Death Took Us Both

[HAP]

Dear friends,

I thought I had posted this yesterday, but I can't find it today. It is the draft of the first chapter of the book I keep thinking about. It deals with the darkest time of Jane's illness for me--a time that still plagues me. We've talked about forgiving ourselves for our mistakes--and we all have made some. This is the one I have the most trouble with.

Peace,

Harry

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

Jane-and-Harry died December 10, 2010 just be fore 8 p.m. EST in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, MA. Four years later, I still have not made peace with that fact nor been able to adjust to the reality of it in any but the most superficial of ways. Jane is buried next to her mother in a cemetery in Fall River, MA. The headstone that marks the grave still does not bear the date of Jane's death.

Jane was my wife for 21 years, three months and eight days. We knew each other for almost exactly four years before we married--and we knew the day we met that we were soulmates. But the knowledge terrified us both. We did not go on our first date together for two years after that first meeting. We were that afraid we would screw things up.

I'd had six relationships before Jane, if you count kindergarten and one case of unrequited love in high school. I was the second person she'd ever been out on a date with, and her first boyfriend. I was 38 when we married. She was 35.

Jane told me several times that I had saved her life--but never more poignantly than the day before I took her to the hospital for her final battles against the cancer that eventually killed her. And I told her several times that she had saved my life--and my soul--over the course of our marriage--and never more poorly or awkwardly than on that day.

Our wedding vows consecrated our bodies as one flesh. Our souls were joined long before that event. We both believed we had lived many lifetimes together. We both believed--and I believe now--that we were destined to live many more in the future. And we both believed I would recover from losing her very quickly because of that belief. What, after all, is the passage of even 100 years in the lives of two souls who counted their existence in billions of years? In that scale of things, even lifetimes of separation amounted to no more than a business trip.

We were totally wrong about that--at least from my perspective. Seven days from now, I will visit her grave on the fourth anniversary of her death. The pain is not less than it was the day she died. The quality of the silence in the house has not changed. The emptiness of the space in the bed next to me at night has not changed. The absence of her touch or the sound of her voice at any point during the day or night has not changed. The missing her has not changed.

All that has changed is my ability to deal with those things. They are--on most days--less debilitating than they were. For the first year after Jane's death, I don't think I ever slept more than three hours a night. Going to bed is still difficult, but once there I sleep for 5-6 uninterrupted hours. When I do wake up, most nights, I can get back to sleep. I rarely dream of her last days in the hospital now. Instead, I dream about the better times or have conversations with her about what I am doing and what I'm thinking about doing next.

But the tears still come with little or no warning. I was in the grocery store Monday, walking down an aisle. I was looking for candied fruit for the fruitcake we made every year. I reached to pick it up and maybe the colors struck me in just the right way, but my eyes were brimming up with tears. Later that night I was watching a scene from Gods & Generals in which Lawrence is talking to his wife--and there we were. The tears came down across my face.

Jane and I were a couple in a way it is difficult to describe to someone who has not had that experience. It wasn't that we finished each other's sentences or dressed to match each other--we didn't do either one. But even separated by the length of a school, we could be on the same page. I taught English and she taught AP Biology, chemistry and physics in the same building.

One summer, I grew a beard. I'd had one when I was younger, but Jane had never seen me with one except in pictures. She liked how it looked, but was not really in love with how it felt against her face in the end. Still, I kept it to begin the school year while we saw whether it would soften. My students were stunned by my appearance and wanted to know why I'd grown it.

"Ms Dybowski and I had an interesting summer," I dead-panned. "The CIA asked us to come back to work and go to Afghanistan to look for bin Laden. I grew the beard as part of my cover." Now neither of us had ever been spies or undercover agents. Nor had we been to Afghanistan. Our knowledge of any of the languages there was non-existent.

High school students can be pretty gullible, but I really didn't expect them to swallow that whopper whole. We maintained a certain air of mystery about our outside interests and our students knew we both had a dry sense of humor that could be missed if they were not paying attention. But this tale was way over the top.

Still, they weren't sure whether to believe me or not. Instead, since several of them had chemistry with Jane the next block, they held their peace, certain they would get a straight answer from her. Jane knew nothing of what I had told them and could have laughed at their question. She didn't.

