It’s No Longer Com­pli­cated: Series Finale

This is part of the It’s Com­pli­cated series.

In August of 2009 I post­poned our immi­nent divorce when my wife, Thea, was diag­nosed with breast can­cer. I promised her that I would stay and take care of her until she was out of the woods.

The for­est turned out to be deeper and darker than any of us antic­i­pated, though.

The breast can­cer growth was sur­gi­cally removed and every­thing was going excep­tion­ally well. The sur­geon did such a great job that Thea could have gone with­out cos­metic surgery after­wards; it went that well.

Or so we thought.

There were appar­ently a few cells float­ing around some­where and they were aggres­sive enough to metas­ta­size into Thea’s brain dur­ing chemother­apy. She was diag­nosed with brain can­cer in the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary and rushed into whole brain radi­a­tion treat­ment. Two months later her doc­tors gave up on her and three weeks after that, she passed away.

It has now been exactly a month since I was woken up early a Sat­ur­day morn­ing in April by the owner of the group home where Thea was stay­ing and told that she has passed away.

I had the same reac­tion that I have always thought looked so stud­ied on TV shows, where I couldn’t com­pre­hend what was said:

My first thought was, “But I saw her just last night!”

My sec­ond thought was, “Put her on the phone and we’ll straight this out right now.”

I must have sounded drunk when I sub­se­quently asked them to repeat them­selves a cou­ple of times before the news sank in. I knew it was com­ing but I sim­ply wasn’t ready for it yet.

Dif­fer­ent peo­ple had given me dif­fer­ent esti­ma­tions for how long she had; it ranged from three weeks to two years. In hind­sight I real­ize that I aver­aged that and set my own expec­ta­tions to one year. I thought I had time to ease into it. As it turned out, the lower extreme was the cor­rect esti­ma­tion. I’m not sure that it was a pes­simistic guess, though. After all, it was mer­ci­fully fast, like rip­ping off a band-​aid.

Then, on the same phone-​call, I had to answer ques­tions on how to pro­ceed, such as about which mor­tu­ary to send her too and I hadn’t even had my morn­ing cof­fee yet. Not even my morn­ing cig­a­rette. These are not ques­tions you want to answer with­out some caf­feine and some nico­tine in your bloodstream.

A few hours later I was run­ning around try­ing to find a notary that worked on Sat­ur­day to sign the papers that were needed for the right peo­ple to come and pick her up from the home. I didn’t know it would be *that* hard to find one. Then again, I was prob­a­bly run­ning around in a bit of a daze at the time. I remem­ber going to the FedEx store twice and them refus­ing to help me.

I know and I knew that I should have planned for this. I knew that she was going away but I sim­ply didn’t want to face mak­ing those deci­sions and prepar­ing for her death while she was alive. It felt like I would be giv­ing up on her for mak­ing prepa­ra­tions like that. The doc­tors had given up on her; I would be darned if I did too.

I even kept every­thing in the house the same way as when she left just in case she would be com­ing back. I left her car parked as crooked as she left it the last time she drove. She was a ter­ri­ble dri­ver and an even ter­ri­bler [sic] parker.

Even though we were going to be divorced once she beat the can­cer, we did grow closer dur­ing those two and a half months of brain can­cer, espe­cially. I spent all my free time with her and held her hand and tucked her in and trained her in using the remote con­trol every night.

I grieve her. I grieve the loss of her dreams and her plans. I grieve the loss of a human being only 42 years old. I grieve the loss of my wife of 15 years even though we were about to be divorced. I so wish that I was a divorcee with a pain-​in-​the-​ass ex-​wife rather than a widower.

I’m a widower.

It’s such an odd thing to say out loud. It tastes oddly on my tongue.

I feel life mov­ing me ahead, though. It’s going to be a long time before the wounds I have from Thea’s pre­ma­ture depar­ture, even though I didn’t want to be mar­ried to her any longer, have healed.

Yes­ter­day I was assaulted with grief when I con­tem­plated going wale-​watching and I sud­denly remem­bered that Thea had been say­ing that she wanted to do just that before she died, if she only got strong enough to travel. I had promised to help her. And it never hap­pened. All my feel­ings of inad­e­quacy and help­less­ness for not being able to fix her came back.

Still, this is the last install­ment in the “It’s Com­pli­cated” series. Thea is gone and I am still here and there is noth­ing I can do about that sit­u­a­tion. I am begin­ning to get a per­spec­tive on my feel­ings about this and the anger I felt for the sense­less loss of a human life, the life of a close family-​member, has subsided.

She doesn’t care any­more that she missed the wale-​watching trip, or that she missed the rest of her life. The only one that grieves those things is me. I am angry and sad on her behalf but she doesn’t care about that anymore.

She isn’t hurt­ing about it so why should I be drag­ging these big pieces of irrel­e­vant lug­gage with me? I have enough bag­gage as it is with­out strug­gling with bulk that is not wanted any­more. This is not the right way to honor her memory.

I still have to decide what to do with her belong­ings. I have given her fam­ily every item and trin­ket they have asked for but I still have a whole house of… stuff.

I go through junk she wouldn’t let me throw away because she was a pack­rat and some­times I run into emo­tional land-​mines (like her wed­ding gown tucked away deep inside a closet, or a diary from her teen years) but slowly and surely I am mov­ing ahead.

Sad­ness and grief remain but I have said farewell to Thea, my would-​be but never will-​be ex-​wife. And now I am say­ing good­bye to the “It’s Com­pli­cated” series. I’ll root around and see if I can’t find Dreamwalker around here, some­where, and dust him off.

We will be resum­ing reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming shortly.