On Random Updates

I have decided to do something out-of-character tonight.

Usually when I sit in front of this screen, it is after a post has been on my mind for anywhere from a few days to a few months. It is neatly framed in my mind with all of the talking points in order. I don’t compose the actual words until I sit down to type, but the framework is there.

But tonight is different. I have felt increasingly compelled to write here, but am not starting out with a specific topic in mind. Sure, there are things I’d like to write about, but one of the unforeseen elements of being in a committed relationship now is that so many of these situations involve private conversations which are not for public consumption. There may come a time down the road when, with Winn-D’s blessing, I might share some of those things here, but that time has not yet arrived. So instead, I’ll begin with a quick recap of our vacation (yes, it’s been that long since I’ve written here!) and see where things go from there.

The trip to the Midwest went amazingly well. It turned out to be an even better idea to take Winn-D to the places of my youth this summer than I thought it would be. That’s not to say that there weren’t stressful moments, but she handled them beautifully. The first part of our trip was spent with my late wife’s family. They have embraced Winn-D, but she had only met half of the family before the trip. Add to that all of my late wife’s friends (some of whom we had not seen in a few years) and she was bombarded with tons of new faces and old stories.

That was something I had not expected. I am not naïve enough to expect that we would not talk about my late wife at times, and I actually wanted to so Winn-D would get a more complete picture of who she was, but I did not expect it to happen across multiple settings and at such an intense level. I think people meant well, but I don’t think they realized that, while this trip was about letting Winn-D see where I came from, it was also about being a couple around the people I care about most. I think when we return to the Midwest after Christmas I will be better prepared to change the subject (or address it head-on, if needed) when these situations arise.

The second leg of the trip was actually to the great state of Minnesota. I know I don’t mention specific places here often, but Minnesota has made the list of places I’d like to visit again. We stayed mostly in the Twin Cities, but even then I felt like we barely scratched the surface of all there is to do there. It was a great chance for us to get away for a few days and spend time together making new memories (especially after being immersed in old ones for a week). My daughter loved the Mall of America even more than the wedding we were there to attend (and this girl loves some weddings!), so everyone heard more about that than anything else when she talked about the trip. It was a beautiful drive from where I grew up and we were all able to add some new states to our lists.

The final stop on our Midwestern tour was my hometown, which is also near the city where I went to college. There were more stories shared here than I expected too, but to a lesser degree at least. (Now, please don’t get me wrong. I want people to feel free to share stories about my late wife, especially with my daughter. I just thought they would spend some of that time getting to know Winn-D too.) She was able to meet my brother and sister and several friends that week as well. We spent time in big cities and small towns, attempted to drive through my old college campus (which was closed for construction), ate doughnuts from my favorite bakery, and spent lots of time in my childhood home. I knew I was excited to “bring her home”, but I don’t think I knew how much I would enjoy sharing that part of my life with her. It was a perfect way to cap off our adventure.

July has two significant potential grief-triggers for me. The first is my late wife’s birthday, which occurred while we were visiting my parents. Some years that one is harder than others. She would have been 33, so the age was not necessarily of significance, but the fact that it was the fifth birthday without her could have been.

Unfortunately, I don’t remember part of that day.

The day before her birthday, I woke up not feeling well. I was pretty sure I knew what was happening, but elected not to tell anyone at first. As the day wore on, the back pain intensified, and the first puff of my inhaler didn’t help. I tried to rest hoping that I could ward off the inevitable. By evening, I was starting to have mild trouble breathing and the back pain had not abated. My family was acting silly and dancing around and I couldn’t join in, even when my daughter asked me to, which broke her heart. I didn’t want her to worry, so I just said my back hurt and left it at that. By the time we went to bed, I knew I was going to need to go to the doctor, but I was 800 miles away and thought that at the very least I could make it till morning (and who knows what a good night’s sleep might have done, right?)

I tried my inhaler again shortly after eleven and laid awake waiting for something to change. It did, just not for the better. By midnight I knew I needed to get help. The only problem with that was that the help available to me at that time of night would come in the form of a hospital – more specifically, an emergency room.

She died the first time in an emergency room.

This was the only benefit to being 800 miles away from home. Instead of going to the ER where she died, I went to the one where I had stitches in my finger once and had my broken arm set and cast, in the same hospital where I was born over 33 years ago. I thought that would soften the blow, and maybe it did a little. But by the time my mom and Winn-D and I arrived (my stepdad had stayed home with my daughter, who didn’t know I was gone until we told her the next day), my blood pressure had sky-rocketed and my breathing had become labored. I didn’t have the foresight to tell them why my blood pressure might be so high (if you missed it, read the single line above), so I quickly ended up in the triage section of the ER. Thankfully, I didn’t know that until we left the hospital, but it added to the worries of the two ladies who were with me.

