The Widowhood │ Manhattan

John and I aren’t in the part of our relationship where he knows about my life in my early 20’s. He doesn’t know about my love for the city or the life I was set to have there at that point in my life. Back then, I was a senior at Rutgers University and I was graduating with a dual degree in art history and journalism and media studies. I had been accepted into some of the best programs for art business and curating, including a new program being offered through Sotheby’s. And that spring I fell head over heels in love with a boy that was several years older than me and we had a very intense relationship that ended in him one day telling me that his love for me had stopped growing and so I broke up with him. For years, he would talk to our former mutual friends about me and I would avoid relationships all together because of that hurt that Landon had left me with. 

        This was in 2008 and at a time where the economy tanked overnight. Within days I had a choice: was I going to fight for the loan that I had to go to my dream masters program or was this the universe telling me to pursue graduate school elsewhere and be closer to the boyfriend that I thought was it for me. I chose to begin to look at graduate school closer to him. And within a couple of months, the relationship was totally over. I often look back at that time in my life as a crossroads where I could have had a life of Manhattan, but instead my life brought me to teaching and in turn to Phil and to my children and South Jersey. I do not regret that crossroads because my children are the loves of my life, but I sometimes do wonder if I had chosen differently, what my life would have become?

        Once I was with Phil things like Manhattan trips stopped all together and I was very much swept up into his life and his friend circle. I had lost myself in my relationship with him and then again in motherhood and becoming his caretaker. Standing just outside of Penn Station with John, looking at the big buildings and the craziness of the streets, brought a little light back inside of me that had been dimmed for many years. This moment in time felt like a return to myself and a day that I hadn’t really known that I needed until I was living it. And I was there with John, a man that I was trying my very best not to stare at. 

        We walked from the station to the hotel that we were going to be staying in for the night. We faded in and out of small talk as we walked.

        “Are you still nervous about the hotel room,” he asked me.

        I probably blushed somewhat. “No, I don’t think you’re a serial killer.”

        He laughed. “Ok, well let me know we can always get another room or separate keys…or whatever, whatever makes you comfortable.”

        I am taken with John in a multitude of ways. There is physical chemistry between us, but I am also taken with him for the way that he considers me. This was our first actual date with one another and he had gone out of his way to make it extra special for me. Despite myself, I had already begun to feel myself falling for him over our late night phone conversations, but since we were together I was feeling that pull even more and it surprised me because as artistic and romantic as I am, I am also very logical, but being with John, logic seemed to be leaving me quicker than I could try to grab it back. 

        When we get up to our hotel room, I put down my bag and walk over to the huge window overlooking the city. You could see the statue of liberty very faintly off in the distance and I just stood there and took all of it in. This weekend in so many ways was the return to myself and to the possibility of new beginnings with John. Eventually, John finished getting himself in order and I turned around to face him. 

        I laughed when I turned around, because the bathroom was totally illuminated and showcased the open shower to the room. A design feature probably included so that whoever was staying here could shower and still have a view of the city. John’s eyes follow my gaze and he too now sees the shower.

        “I’m sorry, if I am honest I had help with booking the room. Geez, that is one heck of a shower,” he adds, clearly embarrassed and nervous all at once. 

        I lightly touch his arm. “It’s okay, we will figure it out, but that is some shower for a weekend where no sex was agreed upon.”

        He laughs and smiles at me, it is his coy smile that he would go on to give me many times over the nearly year and a half that we would be together. It is when I know that he is humored, but reflective at the same time and the flash of his eyes that would always follow that coy smile of his, that would make me want to do everything and anything with him. 

        John excuses himself from the room to give me some privacy so that I can get ready to go to dinner. A new wave of excitement has found me and I eagerly take off my jeans and slip back into the dress with the pretty underwear that Sasha said all went well together. I feel beautiful and I feel like myself in those moments. John eventually comes back up and changes and then suddenly we are back on the streets of Manhattan walking to the Irish pub. 

        The food at the pub is not the greatest, but I am thankful for my first rum cocktail in many months and picking apart the tacos that were the only slightly appetizing thing they had to offer. We send back the flavorless mozzarella sticks and make a joke about how food in Manhattan and especially places like this are always hit or miss. John got a steak sandwich and after a bite, he immediately takes some off of his plate and puts it onto mine. It stops me for a moment because I am taken back to one of the many conversations that I had had over the years with dating and finding the right guy for you before she passed away a couple years before. One of the things she always told me about dating was to wait for the man who feeds you off of his own plate. To my grandmother this was a sign of both respect and care, because it showed that the man would want to provide for you and cared for you enough to take something away from himself and to give to you. I try to stop my mind from wandering into things that it is too soon to think about. 

