It is not often anymore that I recount the days leading up to Mark’s death, the manner in which he died, or the aftermath of that devastating day. In the beginning I had to tell the story over and over which I learned was common and even necessary after a death. Now it seems like everyone knows and those who don’t can hear it from someone else. On the rare occasion when I hear my own voice recounting those days from six years ago I still have trouble believing any of it.
I went to lunch last week with a friend who lost her husband three years ago. Our daughters have been friends since middle school but it was the sudden death of our husbands that forged a friendship. We seem to need to touch base after the holidays when we feel steam rolled and flattened and need to check in to make sure we aren’t crazy. Eventually we start talking about the things people say to us that feel like a knife to an open wound that will never heal. “Happy couples on Facebook,” we say, “gawd, I hate their smiling fake faces that say look at us.” There is no escaping we say and I thought of all the times I posted a happy anniversary and photo of Mark and I for all the world to see how much I loved this guy I married. Surely it stung someone I knew who had lost their spouse or was in the midst of a divorce they never wanted. BUT HEY YOU GUYS MAYBE YOU CAN STRIVE FOR WHAT I HAVE was the hidden message when I was clueless about the permancy of loss. “To be honest,” I said to my friend, “I was probably one of those obnoxious people who tried to cheer someone out of their grief and did everything wrong including piss them off,” and she agreed because experience dramatically changes your empathy. “When you know you know,” she said as the ghosts of the two men we loved hovered over our table.
A few months ago I was invited to a dinner party. I knew the hosts and one other person and since it was centered around an author the subject of my writing came up. I said that I started a blog many years ago and mostly wrote humorous pieces about life until my husband died suddenly and it changed the course of everything in my life. Before I knew it I was recounting Mark’s death to the rapt attention of everyone at my end of the table, hearing my own voice tell a story that sounded horrific and must have happened to someone else because how could it be me? How could I live through that and casually say why yes I’ll have more wine. At one point my voice cracked, the specific detail I don’t remember because it is all worthy of cracking. The faces of those around me looked stunned and uneasy and I don’t think there will ever be a time in my life that I won’t want to crawl out of my skin when I see the reaction to the retelling of the day Mark died. Maybe it’s because it spectacularly fails to match up to my heartbreak and that of my kids, maybe it feels like a heaping dose of pity instead of empathy, maybe because if it could happen to me it could happen to you and nobody wants to believe that could possibly be true.
When the dusty remains of my story settled and blanketed the table, someone asked, “Are you mad at him?” Are you mad at him? I fumbled, I deflected, I forgot for the thousandth time the thing my therapist said was the only proper response to a question like that. Why do you ask? I don’t remember what I said. Did I throw my dead husband under the bus for leaving me? Did I say anything that made sense to someone who never knew him, never saw his passion or exuberance and delight for life? That he got so excited when his grown kids were in the house that it felt like Christmas morning? That after his Saturday morning rides with his biking friends his eyes would glisten as he said, “I love those guys.” Or did I say that I saw a despair on my husband’s face that I hope you never see because you will never forget it. That I saw him struggle and come out on top over and over and the last struggle took him down in a way that on any other day would have shocked him to his core.
When you know you know, my friend and I knowingly said to each other over lunch, which is why the only thing you need to say when someone invites you into the hallowed halls of their grief is, “You must miss him terribly.”
Last month when I linked the pre-Christmas post I had written on my Facebook author page, someone commented that my writing was always profound. I kicked that word around for a good, long time while frantically finishing my shopping. The only conclusion I came to was, like another word someone and I were recently talking about it, that is one that has some weight to it.
Our Christmas Eve plan was to go to a friend’s house. Both having three kids of similar ages and living around the corner from each other, we’ve been friends for decades. Last year we celebrated with them and had so much fun that we were looking forward to a repeat. But first Maggie, Mal, Rubin (Mal’s partner), and my two grandkids went to the performing arts center to see the matinee performance of The Nutcracker. We have done this for the last few years and this time my grandson had reached the age which my daughter said was old enough to go. I was exhausted and last year fell asleep during it. My prediction was that I would do the same this go ’round. I made it through the first half, we went to the lobby, and the grown-ups in the group (sans me) had a glass of wine. When we returned to our seats and the house lights dimmed, there was the distracting noise of someone opening a bag. While Joseph and Mary were wandering around Bethlehem on their donkey looking for a place to have a kid and little dancers were doing step-ball-chain on the stage, someone behind us decided it was time to partake in that corned beef sandwich and bag of chips they had stuffed into their coat pocket. Rubin turned around and gave them the stinkeye. When the show ended and the lights went up I turned around to deliver the old-lady-stinkeye which is more effective because it’s been done much longer. The offenders had skedaddled as one might expect since they were lunching at A PERFORMING ARTS CENTER DURING THE PERFORMANCE. The audacity Rubin and I said as we were leaving as my six-year-old grandson exclaimed, “This has been the best Christmas Eve of my life!”
When we got home I saw a message from my friend followed by a phone call. She had Covid, our Christmas Eve plans came to a screeching halt, and so Michael and I decided we’d get Chinese food (a la A Christmas Story). I have been ordering take-out from the same restaurant for over thirty years, made some choices for five of us, and called it in. The phone rang and rang. I tried again and then again. I was certain they had to be open and so we decided to drive over and place our order.
