The Widowhood │ Six Months In…

Life comes at you pretty quickly. I thought that I had mine figured out for the moment…I had the house I wanted to grow old in with the husband I wanted to grow old with and three amazing kids. I was getting up for a wine festival…my first thing to do kid free in years and I came downstairs to find my husband in full blown cardiac arrest on our deck.

And in that instance, I would never be the same again. We would never be the same again.

It’s been over six months since I lost the love of my life. And for the most part, life has found it’s calm again. My main focus has always been our home and our children. In that respect, I have existed almost in a bubble of their life and needs. It has only been recently that I have wanted to de-bubble somewhat.

Eating when you’re grieving I think it the strangest thing. I know that I have to because of my kids and because I am still breastfeeding our youngest, but since he died nothing tastes the same anymore. Nothing is the same. On the nights that it gets really bad I often will make just a side. I call it grief sides and it’s manageable to eat a bowl of stuffing or Texas toast on the super hard nights though even then not enjoyable as you would think.

Doing anything beyond what I had to do has been hard. I don’t read books or paint unless it’s related to getting the house in order. I find myself zoning out to energy healers on YouTube after my kids go to sleep until I finally fall asleep.

Because the anxiety of being a widow is something else. I worry about being the sole provider for my family. I worry about my kids now growing up in a single parent household. I worry about what is happening to my husband’s body. And then very recently, I started to think about what my life is going to start looking like moving forward.

Will I be alone for the rest of my life? Will I find love again? Will I get to have more children? Why did this happen to us? Why did this happen to me?

I was never lucky in the love department. I had two big loves in my life–one I left because I was so in love with him and it was clear he was just going to play games and then the other, died randomly on a bright fall morning taking our dogs outside. For years, I thought I went through all that came before my husband so that I could meet my husband…the night that I met him I came home, called my mom and told her I had met the man I was going to marry. That’s how *right* it all felt with him from the moment I met him.

And I guess the point was that we would come together, have a really good marriage and have three amazing kids…but I just thought we would also get to see our kids grow up together as we grew old, watching our bodies fall apart and laughing and dancing our way through it all.

I guess I just wonder what is next…will I raise my kids and travel the world looking at cool art and cultures by myself? Will I meet someone again?

I just don’t know, but I do know, I am having such an urge to find myself in all of this. I lost myself to marriage and motherhood for a long time and now I guess I have time to reflect on it all and am realizing that there is more out of life that I want and somehow I just have to find the courage and the energy to move passed the exhaustion of grief and being a single mom to find those pieces of myself again and nourish them.

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The Widowhood │ You’re Going to Cry Over the Weirdest Shit

The first time I realized that grieving the love of my life would mean crying over the weirdest shit was when I was in the midst of planning his funeral. I had to get clothes together to bury him in and that meant, I would have to do a load of his laundry, so he had clean underwear.

This would be the last time I would be washing his underwear for him.

I was emotionally unraveled at that point. There was the active role I played in his death: finding him, trying to save him, the 911 call, the police, the paramedics and so on. Then, I had already had to deal with people I could go with never having to see again in my life, I had to write his obituary which was a day long saga filled with many tears and sobs trying to get it like I knew he would want it to be, and then came the drama of not having a plot to bury him in until hours before his funeral. I got myself through it all though.

I would have loved in my bathroom never had painted tiles or spray paint over all of that wallpaper.

It was the underwear though that sent me into sobs on our laundry room floor.

However, the next morning my daughter and I went to the funeral home and delivered an outfit I knew he would want along with clean underwear and socks. And on the day, he was buried, he looked very much like he did in life with everything I knew he would have wanted with him.

I have been doing alright since. Some days are so hard and other days it feels okay again. Christmas was really good, but the days that followed were very hard. Then, so much of the house decided to fall apart: the chimney, the fence, and our bathroom all decided in one way or the other to just fall apart.

Thankfully, I have been able to deal with most of it. Tomorrow begins what I am sure will be a saga with the bathroom. However, it was once again something weird like a bathroom that sent me into tears on the floor. So much of Phil’s health problems revolved around that bathroom. I would often be scared that it would be the bathroom that I would find him in. However, it was not in the end.

