AUTHOR’S NOTE: After rising early the morning of Oct. 19, 2023, I wrote the following story. It earned an honorable mention in the Jade Ring nonfiction contest at the Wisconsin Writers Association’s annual conference Oct. 25 in La Crosse. It and the other winners have been published in the association’s Creative Wisconsin magazine, which is available for $11.95 at Amazon.
As I mentioned in last week’s The Widower column, I hope to write a book using a journal I kept for 10 years to monitor Cheryl’s descent into dementia. While I don’t intend to put these columns in the book, this is the type of story that would be included.
Sometimes in the predawn darkness, I awaken and toss and turn and turn and toss.
At times like this, it’s quiet outside, except perhaps for the distant toot of a train traversing downtown, the faint hum of freight haulers rolling the freeway, or the noisy muffler of the carrier dropping thin newspapers in neighboring driveways on his dwindling list of customers.
I lie there in that early-morning blackness, unable to regain sleep, deep in thought, much of it dark.
And I admit.
At these moments, I miss the clutter. I miss the chaos.
Her clutter. Her chaos.
As the disease tightened its grip, one more trinket, one more souvenir, one more ornament was never enough. This disease being not the Big C of cancer but the Big D of dementia.
I miss the years when, though a decade older than me, she and I trekked side by side into grand yawning canyons and up rock-strewn paths to mountaintops with stunning views. She joined me, twenty-five years ago last May, on a distant Pacific island where we said “I do” in a picturesque tourist city now lying in charred ruins after a deadly wildfire raced down the hillside and chased survivors into the sea.
So on mornings like this, after a tear slips from one closed eye, crosses the bridge of my nose and heads for the other, I rise, flip on a light, and pick up my ever-present bedside book, hoping the story will restore restful calm and allow another hour, maybe two, of sleep.
Pausing from the pages, I glance across the covers to the corner of the room and an old television stand that her former husband built, one that now stores favored copies of signed books and serves as a tabletop for family photos. Below those pictures is the empty cubbyhole once designed for a VCR and that later she crammed with trinkets and souvenirs and ornaments.
Not wanting to dust them any longer, I cleared that cubbyhole. It now stares back, empty, yawning, mirroring the hole in my heart.
Much of my summer was consumed by three rummage sales gobbling seven days. Sorting and pricing and organizing swallowed a week before each sale. Afterward, more days vanished while clearing and packing and hauling the remains to charities and a consignment shop.
When the reading fails my objective, I slip on warm clothes on this chilly autumn morning and head for my basement computer. And I type words like these.
Now, it’s nearly nine months since that day, the last day she would ever step inside this home. Our home. Really, her home. She invited me into her life, and I invited her into mine. But she also invited me into her home.
I miss her smile. I miss her delicious meals. I miss holding her hand in church.
I miss snuggling up behind her in bed, putting my right arm around her and the way she curled my hand into hers in a comfortable sleep-inducing embrace.
Some nights, I awaken with an unsettled feeling. Groggy from restless sleep, I momentarily think she’s lying beside me and that I’d better stay still so I don’t wake her.
In the clarity of each day, the “long goodbye” continues, and I drive out to that place, that institution, and watch the woman I once knew further fade before my eyes.
Yes, sometimes I miss the clutter. Sometimes I miss the chaos.
Mostly, I miss my Cheryl.
So beautiful, Greg…and now you have me considering my own various assortments of “things” like the stacks and stacks of journals my husband says, “What am I supposed to do with all these…?” (if I go first). Your story reads like a song from harp strings.❤️
Ha! I thought you would say you miss everything but the clutter😉