Yesterday would have been mine and Kateri’s 14th Wedding Anniversary… yay! Although we were together for 20ish years when she died, I was slow on the draw and waited over a decade before asking her if she wanted to get married… to me… but at least we got to call each other Husband and/or Wife for more than a few years! Of course, it’s a little weird thinking about how I’ve been a widower now almost as long as I was a Husband…! Life… sometimes it wads up your list of plans, tosses them in the trash basket, and we are forced to learn that wonderful skillset of “Adapting”.
After Kateri died, I told myself I would not work on her Death Date or on our Wedding Anniversary. Luckily, I work with some great people and so far, have been able to make that happen every year. As I’ve gotten further and further away from her Death Date, I’ve needed less and less time to recover from the emotional and psychological gymnastics routine those Anniversaries can sometimes bring. It’s also nice that as I see these Anniversaries coming up on the calendar, I’m not the emotional wreck I’ve been in the past, dreading the waves of feelings that sorta crash into you while wading through the weathering effects of Widowhood.
For the last 10 weeks Amanda and I have been doing this thing we’re calling The Sourdough Stump. Basically, Amanda has been baking more sourdough bread than we can eat and has started giving it away on Sundays… on a stump of wood… next to the dirt road. It’s something that we have both gotten really… REALLY… excited about as the weeks have gone by. We’ve met neighbors. We’ve met strangers from faraway places. We’ve waved from the porch… and have spied on peeps from the living room as they pull up next to the stump, look around as if trying to figure out what’s going on, and then wave to the house hoping someone inside see’s their gratitude. It has been such a wonderful little project for us, that even though it was my Wedding Anniversary, I still wanted to be a part of The Sourdough Stump! So I decided to spend the morning hanging on the front porch with Amanda, and then at noon I decided to go for a drive… to the camp where Kateri and I got married at.
I brought a picture with me on my little cruise across Vermont. It’s a pic of the moment we were married… arms in the air, mouths open with hoots and hollers frozen in time beneath the two perfectly placed old ass trees. I wanted go see those trees again… stand in the field… see how things have changed and what things haven’t. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen!
One of my fears on the drive over was that I would be crashing a wedding taking place there at the camp! Just driving on in like I owned the place…!.. and I didn’t want that to happen. Luckily… it didn’t. No weddings were taking place, quite the contrary… there wasn’t anyone!… couldn’t find a single person!… even tried the office and it was locked…! Now, even though I thought it would be pretty cool to revisit the place we got married and maybe get a cool pic out of it, I felt uncomfortable just parking my truck on their property and then tromping all around the fields, roads, and woods! It’s a private place, after all… and its currently foliage season here in Vermont… so I also didn’t wanna be one of THOSE people. You know, the self-absorbed-“I don’t care that this is your house, I want a picture of us and our kids in our L.L. Bean scarves and duck boots petting your cow in the field with your barn, tractor, and trees in the background” type Leaf Peepers… who will then ask you for some warm cider to take the chill off and for a cider donut just for the novelty!… (Not to be confused with the Good Leaf Peepers. You guys enjoy the show… and keep spending your money). I wanted to be respectful to this place that still holds a special spot in my heart, and to respect the people who currently hold it close to theirs… so I decided to drive home.
As I sorta said earlier, Widowhood is a great exercise in “Adapting”… “Accepting”… “Rolling with the punches”… “Going with the flow”… as we learn about ourselves, our grief, loss, and Life in a world that was never on our radar. Mine and Kateri’s Wednesday Wedding is still THE day where I feel I felt the most excitement, joy, comfort, and Love since being plopped on this earth… but that was a different Time in my Life and as the years go by, I need to recognize that there will be change in how my Past fits into my Present… and I need to adapt.
This year’s Widower Wedding Anniversary was honestly a pleasurable one. It was a nice balance between being in The Present at The Schoolhouse with Amanda, Xander, and The Sourdough Stump through the morning, while also taking the time and creating the space to provide an opportunity to stick a toe in the puddle of The Past… and not getting unexpectedly splashed by it…!
ps… It didn’t hurt that the drive was absolutely gorgeous!… we live in a beautiful place… patience helps.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
- There is a special pocket in my heart for the people who were at our wedding, who were there to celebrate Us, who gave me wonderful stories and memories to take with me on this journey that I can share with people who cross my path… and I miss them all.
- Since the beginning of my Widowhood, I have sort of isolated myself from friends, family… the world. I can sometimes justify it in my head with the ol’, “There was a global pandemic” and “Going through my mom dying” or “The struggle just to keep my life, my house, my job somewhat in order” blah blah blah type things, but for whatever reason, what it comes down to is…… I don’t take/make the time to communicate with people… and it’s been a hard thing to come to terms with.