I have never had to stay in the hospital for myself. Sure, there were a few hospital stays with my late wife, but I could still come and go (from the room at least) with relative ease. Sitting in that bed, I gained a whole new respect for anyone who has ever been hospitalized. After I received a breathing treatment and could talk at a normal volume again, all I wanted was to get out of there. Knowing my body as I do, I knew that the breathing treatment would be enough to make me well again. But when you are in the hospital, even if it’s a triage bed in the ER, you are completely at their mercy (and they don’t show you any as far as your time is concerned!) To be fair though, they took great care of me and I am grateful for that.

Now, I know that some of you might be asthma sufferers yourself or might be concerned that I allowed the “attack” to progress for as long as I did. For some reason I don’t get a sudden attack. My symptoms are gradual, which gives me plenty of time to make a decision. Unfortunately, I still can’t get help until the symptoms reach a certain level (if I had gone to a med center earlier in the day, they would have likely sent me home without a treatment given my symptoms at that time). I was more than a little concerned that I had my first attack in over a year shortly after I started medication, but things have remained fine for me health-wise since that night.

The events of that night and the subsequent morning of sleep overshadowed the date on the calendar, and I managed to make it through okay. But the very next week, after we returned to the Southeast, was what would have been our tenth anniversary. I expected that one to be a tremendous kick-in-the-pants, complete with an outpouring of tears and anger about what could have been.

But in a lot of ways, it was just like any other summer day.

It would be easy to assume that this is because I’m in a relationship now and am therefore “happy” again (how many more times do I have to hear that?!?), but I really think it’s more a testament to where I am in the grief cycle. I don’t mean to sound callous because I will always care about my late wife in ways I cannot describe, but I don’t pine for her like I did the first few years after she died (which I suppose is good news for Winn-D). I can’t remember the last time I spent time crying in that painful, grief-stricken manner, but then, I couldn’t remember that before I met Winn-D either. Again, I’m not naïve enough to think that this might not ever happen again. But I am certainly glad that this day that should have turned out to be a major grief-trigger ended up being completely bearable.

There are plenty of other things rattling around in my head tonight, but this has become lengthy, so I will close with some good news. I received an e-mail the other day that this blog has been placed on a list of the 50 Best Memoir Blogs. This came at a time when I was feeling bad about not being able to post on here more often and is my first official honor as a blog author. That’s certainly not why I do this, but it does feel good to have my work here recognized in some way.

Guess that goes to show you never know who might be reading…

On Dating Trials and Surprises

I have always worked best under a deadline.

I’ve been framing portions of this post in my head for two months, but now that I’m leaving on vacation in a couple days, I’m making time to sit down and actually share these things here.

First, an introduction of sorts.

It has been requested that I “introduce” my girlfriend here. Unless this is the first time you’ve read my site, you’ll know that I do not use any real names and typically limit physical descriptions of people as well as names of specific locations, with rare exception. I have decided that I need to give my girlfriend a name for this site, as she is someone I hope to be writing about in future posts as well. The name I have chosen is a play on words that only I can see. So for the purposes of this site, I have chosen to call her Winn-D.

Now, I realize that some of your imaginations jumped immediately to a former chain of grocery stores (if you live in an area where they existed) or a beloved storybook puppy by the same name. That is precisely the reason I have chosen to shorten her moniker to Winn-D, as opposed to calling her Winn-Dixie, as was my original intention. She is neither a grocery store chain or a four-legged creature, so hopefully after this no one else will be inclined to think of her as either of those things.

As far as other information goes, she is also a school-based employee, though we do not work in the same school building (which would go against my strict policy about dating co-workers). The good news about that is that we have been able to spend an increasing amount of time together this summer. The bad news is that when school starts again we will have a harder time being able to do so as we live and work in different towns.

She is probably the tallest woman I have ever dated (not that there have been many, mind you) and has brown eyes. I never had a type before I met my late wife, but the few women I did date before (and including) her all had two things in common: they were on the short side and all had blue eyes. The first woman I dated after my wife passed away was not as short and had brown eyes. Winn-D is even taller than she was. She possesses a great many of the wonderful qualities that attracted me to my wife, but does not remind me of her in the least bit. (And so far there are no red flags like there were with the last woman I dated). Oh, and did I mention she has an accent that is thick as mo-lasses?