"Were you and Mr. Proudfoot really in Afghanistan this summer," they asked?

"Yes," she replied with a straight face, "And let me tell you, those burkhas are itchy."

I'd made the story up on the spot. I'd never discussed it with her. But her answer was psychically perfect.

It took us weeks to get our students to believe we'd been kidding--and some of them are still nor entirely convinced.

We knew each other that well because we never made major decisions about anything without talking to each other--and rarely made even minor decisions without discussion. It wasn't that we didn't trust each other or were incapable of making decision without the other's input. Rather, we wanted to be sure we had considered all the angles on everything before making a commitment. We knew that we were smarter and more observant together than we were separately.

For example, we looked at more than 400 possible houses before settling on the one I still live in. We had a checklist that included the dimensions of every room as well as the shape of the yard and the position of any trees on the lot. This house was a shell when we decided to buy it. We looked at light fixtures for days and discussed the pros and cons of each one in each room before making a decision. We did the same thing with the flooring, the cabinets, the exterior and interior colors. We studied grass seed and foundation plantings and landscaping--even lawn mowers and snow shovels.

There was no such thing as man's work or woman's work. We both cooked--though Jane was the better cook--we both cleaned, we both mowed the lawn and pruned the trees and shrubs. I did more weeding and vegetable gardening, perhaps, but only because I enjoyed doing it more than she did. She loved cross-stitch and other forms of needlecraft--which I have no facility with--and filled the house with examples of her work.

On a hot summer afternoon, we would sit under the trees and read or write or work on some craft we loved loved. The majority of the ornaments on our Christmas tree are things Jane had created. We would work together on finishing a piece of furniture or designing a new flower bed. If one of us wrote something, the other would play editor.

Sometimes we argued with each other. Sometimes we got angry with each other. One day, Jane was so angry she told me, "Go to Hell--And come back." Then we both laughed. "Well, at least I told you to come back," she said by way of apology. We might go to bed angry with each other, but by morning the fit would have passed. Before Jane's illness, we spent just one night in different beds--and that was because I was out of town for a conference. We both hated it so much neither of us ever went on an overnight again without the other.

Yet we had very different interests we pursued without a second thought. Jane loved playing tennis. In the summer, she would play for two hours every morning with her sister. Sometimes she would get an invitation in the afternoon to go play doubles with three male teachers we knew. While I like watching tennis, it was never a sport I had much interest in playing--and what ability I had was so far below hers that it would spoil the game for her were I on the court. I had interests, birdwatching, for example, she found equally dull and excused herself from.

While we were both politically quite liberal, I was more of an activist than she was. We never discussed whom we voted for after the fact, though we explored every candidate and issue in detail together beforehand. Most of the time, I think, we agreed in the voting booth, but I suspect there were sometimes real differences we simply ignored. But those differences were more a matter of the pace of change than where we wanted things to end up.

We both fully expected to grow old together, gradually losing our physical and mental strength over time at about the same rate. Then we would die--if not at the same moment, then close enough to it that the other would not have too long a time before joining the other. We both come from long-lived families that tend to stay sharp and healthy into their 80s and 90s. We believed we would have 30-40 years together after retirement

Two nights before she died, we had a horrible argument that left us both angry and frustrated. It started when she told me she wanted me to help her into the bathroom so she could use the toilet. She'd been on bedpans and catheters since the operation that replaced the valves in the right side of her heart three weeks before. I had to tell her that I couldn't--and that the nurses couldn't--that moving her that far would risk pulling out the needles that were keeping up a steady drip of medication, risk pulling out the monitors. Getting her out of bed meant putting her in a lift--and that lift would not fit through the bathroom door.

Then she told me she wanted to go home--and I had to tell her she couldn't--that she wasn't strong enough and that she needed to go through rehab first. "You'll be out of here right before Christmas," I told her--as they had told us both earlier in the day. "Rehab will take until the first of February--and then you'll come home. We'll go to New Hampshire for a week--like we planned."

'I want to go home," she said. "I want to go home tonight...now. I want to sleep in my own bed." Every sentence was a breathy rasp and a struggle--as every word had been since they had put in the breathing tube in her throat so they would not have to intubate her again. It was a combination of reading lips and trying to make out the words she had not yet entirely succeeded in learning how to form. The exercise frustrated us both at the best of times.