We walked into the packed restaurant, lines of people waiting for a table, the phone lit up like a Christmas tree ringing and ringing. When we saw one of the harried owners and asked about placing a to-go order, she wrote it down, said it would take an hour, and to come back. Not what we were expecting but at least we had a dinner plan in the works. When we returned to pick up our food the restaurant was even busier with groups of families crammed in from the cold and waiting for a table. Occasionally a group would leave, another group would get seating, three more groups would walk in the door. Grandparents hobbled in like wise men around the manger and sat waiting amongst us. I whispered to Michael, “I hope if the time comes that I am using a walker that the people I love don’t drag me out in freezing weather on Christmas Eve to a packed restaurant because I think it’s probably going to kill half these people.” In the meantime, the husband half of the owners kept disappearing while the wife kept telling us our order would be “two more minutes.” Over in the corner, a short, middle-aged, white guy (SMAWG) said, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this.”
After waiting a good while, a tall, angry white guy (TAWG) comes in the door and he’s got an ax to grind because nobody is answering the phone. When he gets the attention of the daughter of the owner and says he wants to place a to-go order she tells him they can’t take any more orders, that the kitchen can’t keep up with what they have, and he stares at her menancingly because apparently nobody has ever told him no. The wife gets wind of the problem, comes over, looks at his order, and says they’ll do it. There are some words exchanged in Chinese between mother and daughter. I have no idea what they are saying but I am backing the daughter because TAWG seems exceptionally unlikeable. SMAWG leans over and says to him, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this.”
From the back of the restaurant comes another guy to pay his bill. He announces that they need a plumber and because it’s utter chaos nobody pays attention to him. Then his wife and young daughter join him and he asks if she went to the bathroom. The wife says the toilets in the women’s room were being plunged. “Just take her to the mens,” her husband said. “That’s backed up, too,” she says and then he not so quietly said, “Just have her go on top of what’s in there and don’t flush it,” and I was like I CANNOT DO THIS ONE MORE MINUTE. “She can’t,” the wife says, “there’s too much in there and I lean over to Michael and whisper, “Are they really doing this here? Are they really going to keep talking about the shitter being full?”
SMAWG weighs in with, “What you have here is a sewer backup. One wrong move and you’ve got a restaurant overflowing with everything in that toilet,” and I feel a dry heave working its way up the chain of gastro command. We hear someone say to us “two more minutes,” TAWG stops fuming for five seconds to say this is ridiculous, and SMAWG says, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this,” and while Mary is in labor with a bunch of men standing around and doing nothing I think about strangling this guy in her name. There is more discussion about the toilets and the wife says, “It’s a good thing they have a waste management guy here.” Her husband chuckles and I wonder why that’s such a good thing if he’s not offering to do anything about it. They decide maybe Walgreen’s is still open and they leave so their daughter can pee there. The husband and wife owners pass by and are arguing in Chinese. He’s flustered and sweaty from plunging. She keeps telling people they can get a table when clearly they are beyond capacity. I’m on his side. SMAWG says to nobody, “My wife and I come here every Saturday at noon. I’ve never seen it like this,” and I was like FOR THE LOVE OF THE NEWBORN JESUS WILL YOU LET IT GO.
After forty minutes our order is ready. They read it off and everything is there. Mary has a healthy baby boy, some kid thinks drumming in her face is helpful, and we have Chinese food. It’s a Christmas miracle. We head for home only to come across a backup of cars waiting to turn into a tiny cul-de-sac known as Candy Cane Lane. I have seen it a thousand times. Every house is over-the-top decorated for Christmas. When Mark was alive he said, “What if you’re the guy who doesn’t want to do this? What if you’re like eff it. It’s too cold. I’m not putting up the lights and a fat, dumb snowman.” I told him he’d probably get silenced, stuffed in a storage shed, and end up on a Dateline episode. A few days earlier when Michael and I drove by it he said, “Huh, do you have to do this if you live on this street,” and I started seeing a pattern in the men I choose. Behind the line of cars Michael said, “Maybe I should go around them,” and I said “Gun it,” and finally, blessedly we arrived home with our dinner.
We filled our plates, played a game of Yahtzee, I got a little hammered. The next day we we told Maggie and Nate about our wild night trying to get some food. Then we opened gifts, the grandkids happily played with their new toys, we hugged each other and said thank you I love it. I do not have a single profound thing to write about any of it except that like every year it was A GIGANTIC CLUSTER WITH ENTIRELY TOO MUCH PEOPLING INVOLVED and that for the first time in many years it felt good to love every wild minute of it.
When I was ten years old, there was an epic January storm in Chicago that dumped 23″ of snow. It was forever known afterwards as The Blizzard of ’67. The snow started early in the morning and didn’t stop until the early hours of the following day. While accustomed to large amounts of snow, this one packed winds of up to 50 mph.
We went to school that day because that was what we were supposed to do. Dad went to work and, Mom, who loved the cold and snow, was at home with Ann. We got an early dismissal from school and at about the time we would normally be coming home, Dad called Mom to say he was leaving work as it would take a bit longer to get home given the weather. What unfolded over the rest of the day and night I don’t remember except that every hour Mom and the boys would get into coats, boots, and gloves and go outside and shovel. My sisters and I watched from the living room window. When it got dark Mom went out alone and you could barely make her out as the snow swirled around her. She’d come in, wipe the tears from her cold face, warm up, and repeat. As the night wore on, Mom said Dad would be home any minute and shooed us all to bed.
