My honey survived his illness this year. My first husband wasn't so lucky.
I have been married three times. My second husband is my son's father; husband number two is alive and well. I checked. It's not hard because we are still friends.
My first husband and I had no children together; we were married for a short time, and we haven't seen each other or spoken in decades. I've always been okay with the lack of contact. It was not a healthy relationship. We were both terribly flawed, and too young, to create and sustain a healthy marriage. I married him for many reasons, including love; I'm not sure why he married me. The marriage and breakup were not pretty, but the divorce was over pretty quickly.
My first husband died February 13, 2014. I stumbled across the information on the Internet more than a month after the fact. I have searched for him in the past and knew a little about his life. This time when I plugged his name into a search engine, instead of long list of unrelated links, a page full of links to his obituary popped up. The shock was so great that I jumped out of my chair, barely refrained from throwing my laptop across the room and proceeded to swear and bolt out of the room.
My first coherent thought was that one husband died and the other survived. I am still struggling to work through the trauma of watching my honey suffer through weeks on a respirator, a month in the hospital, and months of recovery. The parallel illnesses are mind blowing. I know that we are of an age when our peers have begun to die, and those numbers will increase as the years progress. At least three people that I went to high school with have passed away in the last few months. I'm still so shocked by his death. I feel bruised by the proximity. If we hadn't divorced, I could be the widow. Even with the divorce, I almost was. This brings the stark reality of the last few months into a sharper, more painful, focus.
The obituary doesn't list a cause of death. I wanted to know how and why he died. He was relatively young, only 51. His father and one brother died of cancer. I believe that his mother did as well. Did he suffer for months or years?
As I searched, I learned more about his life, and so much was good. It looks as though he overcame enough of his flaws to create a happy life. He was married for a third time and had three children. The pictures I found of them online are lovely. I'm truly happy that he was able to find stability in his life and build a family. It looks as though he was surrounded by a community of people who genuinely loved him. I remember him as being very charismatic and a great storyteller. In our life, his stories ultimately got in the way of our marriage because he couldn't seem to make a clear distinction between fact and fiction.
I reached out to both his ex-wife and his widow through the Internet. I expressed my condolences and sent them prayers. It is the least they deserve. They and their children loved the man. He was so clearly not the boy I married any more than I am the girl he married. I didn't ask them about his health or death. I didn't ask any questions. Neither has responded.
I found pictures of him in a wheelchair, but no explanation as to why. I ordered a copy of his death certificate; the causes of death don't point to a definitive, definable thing. I finally stumbled across an online posting that said he had a heart attack.
I keep coming back to a few parallels in our lives. We have both been married three times. Our parents are all dead. Russ had a massive heart attack the same week that Joe was told that he might have cancer in his brain. The overlap of illnesses is so strange.
Is it possible that even after all these years there is still some sort of cosmic connection? Can we attach our lives through marriage and really completely severe all ties in a divorce? My own parents died 20 days apart. They had been divorced for 40 years and hadn't spoken in more than a decade, yet they died close together in time, 100 miles apart.
Russ became very ill; the heart attack left him on life support in a vegetative state. Joe became very ill and was put on a respirator. When the doctors removed the respirator, Joe could breath on his own. Shortly before doctors took Russ off life support, tests confirmed that Joe did not have cancer. When the respirator was removed, Russ died. The parallels diverged.
One husband died; the other didn't. Is it irony? Coincidence? Divine hand? I don't know. I do know that it is painful.
RIP to the flawed boy I once loved. RIP to the good man he became.
