Widowish: A Memoir(28)

I did not have the luxury of co-parenting with my husband. I was a full-time parent, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. By myself. It all seemed daunting. After thirteen years with Joel by my side, I did not have the confidence that I would be able to raise our daughter alone and be good at it.

Sophie and I traveled a lot that first year. It was easier to be away from home. One of Sophie’s best friend’s parents were divorced, and I was friendly with the mom. She and her daughter were heading to Hawaii for winter break, and I invited us to join them. Joel had only been gone for two months, but they didn’t seem fazed that they would be spending their vacation with a brand-new widow and half an orphan.

We were perfect travel companions. The moms spent days by the pool while the girls went paddle boarding and swimming. We shared some dinners and sat on the beach while the girls took a surf lesson. We were busy but relaxed in a tropical paradise, and my friend never seemed to mind that throughout most of it, I was present but not really there. She didn’t seem to mind that sometimes I would stop mid-conversation and put on my sunglasses to hide my tears. She didn’t mind that dinner plans were cancelled last minute because Sophie and I were too sad to leave our room. She didn’t seem to mind that on the white sandy beaches of Oahu’s North Shore, Sophie and I were arguing.

“This is a great place to sit and just think about Daddy and how much he loved the ocean.”

“You don’t have to tell me when to think about Daddy,” Sophie said.

But I couldn’t help myself. “I just would like you to spend some time reflecting on the time we all had together.”

“God, Mom. Stop telling me how to feel!”

I didn’t mean to.

My brain had a hard time reconciling that Joel was missing. There were people all around us, everywhere we went, but none of them were my husband. Where is he?

I would look to Sophie to commiserate, but she didn’t have a need to discuss Joel as much as I did. I kept trying to elicit a response from her, maybe even some emotion. She seemed to hold a lot inside, and this concerned me. My tears were plentiful and unpredictable. I rarely saw her cry.

I thought if I just kept us busy, busy, busy and distracted—if we just keep moving—maybe we would forget for a few hours just how hard it was to move through life without Joel.





ELEVEN

The Other Joel

When Joel was in a coma, newly admitted to the second hospital, I came home one day to make a quick turnaround before picking Sophie up from school. I went inside, put down the ubiquitous medical paperwork from the day, splashed my face with water, and rushed outside to get back in the car for school pickup. In that short amount of time, a package had been delivered and was waiting for me on the front porch. I wasn’t expecting anything and didn’t even hear the dogs barking that someone had been out front. I picked it up, curious, and saw the Bravo TV logo on it. The package was in a soft wrapping, and as I started to open it, I remembered.

“I know what I want for my birthday!” I had said to Joel over lunch in our kitchen a few weeks earlier.

“You do?” he asked. I rarely wanted anything other than a meal at a nice restaurant.

“A mazel sweatshirt,” I said.

“OK, from where?” Then it registered. “Wait, what?”

“From Bravo TV. Bravo-wear, it’s called.”

Mazel is the Jewish word for luck or congratulations, and the sweatshirt I yearned for had the word mazel emblazoned on it.

He shook his head, smiling. “Is that like a Real Housewives thing?”

“Kind of?” I said, but it sounded more like a question.

Joel laughed. “OK. Send me a link or something, and we’ll see.”

I hugged him and said, “You.”

He wasn’t doing great at the time. Just that morning, the nurse had given him his first round of steroid infusions. He thought he would try to get some work done that afternoon . . . which is when I slipped a note under the office door with the details.

I didn’t know he had ordered it, and Joel would never know I received it. He would never know how happy it made me, even when I wore it to the hospital the next day to show him. I sobbed into the sweatshirt that afternoon.

That was the last birthday gift I would ever receive from Joel. I decided it was a sign of Joel’s love for me. In his absence, I started looking for signs everywhere.



I focused all of my attention on Sophie. She motivated me to keep going, because without Joel, I felt like half a person. I was only half paying attention. Half listening. Doing everything half-assed. Sophie had lost her father, and now only had half a mother.

She was seeing her therapist once a week. Julie’s office was a twenty-minute drive away. So instead of taking Sophie to a soccer game or drama class, like Joel and I had done every Saturday for most of her childhood, our Saturday mornings were now spent going to therapy. Sometimes we’d pick up a smoothie or a coffee drink on the way. I would drop her off and park the car where I would stay for the next fifty minutes. I usually spent the time on the phone with my dad and Elisabeth. Sometimes I would visit Hal and Rita, who lived nearby. But more times than not, I would sit in the car and listen to satellite radio. I’d catch up on Howard Stern or the Oprah station.

One Saturday morning, while perusing the channels, I heard a voice that made me stop turning the dial. It sounded happy, like he was smiling while talking. I caught the tail end of the program and could tell that this man’s eyes twinkled, much the way Joel’s did. Then an announcer interrupted the program.