Diary of Not a Wimpy Widow

Author: kcmoyer65

  • Praise Be for Small Things

    February 2, 2018

    Bill and I put our bird-feeders at the back of the house, outside the kitchen door. There Bill mounted the large pole feeder for the sunflower seeds and hung the tube feeder for the thistle, and I hung the bluebird feeder which Bill at first laughed at, and then conceded that yes, it did attract bluebirds. We also suspended a large suet feeder from a branch; it has a long wooden tail and even the pileated woodpecker is attracted to it. Two years ago my cousin Carla gave me for Christmas two wire spheres to hold suet pellets, and I hung one outside the kitchen window.

    In January I hung the extra wire sphere filled with suet pellets outside the living room picture window, from the hook where in the rest of the year a hummingbird feeder hangs. And now this late afternoon, with the sun light slanting low through the willow oak, the small birds are busy, clinging one at a time to the sphere, or scrambling on the ground in the flower bed searching for suet bits — Carolina wrens, tufted titmice, hairy and downy woodpeckers. The cats are mesmerized and so I am.

    Praise be for small things.

  • “Single Girl Oh Single Girl*”

    January 31, 2018

    “So, how do you like life as a single?” Sue my water aerobics instructor cheerfully asked me, as I sat in the hot tub, my arthritic left knee bent to receive the warm jets. She was standing above me, ready to take the next class, my 8:00 am class having finished.

    I was so gobsmacked by the question that I do not know what I answered. I babbled some reply, and Sue went back to the pool to teach her class. She had commented to me once or twice that I seemed strong and independent. Perhaps she admired that. She is ten years younger than I, and married.

    Bill died over seven years ago, and I never have thought of myself as single. I am a widow. I am on my own, but I did not choose to be this way. Maybe those who are single do not choose to be so, either, but I think they have more say in their situation. Bill and I were married for 45 years, and his death from cancer ripped the fabric of our married life in two.

    On most forms that ask for marital status there is a box for widowed. Except on the income tax returns; there I have to check off Single, and I resent that.

    So how do I like life as a single? I get to do what I want, when I want, without consulting my husband. I get to hold a holiday open house by myself, without consulting the resident introvert.  I get to stay up late and watch a movie, without Bill saying, “Are you still up?” I get to plan overseas travel to suit myself. And I get to worry about the woodpeckers drilling holes in the siding alone, and worry about my upcoming surgery alone. I get to pay all the bills, and worry if there will be enough money. I get to celebrate my birthday alone.

    And I miss Bill every day.

    *Title of American Folk Song

  • Sweet Betsy from Pike

    Sweet Betsy from Pike

    November 29, 2017

    Happy to say that Old Betsy my 17 year old Toyota Tundra is running again, after a jump start last Saturday from my USAA road service. I came home from a trip to find that Betsy’s battery was dead and that her trickle-charger had been unplugged by unknown agents. I was very annoyed. My son had rigged up the trickle-charger because I drove the truck so seldom that the battery frequently was dead. This time before calling for road service I bought a new battery for Betsy, but it was not needed on Saturday, so I have it on stand-by for this winter.

    Bill bought Old Betsy in the fall of 2000 on our return from England, pretty much on his own with no input from me. He drove her to his part-time job, and used her for hauling fence posts and other supplies for our little country home.  He was not always careful about dents and scratches to Betsy, and when I complained, he would answer, “She’s a truck!”

    I remember Bill’s driving Old Betsy to Richmond to the VA Center for the clinical cancer trials that last winter 2009 of his life. In fact, that is the memory I have every time I put my foot on the running board and swing into the driver’s seat, remembering Bill behind the wheel, me in the passenger seat, going down I-95 to Richmond. A lost cause for him, but he was hoping it might help someone else with cancer. So he put up with drinking that awful chalky stuff and all the blood draws and those drives down 95 to Richmond and back.

