Dream New Dreams (18 page)

But the pain it caused Randy was enormous. Like most men, my husband was not quick to tears. In fact, I’d only seen him cry on a couple of occasions when he was distraught, one being the death of his father. To see him hurt so deeply broke my heart and made me curse his cancer for yet another dimension of pain it caused him. Even though we both had known this moment would come and had prepared ourselves for it, that knowledge could not shield us from the distress of telling our children that their father had cancer. I think part of us felt that we had let them down, that we had failed them as parents, because we knew they wouldn’t have a normal childhood with two loving parents to raise them, to protect them, to be there for them at every turn in the road. These are not rational thoughts, just the natural ones felt by parents knowing the responsibility that comes with bringing a child into this world. We would have to make peace with ourselves and accept that our situation wasn’t of our choosing. We had to play the hand we were dealt in the best way we could.

In the early hours of the morning of July 25, 2008, Randy began vomiting. Then he lay down to rest and died. I did not tell the children immediately. I needed to prepare myself, gather my thoughts and emotions, as well as make sure they were in a comfortable and loving environment. I wanted to soften the shock and devastation
for them as best I could. I had arranged for the children to go over to my brother and sister-in-law’s house when the time came. While I took care of the logistics—calling the hospice nurse, setting the telephone tree in motion, and welcoming family to the house—my children followed their normal routine: going to summer camp, playing at the park with our nanny. They got to have lunch and take their nap at their uncle’s house. I didn’t want to risk letting them see their father’s body being taken out of the house and loaded into a hearse, or the hospice van taking away the hospital bed and other items from Randy’s bedroom. Later in the afternoon, I joined my children at my brother’s house. While they played, I gathered my brother, his wife, our babysitter extraordinaire, Laura O’Malley, and our nanny, Rachel Paige, around the kitchen table to set the scene. I wanted to have a show of support and the physical presence of the people who loved them and would help take care of them. I wanted many arms to comfort them at the moment I had to shatter their world.

With everyone in place, I called Dylan, Logan, and Chloe to come downstairs so we could have a talk. Instantly Dylan picked up on the tension in the air and the unusual events and began asking if his father was dead. I didn’t answer his question directly, but rather kept to my game plan. After we were seated with each child in someone’s lap, I began to tell them that the cancer had made Daddy’s body very weak. The doctors had tried all the medicines they could to remove the cancer and to make Daddy better, but it hadn’t worked. I explained in very simple language that their father’s heart had stopped beating and he stopped breathing and then he died this morning. Daddy wouldn’t eat anymore or breathe anymore. He was dead.

There is no worse feeling a mother can have than to see her children so emotionally crushed. To have lost their father at such young ages (six and a half, three and a half, and two) made my heart break even more deeply along the fault lines that had already formed from my own grief. But to see their tears and to hear their cries for their father was simply too much. I can’t even begin to describe the sadness we all felt at that moment.

At two, Chloe didn’t understand initially that her father was dead or what that meant. She sat for a few minutes at the table while I was talking and then she slid out of her seat and scooted out of the room. I didn’t force her to sit at the table and listen. She was simply too young to process much beyond the first couple of sentences. And that was OK. There would be plenty of opportunities to talk about what had happened to her father.

At first, it seemed as though every day one of the children would ask about their father and ask me to tell them what happened. I would need to repeat the explanation of Randy’s death over and over again using the same simple language. I added that their father hadn’t wanted to die. He had tried his best to defeat the disease. I also emphasized that there was nothing the children had done to cause Randy to die. Likewise, there was nothing they could do to bring him back to life. No matter what we were doing, no matter how sad it made me feel, I always took the time to talk them through Randy’s death, explain what dying meant, and reiterate that they did not cause his death, nor could any of their actions bring him back to life. Their emotional needs were paramount. If answering their questions one more time meant being late to preschool, then so be it. If one child was upset, but the other children didn’t want to talk about Randy’s death, then I would take the child who did want to talk to another room to chat in private so I wouldn’t
upset the others. If I got sad or weepy, I would acknowledge that I was sad but would explain that I wouldn’t always feel sad and that they wouldn’t either. Most important, I wanted my children to know that they could talk about the feelings they were experiencing over the loss of their father, that I was there to take care of them emotionally as well as physically. Helping them to grieve, as well as allowing myself to grieve, became its own journey.

O
N THAT GLORIOUSLY SUNNY
, hot summer day of July 28, 2008, I stepped into the black car reserved for the immediate family of the dead. I think it was only the second time I’d been in a limousine. I rode with my mother-in-law and Randy’s sister while the sitter drove my children separately so they could return for lunch and naps. As our close family and friends began to arrive at the funeral chapel to celebrate Randy’s life, I stripped off my managerial persona and gave myself permission to experience Randy’s funeral service. Everything was in place. All the details were taken care of, and my children were fine. There was nothing demanding my attention. I didn’t have to keep it together for anybody, to show my strong side so as not to scare my children or sadden my husband. I wasn’t going to stop those sad feelings from bubbling up. I wasn’t going to distract myself from the pain of the moment. Randy had been right: the funeral was my time, my
opportunity to set aside all the responsibilities of home life and turn my attention to myself.

I entered the chapel after almost everybody was seated. I walked up the aisle accompanied by my sister-in-law and best friend and took the very first pew. Directly behind me was Randy’s immediate family: his mother, his sister, and her family. To my left were Randy’s pallbearers, including my two brothers, Bob and Rick. The rest of the chapel was occupied by our friends, Randy’s graduate school buddies, and my family members. Randy’s oncologist and the coauthor of the book, Jeffrey Zaslow, also attended, but as Randy requested, I kept the funeral private. And that was a good thing because it made the service much more personal and intimate. Here in the safety of friends, the sadness didn’t feel as heavy as when I was alone. Perhaps that was because each of us held a little piece of grief’s mantle.