What was normally an hour ride from work to home with his carpool buddy, Roscoe, took Dad eleven hours. He was driving our VW bug and credited that little car with being able to manuever where drivers in bigger cars weren’t able. It was also small enough and light enough to push when they got stuck. They got close to Roscoe’s house and Dad walked the remaining four blocks home.
The following day my three brothers went with Dad to dig the car out. Mom was in a panic because, Ann, who was only a year old needed milk and we were running out. We headed to the store, put a couple of gallons on our sled, and walked home.
This weekend we had a snowstorm that dumped half the amount of snow from that infamous blizzard of my childhood. For days before it had been predicted to land on Saturday afternoon starting with freezing rain and turning to snow. On Thursday I went to two different grocery stores – one was packed, the other nearly empty. I ran some errands on Saturday morning for essential things like going to the paint store and getting samples. Michael went to the grocery store. I asked him to pick up a few things I forgot and he came home without any chicken breasts because they were completely sold out.
We watched the local news, the Weather Channel, and our phones to keep track of it all. There was not a moment this weekend when we weren’t aware of the weather conditions, the road conditions, school closings, store closings, work closings. Yesterday when I turned on the tv to watch my favorite Sunday morning show, it was wall-to-wall coverage of the storm. Bundled up reporters running their booted feet along icy streets, cutting to another reporter standing next to a pile of snow as a plow rumbled by, cutting back to the studio where the breathless, suited weather guy was so hyped up over the weather you’d think he snorted something every time he was off camera.
Decades after that snowstorm of my youth, I was talking to Mom one day about how different it was back then, how there were no cellphones, nothing more than the six and 10:00 news to know what was going on, how you may have known that it was going to snow but it didn’t cause a city-wide panic and a run on the grocery store. “I was so worried about your dad,” she said, “that I kept going out to clear the driveway and looking down the street hoping to see his car.”
And all that time I thought the tears we saw on her face when she came in from shoveling was because of the cold.
A few weeks before Christmas when we were young, our mom and dad would take my sisters and me to downtown Chicago to see the department store windows decorated for the holidays. We would go to mass at 8:00 a.m and then to Almar Donuts where we would pick out our breakfast. Mom would pour her and Dad a steaming cup of coffee from the red plaid thermos she had filled before leaving the house and we would head towards the city.
Bundled up against the December cold, we would walk to State Street where we would ooh and aah at the windows of Sears, Carson Pirie Scott, and the big finale of Marshall Fields. Nobody was downtown on those early Sunday mornings so we could stand right against the glass and be mesmerized by the elaborate displays and decorations. Between the two of them, Mom and Dad would excitedly point everything out and as I got older I wondered if this adventure was more for them than us. It didn’t matter – it was an annual event just for us girls. If it was close to opening time we would go into Fields which was the Cadillac of department stores. Red bows hanging from every light fixture, the first floor perfume counters, and boxes of Frango Mints stacked everywhere. It seemed magical.
When our kids were little, Mark and I wanted to have our own tradition and so we decided to take them on a carriage ride on the Plaza where we could leisurely see the store windows and lights from the comfort of a horse-drawn buggy. The only problem with our plan was that the night we had reserved a ride was a mixture of snow and sleet and bitterly cold temperatures. Not to be deterred because Chicago was firmly embedded on our DNA, we forged ahead and hyped it up for the kids. Despite the conditions we were managing to perservere until we rounded the corner and sleet was hitting us directly in the face. Mallory was a baby and even though she was bundled up it wasn’t enough and I unzipped my coat and tucked her inside. Maggie and Will were crouched down on the floor to avoid the sleet. Maybe they were crying – I don’t remember because I felt like a pioneer woman on a wagon train fighting for our lives – or maybe their tears were frozen to their tiny, frigid faces. It was miserable. Afterwards we were supposed to have a family dinner but only made it as far as McDonald’s. Mark tried to cajole the kids into walking a few blocks to a nicer restaurant but they weren’t having it. All they wanted was a happy meal and for the frozen blocks that were their feet to thaw out.
I’m not sure if it’s an age thing or no longer having a living parent but this year the memories of all my Christmas seasons have been like a movie that’s been whooshing by on fast forward. The simplest task brings up memories of my mom and dad, how hard they worked all of the time but especially at Christmas to make it feel special. I see my daughter and her husband doing the same thing with their kids even when it’s clear they are exhausted. I remember those overwhelming days.
This year I am in a different house with a different partner. I’m not sure yet how Christmas will look, but Michael is kind and generous to a fault so I have no doubt that it will be lovely. But even if it isn’t, even if there’s some hiccups that throw a wrench in our day, we will show up in sparkles and plaid and a snapshot will temporarily stop the whooshing of time and prove that we were together and we did our best.
If you are one of my followers on this blog or a frequent drive-by, you may have noticed that things here have been a bit off. When I wrote my last post I was unable to share it on my Facebook author page. After a few days of repeatedly trying I found out that all of my posts (900+) had suddenly been flipped to private meaning only followers had access to the content. How this happened is a mystery and after many tries on my end I reached out to WordPress for help via a customer chat. They offered to correct the problem and I was like ALLELUIA THIS IS MY BABY AND I NEED IT FIXED PRONTO. A malware problem, they said, and could do a one-time fix of $199 or a year of monitoring for $499. That’s when I realized that their logo was ever-so-slightly different from the real WordPress site and I’d just handed over my login information (but not my credit card) to a hacker.