    Tomorrow I will drive Betsy to the car wash and get her scrubbed clean of the leaf droppings of the summer. Then I will drive her, fresh and shining, to the Lions Club stand and pick out a Christmas tree, the way Bill and I used to do.  And Betsy and I will bring the tree home.

  • They Were Just There for the Music

    October 3, 2017

    They were just there for the music.

    On Sunday morning, the first day of October, I went to church. And we sang. We sang “There’s a river flowin’ in my soul” and later “Blue Boat Home.” The children’s choir, lined up on the edge of the platform, sang “It’s Possible” from Seussical the musical.

    And the congregation sang “This little light of mine” as the children and teachers left for their classes. I went, too. In my third grade class, we sang “Swimming to the Other Side,” with its wonderful chorus, “we’re all living neath the Great Big Dipper, we’re all washed by the very same rain.” Music unites us, music binds us in community.

    And much later on that first day of October, that night after the children were home and in their beds, and I was home asleep in my bed, far across the country in a city that glittered and sparkled with lights at nights, while guitars played and the crowd applauded, a gunman high in a hotel that shimmered like gold in the night aimed his weapons from a broken window and fired at the crowd. Over and over. And the music stopped.

    Now I look in my newspaper at the faces of the dead, who were just there for the music and who now are gone, and my heart aches. But I think we must start singing again, and marching, and making changes in this country. 

    http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMCyYgVDERY

  • On the Brink

    July 18, 2017

    I had not planned to step backwards into a void when I boarded the ferry from the mainland island of Orkney on the north coast of Scotland to the island of Hoy, but that is what I did.

    I had climbed the stairs to the open deck when we boarded the ferry and sat on benches with the other seven from my small tour group until the cold wind and the ocean spray made me think better of the decision and decide to find a drier place to sit for the thirty minute trip. 

    Coming down from the sunlight to the dark and into a crowd of passengers trying to go up the stairs to the open deck, I stepped backwards to give them room, into a void.

    As I fell, head first, backwards, down the flight of stairs that led to the passenger lounge below decks, my brain registered what was happening, and I screamed for help.

    We take our lives and these soft bodies for granted, most of the time. It is not only the young teens who think they are impervious to death, it is all of us. We know in one part of our brains what a slim line separates us from death, but most of the time we are able to shrug it off. There might be a moment in a plane, our seat belts fastened, our bodies pressed back as the plane begins to climb, that we silently acknowledge to ourselves that we live on the brink between life and death, but most of the time we delude ourselves that we are immortal, or close to it.

    In that moment of falling, I knew that death was possible, that we are always on the brink.

    And then I felt a hand grab my hand, and a voice say, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” and I looked up to see a small brown haired woman with glasses staring down at me, gripping my right hand, keeping me from sliding any further down the stairs. And then other hands were there, below me and above me, helping me down the stairs where I could get to my feet, and then helping me to climb the stairs to a quiet spot where I could sit down, offering me tea, asking me who they should find. All of them were strangers.

    The metal edges of the stairs had branded me from the top of my shoulders to my thighs, but I had not broken my neck or cracked my spine. I was very lucky.

    As I sat there, breathless and shaken to the core, I remembered the words of the brown-haired stranger: “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”  

    And I was back from the brink.

  • A Love Song, on Mother’s Day

    May 12, 2017

    It is Mother’s Day, and instead of thinking of my mother, as I should by popular tradition, I am thinking of you, the father of my children. Perhaps it is because I am sitting in the corner of the couch closest to the picture window, your favorite spot to sit and read. I used to sit opposite you, in the black leather chair with my feet up on the ottoman, and every now and then look up from my book and say something to you, although often I was out at a meeting and you read alone.

    Now I sit in your spot on the couch because it is easier to get up from the couch with its higher seat and arms and I am older, and if truth be told, I like this view of the garden better. I have snagged the ottoman, so I can put my feet up, and although I began reading the latest book group selection on my Kindle, I have stopped to listen to the Carolina wren outside the picture window. He is singing away, so big a song for his tiny body, and perched on a branch of the lilac shrub that we tried to kill off because it was so massive when we moved into this house forty years ago, and when the lilac persisted and did not die we let it be.

