by Linda Zercoe
Startled, I said that I just got Kim to sleep.
“I didn’t come here to watch her sleep.”
She picked her up, and immediately Kimberly started fussing. I’d been having difficulty breast feeding, but I tried to feed her. My mother, watching me struggle, said, “Nursing is barbaric. Why don’t you just feed her the bottle? After all it worked fine for me.”
I gave up breast feeding a couple of days later.
After taking off a year when Kim was born, I went back to work part time while taking a couple of classes at the state university to earn credits toward my bachelor of science in nursing, the BSN. My motherin-law was very happy to watch Kim for the times I was away. We had it all, love, a beautiful daughter, enough creature comforts, friends, a simple but fulfilling life for a young married couple.
Chapter 5
Blackout
1983—1984
It was Saturday, a sunny but not overly warm day for the later part of August, and my biweekly cleaning and laundry day. I was still glowing with the tan I’d developed on our weeklong vacation on Long Beach Island at the Jersey shore a couple of weeks before. Dave and I had just celebrated our sixth wedding anniversary. It was a good time and I was very content.
After breakfast, Dave had gone out to work on some of his side jobs of mowing lawns and doing gardening for his own clients. Since Kim had been born, he kept busy working to earn extra money as the sole provider for the family. He wasn’t exactly happy that I was going to start a new full-time job in a few days, working the evening shift in Labor and Delivery at Morristown Memorial, but he knew this was my dream position and supported my decision to return to work.
He came home for lunch smelling musky and sweaty, but he was animated and got right down on the floor to begin playing with Kim, now 2½. I made our lunches, bologna and cheese with mayo on white bread, served with potato chips and a pickle. The laughter and playing ended when I called out, “Lunch is ready!”
While we were eating, and in between entertaining Kim, we talked about how excited we were that we were going on a rare date that night. His mother was going to babysit Kim. We were going to see the new movie Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton. Then the harvest gold wall telephone rang.
“Hi, Dad! Yep, he’s here, just a second.” I handed the phone to Dave. In a few minutes he was off the phone.
“I’m going to meet the old man after lunch. Ned needs some help with some tree or something.” Ned was a realtor that Dave did some work for on the side.
“OK, be careful,” I said.
He brushed me with a kiss and off he went.
After lunch I put Kim down for her nap, hung the laundry out on the line that ran from the porch to the horse barn, put another load in the washer, and turned on the stereo. Dancing to Kajagoogoo, the Police, and Dexys Midnight Runners, I vacuumed the downstairs in my cut-off jean shorts, a pastel-striped terry shirt, and flip-flops. When I began to feel hot, I blew away the strands of curly hair that hung and stuck to my face, shut off the vacuum, and walked to the mirror to reclip my hair back. Noticing the beads of sweat on my face, I removed my glasses and wiped my face with my shirt. I headed back to work, but the vacuum abruptly shut off, the music stopped, and in a moment I realized all the power was off. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and no chance of a thunderstorm, so I thought a power failure was odd.
I sat down in the kitchen, phoned up my mom, and while half listening to her going on and on about something, drinking a coke, and smoking a cigarette, I flipped through the newspaper. Skimming down the local activities and clubs page in the paper, I noticed “W.O.W.” the young widows and widowers club. Wow, how sad, I thought to myself, a club for people who’ve lost their husbands or wives. In another few minutes, the power came back on, so I hung up and went back to vacuuming.
Still cleaning, I heard someone come in the back door. Expecting to see Dave, I saw Bill, my brother-in-law, instead. The look on his face was very determined.
“There’s been an accident,” he said.
I was speechless.
He continued, “The ambulance is taking Dave to the hospital right now. I need you to come with me.”
“Is he OK? What happened? OK. Kim’s napping, I’ll get her.”
“No, leave her. Karen is on her way over to watch her.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
That was the first of a million times I cried out to God that day.
