A Widow's Awakening

by Maryanne Pope

  “First of all,” I say, “I was awake and secondly, it scared the crap outta me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I shook my head.”

  “And?”

  “It went away.”

  “Well what do you think the red light was, Adri?”

  “Sam. But he knew it might scare me, so he chose a night when I wasn’t alone.”

  Then the chaplain asks me what the colour red means to me.

  “Anger.”

  “What about passion?” he suggests. “Or love?”

  “Or sacrifice,” I say.

  After our conversation, I look around the living room. If the red light was Sam, then why was I afraid? Was it because a light in lieu of a husband is rather disconcerting—or was it because I really don’t want Sam to come back to me in any form? As in our marriage, I figure honesty is the best policy.

  “If that was you, Sam,” I say to his nearest photo, “then you better find a new way of communicating with me because you damn near gave me a heart attack.”

  “Or maybe,” I add, “just don’t come so close.”

  FOR AMERICAN Thanksgiving, I order Chinese food from our favourite restaurant and watch our favourite Thanksgiving movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Since I didn’t watch it at Canadian Thanksgiving, I figure watching it now would be acceptable to Sam in our new relationship as red light and wife.

  What I don’t remember about the film is that the main character is a widower who carts around a photo of his dead wife. At one point, he’s sitting in his car during a snowstorm chatting away to her. Sitting on Sam’s perch, surrounded by pictures of him, I can certainly relate. The dead are often better companions than the living. I’m far happier staying at home alone, talking to the walls than I am venturing out into the world and hearing what the mortals have to tell me. For as the two-month marker of Sam’s death approaches, I’m noticing a definite shift in the clichés coming my way.

  “You’re young, dear,” is a popular one from the over-fifty crowd.

  “I’m so sorry,” is being replaced by an oddly enthusiastic, “Well at least you didn’t have children!”

  That’s right, you fucking morons: now I don’t have a husband or a child.

  And my all-time favorite, occurring with alarming frequency and frightening conviction, is: “Losing a spouse isn’t as bad as losing a child.”

  “Grief is not a pissing match!” I scream at the water fountain when I get back home again.

  Then there are the dozens of people who take my hand and softly confide, “Adri, I just want you to know that your loss has really made me appreciate what I have.”

  I’m so pleased my nightmare could be of assistance to you. Not.

  After Planes, Trains and Automobiles, I head to bed with my cheery Armageddon book. According to it, nothing is pre-determined. Rather, all St. John does in his Book of Revelations is warn humanity of what could happen. Since God made us free to choose our destiny, the choice to live or die is ours—not God’s.

  Perhaps there is a God, but not a plan.

  “But that,” I remark to Sasha as I reach over and turn out the light, “would be a rather ineffective way to run the universe. No wonder we’re in such a pickle.”

  THE NEXT day is November 29th. Two months down, five to go. At 9:00 a.m. sharp, Dale picks me up and drives me downtown to meet my potential financial advisor, recommended by Stan. But how is one to invest one’s money when one will soon be dead or Judgement Day upon us? Throw in the possibility that the investor is the Second Coming of Christ—or His widow—and another dilemma arises: surely Jesus the sequel wouldn’t invest in environmentally unfriendly multinational corporations whose extreme wealth is made on the backs of the poor?

  “…the federal government.”

  I turn to Dale. “Huh?”

  “I said I heard back from the federal government about Sam’s student loan.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “And in light of the circumstances, they’ve forgiven it. This means all your and Sam’s debts are now paid off.”

  I nod. “I know.”

  He frowns. “Did the federal government write you, too?”

  “No. Sam’s cousin had a dream about him,” I say. “In the dream, Sam told him how happy he was to have all his debts paid off.”

  Dale opens his mouth then closes it again.

  WHEN WE meet the financial advisor, Dale is speaking again and asks a barrage of questions.

  Seemingly satisfied with the answers, he then turns to me. “Were there any other questions you had?”

  “Well,” I say, shifting in my seat. “Because of all that’s happened, I’m a little…”

  Both men lean forward as I pause to think of the best words to use, without coming across as a complete lunatic.

  “…freaked. So, it’s really important to me that the money is wisely invested.”

  “Of course,” replies the financial advisor.

  “I don’t want anything risky,” I say. “It has to be very safe—as in able to withstand something really bad happening.”

  The advisor looks perplexed. “What, like if the world markets collapsed?”

  My face reddens. “Something like that.”

  He leans back again. “I guess anything is possible. And I do agree with you: this money ought to be very wisely invested. It’s your future.”

  “Well,” I say snottily, “I’ll certainly be earning my own income down the road.”

  “Of that,” he replies, “I have no doubt.”

  “MY FINANCIAL picture is looking pretty good, isn’t it?” I remark to Dale as we’re leaving the parkade.

  “I’ll say. It seems that Sam has put you in a very unique situation.”

  I turn and look at him.

  “You have a real opportunity to do some good in the world, Adri.”

  Billions of souls, some reading magazines in heaven’s waiting room, climb upon my shoulders.

