A Life's Story

When it's been four years since something happened, you might assume that all of your friends know about it. Obviously, over time, you're going to make new friends and you find yourself telling the story again... and again... until the narrative is clearer and it gets easier to tell. The details have been rehearsed, you don't get suckered into tangents and, most importantly, you know when to stop.

After four years, this is how I'd gotten with the story of Stan's death, our sometimes complicated relationship and the information that came after his death - namely that he was probably planning on proposing just a few weeks later - that makes the whole story that much more heartbreaking for most people.

For me, however, that's what makes me angry. But I don't usually get to tell that part of the story anymore. Because when I tell the heartbreaking story, it's to new people in my life, people who didn't know Stan, people with whom I'm not ready to be quite that honest.

But a couple of days ago, a friend I've known for years, who has been a part of my social circle in Las Vegas since before I ever moved here, who knew Stan long before he and I met, said something interesting to me. She said that she was sorry, that she hated to admit it so long after the fact, but that she never really knew about my relationship with Stan and would I mind telling her about it.

So I did. And I found myself talking about the things that I usually hold back. I told her these things because she actually knew him as a real person with fears and weaknesses, not as a military hero who bravely put himself in harm's way to ultimately save the lives of others. She knew him as someone with complicated relationships, not a shadow who loved me therefore we can only assume we would have lived happily ever after, if only he had lived. (Yeah right.)

So, I told her about the ways he made me angry, in life and in death. I told her about the ways he broke my heart, in life and in death. There were the lies of omission he clung to to save his own heart and subsequently confused mine. There were the assumptions he made to simplify his own feelings and subsequently complicated mine.

I told her how all of these things are caught up in the reasons why I can't trust anything a man either does or doesn't say to me now. Because just like any relationship, whether it ends with crying and slamming doors or a reasonable conversation and a hug, or a roadside bomb and a blast, the experiences within that relationship affect our behavior in every relationship thereafter.

Just because somebody dies doesn't forgive all of the mistakes he made when he was alive. And just because somebody dies heroically doesn't in any way make him a saint. And the people left behind shouldn't have to feel that way or even pretend to feel that way. And I shouldn't have to tell his story that way. But it's hard not to when talking to people who didn't know him. Because people who didn't know Stan when he was alive want to see him as a symbol of patriotism, bravery, strength, masculinity - and most heart breakingly - lost love.

It was a relief, after all this time, to tell the story to someone who did know him. But then I found out how well she knew him. She said, "I don't know if you knew this, but Stan and I dated." In fact, I didn't know this. Stan, after all, was very private about his emotions, which was one of the things that broke my heart. So, it's not surprising that he wouldn't have told me that he had dated someone I was also friends with.

But what was surprising is that it didn't hurt me that he had never told me. Maybe if I had found out right after he died, or even while he was still alive, I would have been upset, jealous even. But four years after his death, when I've been able to sort through all the various levels and directions of my anger, frustration and heartache, this didn't bother me at all.

What did bother me is this: she told me that they were never really a couple, they just "hung out" (her words) for a few months. But when she told him that she'd rather just be friends, that she broke his heart and he started using drugs. She told me that she still, to this day, feels terrible that she hurt him like that.

This bothered me because it meant that he wasn't honest with her. When she told me this, I was able to place the time frame when they would have "hung out." It was one of the times Stan and I were "off again" in our long "on again/off again" relationship and I was also "hanging out" with someone else. The heartbreak and drug use that she saw as a result of her breaking things off with him, had much more complicated roots than that. Much much more.

I told her that she should forgive herself and that I was sure she really didn't hurt him that badly, plus he was not the type of person to ever hold a grudge towards someone else. I should know after all the times he and I forgave each other and reunited.

But this conversation and my friend's admission just reminded me all the more that loved ones who pass on still leave behind all of the emotions they made other people feel. People want widows to remember the "good times," but it's just as valid to remember the difficult and complicated times, too. Dead people - even those who die heroically - were still people: humans with human frailties who made as many mistakes and caused as much heartache, anger and frustration as anyone else during their time on earth. And that's part of the story, his story, and it should all be worth telling.