Long story short this has been trying to say the least. My friend, Lisa, who six years ago helped me move all of my content from Blogger to WordPress was doing everything she could on her end. She enlisted her friend, Gina, for help. Gina (who I have never met) tried many fixes and sent many emails with updates on what she was trying without success. I had an online chat for over an hour with Bluehost who tried on their end to flip my work back to public. Michael’s student, Thomas, came over for nearly two hours to work on it, I reached out to Mark’s biking buddies to see if anyone had experience with WordPress, a friend who is a coder offered to look at the problem. I had a small army of people trying to help me.
Yesterday I sat down again like I have done every single day since this happened and decided to changed the theme of my site. Though this was one of the things that had been suggested, I resisted making the change. I liked how this little home for my writing looked but since nothing was working I gave it a go. Through the new theme I was able to change my posts to public and they didn’t immediately revert back to private like they’d been doing with my previous layout.
I could have cried from happiness and relief. However, if you have been getting a flurry of emails from here, it is because everything I’ve written in the past 13 years has to be manually changed to the public setting which I have found out results in an email. I’m so sorry for that but it’s the only way I can fix it so please delete them and don’t stay mad at me. I’m rather fond of this little blog and having it crippled and on hold felt debilitating so my early, most welcome Christmas gift is having it up and running with a new look.
Speaking of Christmas….as I have written about a few times, I have struggled with reading since Mark’s death. For years I have had no concentration with the exception of any book that promised to fix the unfixable. Other than that I could read for hours and not retain one word. Thankfully, that has changed in the last year. Maybe it was the passing of time or more likely it was having Michael in my life and the safety net of love and support that made me no longer feel like I had to be on high alert for trauma. That, too, is a gift.
Below is the stack of books that I’ve read since the spring. The Wedding People was good – funny, poignant, real-life kind of stuff. James was stunning. Buy it – it’s like nothing you’ve ever read before. Paradise was about the largest wildfire in California history and was one of the most harrowing stories I’ve ever read. I picked up Winter Birds at an estate sale for ten cents. The story is told through the eyes of a young boy who is a hemophiliac, the abuse his father reigns down on the entire family, and the endless cycle of poverty and violence. The Collected Regrets of Clover was about a woman who was a death doula and her only friends are her clients who are dying. The Yellow Bird Sings – oof, this takes place during the Holocaust and is about a mother trying to hide her and her young daughter from the Nazis. It was really, really good.
I listened to Between Two Kingdoms on audio and it was incredible. It is the story of Suleika Jaoud (wife of musician Jon Batiste) and her diagnosis and treatment for leukemia. I highly recommend it especially on audio. She has an incredible voice and paints such a vivid picture with her storytelling that you feel like you’re in the hospital with her.
And last but not least is I Will Send Rain. The month Mark died was my turn to pick a book for the book club I was in. I chose this because a writer friend had recommended it. I had read about a third of it when my life was upended and after many months I moved it from beside the bed to a shelf. Every time I came across it I remembered talking to Mark about it and how I would be hosting that month. I couldn’t open it and I couldn’t get rid of it. This summer I looked on the library site to see if it was an audiobook and downloaded it. It is a stunning book. The writing is exquisite, and this is another one that I think is worth listening to via audio.
Is it good to be back among the reading? Wondering what story is waiting once the cover is flipped open? At the book store wondering what would make a great gift this Christmas?
When I started my first freshy-faced adult job in downtown Chicago, I took the bus back and forth. I walked to the end of the street where the bus would screech to a stop, choke exhaust out the back end, and wait for me to board before traveling on to the next stop. My friend, Pat, was already on board and we’d sit next to each other towards the back and on the right.
The same people were on the bus every day – always occupying the same spot. For as much time as we spent together there was little conversation except when traffic on the Calumet Expressway was backed up merging onto the Dan Ryan. Stopped still with a sea of red lights ahead of us, the bus driver would shout, “WHO WANTS TO TAKE THE SKYWAY???” We’d shout back an enthusiastic WE DO and his cap would be passed down one row of the bus and up the other so his passengers could fill it with spare change to cover the cost of the toll.
At the front of the bus sitting on benches facing the aisle were two regulars. One of them I knew – he was in my social studies class in high school. There were a couple of occasions during that class when he would pitch forward in his desk, rock back and forth, and moan. It was a very scary thing to witness, mainly because nobody knew what was happening. The teacher would stand beside him until it was over and years later I would find out that he had epilepsy. After high school he went to work at the local donut shop. He lost both his hands to burns when they were plunged into a fryer of hot oil when he was having a seizure. It wasn’t until I started taking the bus, him sitting in front with his prosthetic hands (which at the time were two silver hooks), that I found out what happened which to this day has not lost its horrifying effect. I got accustomed to seeing him every day and in time his hands ended up being the least remarkable thing about him. It was his booming laugh that frequently filled our quiet bus that separated him from everybody else.
Next to him was a guy who was probably in his early thirties. In retrospect he seemed to be on the spectrum which at the time wasn’t something anyone knew much about. Because he sat in front he was in charge of the hat passing for the toll – making sure it made its rounds and there was something to give the bus driver. If that job wasn’t required, if we were moving at a decent clip during the morning rush hour, he’d keep watch over his fellow passengers the entirety of the ride. What that meant was that he’d watch them sleep, and when their head bobbed forward or off to the side, he’d get up and lean their head back so they would be more comfortable and wouldn’t wake up with a stiff neck. Sometimes he only needed to do it once, other times over and over. This tended to startle people but then they’d go right back to sleep and he’d go right back to monitoring the situation. It was odd to say the least but nobody ever complained, got mad at him, or asked him to stop.
