Notification of my husband’s death happened at 3:15 in the morning. A brief phone call from an officer asking me to please meet them at my door. They came in (2 female officers), I sat down, because they told me to, and they told me of HIS death. (Car accident on his way home from work).
A good friend, “P”, was visiting at the time and one of the officers roused her out of bed since they apparently have a rule not to leave us shell shocked widows alone….this extends to not letting us go up to the bathroom alone, one of them stood outside while I went…I mean seriously?!? If I was going to try suicide I would wait until the police had left, and frankly if they were that worried they should have moved the huge bowie knife that was sitting in plain view on my desk.
At some point one of them mentioned to P that I seemed to be in shock…
…Ya think?!?!?!
By 4am the cops had left and P and I had time to kill before we started making the awful phone calls. I spent some time crying but we also came up with a few rules I should follow:
- NO more cats, we already have 2 and anymore could start the slow decent in “Crazy Cat Lady” territory.
- NO tattoos for 10 months, incase I wanted to go that “”commemorative” route.
- NO neck tattoos EVER
- NO puppies, P thought her Jack Russell might be in the family way with a Beagle, the puppies would be cute but also dumb, noisy and hyperactive….if I wanted that I should have had kids.
- NO Face Book for 36 hours (I had a wild compulsion to post “Due to the upcoming zombie apocalypse we have decided on cremation”.)
Eventually a reasonable hour of the morning arrived when we could start making calls, P actually made most of them; I was done after phoning my parents. Then had the vague stress about what a disaster the kitchen was after doing up a vodka watermelon the day before for a pool party. (I did try mopping the floor the day before but that mop broke.)
One of P’s first calls was to another close friend of mine, C. C showed up with another friend, K, in tow with food, boxes of Kleenex, toilet paper and a new mop, and then proceeded to clean my kitchen – really above and beyond the call of duty considering my housekeeping skills are on the relaxed side. I was also told by C that as a widow I had the SUPERPOWER of acting however and doing whatever I wanted! It made me a little bit happy because I thought I was acting a bit weird, cry, crack a joke, cry. At some point I was ordered to grab a shower and change my cloths, when I reappeared the cleaning crew was gone and the kitchen was Mom-ready.
The stupidest things we had to worry about was that HIS name would be released to the media 12 hours after he had been identified, and we didn’t want anyone finding out that way. I mean fuck, who needs the stress of playing “beat the newscast” on top of everything else?!?!?
I made some calls to close friends, “P” called everyone else. I’m so grateful she was here; she handled all kinds’ issues. At one point a well-meaning (but stupid) friend of a friend called and when I picked up she told me she had hear I was in a car accident and was I alright? ….I silently handed the phone to “P” and lit another cigarette.
HIS best friend showed up and shortly afterwards so did my parents after their 6 hour drive and after that the machine took over. A funeral home was chosen (the closest one to our house), more people were notified, people answered the phone for me, other people showed up with food. Then we got an awful call from the local newspaper. Due to one of HIS hobbies he had been featured in past media stuff, a reporter caught his name as being the deceased, had already talked to a few people for the article and did we want to comment…?!?!?....Wow, just wow. You’d think a small town newspaper would have a bit more tact or respect but apparently not. So HIS best friend “D” talked to the report for awhile. They were running the story whether we liked it or not so might as well help them get it right. But I mean seriously, WTF?!?!?!?!
About this time I started swearing a lot, usually I don’t in front of my parents, or try not to, but I seemed to have lost that filter, and it’s still missing….plus my Mom’s half deaf, and I’m the WIDOW I have SUPERPOWERS I can do whatever I want.
I started referring to the whole thing as “a big bag of suck” and mentioned several times that HE was an inconsiderate asshole for dying on me. In the next few days that would change to inconsiderate mother-fucker because it started to sink in that this was really happening.
Sleep was impossible that night. I didn’t help that I had a summer cold and was coughing a lot; chain smoking my way through the day didn’t help either.
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