Stag Funerals & Pine Needles

I wanted to share that I've posted a blog at my other blog site about my father-in-law's funeral. While it's related to this blog, too, I didn't want to blatantly cross-post. But please visit Almost a Stripper, Never a Bride to read this story. I hope you like it.

This Suicide Will Be Tweeted

Those of you who follow me on twitter (@librarykristin and, now, @genxwidow, and, if I ever decide to use it @goth_teen), know that I tweeted a lot at the time of Eric's death. I think it'll be interesting to post some of the early tweets here. I didn't have blogging in me when the feelings were really raw...but I did have micro-blogging. I have very little memory of actually writing any of these tweets, so re-reading them has been v. interesting.

So, for posterity: here's my last "normal" tweet:

librarykristin: unplugging for the day to enjoy last days of staycation. Couch, heating pad, season 2 of Tudors, and Croggon’s The Singing.

...and then:

librarykristin: E not home from IN and he should be by now…left saying things would be better soon…starting to worry…hoping I’m w[orrying for no reason]

librarykristin: is v. v. worried

...and then, when I found out:

librarykristin: Those of you who know what I've been going through 2night. The worst case sceanario happened. thank you for the support.

There was a string of tweets about what I was doing to remember Eric that first day and a few days after:

librarykristin: Wearing Eric’s “screw the man” hat…it is oddly comforting

librarykristin: Any Columbus tweeps who wish to help me remember my husband are welcome to stop by my hours, I’m not alone, but welcome [company]

librarykristin: It turns out that crying makes my eyes look mega-super green. Not inclined towards vanity, but glad I’ve finally found [an upside, however small]

librarykristin: Unconventional mourning methods: playing rock band on the PS3 with friends of one’s step daughters whose best memory of [E is gaming]

librarykristin: Unconventional mourning methods #2: being totally bitchy with theater folks about some of E’s cattier theater relationships.

librarykristin: Unconventional mourning methods #3: watching British Coupling with brother, laughing, knowing E would really want to be [here]

subsequent tweets range from the stunningly prescient (see Supersize Me, below):

librarykristin: Can still taste the cayenne from my sundae on the back of my tongue…how am I going to live 2 blocks from Jeni’s witho[ut gaining a ton]

to the silliness of family:

librarykristin: My dad is completely delusional about the point at which bacon becomes too burned to eat. He has been disallowed from a[m bacon chefery]

to the craziness of shopping for the memorial:

librarykristin: When people ask if there’s an occasion for which you are purchasing a dress, “my husband’s funeral” is low on the list [of expected responses]

to my first tweet that ever aluded to the coming DBoD:

librarykristin: Attorneys and phone calls and insurance, oh my.

to my first documented widow-brain-y moment:

librarykristin: Erm, can one of my fab brothers please remind me what we set my wireless password to? Somehow I have already forgotten…

librarykristin: 2 minutes after last tweet, 2 phone calls from 2 brothers in rapid succession. Now I remember my password…thx guys!

to the new power structure at home:

librarykristin: Thinks the dogs have finally cottoned on to the fact that I am now the alphadog. Bwa ha ha ha. Drunk with power…

However, I think I was premature in thinking the dogs acknowledged me as their new leader...

There are so many goofy, strange, funny tweets from those first weeks, and there's really no good way to catalog them. However, this was the only way I could think of to go back and remember what the immediate aftermath felt like. Maybe it's good that I don't have solid memories of those days...but now that I'm putting it all down in writing I wanted at least a snapshot, for the record.

Please note: my early tweets on 3/27/09 and the following day were intentionally vague about what exactly had occured. Almost everyone who needed to hear about Eric's death via channels other than social networking ones was called early in the game, except for three very important individuals: Eric's three daughters. They were on a vacation with their mother (we'll doubtless talk more about her later, but it'll have to wait until HLILB is over). She was nonresponsive to her phone for nearly 24 hours. Unfortunately, during this time my step-daughters' cousins were very active on facebook. The girls confusion over some pretty specific facebook chatter finally instigated their mother's call in to get the news. Her reaction to Eric's death was less than appropriate, just saying...(OK, new acronym here, we're going to call the ex SECB...but I'm not telling what it stands for until after HLILB, understood?) I will always feel bad that I didn't think to warn Eric's siblings to coach their children about being cautious about their facebook use until the girls had been told. It was unfortunate, but everything happened so fast, and I was pretty much a wreck. Hindsight=20/20.

