WE WERE ALL PRETTY exhausted when we got home. We changed into comfortable clothes and just hung out in the house for the rest of the day. I sat down on the couch and mindlessly stared at the TV. The girls and Jackson each headed up to their rooms. We had a light dinner and were all in bed by 9pm.
The next day was Tuesday, the first day of our new normal routine of life. I thought it was pretty important the girls got back in the swing of things for a few reasons. First and foremost, I wanted to get their minds off everything, but also, I wanted to get that one last pity day out of the way. That first day that anyone returns to work or school after being through an ordeal like this prompts a thousand new condolences. I wanted them to be able to put that behind them pretty quickly.
I got up to wake them for school but they were already awake. I helped the girls get ready and that was a strange moment for me. This had always been Gina’s job and now, it was mine. It was very strange and overwhelming helping them pick out clothes, brush their hair, feed them breakfast, and then drive them to school. I almost got emotional a few times along the drive, but I suppressed it. I walked into school with them to clear up any notes that they might need. It wasn’t as if the school didn’t know, but I just felt like it was something I should do. The girls walked into the principal’s office with me, but they were quickly dispatched to their classes so I could talk to the principal. Standing there watching them walk away with their little backpacks really did a number on me. I didn’t lose it, but the tears definitely started to well up in my eyes.
Everyone at the school was great. They had already made arrangements for the girls to see counselors whenever they wanted. The rest of the administration was very supportive as well and that helped both them and me tremendously. If you ever have to go through this, go talk to the principal to see if you can set something like that up.
Driving home I knew I was going to need to figure this all out. Luckily, we already had Nona in the mix, and the kids were comfortable with her. I don’t know that I wanted another new thing coming into their lives at this point. There was enough change to deal with already. A new woman might have been too much.
School started at 8:45am and I was taking the week off from work, so it was about 9am when I returned to the empty house. It possessed an odd silence, and all I could do was stand in the kitchen and kind of look around, trying to decide what to do first. My mom called to check in and gave me some good advice – don’t sink in this. She knew these first few days were going to be hard and foreign to me and as a concerned parent and friend, she didn’t want me to crumble beneath the silence of it all. She was right. There were things I had to get done and things I needed the kids to get done. Getting them back into school was the first thing and that went pretty well. In fact, they were actually looking forward to going back to school and being with their friends again.
As for me, I ended up spending most of that morning going through sympathy cards and the visitor book from the wake. It was an odd and lonely process as I wrote out the thank you cards and popped them in the mail. I wanted that off my list as soon as I could. It would have been rude to let too much time pass and that was a task I didn’t want sitting on my head. If you have to do this, give yourself some time because it takes a few hours to do them if you want to write more than just ‘thanks’ in there. I felt like everyone deserved a nice little note. After all, they took the time to come out for us, the least I could do was send them a nice note acknowledging their kindness. Reading them really made me feel good again. If I felt at all alone against the world going into that task, I sure didn’t when I was done. It brought me a sense of peace. I didn’t even cry while I was doing this. It was oddly therapeutic.
After I got those done, I wanted to get the bills knocked out too. That was another thing I never had to handle before. As the days and months wore on, I would find myself habitually looking for something like a bill folder, or a pot-holder, and saying aloud “Gina, where is the…” whatever I was looking for. It’s not that I forgot; how the hell do you forget that your wife died? But it was a habit and each time I did it, I caught myself and wondered if I was losing my mind.
I’ve heard stories from other people too who have gotten this surprise, but usually it was with their mothers or grandmothers after they had passed away. I mentioned before that Gina and I sat down and she showed me then that she had a bit of a soft spot for home shopping because I owed $5,000 worth of balances to both the Home Shopping Network and to QVC. In looking back through the invoices, it was mostly jewelry and mostly towards the end of her days. When I went looking, I found all of the jewelry upstairs in our bedroom, almost all of it still in its packaging. I figure she was probably planning on giving them as gifts to the girls and some of her friends, but she just ran out of time.
Sitting in our bedroom with all of this ungifted jewelry, I lost it again. Here it was, only February, and this was already hands down the worst year of my life, and from where I was standing it only looked like it was going to get worse and bleaker. It wasn’t just her death; it was the whole upheaval of our lives. I know it might sound selfish that I was crying about my life’s upheaval when my wife literally lost hers, but I was so overwhelmed.
Going through some paperwork I found a gift certificate for a massage Gina had bought for me. I thought about it for a minute and that seemed like the best time to go get it. It struck me that not only was that something I could really use, it was something she had given me. This massage was something she wanted me to have. I’m a believer in signs and for some reason this struck me as her reaching back and trying to make me feel a little better after all we had just gone through. Crazy, I know, but when you let it, the mind can take you to some pretty believable places.