On the way to the hospital, I asked Bill all manner of questions to try to get an idea of what happened. He didn’t really know much. He knew that Dave hit a power line with the chain saw and was alive when the ambulance took him away. Oh my God, I thought. I started crying. Please, God let him be OK. Please … God.
We arrived at the emergency room entrance. I looked like such a slob, no make-up, hair a mess, crappy clothes. Who cared, I was so worried. I just wanted to see Dave. The emergency room personnel escorted me to a “family room.” They told me the doctors were with Dave and would come by as soon as they could tell me anything. My body starting shaking so violently, I could barely walk. They had me sit down on the sofa.
It was then that I noticed Dave’s mother, his father’s boss, and my mother were there. What were they doing there? How did they get there? My father-in-law’s boss was there. Why, I wondered. My motherin-law was moaning. None of this looked good. My mother tried to put her hand on my leg, but I swept it away. Please, God, let him be OK. A thousand people could have been in the room, it didn’t matter. I was getting my first taste of true horror in that family room that day. I was so cold, so worried. My lips and front teeth were numb.
It seemed like hours went by. I couldn’t stop quaking. Finally, two doctors walked in. Addressing my motherin-law, one of them said, “We’re sorry, your son didn’t make it. We tried everything, but he didn’t make it.”
The cleaver came down and the world became black. The only way I knew I was still alive was the heaving sobs that came from the depths of my being, making my throat sore, gobs of snot running down my nose. An outpouring of support was circling my bereft motherin-law, who’d just learned that she had lost her second son. My mother was there telling me, “It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.” I recoiled at her attempts at giving any comfort.
I asked and they let me into the ER treatment room to see him, my love, my sweetheart. He was lying on a stretcher covered in those green-colored scrub drapes. He had a tube hanging out of his mouth. His head was turned to one side. His eyes were closed but had the look of pain around them. I didn’t uncover him but instead threw myself over his body. It didn’t move. He wasn’t exactly warm. He didn’t breathe. He didn’t tell me it was going to be OK. Then I was escorted out. I may as well have been dead, too.
Eventually someone brought me home with a bag of his clothes. I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything about Dave’s father other than I knew he was with him when it happened. Time slowed to a crawl. I knew time had passed when I needed a new box of tissues. I was there but not there. People were coming in and out of my house speaking in hushed tones. Kim was talking to me. People were taking Kim away. People were touching me. Food began appearing. People were eating. I could hear my breathing.
Someone put me to bed that night. I fell asleep curled up with Dave’s musky, dirty work clothes, my heart hollowed out like an avocado. The next morning I woke up—it wasn’t a nightmare. Hell was here, on earth.
Death is so disorienting, just like the act of a cruel magician, and this time the joke is on you. There were arrangements to be made. Kim wandering and wondering where was her daddy? My crying never ceased, to the point where fissures like paper cuts, appeared next to my eyes and around my nose. Horror was the reality of every second. A fifty-pill prescription for Valium showed up.
“Take a pill,” someone said.
A few hours later, someone else said, “Take a pill.”
Calls were made, and somehow the day of the funeral arrived. With my box of tissues, wearing black po
lyester, I was held up through a service at the United Methodist Church, where Father Charles, the priest who had married us just six years before was commenting about some tapestry we weave. Everyone filed out to follow the hearse containing my husband in a top-of-the-line walnut box. It was followed by the New Vernon, Green Village, and Chatham Township fire departments and numerous police cars. It was a parade, a spectacle that went on and on, all the way to Somerset Hills Cemetery in Basking Ridge.
He was only 26, not famous for anything. He didn’t work at a big company. He loved me. He loved Kim. But, oh, I learned then, was he loved! He was the good guy, the guy that would give you the shirt off his back, stop to help someone with a flat tire. So many friends, some I knew, many I didn’t. And how was that? I’d been with him since we were 16. Who were all these people? Back at our house someone fashioned some sort of banquet potluck of deli meat, some bowls of mayonnaise-y salads. Kids were running all around the yard. Dave’s German shorthair pointer, Rocky, was barking from all the fuss, as if asking the same question as me. Where is Dave?