After the minister had conducted the service and Randy’s sister had given the eulogy, people were invited to come up and share a special remembrance of Randy. Most of these stories I had heard or been witness to, but I felt comforted in hearing them again and reminiscing alongside my friends and family. And then off my thoughts would sail, floating on a story shared by one of Randy’s friends about his unique and imaginative spirit. One of his longtime friends recounted some of their silly graduate school pranks. During the eighties, when Randy was a grad student at Carnegie Mellon and sharing a house in Pittsburgh with several other computer science students, he had made a birthday cake for one of the friends using granulated sugar for the frosting. Needless to say, it was rather crunchy. His friend returned the favor by making a birthday cake out of Jell-O and frosting it like a real cake. The story led me to
think about Randy’s amazing baking skills. He could make checkerboard cakes and had even made wedding cakes. He whipped up a cake shaped like a blue crab for his father’s eightieth birthday party. The only time he shopped at Williams-Sonoma was to buy a sand-castle-shaped Bundt cake pan.

Together we listened to some of the music Randy loved, like “Linus and Lucy” by Vince Guaraldi. I can’t hear that song without remembering the many times Randy asked his niece to play it for him on the piano. She always obliged, playing from memory. There was also a slide show made up of pictures I put together showing Randy at different stages of his life. It had been an incredibly painful project for me prior to Randy’s death. But now my efforts paid off. People laughed, smiled, and sniffled as the pictures scrolled by.

During the hour in the funeral chapel, I felt a sense of déjà vu. There were odd parallels between Randy’s funeral and our wedding eight years earlier. The same minister who married us now conducted his funeral service. We listened to “The Rose,” the song Randy and I had chosen for our wedding, which took me back to the sweet spring day when Randy and I held hands as we listened to his sister sing it.

Randy and I had chosen “The Rose” because of the hope that love kindles. Now I sat there looking at the red roses covering his coffin. When the pallbearers lifted Randy’s casket, I dutifully followed behind alone. It wasn’t until that moment that it truly hit me: Randy was dead; I was alone. I would now be walking without him beside me. I don’t know how I was able to see through my tears to make it that short distance out of the chapel.

This train of thought led to self-pity. At the graveside service, I reflected how instead of pronouncing us man and wife, Reverend Herndon had committed Randy’s body to the earth, releasing me
from my wedding vows “till death do us part.” The crazy thoughts that run through one’s mind at these moments! I admit I secretly patted myself on the back for having fulfilled my marriage vows in my second marriage. Given that my first marriage ended in divorce, I had wondered about my ability to make a marriage work. One of the silver linings of caring for Randy when he was ill was that I learned a lot about myself, including the fact that I could be a good partner, that I could work through the tough times and not be just a fair weather wife. But I had not been ready to relinquish my role as wife to the most caring and loving man I had ever met—the man who truly was my better half. Through knowing him and learning from him, Randy had made me a better person, though we had our disputes. What would become of me now that my better half was gone? What did that leave of me? The lesser half? The worse half? I honestly can’t recall what the minister said at the graveside service. My thoughts dragged me down a rabbit hole from which I could not escape.

When I planned Randy’s funeral, I had wanted to end it with a meaningful gesture, so instead of our minister sending everyone on their way at the conclusion of the graveside service, he invited people to come take a red rose and lay it on Randy’s coffin. I had the honor of beginning. Taking the rose in my hand, I thought about our wedding song, “The Rose.” Making my way to my husband’s coffin, I remembered all the red roses and flower arrangements Randy had sent me when we were dating long distance and even after we were married. Standing in front of his coffin, which was poised over the open grave, I carefully laid a rose on top. I spoke to Randy. I told him I was so sorry he had died. That’s when waves of grief gripped me hard. I was paralyzed—I literally couldn’t move because I was shaking so hard from crying. Tears streamed down
my face. I couldn’t even move my hands from the coffin to wipe my eyes. I stood there overcome for what seemed like an eternity, all the while telling Randy how sorry I was. I held on to his coffin, using it as a crutch to prop myself up. Finally, my sister-in-law came up to me to ask if I was OK. “I can’t move,” I told her. She helped me pull my hands free from the casket and supported me while we walked to the funeral car. Once out of sight of the grave, I slowly pulled myself together. I was embarrassed by my reaction and by my display of emotion. I hadn’t intended to break down like that in front of everybody, and I have no idea how people reacted to what they had witnessed. Mercifully, my family has never brought it up to this day. Sometime after the funeral, I realized how good it felt to have a good hard cry, to not be strong or have to worry about others. The funeral might have been the first time I felt such heart-wrenching emotions. It wouldn’t be the last.

The funny thing about caring for someone with terminal cancer is that I had a long time to process the idea of Randy not being in my life, of Randy being dead, of being alone in the world without him, of being a single parent. When I was at the pool with just the children while Randy stayed home, I would think, “This is what it’s going to be like when Randy’s not here anymore,” and in such moments, I would grieve for the life I was losing. When I say I was grieving, I don’t mean I would break down in tears. Rather, I was conscious of how dramatically my life was going to change, and I felt remorseful, wistful, and sad. Dr. Reiss, our counselor, had told me it was good for me to allow myself these little moments of grief. That would lessen the blow later on.