    I look out the window with your eyes, seeing the wren in the lilac shrub, the wren house swaying from the eaves where this little bird is building a new nest. We bought that bird house on a vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. You put up the hook the wren house is hanging from. And when the original cording broke, you strung new cord, and that cord is holding still.

    Beyond the window your eyes must have seen the changing light at this time of day, when the sun dips lower in the west, lighting up the spring green leaves of the willow oak that we planted together so many years ago. The willow oak and her sister have so shaded the bed by the picture window that I replaced the struggling plants you would remember. Now ferns, hellebores, native geraniums, and astilbe grow there.

    But inside, this living room is not much changed at all. You could sit down in your favorite spot on this couch and pick up from the side table the last book you were reading before you became too ill to read: A Team of Rivals. There are other books stacked on top of it, but I have not found the heart to move it.

    There is a new basket for kindling on the raised hearth, and a new hearth rug. There are two new Siamese cats sitting on the rug: Jasmine and your sweet Blueberry have passed away. And there is me, not all that different after almost seven years, but perhaps stronger for this journey, sitting in your favorite spot on the couch, listening to the Carolina wren singing his love song in the lilac shrub.

  • Love and Loss and Grief

    April 9, 2017

    My minister asked me to speak about the healing power of love at our worship services this past Sunday, and this is what I said:

    Not quite seven years ago, my husband Bill died of cancer. He was one month and one day short of his 68th birthday. We celebrated our 45th wedding anniversary six weeks before his death. Bill died at home in our bedroom, peacefully with his family around him. We were able to give him the kind of death he wanted.

    When such a deep loss happens to you, you feel as though someone has handed you this enormous boulder to carry, a rough and heavy boulder of grief. You stagger at first as you try to carry it, and you try not to fall down with it in public, but in private you simply collapse and sit beside that boulder and weep.

    But after a time you learn how to carry the boulder without collapsing so frequently. And after an even longer time the boulder seems not as large and not as heavy, or perhaps you have grown stronger and learned how to carry it more easily. And the surface is no longer as rough, perhaps smoothed by time or by your tears, and the boulder has become easier to grip.

    And once your boulder of grief does not overwhelm you, you lift your head up and you look around.

    You look at all the people with such tenderness and new awareness.

    And you see clearly the boulders so many are carrying. You knew on an intellectual level before, that they were burdened by grief and sorrow, but now you see their grief with your heart.

    The friends who lost their son in a terrible accident.

    Your colleague who struggles with depression, and the other colleague whose mother has been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s.

    Your friend whose husband collapsed while running and died of a heart attack.

    The couple who are coming to terms with the fact that they will never conceive a child.

    And for those whose stories you do not know, but you can imagine. No one is spared from grief.

    Your own heart has been softened by grief, and your sense of compassion has expanded. You will never be the same.

    And perhaps after a very long time, your boulder will shrink in size until it is a rock small enough to fit into your pocket, a warm smooth rock that is a talisman of the love that will never leave you and that has opened your heart to all those around you.

    May it be so.

  • Memory

    February 18, 2017

    Our ship had docked in the harbor of the most beautiful island of our journey through the Aegean Sea.  Symi is tiny and hilly, with white and yellow houses rising up the steep hillside from the blue harbor. I wanted so much to swim in that blue sea, but doing so was unlikely. There seemed to be no beaches. So when our trip leader Alexander asked if anyone wanted to swim, I said yes eagerly. You, of course, did not want to swim, not sharing my passion, but you waited while I rushed back to our cabin to put on a swimsuit and sundress, and to grab a towel. I hurried back to the deck, and we joined another couple to descend the gangplank and thread our way along the narrow sidewalk around the harbor. Small shops formed a wall to our left, with the sea to our right.

