Days
1/4/2021
Days, months, hours, years of sadness
and suffering. Well, not years yet. But years stretching ahead. And would they
all be filled with pain and loneliness like this? And now this new worry! How
could he deal with what had happened? Hell, if he accepted—and he did, more and
more, every day—that his wife was still there, it was in for a penny, in for a
pound. If she was still there, in some way that evoked echoes of all that stuff
Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance…”
Well,
if that was real, and she could reach out to him, and he could reach out to
her…
But
now the two women he had felt some interest in since her death had both had
accidents the day before the times they’d set up to meet. And that was pretty
alarming. One of the accidents was catastrophic. Life threatening. The poor
woman had literally been run over by a truck!
He
missed his wife so much he felt bent down and twisted, like a fragile old tree
in a winter storm. But he remembered her jealousy too, and how it had cost him
a lucrative freelance job a few years before she passed. So was she reaching
out from another world to prevent him from seeing others? Perhaps even harming
them? And was he responsible? Was he going to have to be alone for the rest of
his life, just so he wouldn’t attract her attention to innocent women?
She
had passed at the end of Spring, and when the anniversaries came, every one hit
him like a tsunami. But he started to feel like maybe what was making it hurt
so much was his resistance. He tried to be more accepting, and then he started
to think that maybe those waves were her, trying to reach him from the
other side. That opened his heart, and it got better, maybe from 12 on scale of
1 to 10 down to 10.
Their
anniversary, the day they met, his birthday, hers. Thanksgiving came and went.
Friends helped, made him Thanksgiving dinner. And then Christmas was looming.
But a miracle happened. Or that’s the way he saw it. A friend who’d been his
wife’s main caregiver brought a box of Christmas stuff, which he set aside.
Christmas without her seemed like an oxymoron, but he’d put up some lights and
decorations. Even spelled their initials, two “J’s” on the outside wall with a
garland of blue lights. But the thought of not getting a gift from her was
weighing on his heart like a mountain had fallen.
And
then he finally noticed the label on a funny looking big popper sort of thing,
wrapped in Christmas paper. And it said from her, love, to him! And
the weight lifted away like a big balloon! He knew she hadn’t made that label,
but there it was, her love, for him, reaching across from the beyond.
The
wonder of that little label loosened his heart and when he saw what the package
contained it broke wide open. Rolled up in the cheery paper was his wife’s last
hooked wall hanging. She’d started it from a photograph he’d taken of a perky
squirrel sitting on a decorative birdhouse. And here it was, hundreds, maybe
thousands of tiny loops of colored wool thread pulled one by one with her
fingers through the coarse weave of the underlying fabric. It was saturated
with her, with the touch of her fingers and the bright light of her creative
artistry. And he was overwhelmed, crying and laughing at the same time. She had
reached across the great divide to him, yet again.
But
what was he supposed to do now? Should he keep trying to meet women? Or was he
putting them in danger? What did he really know about how it all worked? God.
His first wife had died too. Maybe it was her interfering. It was 11:30,
bedtime again, but dawn was a long ways away.
Jim Dodd
My own story is about trying to make a good new life, here in Vermont. It's seven months now since Alzheimer's took my wife from me, and I've been taking courses and working with Burlington Writing Workshop. Hard times, especially the holidays, but she was with me, as you'll see by the piece below.
Credits:
Two
pieces on storiedstuff.com 10-19-2020
& 1-6-2021
One poem
on www.academyoftheheartandmind.wordpress.com/ 12-17-2020
One short
fiction on www.potatosoupjournal.com/ 10-21-2020