I called and set up an appointment that afternoon and when I got there, I was torn. I sat in my car just looking at the certificate. Gina had written a note inside to me and I was going to have to give that up; I was getting this massage not just because I needed one, but because she gave it to me. I didn’t want this gift from her lying around unused. She bought it for me because she wanted me to have it. I missed her and this was a way to bring all of those things to a close, if even for a little bit. It was almost my way of honoring her with some alone ‘us’ time after everyone had gone back to their lives.
Handing it over was difficult. I kind of sideswiped the lady at the counter by mentioning Gina and her death, but I had a hard time letting go of the certificate. It felt really strange to hear myself tell her that too because this was really the first ‘stranger’ I had to explain my situation to. She politely offered her condolences and to be honest, the sympathy felt good. It felt good because the conversation and sympathy from this woman kept Gina from slipping into the past. As much as I’ve been saying how much I wanted to leave all of this behind us and move on, in reality I was torn by wanting to keep her current too.
That was the first moment that I began to feel like people were treating me differently; whether or not it was only in my head, I felt that they were treating me with pity and kid gloves. It seemed to happen often, whether it was the lady at the spa or my buddies after we played basketball. Even stranger, it was okay with me. There was a comfort in it. I know that sounds sad and it’s hard for me to say because I’m not the kind of guy who ever wanted anybody’s pity or help. I’ve always taken pride in being the guy who lowers his shoulder and gets the job done. But in the midst of that intense, lonely feeling that I was in, I welcomed it.
As I lay on the table, I closed my eyes and imagined it was Gina’s hands rubbing my back and shoulders. I know this sounds crazy, but I let myself go and enjoy the last time that she would in any way wrap her arms around me. When I left the spa, I wondered if I could ever feel that way again, or if I would ever be able to meet anyone again. Not that I was looking to meet anyone or anything, that was the furthest thing from my mind, but I wondered if that intimate and emotional part of my life was over. In that moment, I couldn’t see it ever coming back.
The girls got home around 3pm that afternoon and were anxious to tell me about their day, which was a first for me. Usually by the time I got home from work they had already bombarded their mother with their stories and notes from the day and I would get the cliff note version of whatever was exceptionally cool. As I listened to them tell me about how so-and-so did this or that, I smiled but inside my heart was breaking. I was glad to hear it all but I was sad that I was doing it in place of Gina.
Dinner felt awkward. When I set the table, I hesitated for a moment before I set out the plates. Normally we would eat at the dinner table and we each had our own chair that we usually sat in. I wasn’t ready to do that with Gina’s chair being empty so I set us up at the breakfast island in the kitchen. It was almost as if we were flying in the ‘missing man’ formation or something. It would take us awhile to get back to eating at the dinner table. I don’t even know why exactly. It’s not like it’s this looming castle-like dining room set or anything. We just didn’t do it.
That whole week I didn’t do much in the way of cooking. We either ate out or we ate at my mother’s. Plus, we would pick a lot because there was food everywhere! The neighbor ladies came by often with casseroles and crock pots full of food. I had so many dishes I couldn’t remember whose Corningwear was whose. They would pop in late in the afternoon or early in the evening, ring the doorbell, and boom—there’s another woman with a pot full of food. It was nice, but to be honest, it began to irritate me. Not the food—the food was fantastic—and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. But I couldn’t just open the door and grab the dish. The talking that went with each delivery was incessant and could go on for half an hour. That’s what drove me bonkers. The talking got to be too much because it was the same conversation all over again with each different woman. I never got a minute to sit down by myself and breathe. I just wanted to sleep or be alone for an hour to decompress. I know everyone meant well, but it was just too much.
On the other hand, the phone had stopped ringing. A week before it was ringing off the hook, but it quickly dwindled down to calls from just my mother and sisters, (albeit they called fifteen times a day). I understood, and while I admit that many times I saw the caller ID and answered it with a roll of the eyes, I knew they were calling to check on us because they loved us and were worried about me falling into a drunken mess. To be honest, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I kept myself out of the bottle the way I did. It was more than I had expected from myself.
Bedtime that night was a different story. As easy as it was throughout the evening, bedtime was a different animal. Once I got them tucked in and we did our routine (eyes, nose, ears, head butt) Jackie stopped me before I got to the door. She asked if she could tell me something, so naturally I said ‘sure.’ What followed was a lot of deep, emotional sentiments that shocked me to hear coming from such a little girl. She got very deep, telling me that Mommy was in her heart and that she knows that she’s still here. On the other hand, Amber seemed to toughen up and tried to soldier through it.
Jackson was just cold to me. I know a lot of it can be contributed to the combination of feelings of loss and abandonment with an adolescent psyche, but he was really pissed off at me. That’s why I don’t mention him much in all of this. A lot of times, he just wasn’t around. Between working over night and acting so distant with me and the girls, he was very invisible and hardly around.