Last week for a die-hard liberal like myself and millions of others, was a blow to the knees. Finally, I thought, this country would elect a woman president like so many other countries had done decades before. I woke up at four a.m. the next day and found out otherwise and haven’t stopped feeling sick since. Added to that was something that happened at work that had me teetering between rage and a super-sized helping of rage. On another week I might have been able to shrug it off but instead it seemed like a heaping pile of disappointment and unfairness that was on the verge of collapse.
I was barely managing to hold it together until I spent a little too much time online the day after the election where a widow who used fitness to overcome her grief and create a business wrote, “Tell me what you’re grateful for today.” Were we really supposed to sunny-side-up a felon as our president? Start counting our blessings less than 24 hours later? There was no better example of why in the midst of loss or pain, people shut down. Why it is so much easier to say nothing than to pretend that things are fine. Why every time someone saw me after Mark died and said I looked great I’d say everything was a-ok when it felt like my heart was dangling from a string tied to my back belt loop and bouncing off the ground with a trail of blood following it. “Oh that thing,” I would say, “that’s the real reason I look so good. My heart’s been cut out of me and so I’m much lighter. I mean the blood isn’t appealing but do you like my new outfit?” Meanwhile, despite how I looked everything in my life had gone to complete shit.
I’m feeling a lot like that again and it’s not a healthy place to linger. I don’t like how loud hate seems to be, especially my own. So I’ve taken a leave of absence from the news which may be permanent, went back to reading at night, and loaded an audiobook from the library to listen to when I’m out walking. I’ve also been thinking a lot about those two guys from years ago who were on my bus every day – joyful warriors of the morning shift. I desperately could use the laugh of one to lighten my soul and for the other to gently push my weary head back so I can rest before the work starts again.
When Will was a fifteen year old boy and told us he was gay, the first thing I said to him was that we loved him just as he was. My immediate thought after that was that his dad and I would protect him at all costs from the hate and vitriol that was surely going to come his way.
A few years after he had told us, I went with him and the girls to see Barack Obama at a rally nearby when he was running for president the first time. As we walked to the venue Will spotted members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a ragtag bunch of a religous zealots who gained notoriety for their hatred of everything. Their specialty was their God Hates Fags signs and promises of eternal damnation for anyone who was not straight. Will grabbed my arm hard and said, “Mom, we can’t walk past them,” and I could hear the fear in his voice. We crossed the street and avoided them, but I wanted to confront them, I wanted to grab their signs, I wanted them to fear my wrath like my son did theirs. But the funny thing about this group was that they were heavily protected by the police wherever they went unlike my young, gay son.
That was many years ago and as a country we have since graduated to hating the transgender community because now everyone knows somebody who is gay so there’s no novelty in that. But that group of people? Well, they’re coming for your bathroom, your swimming medals, the dressing rooms at the moonlight madness sale at your local Kohl’s, and in the course of your kid’s school day changing their sex in the nurse’s office.
When I worked at a local university, our office was home to LGBTQ Affairs so seeing students of every identification was a normal part of the day. I was working with a student group on one of their events via email. The student rep’s name was Katherine, but every email was signed off with a different name which kept confusing me. When they came to the office to meet me in person and talk over details, the person at our front desk came to tell me and said, “Just so you know, they are presenting themselves as male,” which I was grateful to have a heads up on. What followed was a conversation on the business end of things and then a different conversation about the difference in name and my apologies for the confusion. We had more emails, and phone calls over the weeks that followed and their event went off without a hitch. Through it all I stayed solidly female.
Last fall I took a writing class sponsored by our library where a trans woman was in attendance. Her look was over the top and garnered lots of attention which for me would be so uncomfortable I’d probably end up hiding in the bathroom out of embarrassment. A few hours later we were in a class together where she furiously took notes which I admired because I was having trouble staying interested. As the class wound down and the instructor asked if anyone had any advice to share about their method of writing, she raised her hand and proceeded to wow the room with a multitude of tips. In that moment her look melted away in light of her enthusiasm for writing and supporting everyone in the room who was struggling with the same thing – making time to write. I often think that trans people are the bravest of us out in the world. We all package ourselves in order to be accepted and they have the courage to rip the packaging off to show their true selves and face ridicule and often violence at every turn.
I cannot accept punishing anyone who has purposely been pushed to the fringes of society for being who they are, for wanting the same things all of us want, for daring to dream that they, too, get a chance. As the holidays get closer and we are starting to think of our celebrations, for those of us missing someone (and isn’t that all of us?) there are so many bittersweet reminders of how it used to be. Mark loved pumpkin pie, my mom used an old-fashioned meat grinder to crush her cranberries, my dad loved stuffing. As the turkey is in the oven the memories flood in and the longing of setting one less plate never goes away.
The airwaves this election season have been flooded with the vilest of commercials demonizing the other. We are being groomed to hate. But there is a person on the receiving end of that, a chair being made ready for them, sisters who can’t imagine life without their brother, and parents desperately praying that they can shield them from that which they do not deserve.
My family lived in a suburb south of Chicago – minutes actually from the city limits. Prior to that, my mom and dad lived in an apartment with three small boys that was bursting at the seams. I don’t know much about those years except that my mom talked so fondly of their neighbors, Gladys and Al, that I felt like I knew them even though I never did. My dad credits my Uncle Moe (the never-married brother of my grandma who lived with her and my grandpa until his death) with giving them the means to buy a house. My dad said his uncle watched them struggle to keep things afloat and gave them money for a down payment on the house we all grew up in. My Uncle Moe was mostly an elusive figure in my life. He wasn’t in many family photos as he worked nights at the steel mill, but I knew my dad was grateful to him his entire life for the help he gave him when he was a young father.