I explained again why that couldn't happen. She sank into a sullen silence, then returned to wanting to go to the bathroom. I went out to consult with the nurse about making that happen, knowing already that it simply was not possible. The nurse came in and explained it to her in much the same way I had already done. The explanation just made Jane angry at both of us--and even more angry with me.

The nurse left and I tried to distract Jane from her helplessness with a Celtics game. She liked watching basketball and previous games had taken her mind off her troubles before--but not tonight. She would not look at the screen. Instead she glared at me. I tried showing her a comedy, a drama, a sit-com. She glared at me. I tried a channel that was just music. I was angry now, myself. Still she glared.

I talked with her some more--explained why she couldn't use the bathroom like she wanted, explained why she couldn't go home yet. Her glare said, "You don't love me; you never loved me. If you did, you'd get me out of this bed."

Finally, I gave up. I walked out of the room for a few minutes to try to calm myself. It didn't do much good. I wasn't angry with her. I understood her frustration. I was frustrated, too. We'd been in the hospital for 26 days. I'd been sleeping on the fold-down couch in her room for 22 of those days. I wanted us both to go home, but knew that was still weeks away. I'd explained it all the best I could. The doctors and nurses had explained it the best they could.

But we could get up when we wanted, use the toilet when we wanted. My world was limited, for the most part, to the corridors of the hospital. But her world was limited to what she could see from her bed and the chair next to it. She felt trapped and alone and there was nothing I could do to change any of that. I could be there every waking moment of every day, but just the fact I could get up and move without help was a painful reminder of what was denied her. It made me an alien to her at times--and it had to hurt.

That I couldn't fix that made me angry--especially at myself. Not for the first time, I wondered if it would not have been better if I had let her go the first time she'd gone into a coma. Not for the first time I wondered if I made made a mistake letting myself be convinced not to let her go when she had gone into the second coma. Logically, I had made the right call on both occasions. I know that now and I knew that then. Our mantra was, "So long as there is a fighting chance, keep fighting. When there is no longer a fighting chance, let go."

I took a deep breath and went back into the room. "We both need sleep," I told her. "Do you want the TV off?"

She glared at me.

I turned away and lay down on the couch. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I opened them. She was glaring at me. "Go to sleep, love. You need to sleep."

Every time I opened my eyes, she was glaring at me. Every time, I begged her to go to sleep.

At 4 a.m., they came in to do the overnight x-ray. I left the room while they did it. When I came back in, I sat with her until the sun came up. Somewhere in there, she softened. She still wasn't happy. But the edge of anger was gone. In retrospect, I think she knew she was dying--that the reason she wanted to go home was so she could die in her own bed.

By 10:30 a.m, she was in a coma again. At noon they told us there was nothing more they could do. That afternoon, we began planning to take her off the oxygen and the feeding tube and everything else so she could die the way she had always wanted to. But it would be in a hospital room and not at home.

I haven't forgiven myself yet for that final argument, for not realizing what she was trying to tell me, for not sitting up that whole night with her holding her hand. I thought I was seeing one thing when something else entirely was happening.

Jane was 56 years and 23 days old when she died of a cancer her doctor had never heard of. Her death changed everything.

[HisWife]

Harry, I'm fairly new to this forum so I don't know your background. Are you a writer by profession? I can tell you write from the love in your heart. You have absolutely captured exactly how I felt the day my husband died in hospice at the hospital from a rare form of cancer. He seemed like he was in a comfortable state after being given morphine for his pain so I decided to nap on the couch next to him. Next thing I knew, I awoke to his final gasp of breath with the nurse standing there - he had passed. We had said our goodbyes earlier but I still feel the pain of not being right next to him,holding his hand as he transitioned from this life. Please continue to post your writings, they validate how I feel and gives me hope that my "second guessing" will eventually lessen. Sue

[ailee]

So touching, so poignant and so very much what I have just experienced with my husband's illness and passing. I have no more words to offer only a broken heart.