    Alexander turned a corner, leaving the curve of the harbor, and soon stopped by some benches.  He pointed to the sea. “There you go!” he exclaimed. I was dubious. The harbor was very close by, and I worried about the pollution from the ships. But the other couple had laid down their towels on one of the benches and were descending the steps cut into the stone wall and splashing into the sea. You sat down on another bench. My desire to swim conquered my worries and leaving my towel and sundress next to you, I held onto the cold chain next to the stone steps and carefully reached for each slimy step with my bare feet, taking care not to strike my misshapen second toe against the rocks.

    At last I threw myself backwards into the cold sea with a whoop of joy. You smiled and waved at me. Behind you the white houses climbed the hills, and the sun shone in the blue sky.

    I think of that moment now, as I descend the steps in this hotel in San Miguel de Allende, where the sun shines in the blue sky and the white and blue and yellow houses climb the hillsides. I remember that afternoon swimming in the Aegean Sea off the island of Symi, and I remember your smile.

  • The Night Shelter

    Fifteen degrees above zero
    A foot of snow on the ground
    And the shelter wings through the night
    Like the red eye bound from LA to New York
    Or the transatlantic flight to London,
    Heavy with sleep and dreams.

    Here sleeps the Korean taxi driver,
    And the Latino construction worker,
    The woman with the broken ribs who flinches in her sleep,
    The pregnant girl curled next to her lover, and
    The man with eyes wide open who steadily talks to god
    As if god could hear.

    In the gray dawn one by one they will awake,
    Look for coffee,
    Find bathrooms,
    Brush their teeth,
    Pack up their bedding,
    And prepare to land
    In yet another day.

    February 14, 2006

  • This is What Democracy Looks Like

    This is What Democracy Looks Like

    500,000 people… or thereabouts. And I was one of them.

    Saturday, January 21st, 2017, Washington DC: the day after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, the day of the Women’s March on Washington and 670 Sister Marches worldwide.

    Chartered buses dropped off passengers. Cars lined up at Metro station parking lots. And masses of people filled the Metro cars. Women and men, many wearing pink pussy-hats. People using walkers and canes. Grandmothers, teenagers, children. People of all shades of black and brown and white. Many of them carried handmade signs, ranging from lewd to amusing to clever.

    Women’s Rights are Human Rights
    My Body My Business
    Free Melania
    It must be bad, even the introverts are here
    You have awakened the dragon

    Despite being jammed into Metro cars, the mood was buoyant and behavior civil.

    From the stations of Metro Center and Judicial Square, L’Enfant Plaza and Federal South West, the people streamed, climbing escalators that had been turned off for safety’s sake. They filled Third Street leading up to Independence, the site of the rally stage. They filled all the surrounding streets, waiting for the march planned to take them west on Independence, then north on 14th Street, and west again to the Ellipse, close to the White House. As more people arrived,
    the crowds were packed closer and closer together. From time to time, the call went out, “Medic! Medic!” and the crowd squeezed together to allow room for an ambulance to get past.

    On Seventh Street where I stood, young men and women climbed trees for a better view and sat on the walls around the Hirshhorn Museum.

    Large screens had been set up to broadcast the speakers and singers at the rally, but it was difficult for the crowd to see, and the sound system could not carry to the massive crowd. For the most part, the crowd stood patiently for over four hours, though every now and then a group would begin to shout, “We want to march!”

    About two o’clock, the word began trickling out that the crowd was too large for the original march route. “To the Mall!” some called, and the people began an exodus. Marchers filled the Mall and moved onto Constitution Avenue and toward the White House. They gathered in front of the Old Post Office Building, now the site of the Trump Hotel, shouted slogans and booed, and piled their signs on the sidewalk.

    It was late evening before the last of the people left.

    When I talk to people who were there, what do they say about the day?

    Amazing

    Exhilarating

    Exhausting

    Joyful

    Hopeful

    Energizing

    And we will need that energy for the road ahead.