  “I mean,” he adds, perhaps noticing I look a tad overwhelmed, “when you’re ready.”

  AFTER DALE drops me at home, I reflect upon my situation over hot chocolate and Bailey’s. Female incarnation of Christ or not, I do want to achieve some good in the world. I’m just hoping my youthful death—gruesome and spectacular as it will undoubtedly be—will accomplish this for me.

  On my way upstairs to fold laundry, I check the mail and find an envelope from a woman whose name I don’t recognize. Inside is a sympathy card from the twenty-four-year-old widow of the police officer who was killed by the drunk driver three months before Sam died.

  “I sort of have some idea of what you’re going through,” reads the handwritten note, “so please call me if you want to talk.”

  In my bedroom, I’m reaching over to pick up my little gray T-shirt when I see Sam, in my memory but clear as day, standing on the other side of the bed.

  “This is cute,” he’d said in the summer, standing in that same spot, folding this same shirt, “and it looks great on you, but I wish I could afford to buy you more expensive clothes.”

  I fall onto the pile of laundry, sobbing. I can afford any shirt I want now but I don’t want new clothes; I want Sam.

  But I can’t have Sam. And judging by the collapsing sensation going on inside me, I know I need to talk to someone. But I don’t want to talk to a person who understands what I’m going through because then I’ll have to accept that what Sam and I had, though wonderful, other people have also had. And lost. Sam and I were special; we were different.

  I phone Jodie.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “Hi.”

  “No, I mean it’s me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Remember how I was nattering on about Revelations and the Second Coming?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s me.”

  Silence.

  “I think I’m Jesus,” I clarify.

  A pause, then: “Oh dear.”

  “I know that’
s totally crazy and it can’t be true, but I can’t get this stupid thought out of my mind, ever since that phone call…”

  “What phone call?”

  So, starting with the phone message relayed to me by Anthony, I explain to Jodie what had triggered my original Jesus thought.

  “Have you told Anthony?” she asks.

  “God, no! My family already thinks I’ve taken a swan dive off the deep-end. They’d for sure send in the men in white suits with butterfly nets.”

  “No, they wouldn’t.”

  “I know I’m creating this delusion,” I continue, “to avoid the reality that Sam’s body is now rotting in a grave downtown.”

  “Listen, I’m not saying you are the Second Coming of Christ because that’s…pretty weird. But if you were truly delusional and mentally unstable, then you probably wouldn’t be so aware of it. And besides, you’re a woman. Jesus was a guy.”

  I laugh. “Yes. I realize that. But since the past two thousand years have been so shitty in terms of the treatment of women, it makes sense that God—or whoever’s calling the shots—would send a daughter to follow up when society is more willing to accept women as equals.”

  “I don’t think the bible mentions anything about sending back a daughter.”

  “So? For one thing, Christianity isn’t the only game in town. And even if it were, it was a bunch of patriarchal men who wrote the Bible. I betcha most of what Jesus actually said and did was totally distorted to fit other agendas. It makes sense that Jesus would come back as a woman because a female perspective is totally what’s needed to get us back on track. The world is way too male-oriented—we place far more value on fighting wars than on actually solving problems. And don’t get me started on how we treat the environment! Dominating nature is a predominantly male perspective, whereas women are more interested in working with the natural world…conserving what we have instead of destroying it.”

  “So hypothetically,” she says, after another significant pause, “why do you think it took you until the age of thirty-two for you to come to this realization?”

  “Because nothing else but Sam’s death would have woken me up!”

  “C’mon, Adri—do you really believe you’re the Second Coming?

  “Geez, when you say it out loud like that, it really does sound wacky.”

  “That’s because it is.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “Of course, there’s also the possibility that Sam is Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “Well, his death sure gave me new life—if I can ever get past the suffering and guilt to enjoy it. That’s pretty much the idea behind Christianity, isn’t it?”

  No response.

  I sigh. “Regardless of what’s going on, no single person should be responsible for pulling humanity out of our own goddamn mess.”

  “So maybe your job as a writer is to help demonstrate that.”

  “How?”

  “By sharing your experience of losing Sam. I mean, look at what you’re learning.”

  “I suppose…”

  “But for God’s sake,” she adds, “do it in a way that you live to tell the tale.”

  “HE’S DEAD,” I scream, “but he’s not forgotten!”

  Then I run out my cousin’s front door, leaving behind a house full of family trying to celebrate my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. However, since there’s a snowstorm on this particular evening in early December, I have to stop at the front door, after my embarrassing outburst, to put on my jacket, mittens and boots. Only then do I charge down the icy front walkway, stomping as angrily as possible in my new ridiculously high-heeled boots. I climb into my car, slam the door and slowly inch my way home on icy roads.

  “They didn’t toast Sam!” I blubber into the phone from my living room.

  “Adri?” says Dawson, on the other end of the line. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was (sob) at my mom’s birthday and my family didn’t even include him (sob) in the toast before dinner. I just can’t believe them!”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  “Could you?”

