One Year Ago Yesterday

Death was on my mind a  lot, even before my wife had her accident. 

Her ex-husband had died, the father of her children, in an accident. We were all close to him. She always made it seem like she hated him but it was obvious there was still something there. I loved the guy. He was fun, funny, thoughtful, and he had some of the nicest things to say about me, the person married to his ex-wife and taking care of his kids, that no one else has ever said. Considering that I grew up watching sitcoms, where the husband and mother-in-law don’t get along and certainly not the husband and ex-husband, I found it somewhat surprising and very, very comforting. 

Not too long after that one of her brothers was murdered. Shot in his sleep over a misunderstanding about a woman. I held my wife as she cried, wondering why people had to die. What could I tell her? Not much. It’s a given that people have to die, we don’t have to like it, or even agree with it, but that’s the way life is. Most of  her drinking was, at this point, fueled by these two deaths.

And not very long after that was when her father died. She left rehab, with my full support, to see him before he passed away. I don’t know if they ever cleared anything up between him (he was also an alcoholic and quite abusive from what I heard) but she was devastated when he passed away. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard on her if it weren’t for the deaths of her ex-husband and brother happening so soon before.

All of these things would be centers of conversation when she was sober and lucid. She made me swear, multiple times, that if she died that I would have her cremated. She hated funerals, you see. She hated them because you’d see this person that you loved lying, dead and still in a casket. All the vibrant life, gone. That wasn’t how she wanted to remember someone she loved; she wanted to remember people as they were, alive, living, laughing. What she didn’t want was people remembering her as a waxen figure in a coffin. I couldn’t disagree with that.

And so it was, last month when my father passed away, I truly realized what she meant. The one thing I really dreaded was losing my dad and the one thing I really did not want to do was seeing him in a coffin. The man I remember was active, always up and about, working on the house or one of my siblings houses, shoveling snow, fighting with his lawn mower, or sitting in a chair playing yet another game of Dr. Mario.

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of my wife’s death. It’s still hard to deal with and, frankly, I didn’t do very much. Barely moved, truth be told. There’s a lot of memories that run through my head and I’m happy to say that most of them were happy memories. I never talked much about the happy times with my wife because I was too busy complaining about her drinking, but there was a reason why I loved her so much, why I put up with the drinking and all the things that came with it.

The bad memories are fading away, leaving the good things to rise to the top. I’m happy with it that way.

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