[kayc]

Harry,

I love it! I loved the story about fooling the students. George and I had the same kind of relationship, only much too short. I think any of us who lose our spouse...it's too short, but we were only married 3 years 8 months, we didn't get a lifetime together like the rest of you. There is a song we loved because it speaks to how we'd felt before we met (not on a barstool, but the sentiment is the same).

Drift off to Dream (Travis Tritt)

We even bought the porch swing to grow old together with!

It's like we spent our lives searching, waiting, and when we met...we knew we were meant to be together. I wish it hadn't taken so long for us to find each other. It was cut way too short.

[enna]

Dear Harry, my friend, what a beautiful first draft to your book. I know you will write it and it will be published when the time is right. I will be in line to buy my copy. No review yet ~ I'll wait for the finished product.

[Wifflesnook]

It's so hard to read this and yet it somehow validates all our different grieving for our beloved ones. Reading what you write, Harry, is like looking through a clear window into your heart. Jane was a very lucky woman. I guess we all think that our love was the greatest in the world, the universe even. I've learnt by being on this forum that this is not so. I've learnt to know, to really know, the grief of others. And by knowing that I don't feel more grief stricken even though it's taught me in a real way how much sadness there is. But sharing our feelings seems to validate our own grief. I'm not expressing this at all well. (Fae would do it far far better). I hope that you can feel us reaching out to you Harry.

[HAP]

Dear friends,

I am four days away from four years and it feels like I am coming apart at the seams. Part of it is the stuff I am writing. Part of it is sitting here alone with the Christmas tree. Part of it is what is going on outside my door where it seems nothing I have done in the last 50 years has made any substantial difference in the world I live in for all that it may have made a difference in a few hundred lives. Tonight, I need a literal shoulder to cry on--and there simply is not going to be one available.

Tonight, I caught the opening of the Santa Claus movie where the old couple gets lost in a snowstorm while delivering gifts. They freeze to death--and all I could think was they went out together--and I wish we had. Jane-and-Harry may be dead, but Harry is still here. And he knows he can't go home because our work is not yet done. But he's tired and he's frustrated and he can't stop crying.

Tomorrow will be better, I know--or at least eventually. I'm riding the tsunami and I've been here often enough to know I probably won't drown, no matter how tempting that might be. But this one looks awfully big.

Peace,

Harry

[Tableforone]

Harry:

I am fairly new here, and new to this journey as well, but your posts have brought me so much comfort. I wish I could offer you some. My Love left this world at 52 years old. We all questioned why so many times, and all I could think was that some people accomplish their work, touch the lives they are meant to touch and make the differences in other's lives in a shorter period of time than we that remain. I know its no answer, but I have come to the conclusion that there are no answers as long as we're on this Earth. Going back through those times has to rip away the "scabs" that had formed. However thin they where, there was a small buffer. The holidays are difficult and adding an anniversary date has to compound it.

I believe you have touched many lives and the "difference" you have made is far larger than you yourself think. I wish I had some good suggestions for you, but being a mess myself - you might be better served receiving them from someone else. I think all we can do is try and remember that love lives on and that we truly will see them again. Today will soon be yesterday.

I wish you much comfort and peace.

[kayc]

Oh Harry, I so relate! I am not going to have Christmas this year, I will be recuperating from surgery (Dec. 23) and won't be able to travel to my son's...if my daughter, by chance, comes up, I won't be able to fix dinner or anything! I feel like she'd just be paying a visit to an old ill person, not much of a Christmas. I can't even have Arlie with me the two weeks after, that's the worst part!

I have my tree up and decorated, and love to see George's ornaments up and his stocking...am caught between feeling comfort in it...and it just driving it home all the more, that he really is gone. Four years, ten years, it doesn't seem to make any difference (to me). We're still here missing them. I, too, wish we could have had the blessing of going together but I also wish we'd had more years together here first.

Tableforone, my husband was barely 51 when he died. Way too soon for each one represented here.

Harry...you've made a difference to our own fae. And I'm sure to a lot of others you'll never even know about.

[HAP]

I'm feeling a bit better this morning. I'm going to try to get out and do something social for a couple hours this afternoon. Some housekeeping to do before then--and some more writing, but that will come later.