        John pays for our food and drinks and we begin to walk towards the theater. He is attentive and talkative and constantly making sure that I am near him, not in a controlling way, but in a protective way that once again strikes something deep inside of me and I find myself beginning to fight with myself about how far I was going to allow this to go. In the back of my mind, I always think about my kids and that they too are part of the deal with whomever I wind up with. Will it all be too much for a single man used to his own life and the way he likes things? Despite myself and the reality of my situation, I allow the soft feelings and little butterflies to take over because at that moment, it is just John and I and my kids are a state away enjoying their first sleepover with their grandmother. 

        The broadway version of The Notebook totally butchers the book and the movie that I had loved for years. It gave into the need for wokeness that entertainment has turned to in recent years and both John and I leave confused as to who people even are in it as they frequently changed actors based on race in each scene. In one scene Noah was the black man, but in the next he is white again–it served no real purpose to the story and made it hard to follow. By the end of the show, neither John nor I stood for the ovation. 

        Turning to me, John asked, “Why aren’t you standing?”

        Knowing why, but not wanting to hurt his feelings since this was our first date and I knew the kind of planning that he did for it, I hesitated. 

        “I am not standing because it was awful.”

        I exhale with a smile. “Yes, I feel the same, but I really enjoyed being here with you.”

        His smile widened. “Yes, the company was made for a standing ovation, but not the singing by screaming at the top of their lungs.”

        I nod. “And I don’t know about you but I was confused as to who was who in every single scene change.”

        “Exactly! What was that?!”

        Afterwards, we meandered around the city in search of coffee for me and things to do. We find ourselves in Times Square, John buys both of us a New York hat. My body begins to feel the end of the excitement and the toll of a day steeped in travel and activity. I am growing tired as the night begins to unfold. 

        “Would you like to go back to the hotel,” John asks me. 

        “I would, but I would still like to do something when we get back there.” 

        “Well what should we do?” He stops walking for a moment and I follow suit. “Do you know how to play UNO? Or any card games?”

        I smile. “Yes to both. And I hate to brag, but I am one heck of a game of war player.”

        “Sounds like we better stop at a drug store and get UNO and some cards then.”

        We walk a couple more blocks and find a store that has both after a creepy elevator ride into a New York store basement and questionable people all around. Afterwards we walk back to the hotel and John excuses himself so that I can shower and change. When he comes back he readies himself for bed and we sit in our hotel room with Manhattan lit up behind us playing several games of war until I feel my eyes fighting themselves to stay open. There is heavy banter flying between us as we play war and make jokes about the physical tension between us. 

        Towards the end of our last game, John stops joking for a moment and looks at me. It is a gaze that he won’t go on to give me often, but when he does give it I know he wants me to clearly hear what he has to say, it makes me feel loved and protected. “Katherine,” he says, my name always sounding like honey from his mouth. “In all seriousness, I know how to be a gentleman and I will be one until you tell me that I no longer have to be.”

        I can feel my face flush ten different shades of red while my body can’t decide what it wants to do with itself. I clear my throat, trying to hold onto my composure and these sudden waves of intense feelings that have come sweeping into me. “Well then, do you like to cuddle?”

        He smiles and cleans up the rest of the cards. “I am a very good cuddler.”

        John slides into bed next to me. My head is all over the place. I am still breast feeding my youngest and I think to myself what if my body ultimately betrays me and I have to explain soaked sheets in the morning. Or worse yet what if one of the panic attacks that I have frequently been getting since Phil died takes over in the night and I wake up into it again, terrified that Phil is dying all over again. Then I look over at John and the noise in my head seems to stop. He invites me to lay down next to him and I let him hold me for the first time. 

A warm and peaceful feeling washes over me when he touches me for the first time and within moments, I am fast asleep and beside John, I sleep through the night for the first time since my husband died.

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THE WIDOWHOOD │ A MIXED MARRIAGE

The things I loved about Phil were the opposite of the things that I hated about Phil. I loved that he was creative and smart. I loved that he was a romantic and would do things like buying me a gold rose for special things and anniversaries so that in the end I would always have a dozen roses in the house. In the end, he didn’t make it to a full 12 before he died, but he got close.

