The River Flows...

I feel like I woke up and it is December of 2004...all that long time ago when I was alone, a single mom with two little girls, living in a little apartment on 4th and Sheldon in downtown Grand Haven. Life was full of transitions, and I wasn't sure where I was going to land. I was struggling emotionally, financially. Feeling like life had chewed me up, found me unappetizing and spit me out. But then...along came the love of my life. I will never forget the moment I met him. I had heard about him as Stubby, my boss's best friend and manager of all the construction projects he had going all over the tri-cities area. I walked into the accountant's office that day, and she said, Laura, have you ever met Chris? I turned to my left and there he was...he jumped out of his seat and had the most amazing expression on his face. It was sincerity...he stuck out his hand and said, "Nice to meet you, I've heard a lot about you!" And he smiled. But I could tell he was nervous. I didn't get it then, but now I know...it was destiny. Our lives met that day and melded into something strong, beautiful, supportive, giving and loving. My life changed forever in that one moment....within four years I would be married to him. Within eight I would be a widow.

It was January 5th, 2012. I called him on my lunch that day as I always did. We chatted about our day...and then he said his chest hurt. Right in the middle, he said. I was concerned, and we talked for a long time about it. He had been through so much with his Rhuematoid Arthritis pain and had so many experiences in the ER, but what really changed our perspective on going to the ER was the time I got so worried about his pain I took him to Mercy in Muskegon. They treated him like a drug addict and literally said, we'll give you a Norco, but that's it. We wanted answers, help, treatment; not drugs. He got angry and we left, went back to North Ottawa like we had always done before. They contacted Dr. Recknagel and within two weeks he was having surgery. But that experience had changed everything for us. It had made us feel hopeless about asking for help at the ER. So when Chris and I talked that day, he was really reluctant to go to the ER. But I was worried, so he said he would call them and see if he should go in. He called me back a few minutes later and told me that they had said that it was almost 1 o'clock, so he could come on into the ER or if he wanted to wait a few minutes, his family doctor, Dr Sterenberg, would be back in the office. He told me he would get some lunch (he would always eat a hard salami sandwich, four slices with salt and pepper, and some Rainbow Dark potato chips), and then give Dr. Sterenberg's office a call. I said, ok, honey, let me know what you hear. I love you, we both said. And then I hung up. It was the last words we ever spoke. The pathologist said that he died within moments of hanging up from that call, at approximately 1:00 EST time that day.

So, in that moment, life changed - although it has taken a while for all the pieces to play their part. The girls I know and love and spent 8 years being a part of their life - they are gone. No contact thanks to a small amount of money - less than enough to buy a new car - which my husband left in an insurance policy in my name. I was advised to keep my mouth completely quiet about that. If the girls moms find out, I was told, it would be trouble. They would want the money for their girls. So I said nothing, but the word got out somehow...hate, blame and accusations were thrown at me like water on a fire. It deluged me with anguish, pain, regret and finally, a sense of anger. The youngest daughter's mother has sent email after email in a torrent of vile and putrid hate. The daughter, now 16 and with a beautiful new car to drive all around town, will not speak to me. The older daughter who originally went digging for the truth about the money - to the extent of calling the insurance company and the agent - has decided she has somehow evolved beyond the money. And yet, there wasn't a conversation I had with her where the money wasn't brought up. In a moment of anguish, I ended that relationship. How long can I be punished because my husband left me a small, SMALL final expense policy???

So life finds me here, wondering who my friends are, wondering who my family is. I will have to move out of the home that Chris and I bought and remodeled together. Well, I can't say we bought it because the person we bought it from on land contract says we didn't actually BUY it...we rented it with the option to buy. Of course, that was never the understanding Chris and I had about the house...especially considering the 6 months of time we spent completely remodeling that home. Completely remodeled kitchen and dining room, half bath and complete basement. New flooring, new walls, painted, refinished the kitchen cabinets and built a high counter to sit at...it will all be gone in a few weeks. The beautiful home my husband made for me...because he loved me. Gone. So I truly am beginning a new endeavor in my life complete with new home and probably a new career as well. After all, I can no longer live on just my income...unless I want to go back to a cramped apartment with a falling apart car and no luxuries, no amentities in life, where even a cell phone at $30 a month was a luxury I could barely afford.

Oh yes, life is changing, changing so much. When I look back at my life on January 5th of next year, what is it going to look like????

I guess I am getting around to that beginning talked about in "Hope Floats"...let's hope it floats up in my life, too.

What it is to love My Honey....