Much thanks to my sister-in-law for helping me to reconstruct my tweets, if you've never tried to find archival tweets, the good folk at twitter do not make this an easy thing to do!

Father-in-Law

Next Tuesday, I will be flying to Raleigh, North Carolina so I can attend Stan’s father’s funeral in Lexington, North Carolina. The Raleigh-Durham airport is about 100 miles away from Lexington. So, I’m renting a car and driving that distance, then I’ll check into a hotel, meet up with family, drink a lot of wine and try to sleep before the funeral the next morning.

I know this is what I will do because I’ve done it before. In June of 2005, I flew to Tampa, Florida, rented a car, drove about 60 miles to Beverly Hills, Florida, checked into a hotel, met up with the family, drank wine until I passed out and then attended Stan’s memorial service the next morning.

The trip feels similar to the point that Stan and his father shared the same name. So, once again, I’ll be attending a service for a man named Stan Lapinski. The major difference is that this time when I arrive, Stan Sr. won’t be waiting for me with that first glass of wine.

When I knocked on the hotel room door where the family was drinking that day in 2005. Stan Sr. opened it widely and forcibly gave me a long hug and a big glass of wine. “We’ve been drinking for days already. You’re going to have to catch up,” he said. Even in the wake of his son’s untimely death, he still was watching out for me. He was kind and warm and funny and generous and he had welcomed me into his family as if I’d always meant to be there. No questions asked. Just affection given. And I will always be grateful for that.

The next day, after Stan’s memorial, Stan Sr. took me aside and said, “Gaye and I want you to know that we’ve decided that you’re our daughter-in-law. We’ll always refer to you that way and think of you that way. And if you ever get married to somebody else, well, his parents are just going to have to understand that you already have in-laws.”

So, my father-in-law passed away last Monday. August 3rd. My birthday. And if I ever do get married, well, this future husband’s father is just going to have to understand that I already had a father-in-law. And he was wonderful. And I will miss him dearly.

Phone Phobia

Anyone in my family could tell you that I've never been a big fan of telephonic communication. Who knows how these things start. At my age I'm too old to go back and try to reconstruct when it started. However, I do not remember the phone being a critical component of my teenage existence...and I was a teen WAY before we had all these great online tools that allowed for nearly complete phone avoidance. I did not even have a cell phone until I started dating Eric, which means it would have been about 2003. I simply refused to get one, using the argument that I didn't WANT people to always be able to reach me. Eventually I conceded to allowing Eric to be able to reach me whenever he wanted, and got the darned phone. It turned out that it was a much more cost-effective method of communicating with my west-coast-based family as well. There were certainly more people in my contact list than just my family at the point that Eric died, but I really only used my cell regularly to talk to Eric.

I've always found cell phones inherently creepy. People pretty much have them with them all the time. So if they ring, there are limited excuses for them not to be answered

(1) The person is already on the phone. I could digress and share my luddite-ish opinion of call waiting, but we'll just leave that be for now. I'll simply allow that my opinion on call waiting led to several marital spats that never ended pleasantly.

(2) The person could just not be able to take any calls at the moment. This is self-explanatory, and happens to all of us all the time. We know when we can't take a call, even if the person on the other end is in the dark. Unfortunately, the in-the-darkness of the calling party leaves another, quite horrible, third alternative:

(3) The person could answer the phone, in fact would answer the phone, except for the fact that they simply don't want to talk to YOU. I hate not picking up the phone because I'm avoiding a specific person, but admit to having done it and feeling actual GUILT about it. I also hate the potential that every time I make a cell phone call, someone else could be making exactly the same judgment call about me.

