Dead Leaves

     I hate this time of year. It's no longer summer, but it's not yet fall. It's "in limbo" time, with dead leaves littering the ground, the deck, the sidewalk, the patio furniture. It's an odious harbinger of the lifeless months to come.
    It's a sad time. Even the crickets sound sleepy - and the long, light-filled evenings I love so much are getting shorter and shorter. It's also a reminder of two years ago when the world as I knew it began to come apart at the seams. The summer had been marked by physical pain for the man I loved more than life itself - which inevitably led to rounds of specialists and endless testing - and ultimately, the hopeless diagnosis.
     I stood among the ruins of our life, among the fallen leaves, with our furniture replaced by hospital "appliances," and I kept focusing intently on acceptance. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change..."  I knew it - he knew it - there was no discussion. We only had to look into each other's eyes, and we knew. It was a day-to-day marathon. I thought of a dear friend who used to say, "Step out in faith. Do what you can as gracefully as you can. Expect God to help." It became my mantra, or litany, all day, every day, as I did my best to care for my dying husband.
     Caring for someone who is dying, especially someone you love, is tough, grueling work. Add to that the emotional strain of helplessness and grief, and you have a recipe for exhaustion that is un-equaled in my experience. Sleep deprivation, companionship deprivation, hope deprivation - "the days dwindle down" - one tired day blends mercilessly into the next. The night slips in a little earlier each evening, and pretty soon the trees are bare and the air is cold.
      In the late-late hours of one of those cold nights, I had him sitting on the edge of the bed, and I was struggling to remove those damnable tight elastic stockings that made him so uncomfortable. I was kneeling on the floor with my head at the level of his knees - and I suddenly felt his hand on my head, and he stroked my hair - lovingly, tenderly. I didn't know that this would be the last time he'd be able to  reach out voluntarily and touch me. No words were necessary - he knew how tired I was, and I knew how heartsick he was - and those few sacred moments will live with me as the most intimate in our life together. He was comforting me, as he had a million times before - my hero, my protector, now mortally wounded.
     And so it is that I hate this time of year, which in my heart represents the beginning of the end of so many things. All of my memories hurt right now, and I wonder when and if the pain will ever end.

Trip Down (Kitchen) Memory Lane

    Eleven years into the game, I finally had the kitchen "bricked." I know that sounds odd, but that's what it was. The portion of the kitchen wall that holds my double ovens was always intended to be surrounded by brick - and it was just one of those projects my late husband never got around to. I finally took matters into my own hands this summer, and on the advice of a neighbor who is a restoration contractor, I hired a guy who is an absolute "artiste" with brick tiles. And I've been happy-happy-happy with the finished product. It's everything I dreamed it would be - and I only hope my husband can see it from his lofty perspective. He'd be pleased.
    An added bonus to the project is two more kitchen cabinets for which my husband had squirrelled away doors and European hinges - and John-the-tile-man knew precisely how to install them. I ordered some free-standing shelves for the cabinets, and today was the appointed day when  ever-faithful Donna, my cleaning lady, and I were to unload other cabinets and re-organize.
    What I hadn't anticipated were the memories that would assail me as I encountered all the "stuff" that had been stowed away. There were the cereal bowls we'd used for breakfast when the house was only framed in - we had a little dorm refrigerator for milk and juice, and I'd acquired the bowls and some really cheap flatware at a local discount store. We sat on some stools, also purchased at the discount store, and ate at a "table," that was a sheet of plywood placed across a couple of sawhorses. It was fun, a little like "playing house," and we were grateful we could eat here at "home" instead of having to go to a restaurant.
     Then there were the candles: dozens of votives, chimneyed candle-holders, big chunky candles with four wicks. I'd forgotten how much we relied on them before the house was wired - and still use them when we have a power outage. Some of the candle collection were housewarming gifts after we'd moved in. I even had two little old-fashioned oil lamps.
     And my cookie tins - that I've had for decades to store the fruits of my Christmas baking labors. Now I can finally get to them without having to move half the kitchen. I remember my husband sneaking into them to grab an extra brown sugar cookie or a family favorite, a "moldy mouse." (It's a long story.)
     Bowl by bowl, plate by plate, roasting pan by roasting pan, the memories of the events of almost 47 years of my life rolled over me, steamrolled me, squeezed my heart. So many of these "things" traveled with us to nine different homes from coast-to-coast, with ultimately three children, a bunch of in-laws and a flock of grandchildren.
     And I felt so alone in today's work. It all went by like a sneeze, all those yesterdays. Forty-seven years is a long time, until you don't have them anymore - and you don't have your soul-mate to share the memories, the love, with.
     Donna went off with a giant box of those yesterdays, to be donated to her church's give-away day this weekend. I am left with neatly-tidied cabinets, now stripped of things impractical for me to keep. It's bittersweet. I am at that point in my life where divestiture is almost mandatory, I just didn't expect it to come so soon - and I never expected to feel an ache in my soul over muffin pans.
      Muffin pans. Are they worth my tears and heartache? They were my kichen treasures. They were 'us' - they were 'we' - and yes, dammit, worth some salty tears and a sob or two, with no apology for what they represented. I guess, because I've never been through this before, that this is the way life and death unfolds. I just wish it didn't hurt so much.