What does it mean to fall in love? To feel loved by one person and to love them more deeply than you ever knew was possible to love another human being? That was the love Chris and I shared. Every issuance from his body, whether it be his morning breath (peppery), his lift-his-butt-cheeks toots, his many times daily squirts of stuff to clear his nasal passages...coming from the body I loved more deeply than my own, it was all ok. The only thing I would never do was pop a zit on his back. I let Grace do that. I remember how he used to pass gas - so loud! And just like a little kid. It would kill me when he would do that in the car. I would tell him I didn't want to breath his anal poop particles. Gross! Now I would love to have another moment where he had to lift his cheek to make room for the air to express itself....it's strange to miss things like that, but I do. It was so CHRIS. You ever smell those really burny peppers they have at Mexican restaurants? Or take a sniff of the Red Hot when you are out to eat? That's the feeling I get every time it hits me - this intense burny hot pain that smarts my eyes and makes my nose start to run. It's horridible....awful. He loved me, I know he did. He loved the things I would say. He loved to see me laugh and have fun. He loved to have fun with me. He would laugh at me when I was being a nincompoop, and he'd give me this look that was so full of love and of pure pleasure in who I was...probably the best feeling in the world to be loved like that and it is my most memorable memory of him, just him looking at me like that. When I think of my honey, it is with that expression on his face, the best face I have ever known in my life. I love you my honey, you are my heart and my soul and never far from my thoughts....

Endings are Usually Sad...

One of my favorite movies is 'Hope Floats,' and my all-time favorite movie quote is from that movie: "Beginnings are usually scary, endings are usually sad, but it's what is in the middle that counts. So, when you find yourself at the beginning, just give hope a chance to float up, and it will."

Now, I know I'm not supposed to start here, but I need to: endings are usually sad. The ending of one thing leads to the beginning of another. And that sort of compounds your problem, because you have the sadness of one thing ending and the scariness of whatever your next thing is going to be staring right down your throat. And wow, do I ever feel that way right now.

But mostly, I'm just teetering on the edge of despondence that my husband is gone. I get up, and I go to work, and I do all the things that I'm supposed to do like pay bills and take the kids to the places they need to go, but my heart is not in it. My heart is broken, barren, and empty. I try to keep reminding myself that I need to start making changes, decisions, do something to recover financially from the loss of my husband, but I waver and wonder and get scared; then I get determined, and I think I'm tough until a fearful thought hits me...and then I waver again. Not exactly leading the charge these days.

I'm also thinking about some of the people in my husband's life. People who meant the world to him, people who meant more to him than his own brothers. I have not heard from these people. They do not call me. They do not have contact with me. I am nothing, I presume, to them. And yet I can't help myself at these moments, when I find myself coming to the only conclusion I can bring myself to based on their actions, that if the situation were reversed, if it was one of them who passed away, Chris would be there for their wives. Their wives would not be alone. Their wives would have someone to ask about the light switch in the bathroom that is acting funny, or someone to get the Wolf Spiders out of the window well in Grace's room. That someone would be my husband, because he took care of people; it's what he did. Is it too much to have expected that I would not have to be alone without even a phone call to see if I am alright? No, that's not too much to ask, and for the gentlemen who claimed my husband as a friend but have no time to check in on his wife, I say this: you don't deserve the faithful friendship my husband gave you all these years. And I don't say that for me, I say it because it offends me on behalf of my husband who would have asked each one of his friends, please, if anything happens to me, please check on Laura and the girls. They know this, and yet I hear nothing, I see nothing of them. C'est ca - it's on them. But it does hurt my feelings.

So, I am stuck in the ending part, haven't been able to get over these humps to look at my scary beginning. For me the scary beginning, by the way, has entirely to do with the financial aspect of losing my husband and making decisions about how my family and I are going to survive financially. But as for everyone else...I am working very hard at getting over your lack of fidelity to your friendship to Chris and working on how to adjust to life alone. And those two things have my hands pretty damn full, I must say.

My New Reality

Maybe I'm more naive than the next person in life, but it has taken this long for me to realize that I truly am alone now. Life backed up 8 years when Chris died, I just didn't know it. Eight years of being a part of his life, yet without him...I am no longer a part of the life he had made in the 50 years he was here. 

I am not saying this for sympathy - in fact, I have no sympathy for myself in saying it. It is just a reality. My life is now minus Chris and all the people that were a part of his life. It makes me sad. But I understand. I was almost an afterthought in his life in terms of the time he spent with everyone else. Even his ex wives! It just makes me sad that the most important person in my life is gone and the only people around me are people that knew him less than I did.