This was the situation on March 27, 2009. Then Eric died, and that took my phone phobia all the way up to eleven.

Technically, I found out that Eric was dead over the phone. When Eric was late getting home from a day trip to his father's property in Indiana, I called his brother to ask if he'd check the woods to see if Eric was still there. I warned him that Eric had threatened suicide and I was worried. Cary's wife stayed on the phone with me so she could "let me know everything was OK" right away. At some point, as we chatted, she said something that amounted to "I've got to go..." and I knew. I knew before Eric's other brother, Gary, and his wife showed up at my door in tears. They were the ones who actually told me Eric was dead, but it wasn't new news at that point. So is it any wonder that I'm not overly enthusiastic about talking on the phone right now?

Right after Eric died, a lot of people wanted to reach out to me, just to make sure I was OK. I was completely overwhelmed, and generally not interested to talking to anyone who wasn't right there with me at the time. I was surrounded by family and I let them answer the phone. There were a couple of times when they informed me I really needed to take the call: when Jack Hannah called because of Eric's connection with the Columbus Zoo and when the executive director of my library system called, for example. Essentially I was in a constant state of not-taking-calls (see #2, above). This was a temporary thing, but it lasted for several weeks. Gradually, I started answering the phone again when I felt like it, and didn't when I didn't. I didn't always return calls. I admit I was rude. People who care about me will forgive me, those who don't care about me enough to forgive me for that lapse of etiquette can suck it.

On my first day back to work, I got in my car, ready to head home, and started crying. I didn't have anyone to call to tell I was on my way. I called my friend Molly instead. It helped, but there's still a void at those times when the cel phone would really be a useful tool: at the grocery store when trying to remember if there's still an onion in the fridge, when trying to figure out if there's anything that you need to pick up on the way home, etc. All those times are opportunities for me to remember Eric. Increasingly, that's a good thing.

My problem with the phone is diminishing daily, but since I've never liked using my phone very much, I've come to rely on the thing more for texting than actual voice communication. I have all the same anti-phone feelings I had before...but there's one much bigger one that I realize has begun to emerge. There is something very intimate about being able to talk to someone wherever they are, whenever you want to. In the loneliness of recent widowhood, that level of intimacy isn't the least little bit comfortable most of the time. This has nothing to do with relationship-y single-girl awkwardness...I'm not even there yet. I'm in a household of one again, and there are blessed few people I feel comfortable enough with to intrude on their lives whenever I feel lonely.

So, understand, friends, that my relationship with my phone is complex at the moment. If I don't answer the phone when you call, it could be any of the three reasons listed above, and I'm going to avoid feeling apologetic if it's number three (but if you're reading this, it probably isn't)! If I don't call you, it's not personal, it “just is.” Like I “just am.” Welcome to my life, the primary occupation of which is daily trying to get to a level of neurosis more in keeping with my pre-3-27 levels.

Supersize Me

I've been listening to Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and my current key takeaway is that Ms. Didion got very lucky in that she lost her appetite when her husband passed away(I'm not very far into the book, and promise to have more profound insights into this National Book Award winner when I'm feeling less superficial, not to mention less constrained by my too-tight pants). I am officially very, very jealous.

I lost my appetite immediately after I found out that Eric had died, and actually had enough time to be generally optimistic about the prospect of using Eric's death as a springboard to getting to my goal weight. That early optimism lasted until my brother, Aaron, arrived and announced that I had to eat something. He then proceeded to make me "Anderson Family Mac & Cheese," which is so delicious in part because it is simply chock full of calories. Then the neighbors started arriving with equally delicious food...and from there it was a downhill spiral of comfort eating for the newly minted Widow Snyder. Roughly 3 and a half months after Eric's death I fit comfortably into size 12 pants. Unfortunately my wardrobe consists primarily of size 6 and 8 pants. With the hideous life insurance legal battle (HLILB) in full swing, this is not an opportune time to purchase an entirely new wardrobe, and while friends have generously donated me-sized pants to the cause, my slowly-but-surely increasing bulk is beginning to pose a bit of a problem. In short, I've got to get some of this weight off of me.