The house by any standard was a starter home. Small, no basement, one full bath, another with a sink, toilet, hot water heater, freezer, and a plastic bucket taped to a vent in the ceiling to keep the birds out. Eight people were crammed into that little house – it’s saving grace a big backyard where we all played.
We spent the first eight years of our school lives at St. Jude the Apostle – an actual barn when my parents first moved there. For all of us life revolved around the church and school and Mom and Dad volunteered for a lot. How with six kids they found the time I do not know. But because of that nearly all of their friends were fellow parishioners, fellow parents with many kids, fellow adults who knew how to be of service and have fun doing it.
One of those friends was named Joan Kelly. Her husband, David, ran a drywall business and they had eight kids. Many of their kids were the same age as some of us so the Kellys were part of our lives for a very long time. Mrs. Kelly knew everything about everyone. My sister and I were a year apart and nobody could get our names straight except Mrs. Kelly. She never even had to guess – she just knew. She knew each one of my brother’s names, who their teachers were, which one of them were the same age as one of hers. My mom loved Mrs. Kelly – if she told us that once she told us a hundred times. Joan was funny, she was a spitfire, and she was a dear friend. Mom would cross paths with her and hear one of her kooky stories and would retell us at dinner. “That David is a saint,” Mom would say. My dad was the first of their large group of friends to die and years later David and many others would follow. I was so sad for Mrs. Kelly when I heard the news. From the stories my mom and dad told it seemed that David was the straight guy to her comedy routine. What was Lucy supposed to do without her Ricky?
Years later the people who started that church and school started moving further west (my mom included) and they would have yearly reunions. When she would see Mrs. Kelly at one of those (or more likely a funeral) she would fill us in on what she was up to – it was like getting an update on your Auntie Mame.
When you live to be my mom’s age you don’t have many friends left and the ones who are either don’t get around very well or are in assisted living. Most of the people who came to her wake were people who knew my mom through all of us which was our own sort of reunion. A few hours into the visitation and balancing on two canes, in came Mrs. Kelly with her niece. News of her arrival spread fast. My sisters talked to her first and then I made my way over to her as she sat in a chair in the front row. She had hardly changed, her eyes the kind of blue that looked like a pool you could dive into. She watched the screen with tears in her eyes as it showed photo after photo of my mom’s life and said, “Oh will you look at our girl? She was beautiful inside and out.” I sat on the floor at her feet and she turned to me and said, “I loved your mom and dad.” “It was mutual,” I said and pulled my grade school friend over and told Mrs. Kelly her name. “Oh, yes, of course I know you Pat. You’re Chuck and Helen’s daughter, aren’t you,” she said and then listed family after family that she knew who lived on the street Pat grew up on. We had a long talk with her and caught up on Peggy, the daughter of hers that was in our class. Will was standing nearby and I motioned him over to meet her, “My god, you look just like your grandfather,” she said when she laid eyes on him. She was the same Mrs. Kelly we had always known and told us a story of becoming the girls softball coach because somebody asked her if she could. She agreed without have any idea what she was doing, pushed a stroller with one of her babies across the field, and winged it from there. “That’s what we did back then,” she said, “and nobody cared if you knew what you were doing or not.” She filled us in on the rest of her kids, grandkids, and great grandkids. I’m not sure if I was distracted or someone I knew was leaving and I got up to thank them for coming, but when I looked again Mrs. Kelly was gone. I hoped she would be at the funeral the next day but if she was I never saw her.
I think most families have a Joan – the relative or family friend who lights up the room with their stories, their interest in your life, their humor and kindness. To have my mom and dad gone and see Joan walk through the doors of that funeral home, which like my mom for many years was a too regular occurance, was a beam of light on years gone by. She knew things about both of them as her and David’s friends, carried stories within her we could never know, and hobbled in with her niece and canes to tell us.
If you ever have a fleeting thought that your presence at a funeral is not necessary I hope you realize that you are the living record keeper of a story that a family may have never heard, a story that will bring light and a smile as you say farewell. How else would I have known that the time our not-even-five-foot mom played Tattoo, dressed in a white tux with her short dark hair and pointing to the sky saying, “De plane, de plane,” in a Fantasy Island spoof that was a church fundraiser, would be talked about by Joan and all my parents’ friends for years. As she lay in a casket just feet away it was Mrs. Kelly’s storytelling that erased the dementia and made Mom shine again.
If there was a prayer I had after that night was over it was gratitude followed by a plea to the universe to protect The Joans in our lives at all costs.
In late July after nine fabulous days in Ireland, Michael and I headed to the Dublin airport to fly to Minneapolis and then home. I didn’t think I was ready for the trip to be over until we arrived at the terminal and suddenly longed to be home sleeping in my own bed. Upon arrival that Friday morning, we were funneled into a long, snaking line to check our boarding passes. The line moved at a fairly quick pace until it suddenly didn’t and we came to a screeching halt. We watched frequent and serious conversations among airport employees with head nods and concerned looks as the queue grew and grew. Within minutes the buzz making its way from person-to-person like an old-fashioned game of telephone was that there was a global computer problem affecting flights.