Bottom line for me is that I miss him beyond any possible expression of grief, and there isn't a moment in my day where I don't feel bereft of the most important person in my life. I think that when this happens to you, you naturally want something to make you feel better. Being around people that loved him as much as I did would make me feel better, or at least, I think it would. But sometimes in life you don't get the thing you need.

So, I miss Chris with my children and my family and my one good friend, and I think of his friends and his family, and I wish them well. Especially because they meant so much to him. And I think of him, and I miss him, and I try to remember that he did love me and believe in me, and I can still be a happy person and make my life good. But it is just really hard to lose so much LIFE and love and people and not feel really sad.

WWSD...Today and everyday

My honey was an inspiring man. Number one, he had his priorities straight. He loved God first and foremost, and lived everyday to do the absolute best he possibly could for his family, whom he truly loved more than his own life. When you know that about a man, what more do you need to know to confirm the claim that he was inspiring? And yet, there is so much more to who he was and what he lived for.

Chris had fun every day. He was hilarious but not in a corny way. He was genuinely funny and had a million original things he did to make us laugh. I guess you could say laughter was one of his love languages. It was how he cheered us up, how he told us he loved us and that we were special. It was how we navigated our lives together - lives that had more than their share of difficulty, loss, pain and illness. It was God's blessing.

As such, Chris lived with joy, love, patience and passion for everything he loved and everything that meant something to him.


His friend Brooks Wheeler had some bumper stickers made after Chris died, and they have a peace sign and say "What Would Stubby Do?"

What would he do?

I can tell you this: he would still be living with love and with humor and really hard work because that was who he was. It was the only road he would walk in life, and I can hear him saying to me, "Come on, honey, you can do it!"

I have to go on living my life without the man who was my soul's love, my heart and my honey. I can not let myself dwell on the fact he is gone. I can only look forward and live a life that would make him proud.

Because that is what Stubby would do.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:S Albee St,Grand Haven,United States

Chris, this is for you...from Emily

All I can think of is My Honey....

Rest in peace, my love.

I love you, my honey

It hits me when I least expect it. I'm here at work, typing away being oh-so-productive when suddenly the bottom drops out of my stomach: my honey is gone. I keep trying to wrap my mind around this reality that I will never see you again. The years stretch before me, endlessly dripping into the beyond, and all I can think of is - what will I do without you? To accept that all the plans we made, the anticipation of growing old together - it will never happen. I never get to hug you again, I never get to laugh with you. That concept just doesn't want to go down. I feel it stuck in my chest, and I try to swallow it up and accept it, but it remains like a fossilized lump in my throat. Oh, honey, I love you so much! Help me be strong today. <3

It's My Birthday Today

Oh, comma, I love you!

You know how there are little niggling things tickling the back of your mind that you think you should probably look up, but half the time when you've got a minute to do so, you can't remember what the heck all those myriad of things are??? Oh, no? Welcome to my life, then...

Well, I knocked one off the list today!

For the last several years, it has been a bugger of a brain-bracker that I compulsively use commas in compound sentences, seperating the first compound sentence from the second compound sentence. However, I have become increasingly aware that other people do not use this comma. Almost no one. But I continued to use it, thinking to myself that I never would have ever begun using it if it was wrong, now would I??!!

Apparently, I was right. I should be using it, and even better yet, when people don't use it, they are wrong! Oh, that made me so happy! Now, I'm not saying all my comma usage is right. I look at my commas in this little bloggery, and I have to say, I'm not sure half the time if they are right or not. But one thing I do know: I can use them in a compound sentence! Whoo-hoo!!!

The Trouble with FB

Like many people oh-so-late-to-see-the-light, I am a recovering soul; yes, recovering from being sucked into the vortex of on-line social networks. As a recovering addict, I have had to force myself to abstain from such pleasures as reading my twitter feed, poking people on facebook and - in one of the biggest moments - I deleted my program on my iphone that automatically updated everyone and everything all at the same time. I don't read other people's posts, I rarely comment or post anything myself. Essentially, I have tried to disappear. Except for that whole deleting-my-account thing. I mean, hey, I've got a lot of pictures and memories wrapped up in all of that!