Oh did I cry though as I cleaned out our bathroom today because by tomorrow it will look nothing like our bathroom anymore. I should be thankful for that and I am, because it was the one room of our house I absolutely hated. It was beat up, painted over tile that renters went to town in. They even spray painted over the wallpaper that had been in there. It was just a terrible room that no matter how much I cleaned it, always felt dirty and old and the paint was just peeling off of every tile. I was able to go through his things, paint our bedroom and make space for myself…but this dumb bathroom was going to send me into sobs on the tile floor…

Because it is something else that is moving me on from the space I shared with my husband. Our married couple space will be completely different from the one that we shared.

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Into the Widowhood │ Keeping with the Bittersweet

By next week it will already be a month since my husband died. It still feels raw and gutting. There is also some relief knowing that he is free from all that he was going through. It is also traumatizing to me when I think of that morning and everything I went through. He didn’t die in his sleep, but I woke up to the chaos of what was unfolding. I think that is why the nights are so full of anxiety for me after I put the kids to sleep– it’s the anxiety of what was to come that morning that I had no idea about.

Phil had made us dinner the night before and he got us coke slurpees because my stomach hurt. I yelled at him about the baby because she was teething and driving me insane with breast feeding. And then the morning came, and our entire lives just unraveled in moments that felt like days.

Since then, everything has changed. Our home. Our lives. Even my job…today was actually my first day at my new job and it felt wonderful to be able to be at work again. It broke up my day and brought me around people. I felt the magic of a new beginning and that felt wonderful.

I am also taking in all the bittersweet moments with our kids, like every time I hear how wonderful our boys are doing in school or when I was watching them dance together in the dining room. Logan would whip Rory around like no one’s business, but when Violet asked for a turn, he became the sweet gentle protector he has always been.

I think this is how you survive grief and the longing for your partner. And also visiting them and talking to them. My mom asked me the other day how many times I have been back to the grave.

I told her we were up to four times, each time a little bit longer than the last. I also made sure that the cemetery corrected his misspelled name. They had it fixed in a day. I am supposed to buy a headstone next…how strange this all is.

And then I thought maybe I would be Black Widow for Halloween. Grief is weird.

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The Hart Home│A Year Ago Today

A year ago today I was waking up heavily pregnant. I was exhausted. We were also passed the second week that my aunt was told that she had left to live. She was an hour away from me. I had planned on going back that day, but I was just so pregnant and tired and really was not in the forgiving mood for other family members that would be there.

aunts

I laid in bed for a good hour, staring at the ceiling weighing out my options. If I didn’t go and I waited, I would probably miss seeing my aunt for the last time. While I had seen her the previous weekend, she was still up and talking, but according to my brother, she was going down fast and was sleeping most of the time now. I would also regret that for the rest of my life. If I did go, it would be exhausting and I would have to deal with a lot of things.

I pulled the cover over my head.

My husband found me soon after. He made me sit up.

“If you don’t go today, you won’t get tomorrow.”

Damn it, I really hate it when he’s right.

“And we both know that if you don’t get another visit in before she passes, you’re going to regret it. You have to go.”

Did I mention, that I really hate it when he’s right?

I threw on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt and slipped into my sandals. I texted my cousin and asked if they needed anything. I went on a hunt for glutenfree pizza from one of the many pizza places around me. When you live in Virginia and have a gluten intolerance, you rely on your jersey pizza. I finally found it at the pizza place we don’t usually go to and was on my way home.

When I got to the house that so much of my life had transpired in: birthdays, holidays, bringing home my husband– I wasn’t prepared to see my aunt so far gone already. It was clear that within the next day or so, she would be with Jesus. She had been talking to my uncle who had died when I was 12 when she was still awake and was talking about seeing other people who weren’t there. If I ever questioned if we lived after our physical body dies, it was this that gave me hope that there is more after this.

In some ways, it turned into just another visit. We sat talking about life, the baby and my teaching life. It must have been a comfort to her to know that we were all there and that life would go on even if she was missed every single day. My mom and I had looked over at the same time to see my aunt struggling to take her last breaths. Surrounded by my mom, myself, my grandmother, my cousins, my brother and my uncle, my aunt quietly slipped away. And just like that, it was over.

