening not far into my life of leisure, I ran into a former colleague, a psychiatrist, who, after hugs and condolences, asked, “How are you keeping busy? Don’t forget that retirement is a loss too, even though you chose it.”  He could not have been more wrong. I have never regretted my decision to stop working; in fact, I have rarely given it a thought except to puzzle a little over why I never miss something I enjoyed very much most days for more than thirty years.

After my retirement, the structure of my life did not relax; it fell away and disappeared like water into sand. Opening the car door in the Publix parking lot at some odd hour, I might be paralyzed by a feeling that I was not where I was supposed to be and that I had called no one to excuse my absence or predict my arrival. Within a few seconds, a realization that no one knew or had any reason to wonder or be concerned about my whereabouts flooded my gut and traveled in slow motion along my body in both directions until my toes relaxed and my brain cleared.

The opportunity to do only what pleases is very seductive; I have embraced it. I see the years I have lived alone and unemployed, including those first two that I think of as a time of deep rest, and any that may remain as a gift of time that has been denied many others.  To paraphrase William Hazlitt in his essay, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” I “loiter” my days away – reading; watching movies and plays; traveling for friendship, pleasure, and curiosity; and hearing, thinking on, and scribbling about what pleases me best. You’ve heard of the slow food movement? I am a devotee of the slow life. It is delicious.