April Pain

Stream of thought response to recovery from death of spouse

     What is wrong with me?  No, not really wrong.  Actually right in a very wrong sort of way.  It is not even June yet.  I am prepared for June.  It will be two years in June.  But it is only April.  I am not prepared for it to happen in April.  Two years of  pushing everyone away.. . Not on purpose, at least I do not think it was on purpose.  I am waking up at all hours of the night with my pillow wet, head pounding, heart racing , the ache in the pit of my stomach as painful as the day he stopped breathing as I held his face between my  hands.  Weeping, snot running down my face,  trying to find him peace… all that I could say was “Shhhhhh, it is ok, it is ok.”

     I remember saying the dumbest things to him.  “You  can’t change your mind now..” as he gasped his last breathes and tried to rise off of the pillow.  Of all the things I could have said, why did I have to say that?  But then I remember how much pain he had been in, the shock of it when his skin started to slide off of his arms when I tried to help him get up out of his chair.  The nausea I felt when it tore as if along a dotted  line.  Not sick for myself, horrified for him.. He never wanted to linger like that.  Even if they stopped the morphine drip and put the mask back onto his dear face… the machine that force-fed oxygen into his stubborn, non-functioning lungs… it would not change the outcome, only put off the inevitable for a few more days.   And the children were all there… I could never get them back , all of them together, to say goodbye… they barely tolerated what they saw as my selfpity  as it was.  

     My roommate says that it was and is because I don’t edit what comes out of my mouth, even after it the discussion/ argument/ debate is over and I can see the  damage, I still think that I am right… she says I am a “big-mouthed, know-it-all b***h.”   I have to shrug surprised how little that comment hurt… probably because I know that it is true….. But, and now I find myself smiling a small, smug, triumphant, bitter smile… He had loved BECAUSE I was that way, not despite it.  I had found the one person who loved me exactly the way I was… I prefer to think that I  told him the way it was.  Not precisely the truth, simply the reality of the moment.  He said his first wife would not have known the truth if it bit her in the a*s.  The ex had always saved her “telling the way it was” for those private moments, when she could cut his soul and than had played the dutiful wife in public.  When he had left the ex for me it had been to his families horror and they had sided with the ex… he had grinned sadly… “their loss… my gain”

    What else did I say when he was dying?  Oh yeah.. I laughed and told the children, his and ours, that he had said I  could remarry, but only if the new guy was rich… he laughed.. The kids were horrified… but they had never been privy to the jokes.. 

“When I go, marry a rich guy with lots of land, so  you can come dig me up once a month and we can …..”

 and we would laugh… Now, almost two years on, I still wear both of their rings and keep his ashes in the china hutch… yeah that will bring the new guys running.   I remember trying to take the ring off of his hand after he was gone and cringing, crying and laughing until I gagged, because I did not want to hurt him.. Strange how it just slipped off of his finger when the nurse removed it and handed it to me.  It was loose on his finger at the end, but now it is so tight on mine that I can not even remove it to clean it….  How thin his hands were.. I did not realize at the time…  

I had walked to the hospital in a fog, after getting the call that it was time.  What was I going to do with his body?  There was no insurance,  no savings, S**t, I was walking because there wasn’t even a damn car… I had stopped at a one of those crematory shops the day before on my way to the hospital.. I supposed it makes sense for them to be in the neighborhood of a hospital and all of the retirement/nursing homes that orbit the  medical buildings.  They had written a number on a piece of paper and I had been momentarily shocked out of the painful fog that was blurring my mind during that last week.  They must had seen my distress, because they handed me another card with a phone number and said that it was a  different crematorium in the area that was associated with medical teaching facilities and that I could donate his body to research and that they would return his ashes to me for free..  

    I ran into his room and saw his white face and blue lips and he struggled to hold up his hand to me… for a moment he must have thought I had lost my f*****g mind as I laughed .. But then I told about the research facility….  Then his eyes filled with tears and he sighed in relief.  We had met in an emergency room almost 40 years earlier and had fought over who the DOA on his gurney belonged to.  He drove ambulance and I was just the night admittance clerk, but there was an aknowledgement of each other even at that first meeting.  He said later that he thought I was the most stuck up b***h he had ever met… but wanted me anyway.. Later he came to recognize it as fear….I knew him  in a moment… married or not, this was the man I was made for.. Thirteen years difference, nothing in common it did not matter… We knew… over  a dead body..  I still shake my head.. Now this seemed full circle.  Later I would laugh in my horror filled children’s faces as I gleefully forged his signature on  the paper giving strangers the right to cut him up and study him… God, the things we do and the way we do them… in whatever small reliefs of grief at those most awkward of times… but he had known and just tugged on my shirt and smiled through the mask that almost swallowed his face.  Little did I know that I was sowing the seeds of my own devastation with the children.. But the kids did not know or understand, or want to….