One of the many things that has surprised me about dating Winn-D has been the response my daughter has had to her. She was initially prepared not to like Winn-D, which is precisely the response I expected the first time I dated someone after her mother died (and did not get). As I gently talked to her about it, she mentioned that she didn’t feel like she really knew her. Now, to her credit we had made it a point to get to know each other via texts, e-mails, and late-night phone conversations before we decided to go out, but my daughter had not been privy to any of that information. So she didn’t really feel like she knew her at all, and she definitely didn’t see the possibility of a relationship on the horizon. I made the comment to her that I knew her and I knew Winn-D and I was sure they were going to like each other. And when they did, I was going to make sure to remind her of that fact from time-to-time (which I do!) We had been dating over a month before the three of us spent any time together. I believe it’s important for me to see where a relationship might be headed before I drag my daughter into it. Our initial plan was to have dinner and see how things went, but the evening ended with my daughter inviting her back to our house to watch “kid tv” and curling up in her lap to do so. Now if Winn-D and I are together when I go to pick up my daughter, she always runs straight for Winn-D and only gives me a hug after-the-fact.

One of the other things that has surprised me is how often Winn-D is presumed to be my daughter’s mother. Now, I know that to a casual observer we likely seem to be a little family when we’re out to eat or shopping or on an outing. I understand that. What I didn’t expect is that her role would be “understood” and mine would be questioned. We even had one man at a festival refer to us as “your mom and, I assume, dad”. If it had only happened once, I would chalk it up as one person’s response, but it’s happened several times over the past few months!

But then, when I really think about it, for all intents and purposes, my daughter does act toward her as a child would normally act toward her mom. And for her part, Winn-D is, quite naturally, doing the same thing. It’s a beautiful thing and it warms my heart. I try not to allow myself to be plagued by the “what-ifs” (the foremost of which being “what if it doesn’t work out and my daughter is heart-broken?), but they creep in from time-to-time. Right now, I don’t have any reason to think that it won’t, but I also didn’t have any reason to think I’d be widowed at age 29, so you can see where a bit of worry might be justified.

We have already, unfortunately, had to weather a few trials (/relationship builders?) in our five-plus months together. Some of them I cannot go into here, of course, but the most recent one has been my health. I don’t know that I can say it has taken a turn for the worse, but something is not right. I had not been noticing any additional breathing difficulty (though I was on antibiotics for my teeth during our high-pollen season this spring), but when I went for my appointment with the pulmonologist last month, he discovered that my lung capacity has decreased significantly since my appointment in January. He wouldn’t give me an explanation for this as he said the list of possibilities was too long to go into without further testing. But I’m smart enough to know that this is not normal for an otherwise healthy, thirty-three year old man who has never even put a tobacco product near his mouth. (On a side note, if you smoke or use other tobacco products, please consider quitting.) So he sent me for a CT scan, which took ten minutes and cost me hundreds of dollars out-of-pocket as apparently my insurance doesn’t pay for diagnostic tests. (Money is a bit of a sore subject with me lately as my body and about half of my appliances have quit or tried to this year!) He also put me on medication, which I had been hoping to avoid. I wish I could say that it wasn’t working and could go off of it, but I think its helping. If that’s true, then I will likely have to use it indefinitely.

I go in for the results of the CT scan tomorrow afternoon. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. It’s been 13 months since I had the initial episode that started all of lung issues and I feel like I’ve bounced back and forth between extremes. I’m worried that I’ll go in and he’ll say I have some terrible disease (like the one I thought he had originally diagnosed) and that asthma was either not the right diagnosis or is not the only lung issue I have. But I think I’m even more nervous that I’ll go in and he’ll say we need to do more tests as the results of the CT scan were inconclusive. In some ways not knowing what’s wrong is harder than knowing (or at least thinking) it’s something really bad. Any prayers would be greatly appreciated.

As I mentioned before, we are headed on vacation in a couple of days. And by we, I mean there will be three of us making the trip this time (four if you count the dog). Winn-D has met my mom, and some good friends from “home”, and my late wife’s parents, and all of those encounters went exceptionally well. But she hasn’t seen where I come from. I’ve only been building a life in the South for nine years. I lived the first twenty-four in a small town in the Midwest. I considered waiting till Christmas to ask her to come with us, but we will have been dating almost a year at that point and knowing my roots seemed too important to wait. We will be staying with my late wife’s parents, just as we do when my daughter and I travel there alone. I have tried to be sensitive to their comfort level with meeting Winn-D (as well as hers), but everyone seems more than willing to move forward with this. There are also a few friends that I inherited through my late wife, and Winn-D will be meeting them as well on this trip. They have also completely welcomed the opportunity to meet and get to know her. We’ll head to the Upper Midwest for a wedding halfway through the trip, then stay the rest of the time with my family. If she isn’t completely overwhelmed and chooses to fly home halfway through the trip, then she will have met all of the key players in my life (with the exception of my one brother who lives in New England). I’m not sure I realized until recently what a monumental thing I am asking of her, but she is more than up for the challenge, and that’s how convinced I am that this relationship is going somewhere.

I certainly hope so anyway.