I did nearly 11,000 words of serious writing this week, 9500 of it along the lines of what is posted above and the other 1500 focussed on civil rights and the recent protests. Both have cut deeply into my psyche. People will say I've picked a bad time to take on these two tasks--and they'll be right. But, for me at least, writing is like giving birth: when the child is ready to be born the parent cannot prevent the birth from happening.

Jane knows my magic number. She's been hanging it everywhere all week. I think she's telling me she approves--that it's time. Or maybe there is something else coming. I'll just have to keep muddling through until I find out.

Peace,

Harry

[HisWife]

Harry, so sorry you're having that uphill battle grieving Jane's loss as the anniversary is approaching. Those ambush emotions are brutle. This is my first year going through the holidays immediately followed by the first anniversary of Al's death. Know that your words are making a difference in my grieving process. I hope you find comfort in your writing and in coming here. -Sue

[kayc]

Harry, I like that your magic number keeps appearing, I wish I could get a sign from George but I haven't. But we will continue our relationship on faith, as we did at the beginning when it was long distance.

[HAP]

Dear friends,

What follows is the draft of Chapter 4 of The Widower's Tale. For now, at least, I am not going to show it to the carcinoid community. I don't think it has much to say to them. They are still fighting their disease.

But I think it has a lot to say to this community--especially to those who are new to their grief. It deals with some of the myths we have all had to confront and also is a memoir of the first ten days after Jane's death and what I felt at that time. These events predate my first posts here by about six weeks--when I was so immersed in grief I couldn't face what I was feeling--and thought I was fine.

Peace,

Harry

Chapter 4

I descended into Hell on December 9, 2010. I thought I was already there—had been there since Jane’s health had begun to seriously fail the winter before. But the reality was I had merely been on the outskirts of that dark place—had merely been on the outskirts when Jane had entered the hospital for the heart operation we hoped would extend her life long enough to take on and defeat her cancer—had merely been on the outskirts when the first, second and third carcinoid attacks had hit.

The real descent only truly began when Jane lost consciousness that morning. It only truly began when they told me there was nothing more they could do, and that if she woke again, I would have to deliver that news to her so she would know what was happening. And in the event, she did come fully awake for a very few minutes just before 6 p.m. that evening. It was the most painful conversation anyone can imagine.

A friend who recently lost her father compared death by cancer—and the grief that follows—to pealing the layers of an onion. It is an apt metaphor, and very much the way the broad outline of this book looks in my mind. I’ll revisit that moment I told Jane what was going on later—just as I have returned to so many of those moments in the 48 months since they occurred both in my writing and in my mind. But before I go there, I need to deal with the myths we have grown up around the world of grief and death.

So much of the popular writing about grief and the grieving process seems to see that process as largely linear: you experience this, then you experience that, then you experience this. But the reality of the process is very different—or at least it has been for me and for those I talk to regularly. While one audience for this book is others who are grieving, another is those who have not yet experienced profound grief. I have become convinced over these last four years, that I would have been better served by a society that was less fearful of talking about the experience of grief than ours is. Part of my purpose is to try to inoculate those whose exposure to grief is what they have seen on television or in the movies against the romantic vision we, as a society, promote about death and the grieving process.

As a society, we avoid talking about death. When we do talk about it, we too often trivialize what it does to the surviving close friends and members of the family. To lose a child, to lose a spouse, is a truly shattering experience. To lose a parent can be as well, depending on their age—and yours--when it happens. I lost my father this summer. He was 85. I was 62. The impact of his death on me was far less significant than the death of a friend’s father who died when she was still in junior high school was on her.

The death of anyone one is close to is never trivial. But our culture often treats those deaths as though they were. Fiction writers, television writers, and film writers kill off characters with impunity. And no matter how close other characters are to them—no matter how deep the initial grief appears to be—that grief is generally short-lived and has no long-lasting effects. Given how infrequently most people now experience the death of someone they care about, we tend to take our cues about what is normal from popular media.That those cues are completely wrong complicates the grief experience for those of us who really encounter it.