    When he died I felt something tear inside me, I turned away from everyone in the room and grabbed my stomach and felt it go…  I thought it was gone, but in these moments in April when the oddest of things have set the humming pain whirling again… First reading short stories on line and then trying to write myself, for the first time in a very long time   The experience of trying to put feelings into written words have pushed it all back into my mind.  I had forgotten how wrapped up our love had been in the sex of it.. But then it had started as a one night stand and ended up being nearly forty years… 

  How cocky he had been, so self-satisfied to have attracted the attention of a 21 year old.  He and his partner on the ambulance had decided to pick up a couple of chicks (his word.,,  I still want to kick him)..  He chose me… He at 33, with a wife and two kids, feeling desperate.. He later told me he was suicidal… thinking of ways to kill himself that would leave his children financially cared for.. He just wanted one last fling…

The thought of his doing that leaves me heaving with pain and nausea and with sooo much anger at that b***h.  How could anyone hurt this man, this gentle, laughing, joyous man with the long fingertips who reached with such hope for my face in those moments after.   Suddenly I understand where this is coming from  the act of writing has broken a dam that I have built inside of myself…. The Great Wall of China is dwarfed by this thing…  I have found music and I listen with my earphones on, strong percussive beats, wild swirling orchestrations that leave me shaking while I create  and read what others have created.. caught up in a world my roommate can not see, but she knows something is changing, breaking, building and she is worried… asks me if my doctor and I have discussed anti-depressants.. But I can not share this with her… We share an apartment and a friendship that comes when two widows can not bear to live alone, can not afford to live alone, but there are things that I can not tell her.   But I have found writers whose prose soars, chills my spine with the depth of it… some it is, pornographic even.  

      Love, Friendship, Sensuality and the most honest equal relationship of my life…. Strange how I never saw it before… He was so dominant in the start and I, the one who had always led, been in charge, was shaken to my knees by the sound of his voice in my ears, the touch, the drive to take me, even as I thought about my  vows.. Not for long, mind you.. His hands did things that I never knew … in time the roles would shift, change, share and move in a tango, but one where each led for a time then wait to be led.

His eyes shone with light, long lashes just fluttering onto his cheekbones as his dark curls thrilled my seeking fingers, his breathe stole mine and his desperate need to love filled every corner of my soul..  the corners of his mouth turned up and his voice swerved between a growl, a purr and a plea as I did things to him that a woman is not supposed to do to a man… my heart races when I remember the night when all the children were out of the house and I made him arch and crab crawl across the floor in darkened living room with just the moonlight coming through the windows.. I made it sure it lasted forever.  We both ached for a week after… He would laugh and blush twenty years later on his death bed when we hinted at it…  if only those kids had known what we were thinking about…  

     Last week I was looking for photos to put in  frame for our oldest son on his birthday.. He and his wife are expecting their son, my first grandson…   I want to find one of  my husband and our son … oohh I had forgotten how beautiful his dark, soon silvering, curls had been.. How I did I forget that.. and then I found his love notes….  I had forgotten I put them in this drawer…. one note is on the large yellow notepaper that he used for his medical notes.  I went back to college when I was 33 and worked on two degrees.. History and Anthropology.. I was working on my masters when he started to get ill… The best and the worst year of my life  We lived apart for one year, coming together on weekends.. So we were reduced to communicating by letter, card and late night phone calls.  He writes about the feeling he gets in the pit of his stomach when I walk toward him and smile… I thought only I felt that way about him… How could I have forgotten this precious gift… this letter from his heart… it was our 18th anniversary and I was middle aged, overweight and feeling very unlovable, but this letter made it all new again… Just like the stories on the internet and writing again… maybe not anti-depressants.. Maybe at 61 I am just getting senile and weepy.. But I had it all …  and I can remember and dream.