After So Much Time

Yesterday as I was driving in my car, I thought, "I miss my husband." And I do. I miss you. Dang it. Darn it. Rats! You were horrible to me in the end. Your meds weren't working and you thought I was interested in another man, which wasn't true, but you had that in your mind, and you were going to show me. You were going to hurt me as much as you could. You thought I was waiting for you to die so I could go off with someone else. But I wasn't. You were being robbed of your life but I wasn't being robbed of mine. Carmi and I were the only ones you honestly told that the divorce was your idea. To everyone else, even your best friend, you said I was divorcing you because you had cancer. To Carmi and me you said you were asking for a divorce because I wouldn't let you gamble without some kind of assurance I would be protected. But after all the awful things that happened, I have these days when I just wish we could be together again. It isn't only the lovemaking I miss, it's the companionship, the talking, your sense of humor, your wit and your zest for life. I miss you, and I wish I didn't. And, oh, how I wish it had ended differently. Wherever your soul has gone, I feel I won't see or feel your spirit again. I miss the essence that is you and must mourn you now along with lots of both ugly and beautiful memories. Now my father has died. You and he, the two men in my life, are gone. I am strong for having been loved by the two of you, but I am weak with loss. It is double now. You died on September 2, and Dad on November 17. It's bitter, it's freeing, it's exhausting, it's sad. My life has been turned upside down in the last twelve weeks, and twenty-seven months before that it was turned upside down, and eight months before that it was turned upside down. And now you are both gone. My life lies before me and I have relatively no plan for myself. You are both gone and I am very much here.

Messy

So much about you was messy. You were disorganized. You lost paperwork and receipts. You didn't clean up after yourself. You didn't pay attention to details. You skipped steps and cut corners. You gambled and lost money. No, you gambled and squandered money. All the boxes the judge ordered me to pack and ship to you were in your garage. You had gone through them and shifted some stuff around. Your apartment was strewn with who-knows-what. It was chaotic. Packing your place was a challenge. Cleaning your place was a challenge. It took weeks. It was unpleasant. It was confusing. We are now tired. We are mentally and physically exhausted. Your things are, once again, in the driveway. We will have a sale. We will sell things on the internet. We sold things in the desert. We gave things to your neighbors for having helped us load the rented moving truck. We will sell them in the yard. You had been on buying sprees. You had made tens of thousands of dollars vanish. You have bills, unpaid bills. You had let your auto insurance lapse. I am getting your bills now. I am making payments. I am calling. Kyle is calling. We are finalizing things. It's messy. Messy, messy, messy.

6 weeks

You've been gone for almost six weeks now. I didn't know you had made me the executor of your estate---although it didn't surprise me---but I didn't expect for you to have made me the beneficiary of your estate as well. Also, the will you had made had been written before our mediation, the mediation you had so wanted, the mediation you had said was what we should have done from the beginning, the mediation where you gave away your entitlement to my retirement plan. The will didn't mesh with what was in the final divorce settlement. In it you gave the lion's share of 'your' entitlement to my pension plan to cancer foundations. How sad for your daughter and how fortunate that it didn't come to fruition. How sad that she had to read that you would give what you thought was over a million dollars to cancer institutes and something like twenty thousand to her. Fortunately your delusional thinking was, once again, inaccurate. You can't measure and collect your portion of a pension plan by what it would hypothetically pay off over any number of years. It can only be calculated against the existing dollar amount in that plan on the date of separation. What a jerk! Was a selfish, uninformed jerk!

The First Day of School

It would have been the first day of my last year teaching school, the last year at the school where I had spent my professional life, at the job that had provided for our family for decades, had given us health and dental insurance, had allowed me to push myself as a learner and as a professional, a place where I had made friends and instructed at least a thousand children. It was on this day we got a call. You had been in the hospital for two weeks, your kidneys and liver were breaking down and you were being put on hospice. You had a woman there, someone who had been smitten by you, someone who was at your side the entire time. In addition, she was comfortably set and was a former nurse. How convenient for you. I remember that while you were still with me and I had received a 1099 in the mail from a casino, I had asked you to look around the poker table the next time you were there and figure out which one of those people was going to be giving you your morphine shots when your time came. How I had underestimated you! You were never one to see limitations. You knew you would be more resourceful than that. You knew you would be able to find someone to care for you and that you would have other places to look than in a casino. As soon as you moved to the desert, you joined a cancer support club and there she was----WHAM!---newly-widowed, very, very lonely and very, very vulnerable. You had no worries about missing me and my caregiving or anything else, I could then just become a target for your greed. She was much more qualified for this job than I could have ever been. Maybe she was a step up. On your release from the hospital, you were being sent to her home. She had cleared out a bedroom for you. She and the hospice nurses would take care of you but you were not being told you were being put on hospice. Laura called me and asked if I could watch the baby. When she arrived at the house she told me the news. I cried. She cried. Kyle looked confused.