I can’t tell you, for example, the number of times people who have lost a husband or wife are approached by friends less than six months after the funeral about getting back into the dating game. Don’t misunderstand me—some widows and widowers do re-enter that world fairly quickly. Some may even be ready to consider a serious relationship. I’ve seen it happen. But sometimes those relationships are prompted more by emptiness and loneliness than they are by a completed grieving process. We are still, most of us, deeply, often desperately, vulnerable for well more than a year after such a loss—and incapable of making good decisions where romantic relationships are concerned. To face the added pressure of friends who want us to get back to “normal” on some kind of societal schedule is deeply unhelpful.

Jane was still wearing her wedding ring on the day she died. She had told me that under no circumstances was it to be buried with her. I told her the night before her death it would stay on her finger until she breathed her last. Then I would remove it—at the same time moving my own wedding band to the ring finger on my right hand. I kept the first half of that promise but, in the event, discovered emotionally that I could not remove the ring she had placed on my hand 21 years, three months and eight days before. I simply was not ready.

I thought I would do so after her funeral. I couldn’t, then, either. I tried moving it on our 22nd wedding anniversary—and discovered the ring finger on my right hand was too big. The ring would need to be re-sized. But that process would take at least a day to do—and I did not want to be separated from that symbol of our love for that long. I decided to aim for the first anniversary of her death, which became our 23rd anniversary, which became the second anniversary of her death, which became our 24th anniversary, the third anniversary of her death—and, most recently, our 25th anniversary.

The ring is still on my finger. I tried, this spring, to wean it off that finger by wearing it on my right pinky periodically. Then it fell off when I was putting some flowers in the trunk of the car. I didn’t notice it was gone until I went to start the car. The blind panic that followed was unnerving—at best. I found it after a feverish search and it has not left my left hand since.

For several months after Jane died, I wore her wedding and engagement rings on a chain a round my neck. But every time I picked up a box or moved a piece of furniture they got pinned against my chest. I worried about damaging them and eventually put them in our safe deposit box. But my band is so simple there is no risk of damaging it. It stays where Jane put it.

I suspect its presence has served as a warning to both friends and newly encountered women alike that I am still unavailable—at least no one has suggested any blind or arranged dates to this point.

Not that the thought of dating has not crossed my mind on occasion. Loneliness is a brutal reality for any widow or widower—as is the absence of any kind of physical touching. When you are coming from a space where spontaneous hugs and long snuggles on the couch are constants available at every instant, being reduced to a poverty in which mere handshakes are as valuable as gold and a hug is valued beyond platinum is hard to explain in a way that anyone who has not experienced that loss can comprehend. I understand completely why so many people who have lost a spouse to death will, sometimes, try to find another partner very quickly.

That temptation is very much there for me—but it is one I cannot bring myself to pursue so long as I feel so strongly what the ring on my finger represents. I am not saying I will never fall in love again—I’d really given up on love just before Jane walked into my life. And Jane made very clear that she wanted me to fall in love again and have that kind of happiness in our last conversation before she went into the hospital. Nor am I saying that a widow or widower should not do so. But the timing has to be the individual’s—and not the expectations of society at large—or even their closest friends.

In fact, I’ll go one step further and recommend that friends keep a close eye on new widows and widowers and try to screen them from romantic entanglements for a goodly while after the death of their spouse. I’ve seen more than one such relationship explode into new grief in short order, complicating the initial grief and making the entire situation worse.

In a previous chapter, I talked about the rituals we engage in over the week or so after someone dies. I talked about how empty the stock phrases are—almost as though there is little real comfort in them. But those rituals saved my sanity in the days immediately following Jane’s death. They gave me something useful to do that kept my mind from lingering too long on the overwhelming agony waging war against both my body and my soul. The death of the one we love creates a pain so powerful that in its initial stages we cannot look on it without dying ourselves. I did everything I could to minimize the extent of that loss—and ignored every piece of evidence that demonstrated just how big—how truly enormous—that loss was.

All of which made me look incredibly brave to the people around me who thought they knew what I had to be feeling. Inside my carefully constructed walls, however, the newly born infant that was Harry-without-Jane was wailing at the top of its terrified lungs. I crushed that wailing without a second thought. Jane had expectations of how I would handle her death—and my conscious mind was determined to do her memory proud.