After a long while where the panic over missed flights hung over the line like storm clouds, we began moving and were on our way to security and immigration. Things were understandedly backed up and a wee bit tense at each stop but we had arrived in plenty of time for our flight. We headed to the duty-free shops to get some Irish whiskey and chocolate to bring home because priorities. I crammed my sealed bag of spirits into my backpack, Michael took the chocolate, and we headed to the gate. By this point we had looked at our phones enough to know this was a much bigger problem than we thought and its name was Crowdstrike. Were we worried? No, there was a plane sitting at our gate that may as well have had a banner saying CONGRATULATIONS, WEARY TRAVELER, YOU GET TO GO HOME UNLIKE THESE OTHER POOR SUCKERS.
We waited and waited and then waited. The flight got delayed over and over. The terminal started to fill to capacity but we found a small table with two chairs to sit and people watch while the covidy respitory particles of hundreds of people filled the air. Then suddenly it was announced that our plane sitting at the gate, our plane with our banner was going to be used for a flight to New York and we were like BUT WHAT ABOUT US? WE WERE HERE FIRST!! Mr. Irish Lad Gate Agent who was understandably stressed said calm down peoples the next one coming is going to Minneapolis. After two hours had passed with frequent alerts from Delta giving us new departure times, Michael said we may as well have some lunch and since there was a restaurant right next to our gate it seemed like a good idea. We could easily ditch our crappy airport sandwiches when our flight started to board.
Hahahahahahaha……
After a couple more hours had passed and on my way back from getting our third bag of Peanut M&Ms, I looked for our flight on the departure board and in red it said CANCELED. I made my way through the sea of travelers to tell Michael who said that couldn’t be because he hadn’t gotten a text message from Delta and thirty seconds later his phone dinged. By then Mr. Irish Lad Gate Agent, who had every bit of customer service wrung out of him, could only point and say, “Go that away” so we followed everyone else down a set of stairs. And who was meeting us at the bottom of the stairs? Delta employees who were taking our duty-free purchases for safekeeping because we wouldn’t be able to reenter the airport with them and we were like WE’RE NOT LEAVING THE AIRPORT YOU DOPES. WE ARE FLYING HOME TODAY.
We had no idea what to do next and no guidance from the airlines so we followed people who looked like they knew what they were doing which is how we ended up in baggage claim – luggage back in hand. We rolled our vacation life to the Delta counter where a very cheerful agent said, “I am here to help you,” which we took to mean rebooking our flight. She smiled and said, “No, you silly gooses, you are going to be in a hotel tonight, a lovely hotel with comped food for your troubles.” We said, “Thank you so much but we are wanting to get home,” and it was as if she didn’t hear a thing we said. “We are waiting on the next bus to take you to your hotel,” she said, “and you can get on the Delta app when you’re there and rebook your flight.”
We were first in line for the next bus which arrived at the curb and the driver disappeared. Nobody could find him for at least fifteen minutes which is probably as long as it took to enjoy a ciggy in peace and quiet before driving a bunch of cranky travelers somewhere they didn’t want to be. We boarded and arrived at the hotel which was quite nice and took the sting out of wearing the same unwashed clothes one last time. We got a room and immediately worked our phones, Michael’s laptop, and the universe to get through to Delta to rebook our flights with zero luck. In desperation, Michael emailed his admin for help on her end and after some back and forth between them we were booked on a United flight for the next day.
The next morning we packed up and headed to the breakfast buffet before taking an Uber to the airport. We sat down next to a couple about our age from North Dakota who asked us if we were on the Delta flight to Minneapolis which started a lively conversation about our previous day’s travel. They were surprised we got a flight out as they were part of a tour group and their agent was trying to rebook 43 tickets which seemed like a nightmare. It was a friendly back and forth and then the woman said, “Dave and I read our devotional every morning and today’s was perfect.” Did we ask what it said? We did not but Fargo plowed ahead and I don’t remember it exactly so I will paraphrase it. Yea, though thou walks thru the shadow of death known to thee as THE AIRPORT, thou shall not want because I have given thee a thimble of patience. Nay, scratch that, my beloved, that’s too much. I have given thee enough patience to fit in the eye of the needle and so thou should go forth in the name of the Lord and call upon me in times of flight troubles for I am your rock. No, it’s wings, yes, definitely wings.“When we read that this morning I said to Dave well of all the things we needed to hear today. Isn’t that perfect? I mean we’re going to need patience, aren’t we?” I had an oh-for-chrissakes look written all over my face as I sipped my coffee and then Michael said, “Welp, we better shove off now,” and we shoved off very very fast.
An hour later we were in the Dublin airport for our flight. It was calm and quiet unlike the day before and we went through security and immigration and picked up our confiscated whiskey and chocolate. We took the escalator upstairs to our gate which was void of frustrated faces, crying babies, or the elderly trying to manage a walker through throngs of people. It was civil like traveling used to be once upon a time. Seven hours later we arrived in Newark for a four-hour layover before boarding our next flight. We sat at a bar to get something to eat and a glass of not-fine-wine that cost $22 a glass. Grossly overpriced? Why yes it was, and we didn’t care.
We made our way to the gate area where Newark airport decided to put long tables with chairs so one could sit upright like they’re at their job and write a letter to their grandma while they waited to board. This seemed like a major design flaw as weary travelers merely need a decent slouchy chair with a charger so they can doom scroll until they hate their life a little less or can get out of Dodge. But nobody asked me and at the packed gate it was announced that though it was time to board one of the flight attendants had gone to the wrong gate and we would have to wait for her to arrive at our gate.