When we were dating, he would call me instead of texting me. He would write me cards and letters when he felt moved to share feelings. He told me he loved me often and never made me second guess him, which in many ways played into the total breakdown of my romantic love for him when I found out about the cheating after he died. I had never felt romantic love for someone die so quickly and I was shocked at how fast it happened considering that he had been my husband and that we had children together. It began after the call from Scott, but I don’t think it was fully truly dead until I called his mistress several months later and asked what had gone on.

“I knew he was married,” she said. “But, it was what it was and eventually I did cut things off. It began around late 2017.”

We had been married in November of that year and I was already pregnant with our eldest by that point. He was his father in the end. I was floored.

She went on about other things, about the last time they saw each other a couple of nights before he died and swore that all that had happened was actual moving and she may have touched his arm. Was that supposed to make me feel better? She had the audacity to ask about my boys and if they were talking. I would come to find out later that this is something that Phil would openly put down our children about which I found amusing considering that their speech stuff was inherited from his side of the family. His mother’s sister told me in one moment of clarity that her children all had speech issues.

After our eldest got a diagnosis, I began to read and research all that I could about what he had going on and what I could do to help him. Would he ever talk? Would we all need to learn sign language? I was relieved when it was clear that he would talk, that he would most likely overcome this with regular support and therapy. My research also led me to the reality of how my life choices in choosing Phil as their father played a role in the speech issues.

Phil came from a family where alcoholism, addiction and womanizing where things that you talked badly about, but for the most part was largely accepted because everyone either was one or all three. They would run their mouths about it when the person was being an addict, an alcoholic or a womanizer, but it was always accepted in some regard because it was what it was. However, if someone in the family showed something like a learning disability, it was immediately shunned, swept into a dark corner and blame assigned wherever they could but never something that came from them, because their bloodline was so perfect. It was a very weird juxtaposition and one that I never understood. It led Joanne and Kaitlyn to calling our son retarded among many other hurtful things to the point where I told my husband before he died that I was absolutely done with all of them. In many ways, I was thankful when they chose to stay away over us protecting our children instead of enabling a chaotic addict.

However, it was this inability within his family to love and support someone who was developmentally different that I believe led to the kind of life that my husband led. Our eldest carries a diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech which means that he can think of the words he wants to say but there is a disconnect between his brain and his mouth that deals with motor planning so he can’t always say what he wants to. Apraxia can present often with autism, but our son was tested, and we were told he was one of the super small segments of the population that is not autistic, but is apraxic and that with the proper love, support, and speech therapies that he would most likely over come it and be a fully articulate adult. The good news is, that after years of supporting him, he is now intelligible and people outside of my family can understand him. He will navigate school on his own next year for the first time and at the end of last year even earned student of the month for his grade level because of how far he has come and how much he has recovered academically. I am very excited as his mom to see how he blossoms in the new school year, because I truly feel that this is the year where he levels out and he hits his grade level all around.

It was in my research of childhood apraxia of speech that I discovered some studies that were hinting at a link between having a parent with ADHD and the child developing with apraxia. In the 10 years that I spent with my husband and in the 15 years of experience I have in special education, I could tell you without even taking that man to be screened, that he was the epitome of an undiagnosed adult with ADHD that never had the therapies or supports needed to become a fully functioning adult. A conversation with Joanne in earlier years, confirmed my thoughts when she had mentioned that they had had my husband tested but they found that he only had a touch of ADHD. I knew when she said it how full of it, she truly was, because even in the 1970’s to 1980’s no doctor or child study member was going to tell you that your child had a touch of anything—your child either has a diagnosis or they don’t. And I am sure that my husband did have one and it was ignored for much of his life because that is just something that could not possibly exist in their family.

As creative as he was, he was also a mess. He was scattered in his thoughts, he always had little piles and little things scattered around the house, often stepping over his things instead of acknowledging them. He always had to be moving or entertained by something, or he couldn’t control himself. His lack of focus on pretty much everything in life was sometimes all together mind blowing. In hindsight, I wish I could have seen his struggles earlier, but the adult problems I faced when we were married and having to be someone’s full on support took over being able to have clarity in all situations.

However, it was this chaotic mess that I think also made Phil very funny. His mind would race faster than the words that he could get out of his mouth most times. When he became impassioned by something, he would go on what we would call a Phil Rant. They would be epically long rants, full of strung together thoughts about whatever made him angry in the moment. They would be about anything from friend gossip to political opinions to one of his timeless rants about Rory in the Gilmore Girls. Sometimes he would become so enthralled in them that you would be laughing so hard that it would hurt to breath. That was Phil though, a larger-than-life persona who knew how to make people laugh, make people feel comfortable like you knew him your entire life and command a room. Those were the good parts of him and the parts that I hold on to when his children ask me about their dad. Sure, they will ask me about the other stuff too especially now that I have chosen to publicly write about it, but the one lesson I got from my marriage and loving Phil, was something that my dad said to me in the kitchen after my husband died and I told him about the cheating and how I just couldn’t understand why he just didn’t take care of himself while I did everything else.