People say stupid things. They don’t mean to.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” I thought, What does that mean?
“So, what are you going to do now?” I thought, Kill myself.
“Let me know if you need help with anything.” Can you bring Dave back?
“He was such a great guy.” I was lucky to have him, and now he’s dead and I have no one.
“He’s in a better place.” And where exactly is that, in a box at Somerset Hills? That’s his dead body, stupid. Where is my Dave?
“God must have really wanted him,” someone else said. I thought, You are absurd. Just go away—leave me alone.
My maternal grandmother, Frances, had become a widow six months earlier when my 86-year-old grandfather died of a heart attack after sixty-plus years of marriage. She came over to me, fresh with tears, put her arm around me, and pulled me close.
“Well, honey,” she said. “This should be the worst thing that should ever happen to you.”
She paused. “You’re young, and you’ll marry again.”
Finally adding, “I’m old, my life is over.”
At 26, I didn’t know any other widows. Although I remembered Scarlett O’Hara, my heroine from Gone with the Wind, who upon being newly widowed said, “My life is over. Nothing will ever happen to me anymore.” Grandma, age 82, was now my widow pal.
Six months later, Grandma died, on Valentine’s Day, from aggressive ovarian cancer. Then it was just me and Scarlett.
In the weeks that followed the funeral, I was able to patch together the events that led to Dave’s death. Dave and his father’s friend Ned, a realtor from a family of realtors, some of whom were our close neighbors in our small town, had phoned Dave saying that his client was supposed to close escrow on a house. There was a fallen tree and some limbs encroaching across the long driveway approach to the house, which was just down the street. The soon-to-be new owners wouldn’t close on the house until this matter was resolved.
Dave had left a message for his dad, who’d called back during lunch. They met at the property and, after assessing the situation, determined that the cable in the midst of these branches was too low and unshielded to be the main power line and therefore must be some sort of guide wire or possibly the ground. Dave’s father thought that they shouldn’t be messing around with this and that Ned should call the power company. Still, Dave somehow wound up on the ladder. The chainsaw jammed in a limb and when he wrenched it out, it hit the wire. There was a popping sound and black smoke rose from the line. Dave turned, his face covered with black soot, and said “Oh, shit!” He started coming down. After about three or four rungs, he started to get wobbly and jumped to the ground, landing on his feet. Then he collapsed. His eyes were closed, his head moving from side to side. According to Jersey Central Power he was electrocuted with between 7,200 and 12,000 volts of electricity.
Electricity traveled from the road transformer through that power line to several homes. When the chainsaw nicked the wire, the electricity traveled from the line to the chainsaw, through Dave, and down the ladder to the ground. This is what caused the transformer to blow. While this was going on, all I knew was that the power failed on a sunny day when I was vacuuming.
I learned from the police report later that Dave had agreed to take $100 for the job.
Apparently Bill, my brother-in-law, was also there that day. It was he who called for the ambulance while my father-in-law gave his son CPR waiting for the ambulance to arrive. After attempts at rescue were made at the scene, Dave was taken to the emergency room, still alive. The doctors attempted to insert a pacemaker. But, though he was strong, a “buck” as his father fondly called him, he died anyway.
It was classified as a violent death, requiring an autopsy, and since he had taken out a term life insurance policy less than two years before, it was investigated as a possible suicide. Neither Ned, the realtor, nor any of his family attended any of the wakes, the funeral, the burial, or even sent a card. My father-in-law took to his bottle with renewed vigor.
The days and weeks went by. The casseroles stopped. The phone calls slowed to a trickle. I ventured out to do errands. When friends at the ShopRite saw me coming toward them down the aisle with my cart, they turned and walked away as fast as they could. That really hurt. I was so young and so alone. I thought of Dave every second. The grief was inescapable. I began to imagine all the ways that I could kill myself just to make it stop.