  A few minutes later the doorbell rings. But it’s not Dawson; it’s Dale’s wife.

  “They sent you, huh?” I say.

  “Yup.”

  “I’m pretty pissed off.”

  “Oh, we gathered that.”

  “I can’t believe my own family. Not one person mentioned Sam the whole night—not even at a goddamn toast to my mother.”

  My sister-in-law winces. “Everybody feels just terrible about that, but I think we all figured we’d try and give you a break from the hurt.”

  “Hah!” I give a shrill laugh. “Well that certainly didn’t work.”

  “You’re right. We screwed up and I’m sorry.”

  “Mentioning Sam’s name and talking about him is really important to me because if we don’t, he’ll be forgotten.”

  “You do know, Adri, that at that dinner table tonight, Sam was on every single one of our minds?”

  I shrug. “If no one says anything, how would I?”

  The doorbell rings. I let Dawson in.

  “Well,” she says to him. “We messed up.”

  “It happens,” he replies. “It’s hard to know what to say sometimes.”

  “Here’s a tip then,” I say. “Not mentioning Sam is gonna bury him a hell of a lot faster than the dirt they threw on his grave.”

  I get the double-goldfish. Is the nice-widow facade finally crumbling?

  RECOGNIZING THAT a change of scenery might be wise, I plan a farewell tour to Vancouver to visit our friends and old stomping grounds, then on to Kingston to see my grandpa. It seems wisest to keep moving; stopping means vulnerability.

  An hour before I’m leaving for the airport, I get a call from the Hope chaplain’s wife. “I have some bad news,” she says.

  “Oh?” I sit down in my chair.

  “Another officer died today. He was in a head-on collision on his way to work.”

  “Shit,” is my first response. “Who?” is my second.

  She tells me the name of the city police officer, adding: “He was a recruit classmate of the officer who was killed by the drunk driver last June.”

  I process this as I process everything else these days.

  “Adri?”

  “Let me get this straight,” I say. “One cop was killed driving home from work. Three months later, Sam died at work. Three months after that, a recruit classmate of the first officer dies on his way to work.”

  “Yes.”

  It would appear God is plucking cops like daisies. “When’s the funeral?”

  “You’ll be out of town for it,” she replies. “Which I think is a blessing.”

  Since the blessings being handed out these days are few and far between, I shall take this one and run.

  STAN PICKS me up at the Vancouver airport.

  “You look great!” he lies, giving me a bear hug.

  Although dangerous on slippery surfaces and uncomfortable to walk in, my new boots do give me an extra three inches of height, an attempt to draw attention away from the twenty pounds I’ve put on from all the damn cookies and comfort food.

  “We haven’t planned much for your visit,” he says, “because you need a break.”

  The problem, however, is that I don’t know how to take a break. Nor do I deserve one. Sam’s death was wrong and it’s my job to figure out how to make everything right again. If I’m not thinking about Sam, the circumstances surrounding his death, societal issues or higher spiritual questions, then I’m not being a responsible widow.

  I borrow their car and head to Abbotsford the next day. Sitting outside the apartment where Sam and I lived four years ago, I stare up at our old balcony, bawling. Then I hook up with Sam’s college buddies for a beer. Several of them work at a prison so I ask one girl how that’s going.

  “Very frustrating,” is her reply.

  “How so?”

  “Well, most of
the inmates are repeat offenders and the main reason they re-offend is because life in prison is easier than working for a living.”

  “That’s absurd!” I cry.

  “It’s easier to get their drugs in prison than on the street,” another girl explains.

  “Let me get this straight,” I say, “once a bad guy gets released from jail, he goes out and promptly commits another crime…say a break and enter, just so he can go back to prison again and buy drugs?”

  And yet another room goes quiet.

  THE FOLLOWING morning, I continue on to Chilliwack to visit a friend.

  “I think I’m going to die violently,” I confess to her over tea. I don’t add “in the spring.” No sense in alarming anyone.

  She puts down her teacup. “Most of us are going to die violently.”

  “Huh?”

  “Think about it. How many people actually pass away peacefully in their sleep, simply of old age?”

  I shrug.

  “Not many. Car crashes, cancer, heart attacks…that’s the usual stuff and it all seems pretty violent to me.”

  “I guess.”

  “So where are you at these days—in terms of accepting Sam’s death?” she asks.

  “That’s the million dollar question.”

  “It just seems that you’re pretty OK with everything. Am I right?”

  I sigh. “Yes and no.”

  She gets up from the couch, leaves the room and returns with a book, The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. “You might find this interesting,” she says, handing it to me.

  I quickly flip through it as if looking for something. A line about love being the energy of the soul catches my eye.

  “Thanks,” I say, “I seem to be on quite the spiritual journey.”

  “We all are, Adri.”

  I RETURN to Stan’s place in Vancouver and sit on the floor with Megan—now days away from giving birth—gluing beads to Christmas decorations.

  “It’s a bit odd,” she remarks, “that both Sam’s best friend and his brother are going to be having their first child right around the same time.”