“Katherine,” he said, “Sometimes, love is just not enough.”

  A simple, very truthful statement coming from my very German, often overly stoic father that I have held onto since. In the weeks and months since I found out about the actual state of my marriage, I have found myself in the selfish thoughts about how could he have done this to me and our family, but then I stop myself because I realize that he had done all of this not because of a lack of love for me or even for our kids, but a lack of love for himself that supersedes my appearance in his life. He was born out of another’s man’s chaotic life of jumping from woman to woman, family to family and in turn never got what he needed to become a fully functional adult capable of making a real commitment to me or let alone to himself. He lacked stability in his most formative years and that played out well into his adult life. However, his charisma and his charm always seemed to get himself out of hot water and on a snowy January evening, caught the eye of a young teacher who thought that his nerdy hobbies were cute and at least that meant he wasn’t a bar scene kind of a guy.

One of the last heart to heart conversations that Phil and I had with one another before he died happened in our living room. He had come in from somewhere, walked over to me and gave me a kiss.

I probably said something like, “What was that for?”

He smiled at me, the tender smile that he would give me when he felt total love for me in a moment. “Thank you. I was never about the house, and the dogs and the kid stuff, but having done this with you, it just feels…really nice. I never knew how nice it could all be.”

I gave him a heartfelt smile, because even when it was hard between us, there was still those moments where it was…really nice.

“Sometimes I have wondered if you love because you’re not big on expressing your feelings, but then I think about times like when I came home from the hospital this last time and you had the entire house set up for me to recover in, including a refrigerator filled with kale and it’s the stuff like that, that when I think about it, I know how much you really do love me.”

I gently reached over and touched his hand. “I love you, Phil.”

“I love you too, Pigeon. Thank you for being my wife.”

And we hugged for a bit, both teary eyed before Phil sat back and made a joke about how crying wasn’t manly and that someone must have turned the heat up because he is sweating and needs to go wash his face. I returned to whatever it was I had been doing before he came in. It was these moments that made me hold onto the idea that Phil and I would always find a way back to each other even in the chaos of kids and the house and the dogs and whatever else life was going to throw at us because I always did believe that love was enough.

It took me falling out of love with Phil to realize that my dad was right. Love is not enough, it also takes a shared vision, loyalty, and unwavering commitment to one another for love to last a lifetime. Things that Phil was just not capable of offering me though I have no doubt he loved me and our kids in the best and only ways he knew how to. I think that the reason God brought Phil and I together was so that I could have three kids and learn what it meant to be a wife in the hard times. I think the reason God gave me to Phil was so that Phil could know what it was like to be loved loyally and honestly until his last breath because that is not something that he had not had in his lifetime before me. My dad is right in that love is not enough sometimes, but I think sometimes love is meant to teach us and to lead us home. For Phil, that was to the end of his life and back to God. For me, I think that story is still being written.  

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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│I Am a Widow Now

I am 37 years old.

And I am a widow.

If you had asked me a month ago what I thought this year would look like I would have told you about the several college classes I was teaching, my book deal, the trip to Disney World that my husband had pushed to book for Christmas, my new job and maybe even the idea of the fourth and final baby we were going to try to have.

Life is altogether different now. My husband is gone. My book deal is on hold. I am on leave from college teaching, and I have no idea when I will be taking the kids to Disney World again. I am looking forward to my new job. I also am both sad and angry that Phil and I will not have any more children together and I too am most likely done having kids as I do not see myself remarrying or being with someone again.

I had a really good marriage to someone who I truly loved and who truly loved me. I just wish we had more time together. This winter we would have been together for 10 years, and our sixth wedding anniversary would have been next month. And I am thankful that if we had to end this way that we at least got to have a family and find our house before because if I had been left totally alone, I don’t know how I would even be getting up every morning. It still freaks me out that I had to buy myself a grave to make sure that when it is my time, I can be buried next to him. How is this even my life?

One moment you think you have your life totally figured out and the next, everything changes in the blink of a Saturday morning. And then several days later you’re balling your eyes out writing and rewriting your husband’s obituary.

Dr. Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart1 Comment