- I have learned that the best way to get THE PERFECT Frosted Flakes-to-Milk ratio is to eat them late at night from a sentimental coffee mug while leaning against the counter in a dimly lit kitchen… with a fork.
Generally, once I start a blog or video I just go ahead and either post it or trash it. Well, there’s actually a fair amount of videos on my phone of me playing guitar or rambling on about whatever that I had full intentions of posting to YouTube and just haven’t because I either lose motivation, run out of time, or simply second guess myself about throwing things out into the world… which is why I like to just write/record and then post… no time to second guess! After 97 blog posts and something like 9ish videos saved to YouTube… nothing horrible has happened to me yet, so I’m kinda keeping on that train of thought with the option of posting something after the fact… like I’m doing right now… from my bed… on a Sunday morning… with coffee.
It was the Halloween of… ummm… 2003 maybe..? Could’ve been 2004 or 5. Well, up to 2007… but one of those years. I know we were living in South Starksboro in our cute little cottage with a loft and a woodstove… it was pretty cool. (Our first stand alone home together… rented from a couple who became very special to both Kateri and I… and who still are. It’s weird to think back at those memories right now. I wish I could get everything that is bombarding my brain right now down on paper… but I can’t… and I’m trying to get to what it is that I wanted to write about! But now… I’m thinking about how Kateri called our back yard the Dagobah System. You know?!… Yoda n shit… and it kinda was.) Anyways, I know it was within that range because on one Halloween we used the tiny bedroom downstairs and the loft you couldn’t stand up in… where we slept… up the ladder… as the places to “design” and make our costumes for the evening. We weren’t going out. We weren’t having a party. Well, I guess we never really had parties… but the point is, we were just gonna be hanging out at home that night and Kateri had a knack for coming up with some fun things to do.
It’s been a year and a half since Kateri passed away… that just seems all sorts of fucked up to me. It’s weird because at some points it seems like it has been that long (whatever that means)… and at other times it seems like yesterday. Actually, anytime I think about Kateri it seems like yesterday… which is hard… and the main reason why I have to try and manage my emotions much of the time. I can function in society without breaking down in the grocery store or coffee shop… but I still don’t care if I do. Although I haven’t become comfortable living my life without Kateri (I just want her back)… I have become more comfortable with my situation… and all the bullshit that comes along with it. Mourning the loss of a spouse is one of those “Big Life” experiences that happens to be somewhat complicated and I realize I am just settling into this whole grieving process… because it’s gonna be around for a while! Oh, it’s gonna change here and there… maybe it’ll even take a break once in a while… but it’s not going anywhere. I’m just learning to live with it.
And… we got older. Out priorities… changed. We slowed down a bit as we were settling into the rest of our lives. Even though I believe Kateri was happy with her life and with me… I know… KNOW… that Kateri wanted more excitement in her life… more adventures… more passion!… and I was happy with how things were. As a widower you can take that type of reflection and put the information to use by living every day like it’s the last!… or some other homogenized cliché saying… and I do most the time. But tonight… reflecting on life also showed me that I do… in fact… have regrets.
I’m just gonna preface this with my Wedding Anniversary was actually yesterday, I’ve been horrible at planning things lately, and at 10:08 in the morning… I’m still in the same comfy clothes as last night because I fell asleep on the couch! (I like to think of it as me being efficient… this way I don’t have to get undressed just to put them back on for a Sunday morning!) Long story short… well, abbreviated… this is what I did.
It was a beautiful drive… cloudy… cool. I took the dirt roads for the first bit and just got in the right frame of mind. When I hit Montpelier I thought, “I should probably eat breakfast…?!” and then Penny Cluse in Burlington instantly came to mind… because I love it there. As I got a little further down the road, another thought popped into my head that put a smile on my face… we cooked a majority of the food for our wedding in the Penny Cluse kitchen!… how fitting that I would be eating there!… today! It’s that whole attachment to experiences thing that I seem to keep trying to do, but it worked for this! So I got to Burlington, ate my Mama Cruz’s Huevos Rancheros, caught up with a couple of people, gave and got a hug from Charles, and moved on to the next phase of the journey.
Well, yesterday was a Saturday… and even though we got married on a Wednesday, most people get married on Saturdays… so the thought was, “I wonder if there is gonna be a wedding going on when I pull up?!”… there was. At least, that’s what I’m assuming… because there were people milling about as if they were getting ready for a wedding!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 