Here's the problem: while Eric was informed (almost daily) that he was "not the boss of me," he did have a certain power to keep me honest. Certainly, "are you sure you want to eat that" is not a popular husbandly comment by any stretch of the imagination (even when said nicely and with the intent to avoid future wifely weight-related complaints), but it has a certain power nevertheless. In addition, people tend to be really nice to widows. Everyone tells me not to worry about the weight, which is very kind, but ultimately unhelpful. It's really not an issue of me being shallow and girly, I genuinely feel uncomfortable at this weight, and not just because my pants are too tight. Plus, now GT is getting pissed as she wants to look cute in a bikini (a BLACK one). GT can be as shallow as she wants, but I want to approach this from the more feminist angle that I simply feel better at a lighter weight. What I've slowly come to realize is that no one really cares what I weigh except me. When I was single before there was always some real or hypothetical guy who might care...but I'm not exactly trolling for Eric's replacement right now, so there really and truly is no one to care but me (and GT). It strikes me as both odd and SAD that my own caring doesn't appear to be enough to motivate me, and this fact alone probably totally diminishes my efforts to be un-shallow about this whole sad mess.

So, perhaps I need to listen to GT some more, as even though she is shallow she may actually be motivated to get the weight off already. And perhaps, just perhaps, publishing this post will force me to be accountable to myself. The hall-pass of widowhood is hereby revoked. Let the excercise and sensible eating commence.

Fireworks

I wanted to get home before dark last night. Unfortunately, dark came sooner than expected.

Most people actually want to be out after dark on the Fourth of July to watch fireworks. But I don’t like fireworks. It’s not a popular stance, but I have my reasons.

First, I happen to think that public fireworks are expensive and pointless. And, in my opinion, the money spent on fireworks by cities, counties and corporations could be put to much better use supporting nonprofits and social services.

Second, I think that private fireworks are dangerous. I’ve felt this way my whole life. Even as a kid, on the Fourth of July, after I’d run around with one sparkler in the driveway I was done and wanted to go inside and get far away from the fireworks.

Although these are my personal opinions, for years I would go celebrate the Fourth of July with friends and eat barbecue and watermelon and keep my mouth shut about my opinions when the fireworks started.

Even last night, there were four different social gatherings I was invited to. But I didn’t want to go anywhere after dark. I haven’t gone anywhere after dark on the Fourth of July for four years now.

Four years ago, on the Fourth of July, I was heading out to meet some friends. I only got two blocks from my house when some kids set off some kind of firecracker right next to my car. It was so loud. It was so scary. I burst into tears and had to pull the car over to the side of the road.

I took me awhile to pull myself together. When I did, instead of continuing on to the party, I turned around and went home. I went to bed early but sat there with the lights on and jumped and fought back tears every time I hear the popping and whizzing and cracking of the fireworks that were going on all around me.

As I sat there, I realized that this was some form of PTSD. The firecracker that detonated next to my car was, for me, a manifestation of the explosion that had killed Stan. This was only three weeks after he had died. I was still crying daily, but that firecracker didn’t just extract tears of grief, but tears of fear. The fear that I imagined he felt as he was dying on the side of the road in Baghdad. The fear I felt for all of the men and women serving in Iraq.

Last night, like every Fourth of July since, I didn’t want to be out during the fireworks. But dinner with my friend took a little longer than expected and it was dark by the time we were driving home. Thank God he was driving because as we got close to my house, there were people, families, out in the street lighting fire to loud and scary things. I started to feel nervous, I felt the tears coming and I just wanted to get home to my bed.

I sat up last night, in bed, with the lights on waiting for the noises from the fireworks to stop just like I’ve done every Fourth of July for the past four years. But that’s okay. I know that it’s okay to still have fear and still be upset. Maybe someday I’ll feel differently and I’ll be able to enjoy this holiday again. But even if I have the same reaction to fireworks for the rest of my life, it’s an honest and sincere reaction to something tragic that happened to someone I love and the trauma that I suffered because of it. And that’s a part of who I am now and just another reason why I don’t like fireworks.