THAT INITIAL WEEK I got us all in to see a counselor. The hospice facility that I had talked with in the hospital offered grief counseling. I think it was Thursday night that we went, and as it turned out, that would be the only family counseling session we did together. Jackie was already going on her own, and I know it seems crazy, but Amber didn’t seem to need it.
I know I should have kept Amber in longer, probably the same eight-to-ten weeks I kept Jackie in, but in all honesty, I seriously thought she was handling it okay on her own. She seemed to be very well adjusted.
It was a mistake. I didn’t know it at the time but she was harboring a lot of pent up emotions. Even all these years later, she harbors a lot of anger and I blame myself for that. Her anger isn’t necessarily directed at any one person in particular; she just seems to carry a lot of it in general. One thing I noticed as she grew up was that she gravitated to hanging out at friends’ or boyfriends’ houses where there were both parents. It wasn’t anything overtly conspicuous, but I don’t think it was necessarily a coincidence either. She craves that and that’s something that I can’t give her.
I figured this out months later when I did end up in a solid relationship with a woman named Denise. I could tell because that was the time when she grew more comfortable in our house and stayed home much more often. I missed it early on and I kick myself for that to this day, but it’s always the tough one who really is the one who’s hurting the most. In retrospect, I should have realized her tough exterior was making deeper scars.
Jackson went with us to the family session, but he dove into his faith to work through things and that was okay with me. Lord knows (no pun intended) that I don’t like the people he’s surrounded with at his church, but it’s where he and his mother felt comfortable and that’s what faith is all about. I am a spiritual person and I do have faith, but they just seemed very extreme and cultish to me. I let it go though because any pushback from me would have only caused a bigger rift and driven him further away from me and the girls.
As for me, I only did the one family session of counseling and didn’t go back to counseling at all until many years later. There were a lot of reasons for my initial decision not to continue with it. I talked to friends, I felt like I was doing okay, it restricted my schedule, and to be honest, I felt like I was too tough for counseling. I’m a grab-life-by-the-balls kind of guy and my vision of counseling was to help harbor the young and the weak. I was wrong, very wrong, but it would take me a lot of years to not only succumb to going but to realize how much better off I would have been had I gone earlier.
The rest of that week I spent organizing finances and insurance, as well as having a lot of heart to heart talks with the girls. Sometimes they would come to me with things, and other times I would initiate a conversation that would turn deep. I don’t think the girls looked at it the way I did, but I was trying very hard to feel comfortable as a threesome and it wasn’t coming easy. I felt a lot of pressure to fill Gina’s role and to be honest, I was trying too damn hard. I obsessed about keeping everything the way she did and making sure no balls hit the ground. It was excruciatingly difficult and to be honest, not necessary. If I had to do it over again, I’d try to relax a bit more and not sweat the small stuff the way I did.
By the end of the week, I was consumed with thoughts about Gina’s possessions. She had so much stuff and it was all over every room. She had jewelry and accessories all over our bedroom dresser. Her knickknacks were all over the family room. We had pictures everywhere. She owned our closet and regardless of how good or bad a day I was having, every time I would open the door it felt as though her ghost was reaching out and punching me in the heart. The scent of her washed over me every damn time. Even our laundry detergent smelled like her. I couldn’t bring myself to move any of her things so I just lived around it. I even left her toothbrush in the bathroom.
I didn’t do any redecorating for about a year and left all of her personal items like her toothbrush where it was for about six weeks. Even something as simple as throwing away a toothbrush, which is something we all do many times a year, was difficult for me. It was the same with her clothes. I avoided it for about six weeks but eventually I had to get rid of them, for the sake of my own mental health. I kept some of the important things like her wedding dress and certain items the girls would want, but everything else had to go. I thought the best way to go about it was to invite a few of her friends and Nona to go through her clothes to see what they would like. She had a beautiful wardrobe so there was no reason it shouldn’t be worn, and there was no one better to wear them than people who loved her.
On the other hand, it took me about ten years to clean out her bathroom drawer with her lotions and foot massager. It got easier as time went by to ignore those things and I’m sure any therapist will tell you that’s way too long to hang on.
That weekend things almost felt normal again. Not that I didn’t notice the big gaping hole in our lives, but when Gina was alive weekends were always my time with the kids. That Saturday was kind of back to normal in a sense for the girls too. They were coming off a week of school, with no trips between home and the hospital, and no commotion or throngs of people in the house. I tried to treat it as a normal weekend for them as much as me because Lord knew I could use one. I took the girls to the YMCA to swim and that was awesome. That might have been one of the best decisions I made in this whole aftermath. The kids just let loose, splashing around and jumping into the pool, and I loved watching them have such a good time. I got my usual whimsical feeling about being a solo parent, but I tried to push that feeling aside and just enjoy the girls. After we splashed around awhile we went and had lunch. It was awesome just laughing with the kids. No real Mommy talk, no death circling above our heads. It just felt great.
By Sunday, I was ready to go back to work. That was also the day Nona, our housekeeper, was moving in. Now I understand not everyone that goes through this has the means to have a live-in housekeeper/nanny, but I was lucky enough that we had both the space and the finances to afford something like this. Besides, like I said, we knew her and she was someone I could trust to be with my girls.
The girls were looking forward to Nona moving in. Like I said before, they already knew, liked, and trusted her so it made the transition easy. When we picked her up at the train station, the girls greeted her with a huge hug. That really put me at ease because even though we had discussed it and all, kids are fickle and they can change their mind about what they like at any moment.
The honeymoon lasted for about two months.