Five Years

Wedding day, April 1, 1986.

I can’t believe it has been five years since I became a widower.

Like I’ve stated previously via blogs here and here, at the time it happened it was not a shock but a surprise as my wife Kim has been experiencing health issues all her life. She rarely shared little if any details about it outside of our immediate family, so extended family and friends (even very close friends) were quite shocked. Since her crossing over happened on Halloween night - Samhain in pagan terms - it seemed appropriate. In fact she actually commented on this near the very end, and was quite positive about it. Technically her death was on November 1 a few short hours after midnight, but those that knew her still consider her passing happening on Halloween. And like I said in the post from three years ago, Halloween welcomed my first granddaughter into the world, and my son’s family actually purchased the house just two doors down so I get to see her quite often. That first Halloween after Kim had gone was quite difficult, but with Evie’s birth I seem to handle it much better.

Dealing With It All

I’m slowly handling it much better than I was previously. Yes there are still things of hers in the bedroom I haven’t touched, but a number of things I have. She had small fans and space heaters in the bathrooms, and they are gone. Certain pieces of furniture she liked that I never use are gone. Old tech, particularly tech used for tracking medical things such as her insulin pump are also gone. I reached the point where I could actually pick them up and touch them, and realized she would have made fun of me for focusing on their old owner instead of dealing with the fact that they are simply old and unused and need to go.

For some reason, here in the past few months I’ve had several different people ask me the following question: “Will there ever be a new ‘significant other’ in your life?” The answer is no, and for multiple reasons. First off, I simply do not want to go through that level of loss again nor do I want to place that burden on anyone else. Secondly, Kim set a pretty high bar anyway. We liked tons of the same things including the new and latest trends but we were also roughly the same age so we had a shared cultural history. Finding someone that is roughly my age but enjoys modern trends (for example modern progressive metal) is next to impossible. Mainly though, it is the first one. That level of pain from that type of loss, I want to avoid that as much as possible. Kim would disagree - more than once after her heart attacks in 2002 she would point out and tell me which females we encountered that I should pursue after she was gone. But no, it is not going to happen.

Probably the hardest thing about being alone has simply been that I have had to make all of the decisions. Before, I had someone to bounce ideas off of and I knew I could trust the responses to be honest, as opposed to something I wanted to hear. This can be anything from simple things like what to eat for dinner to major financial decisions like which new car should I buy. I had little to no choices before getting married as I was rather poor, and while we were fairly broke most of the time during our early marriage years we gradually developed a system of checks and balances to make sure we never ended up broke again. Kim ran the books so I had to figure all of that out after she was gone. Granted she had everything laid out logically and she had gone over it with me a few times, but it was still something wild to deal with as there were still tons of decisions along the way.

There is an upside to making all of these decisions now, and that is I’m become more confident in myself and there is a feeling of independence in that my decisions only impact me, and no one else. If I decide to get something to eat through a drive-thru instead of fixing it myself at home, I don’t have to talk anyone else into it or throw someone else’s schedule off. This might seem rather insignificant to most people, and for the most part it is largely insignificant to myself, but as someone who had lived with family, roommate, and a spouse for most of my life where dinner decisions involved at least one other person this quite a change. I bring up this food angle because it is simply an easy-to-understand example of this whole “independence” experience.

Spring 1994. Photo by Torin Loveless, who at age 6 was handed Kim’s expensive film camera and pulled off this great shot.

Triggers

From my blog post three years ago I mentioned a few “triggers” that make me sad. These included sirens, certain music artists, playing music, and dreams. In general things have improved on almost all fronts.

• Sirens. Yes, still happens on occasion in that I remember the night the sirens came to the home to take Kim to the hospital in an ambulance. Having a fire station a few hundred feet away, and being close to a hospital means there are plenty of sirens multiple times per day around the clock. For the most part though, I seem to put it out of my mind and it becomes background noise like it was before.

• Music. I can listen to more music that Kim and I used to listen to on a regular basis, although a few artists such as Kate Bush I still cannot. And I still haven’t touched a musical instrument, they gather dust and I regularly dust them off, but yeah, slight improvement only.

• Dreams. Kim still very frequently appears in dreams, and some of them are quite vivid and wake me up with a start. However my reaction is more nostalgic in nature, and the really profound ones seem more insightful than triggering. Depending on the subject it can still be something that affects my mood for the day, just not as often.

A new trigger of sorts seems to have randomly occurred on occasion when I am going through some of her old items. Clearing out a part of a closet or going through a box of random “stuff” when looking for something can result in quite a reaction, however I think I am able to handle it much better than I would have a few short years ago.

Closing Thoughts

In general, things are better. For those of you that have recently experienced loss, note that when I am relaying that it gets better I am referring to the fact that I have slowly learned to deal with it. There are still triggers, I still get just as sad as I got before, but I’ve simply learned how to handle it. I fully understand there are those that handle things like this by quickly throwing themselves into a new relationship, drinking and drug use, or simply emotionally give up and shut down. I’ve learned how to cope in part by facing my feelings and really trying to understand them, and not hiding from them. I’m not saying this will work for you by any means, but it works for me. And I got a good amount of positive feedback from many people about the last blog post on this topic, so I hope this one helps as well.

Kim on October 10, 2021. Photo by Natalie Keeton/Wondery Photography