So when I began to plan her wake and funeral, I designed it to comfort everyone else. There is no name for the faith Jane and I shared. It is an amalgamation of Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity liberally spiced with elements of the Koran, Hebrew and Pagan traditions, and Vedic texts and stirred by our own experiences and meditations. Her family and most of our friends are Catholic Christians, however. We both believed that funerals are about comforting the living, so I designed a Christian funeral for the Catholic church she had been baptized and confirmed in, and in which we had been married. Her casket entered the church to “Amazing Grace.” The service included hymns based on two of our favorite Psalms—the Psalms I had read to her as she lay dying on her last day. We exited the church to “Ode to Joy” and “The Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah.

People told me afterward it was the most beautiful and striking service they had ever been to—that the “Ode” and the “Chorus” had lifted them up in hope after the hideous despair of the week before.

I did build two things into the service that were there purely for me. I assigned myself a role as one of the pall bearers. I explained that just as I had carried her into our home on the day we were married, I would carry her body to where it would wait for my ashes to join it. The second was the inclusion of a hymn whose chorus, “All I ask of you is forever to remember me as loving you,” had a second meaning for both of us beyond that of the church. I cry every time I hear it because it reminds me of the vow we had made to each other using those same words.

Jane hated cut flowers, so i went out and found two Norfolk Island pines decorated for Christmas and two large dish gardens that served in place of the traditional coffin blanket made of flowers. The pines went to the rectory afterward. One dish garden went home with Jane’s sister. The other still lives in my house.

Jane’s funeral took place eight days after she died. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute had asked for some time to run some final tests on her body. I also wanted our former students and any of my family that wanted to come to have time to get there. And I didn’t want to kill any of her elderly aunts and uncles—not to mention her father—by putting them through the wake and funeral on back-to-back days. They were all in their mid-to-late 80s and not all in good health. Her father was on dialysis three days a week.

People were waiting outside the funeral home 15 minutes before the wake officially began. For four hours, people passed her coffin to pay their last respects. I spoke with each of them. Her father stood near me, shaking his head and repeating over and over again, “I can’t believe all these people are here for Jane. I would never have believed it.” Jane had taught for 30 years, and students from every one of those years came to say good-bye. Doctors and nurses came from her primary care physician’s office and from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston as well.

The church was packed for the funeral two days later.

I spoke, briefly, at the cemetery about the importance of discussing end of life issues with family. We went to a local restaurant for lunch, then encouraged people to come back to the house to share stories about Jane.

By 5 p.m., only two of my brothers and I remained. We sat up talking until 11, when one brother went to bed so he could catch his early fight in the morning. My youngest brother and I talked until nearly 4 a.m. He had a later flight—and neither of us had much interest in sleep. At least I didn’t.

He had arrived early in the week. We’d put together the collages together, looked for the trees and plants, discovered how bad my driving was and that my usually steady hands were shaking most of the time. He’d gone back to the hospital with me to deliver bagels for all the doctors and nurses and other workers in the cardiac ICU, and waited patiently while I sought out every doctor and nurse and technician and CNA to thank them for their work with Jane.

One of her nurses told me that what I was doing was unnecessary—that he—and many of his colleagues—felt working with Jane was one of the greatest honors of his career. I cry, even now, when I think about that.

I took my brother to his flight on Sunday afternoon. He’d convinced me to fly to Seattle to spend Christmas with my family—wanted me, in fact, to take another week away from work and fly out with him.

But I needed to go back to work. For Jane and me, our students were our children. For some of them, we were, in fact, surrogates—models of what it really meant to be an adult—to be a married and loving couple. Even today, I get notes from some telling me how much having the two of us in their lives meant to them—and the people they have become.

Those children had, in a sense, lost their mother--and needed their father back—even if he were badly wounded.

So I got out of bed at 5:45 a.m. on Monday, December 20. I showered and shaved and put on my suit. I ate my morning bowl of Cheerios, drank my juice, took my vitamins, and brushed my teeth. I went down the stairs and through the basement to the garage. I walked past my wife’s car—the car she would never drive again—to mine. I opened the garage door and pulled my car into the driveway. I closed the garage door and drove the too-familiar road to work. I parked my car in its space and walked past the empty space assigned to Jane. I walked up the walkway to the gym door, then down the dim corridor to my dark room.