Since my self-enforced retirement from the online community, I have given some thought to why I felt the need to make this socially-sacrificing gesture, essentially removing myself from party invitations, birth and death notices, and all other general information about my friends and cohorts. What it boiled down to is very simply stated: I only have time in my life for people I truly care about. Perusing these websites not only diminishes the amount of time I can spend on people I truly care about, it distracts me with slogan-style statuses from people I actually don't know all that well and if the truth were known, I really don't care about very much at all. Not that I wish them ill, I just don't wish to see yet another status about a piece of food stuck to the side of their coffee cup or how their dog farted and it really smelled. Which really gets me thinking about what I want and why I want it: I want to know what the people I care about are doing - which can be counted in a number less than 30 - and I want to touch base with them and them only. So....I think I'm going on there and I'm going to clean house - and leave it only to the people I truly want to know drank out of a dirty coffee cup.

Yeah, I had a stroke and can't remember what I was going to write.

I know you, my dearly faithful blog readers (who essentially don't exist), are deeply disappointed by the title of this blog. But, I felt I should share it as this is the one reason that you rarely see posts from me anymore. Here I am at work with a slight lull in my day and suddenly had a burst of inspiration for a new blog post. Excitedly, I logged in already beginning to compose my new literary piece in my head. But then - oh, distraction of distractions - I see my brother's post and begin reading his posts....about five minutes into it I think, oh, yeah, I was going to write a post! So I go to write it and - poof - it's gone. Empty. Blank. Not a primrose of a memory of what it was I thought would be so exciting to write.....and so you get another vacuous nothing of a post. Hmph!!!!!!!

Perhaps one day I will be able to retain my train of thought long enough to write extemporaneously....until then....harumphicolispism!!!!!!!! 

My honey

I just have to tell you - the general world out there - that I have probably the best human being in the world as *my husband*. I'm not saying that to brag, and I'm not saying that to butter him up. It's just the darn truth. No matter how you measure out what a good person truly is - no matter what criteria you use - he will rate at the top of your list, too. He's truly the best human being I know, bar none, and I love him more than my flattened personality could ever, ever express. He saved my life, my childrens' lives and the lives of many other people too numerous to count by being the good, honest, hard working, truly inspiring human being he is. At this time of year when we are thinking of giving things to each other - and even about the things we may get - I realize that there is nothing I could ever give that means so much as what that man gives every day. He is the love of my life, and I pray that his influence makes me a better person each and every day.

Doing it for myself

About six years ago - or was it seven? - I quit college just short of my two year degree. By "just short" I mean by 22 credits. Even still, I could get those 22 credits fairly quickly. I remember Brian Hosticka took 24 credits one semester prior to transferring to a four year university. Last time I saw him was at the court house prior to some court case he was working on. As a lawyer. So I guess those deeply mediocre grades he got that semester didn't hurt him too badly. I mean hey, he finished. I have A's on my transcript. About one A for every class I dropped. I'm thinking deeply mediocre grades on a completed degree a far better accomplishment than my few A's and many, many withdraws.

So I'm heading back this winter, taking six credits, considering that the likely outer limit of my ability while working full time. I'm also taking the last two required classes for my Associates degree. After that, I'll have 16 credits to fill of whatever I want to take. Not too bad, I'm thinking...wish me luck that I can still retain newly-learned knowledge after my stroke. If not, this could be a deeply painful failure. Good luck to me!!!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Hello, Blogger, Long Time-No See!

I said recently on that little comment on the post one-down on the list here that I don't care who reads my blog; I just write because it is IN me to write - or some such nonsense. Well...that's not entirely true. I write because I love to have people read my blog and post comments. For a long, long, looong time I did the FB hop like the little bunny-bunny I am, reading and commenting and genuinely irritated at most everything other people put on their FB wall. It lacked any real sense of accomplishment for me. Oh, I would post exciting little tidbits and wait with bated breath until *someone* posted a comment and then, within 30 seconds, I would respond. Then wait once more with bated breath for more comments.... Stupid. Not fulfilling. And I would always put such stupid statuses on there - for example, see the stupid status I posted a month or more ago happily plastered on my blog wall (look to the right). See what I mean???

One thing I did like about FB, though, was when my girls' friends wanted to friend me. I loved that. I thought it was so deviilishly clever of me to have *their* friends as *my* friends because then I could see what *they* were putting on *their* wall!!! Stupid. All it really did was show me what is obvious to most well-actualized parents: kids are kiddishly posturing their version of adulthood exhaustively on FB. And quite irritatingly, too. I used to get pretty hyped up if I saw something upsetting on there. Now I realize that - like my own self - the kids are putting stuff up there they barely put together into an actualized thought, so why bother? I mean, do we REALLY want to see the random thoughts plucked out of the heads all around us? Not really. Not me, that's for sure. If I want a vision of random thoughts, I all I have to do is listen to my own!

Anyhoo, it's good to see you. Love-love-love!!