God's Coincidence

    It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. An e-mail from the church said there would be an ice cream social and a hymn sing last night. Glued as I've been to the Olympics, I decided I'd take an evening off for some ice cream and some good old hymn singing. The incongruity of ice cream and hymns didn't bother me - I love both. So I took myself off to the parish hall to meet up with many familiar to me, friends from the community chorale I sing with, and other acquaintances from church. Mary Grace was our leader, with delightful, comfortable old hymns to sing - I sat next to dear Pat, whom I adore - and Fred, two down from me at the table; cute Beth next to me, and Owen and Betsy across the table. I finally got to meet Pat's son, Jared, an acquaintance from Facebook, who turned out to be an extremely accomplished pianist. There was a smattering of others I didn't know - but we were all eagerly holding onto hymnals and song books and Xerox copies of out-of-print hymns. We sang lustily, with a lot of smiles and laughter, invisibly bound together by the spirit of the music and the words.
    I put in a request - a hymn with an unpronounceable Welsh title we'd sung at my husband's memorial service - but everyone knows it, and everyone who has ever attended a Christian service has sung it at one time or another - and anyone who has ever attended a sporting event in the British Isles has heard it sung as a "team song" of sorts. They say it's the un-official national anthem of Wales. I've always loved it for its phrases in the refrain - in English - "...grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour..."
     A woman across the room who looked vaguely familiar to me absolutely beamed, obviously delighted by my hymn choice. After the singing was finished, she came over to me and said, "Linda, I was so thrilled to sing that hymn again. I used to sing with a Wesh chorus!" Who was this woman? And how did she know my name? Later, out in the parking lot, I discovered she was a fellow yacht club member - and two of her grandchildren had been students in the sailing school my husband founded And a few paragraphs later, I learned she'd been widowed four months less than I - and she invited me back to her house for a chat.
     We spent the next two or so hours sitting in her living room, with a beautiful breeze from the bay blowing in through the windows, chatting like old friends and comparing notes on how we'd survived the loss of the love of our lives. (She'd had about 4 years' advance notice - I'd had only 16 weeks.)
     And upon reflecting on the evening, it struck me that I'd made a new friend with whom I have so many common bonds - someone who really understands how I'm feeling - and someone who doesn't share a past with me that includes my husband. And vice versa. And I'm learning, in this vast wilderness of widowhood, that it is important for my own mental and emotional health, to establish "solitary" relationships. I don't mean that I want to wipe out memories of my husband, or exclude him - but I appreciate the new relationships that are part of my journey alone. I've been half of a whole for so long, I really don't know who I am anymore.
     So God sent me an angel named Anne, all wrapped in ice cream and Sunday School hymns - and it just has to be more than a coincidence.