I opened the door.

And there, sitting along the windows, were my newspaper editors and AP students. Above them was a large but simple sign: Welcome Home.

A lot had happened in the 40 days since I had left that classroom to be with my wife. A lot would happen between that moment and the day I would close that room for the last time the following June. But the last of our children were in that room that morning to welcome their widowed father home. It could not make up for the loss I had endured. It wasn’t meant to. But it was an action that went beyond words and struck me in the heart.

[Wifflesnook]

oh what can I say. Heartfelt and true.

[feralfae]

Harry, If the above is any hint of the book to come, you will have done humanity a great service in sharing the grief and loss feelings from your heart with others.

Beautifully written, thank you.

fae

[shalady]

Harry, What a beautiful thing you are doing by sharing. I know it has to be so difficult and heart wrenching for you. My heart goes out to you. I wish you strength and peace as you continue.

[MartyT]

Harry, dear heart, I believe firmly that no one knows grief better than those who are living it, and no one is more qualified to teach us about it. Your words reflect not only the skills of a talented writer but also the heart and soul of a dedicated teacher. We are honored that you choose to share the birthing of your beautiful book here with all of us. ♥

[kayc]

Harry,

I thank you for sharing this with us. I only wish I'd had this to read when George died, for I am one of those that entered into a relationship to avoid the loneliness and grief, it was disastrous, and I still had to do my grief work and then some when all was said and done. I've learned a lot...too late.

I also wish I could have had your message about the wedding rings. When I saw a grief counselor a couple of weeks after George died, he gave me a book to read, it started out with removing the wedding ring! I felt this was highly inappropriate and I couldn't read the rest of the book. I went back to the counselor and he said if his wife died, he'd have to move on. What a horrid counselor! It wasn't many sessions and I discontinued with him.

I recently had my wedding band resized, $275 due to the platinum and yellow gold plus inscription. I was wearing it on my left ring finger and felt much comfort having it there, when I received a facetious remark about how I should wear it on the right hand since I'm not married. I was able to retort a more polite response than I was feeling in my head. Now that I'm losing weight, I've had to move it to the right hand in order to keep from losing it. I can't afford to resize it again. When I get to goal weight, perhaps it will fit a middle finger. All I know is, I derive comfort from having it with me. I'm glad you addressed this subject in such a sensitive way that the reader will know it is up to them when/how they move their ring, if at all, and no one else's business!

[enna]

I firmly believe that those of us who are grieving do learn from other grievers. Thank you, Harry, for writing your story. We are all better off when we keep our hearts open and are willing to "hear" what others are saying.

[MartyT]

Anne, my dear, that is precisely why I believe this site is so valuable and so worth preserving. For those who are willing to learn, it could serve as part of a graduate course in understanding the grief process. The material collected in these forums over the years is, in my mind, priceless. ♥

[HAP]

Dear Kay,

Your story--among others--was one I was thinking about when I wrote that section.

Peace,

Harry

[enna]

And Marty, then maybe, just maybe, if this site were mandatory reading for ALL who are in the medical profession, GRIEF would not be being considered a psychological condition that needs to be added to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) from the American Psychological Association!

If someone would put a syllabus together I'd offer to be on the faculty!

This site could be preserved if we all donate to it what we can.

[HAP]

Which makes this a good time to mention that a portion of the royalties/advance--if the book gets published--will come here. My plan is for all the profits from the book to go to NET cancer research and the support of this site.

[enna]

Oh, Harry, this makes my heart sing. How wonderful and generous of you. Perhaps I could sale some of my ART therapy work ~ maybe others will have some ideas for supporting our site ~ can you just imagine what a beautiful book it would be if we filled it with our poetry, crafts, essays, and original music ~ maybe titling it, "Around Our Grieving Fire" (if fae wouldn't mind).

THANK YOU.

[kayc]

Harry, that made me cry (good tears)! I have been concerned about the financial aspect of this site as it is invaluable to all of us. Alas I wish I had more money, but the truth is, just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it takes everyone contributing what they can to keep this site going.

Anne, I've loved your pieces lately on keeping our hearts open. I think mine is pretty much an open book, but I've had to learn to require people to EARN the ability to be INSIDE my heart.