We waited so long I wondered if the flight attendant was at the wrong gate at the wrong airport. The gate agent at one point had enough, walked away, and took a seat (on one of the few comfy chairs) to bitch about work with another gate agent and I was like SHOULDN’T YOU BE OVER THERE DOING YOUR JOB???? When the flight attendant finally arrived everyone started clapping like that was a normal thing to do when an employee shows up an hour late for work. We boarded and sat while a minor mechanical issue was addressed and by minor I mean we didn’t move for another hour. Michael and I didn’t sit together, stuck in the middle of different rows like the white part of an Oreo cookie. I couldn’t sleep because I was distracted by the four-year-old in the row in front of me who kept punching his mom when anything didn’t go his way. When we arrived in Kansas City, close to midnight to an empty airport, we had to wait for a gate and by that point I believed we had moved from the passenger category to hostage.
Five weeks later we went to Canada for another meeting for Michael. It was a fast flight to Detroit and then to Montreal – easy and uneventful. We stayed at the Doubletree Hotel which was where the meeting was being held. Our first night we took a long walk in search of a place to eat and ended up at a fantastic Indian restaurant The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel then came back to the room to gather our stuff for a day of sightseeing. I tidyed up before leaving saying to Michael, “I don’t want the housekeepers to think we’re lazy, American slobs.” Hours later we returned to our room looking exactly as we had left it. That’s when we learned that the housekeeping staff was on strike. Was this city wide? No, just at Doubletree hotels.
On our last full day in the city we walked to the Ritz-Carlton because the retired owner where I work said it had the most beautiful bar in North America and we had to check it out. That might have been a bit exaggerated but we went and as soon as I walked in the first thing I noticed was that the Ritz didn’t smell like mildew from hundreds of unwashed towels. Since it was only 11:30 in the morning we each had a mocktail that was spritzed with a little geranium which I didn’t even know was a thing and had a lovely conversation with the bartender who didn’t seem stressed and ready to snap like everyone working at our hotel.
Later this fall Michael has a trip to Omaha which I took a pass on because I’ve already been there and I’m feeling a bit striked out. I did, however, discover you can buy an oil from Amazon that smells like the Ritz Carlton. It came the other day and it’s so lovely – a fragrant mix of well-paid employees, impeccable service, and clean towels.
Every year as the anniversary of your death approaches, I always say, “I can’t believe it’s been __ years.” Time has marched on which sometimes feels unforgiveable. I have flashbacks often, but when there is a hint of changing colors, and the sound of early morning band practice from the high school cuts through the crisp air, they ramp up. I don’t analyze them for answers any more as I have done plenty of that. They are more of a curiousity to me about a time in our lives that still feels like a terrible dream.
Much has changed in the last year. Last fall my aunt died, in January my uncle. Such a lovely man, and if anyone deserved to have a flight of angels sing him to his rest, it was Paul. In April, it was my mom. We prayed for her death – three years on hospice and she couldn’t let go. I think she learned at four years old that when her dad died she just needed to hang on, and hang on she did. She was shockingly thin at the end and there are some images of those last hours that I wish I could erase. How two good people like her and my dad had such horrible end days will always haunt me. Her wake was exactly what she would have wanted – filled with family and friends, a gathering of pure love. I was so proud to be a part of the family that her and Dad made. The next day at her funeral the priest kept calling her by the wrong name. At first I thought I misheard it, but once he went down the road he never came back and so now we refer to her as Peggy.
Maggie and Nate and the kids are thriving. This summer they went to Hilton Head which was a relatively unknown place when we went for our honeymoon 41 years ago. They have the most beautiful beach babies – I think we planted that seed in all of our kids long ago on the shores of Lake Michigan. You would so love being their grandpa. Will has had a rough ride of late – bravely ended a relationship and engagement that was not right for him. He is missing you terribly through this upheaval in his life but is righting his ship, and after weeks of constant worry about him and his emotional health, I feel like I can exhale. Mallory and Rubin are the hip couple from LA who come into town and fill us in on all the cool stuff we’re missing in the Midwest. Mal is still in school, still working full-time, and is dancing again – this time for fun. I imagine you and her in deep conversations about her masters program and you peppering her with questions. On paper it all seems good, but your absence in their lives is profound and painful, so I will ask you again and again to please watch over them.
In the last year my life has changed the most. Last September I met Michael who you knew. All those nights I laid in bed, bereft and heartbroken, asking you to send me someone to love and you delivered a gem. Between us we have 75 years of marriage and things are different this go ’round. We don’t fall into pettiness as we are too aware of how short life is, how fast everything can change, and so we live accordingly. I am unsure how I have been so fortunate in my life to love and be loved by two such passionate, kind, and honorable men.
The other day I was telling my therapist about some flashbacks I was having to your funeral. How it was so important to me that I made people believe that I was okay, how I welcomed everyone with a smile so they weren’t afraid to talk to me, how the distraught on their faces never gave way to my own. I kept my back straight, stayed focused, and never faltered. She listened to all of it and then said, “You didn’t know how to be a wife who was suddenly alone because your husband ended his life, but you knew how to be a hostess.” I have yet to recover from that observation of hers.
Some days I still want to burn everything to the ground out of frustration and grief and rage, but for the most part, gratitude is my daily prayer. And you probably already know this, but there has not been a single day in all these years that I haven’t spoken your name. You live on and so do we.