We sat with her for a couple of hours as the reality didn’t even sink in that she was gone. The hospice nurse came and pronounced that she was gone. It still didn’t feel real. My mom and I sat with my cousin as we watched the funeral home take her. The men were there too, but there was something about that moment between us women. It was always us four, even when my cousin and I were younger.

After that everything was a haze. My grandmother had to be moved to assisted living. The house was being sold, my uncle was leaving with my cousin for Virginia. I suddenly had all of these family things in my own home and I was slowly coming to accepting the idea that my aunt would never get to meet my son even though she had been looking forward to his arrival so much. Then it was the funeral and then it was like everything that was my aunt was suddenly gone– my aunt herself, the house that had been my center for many years and with it, was the last of my childhood. I would become a mom 2 months later and life has not been the same since.

It would take more time for me to realize the impact that losing my aunt would have one my life. It was my aunt and my grandmother who I would go to when I needed help and advice and suddenly, my grandmother seemed 20 years older than she had been last year and my aunt was no longer here to call or visit. My aunt was like a mother to me in many ways, she always made sure I had things– new clothes for sorority life, makeup, jewelry, etc. She was also the first one to read my manuscripts and avidly read all of my blog attempts and then would drive me crazy with her commentary to my grandmother about my blogs (usually ones about dating).  Christmas was always a huge deal at her house so was every other holiday including our birthdays. She was the heart of our family and since she left us, it’s been strange trying to rebuild that center.

A year ago today, life had changed as I had known it.

Note: This was scheduled to appear yesterday, June 10, 2019, on the first anniversary of losing my aunt, but I couldn’t get through writing it. So, it appears now, after writing and revising this many times over since yesterday afternoon. 

Dr. Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart1 Comment

Book Review│Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries: The Many Victims Of America’s Most Infamous Serial Killer by Kevin Sullivan

bundyI am a true crime junky and when it comes to Ted Bundy, I can read anything about him. I find it crazy how so many women found him to be so trustworthy and charming because when I watch footage of him or even see pictures, I just think how demented he looks. I would have promptly walked in the opposite direction of him had I ever encountered him in life.

That said, Kevin Sullivan has written three other books on Bundy making this volume, the fourth in his series. Sullivan’s Bundy novels include The Bundy Murders, The Trail of Ted Bundy and The Bundy Secrets. What makes Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries: The Many Victims Of America’s Most Infamous Serial Killer different from the first three books in this series is that Sullivan shares with the world case files and notes that have not previously been released, creating new information even for the most dedicated of Bundy’s researchers.

Detailed Case Notes

Sullivan does not disappoint with his inclusion of copies of copious amounts of case files from investigators that detail Bundy’s relationships, abductions and murders. As they are true files from the case, they are detailed and often bloody, but they give you an honest documentation of the horrors that Ted Bundy inflicted on countless women while he was alive and free.

Along with the case files, Sullivan wonderfull strings together the events and timelines, guiding the reader in putting together the new information presented as well as synthesizing it with previous information from earlier works. That said, this novel is not a light read and I found myself needing to take breaks often just because of how heavy and gruesome much of the material was. What made it even more difficult to stomach was how Sullivan showed you the cases through the victims. He makes you feel as though you are watching the last parts of each woman’s life as they encountered Ted Bundy and met their often gruesome demise.

Sullivan curates the case files and his own commentary with the ease of someone who knows their course material well. This book stands as a way to preserve what is known about Ted Bundy and his victims which as Sullivan himself admits, is important because so much of the material that we once had has already been lost because Utah had no interest in preserving it and what they did have was destroyed once the trail documents hit their nine-year limit. Overall, Sullivan’s completion of his Ted Bundy series does not disappoint and offers much detailed information into Ted Bundy and his many victims.

Book Information

Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries: The Many Victims Of America’s Most Infamous Serial Killer by Kevin Sullivan was released by WildBlue Press on April 19,2019, with ISBN 9781948239141. This review corresponds to an electronic galley that was received from the publisher in exchange for this review.

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