I wrung my hands thinking, Why did he have to die? Wasn’t I the bad person? Just the previous spring semester, I’d written a paper in philosophy class on why God didn’t exist. Maybe this was the ultimate punishment—living, living without Dave.
During the winter months of 1984 I started dancing to ease the feeling of despair. Every day while Kim was napping I would dance to “Wanna to Be Startin’ Somethin’” from Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Soon I could do Jennifer Beals’s “Maniac” dance from the recent movie Flashdance. Then I stopped getting my period. I went to the doctor and learned that because I now weighed less than 110 pounds, my periods had stopped. He said I didn’t have enough body fat and should dance less. A few months later they returned.
Then, in another attempt to feel better, I decided to try smoking marijuana.
I called my cousin Rob and asked him to come over and bring some pot. He came over with his wife and we sat down in the living room. Kim was already asleep for the night. I hadn’t smoked pot before. He brought out the joint and lit it up. I liked the smell and recognized it from rock concerts.
Soon I was laughing, but then something happened. The television was on in the background with some show about firemen fighting an apartment fire, which got my attention. In addition to the apartment fire, there was a loose power line with sparks flying everywhere. Then I faintly remember wondering if I was saying what I was thinking and trying to test my theory by thinking of sex, sex with Dave, how this or that would never happen again. And then I began sobbing uncontrollably. They put me in the shower with my clothes on. My sister Diane was called to spend the night.
At some point, hours or days later, I woke up on the floor of the kitchen with little Kimberly shaking me saying, “Mommy, wake up. Wake up, Mommy.” That incident helped me to realize that I had to live, even if I didn’t want to. I had to go on for Kim.
At this point, Kim had been told that her dad was in heaven. Kim thought heaven was in the sky, so every time she saw a plane she would ask, “Is that where Daddy is?” Not really knowing where her daddy was, as if anyone did, I called up my friend Beverly, who had lost her dad when she was little, and asked her how she was told. She gave me an idea.
Fortunately, that night the sky was clear. I bundled Kim up and we went outside to look at the stars. Together we found the brightest star in the sky. I pointed to it and made sure that she could see it.
I told her, “That star is where your daddy is.”
&nbs
p; “Even during the day,” I continued, “Daddy’s star is still there, but hidden by the daylight. Even then, day or night, Daddy can see you and hear you.”
There were no stars in my sky, though. I was still walking around in the dark with the wind knocked out of me. I saw Dave’s ghost in every room. Every corner was filled with memories of stripping wallpaper, painting, laughing, crying, making love. In my nights of insomnia, I poured through a chain-reference Bible, looking for clues about what happens to us when we die.
Finally, on a mid-autumn day while hanging out the laundry, after pleading with the God that I didn’t necessarily believe in that I needed a sign that my Dave was OK, I looked out to the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge across the street from our house, and for the first time in my life saw a double rainbow. I was so excited I grabbed Kim to show her, hysterical that this was the sign, the sign that he was not just OK, he was great. She didn’t understand. I called my mother and told her breathlessly about what had just happened. She responded, “Whatever you need to believe.” She didn’t believe me. Deflated, as I had been so many times by her, I still held some modicum of excitement and a renewed commitment to forge ahead.
My parents kept asking me what I was going to do and why didn’t I move back to their house. I began taking stock of my situation. I finally threw out the rancid clothes I’d slept with and the toothbrush I had contemplated for weeks. But the rest? What was I going to do with a brand new 1983 Silverado three-quarter ton truck, a restored 1953 Chevy pickup in candy apple red, and a 1968 Chevy Camaro SS souped up for racing, not to mention two motorcycles and assorted guns and fishing equipment, a log splitter, and a neglected German shorthaired pointer? How was I going to care for three acres and pay rent to my dead husband’s parents?
Somehow, my father-in-law got wind of the fact that I was considering what to do with his son’s stuff, and came to the conclusion that I was preparing to pack up and move on. One Saturday afternoon he stormed into my house without knocking, drunk and raging like a bull.
