Diary of a Widower

Facts of the unbearable truth

SUNDAY, December 6 – It’s a miserable Sunday afternoon.  Sander’s away playing jazz at ‘The Bathtub’. I’ve picked up some potato chips for Eamonn which he is now devouring on the couch, absorbed in his new Garfield book. The dog seems happy enough.  The cat’s been mad at the dog for once again pinching his dinner, with just one sweep of her tongue. But, now, he’s comfortably ensconced on Eamonn’s lap. Maybe this is a good moment to go over that medical dossier.

Her last moments of consciousness:  ‘Friday 23 October 02:00.  Severe headache persists, T 36.7.  Procedure:  repeat paracetamol 1000 mg. plus tramal 50 mg.  After 3 hours,severe occipital headache persists. EMV max, lucid and oriented (in English). B / subcutaneous 5 mg morphine.  04.00 call in connection with sudden drop in EMV and immeasurable output: pulse 180, RR immeasurable, no exhalations: reanimation and intubation (initially without sedation):  during EIMIVI, anisocory, no response to light.’

All of this according to the doctor in attendance.  The surgery was to no avail…  It’s a  big pile of paper.  Shuffled in amidst all the medical terms, we – her husband and children – also make the occasional appearance.

Questions begin to arise. A great many questions. But the answer remains mercilessly  the same. She is dead.

Signing ‘our’ mortgage papers

WEDNESDAY, November 25 – Feeling terrified by the howling wind. It’s stormy this morning and even the dog is edgy. Dry leaves blow up all around her and invisible gusts of wind attack her from all sides. It gets to me, too. Weird thoughts enter my head. What if a huge branch were to fall from that tree? What if an entire tree gets blown down? My own vulnerability is palpable. The boys aren’t the only ones to feel it. In a matter of seconds, it could become reality and I fear an early death that’s just around the corner.

15:20 – I am writing this entry with a brand-new pen that I snitched from the bank where I signed the new mortgage papers.  A dozen or so initials and one full signature. I don’t know whether I was even in the neighborhood of the lines, since I was blinded by tears.

I couldn’t see the last few pages. It’s possible that the document was ultimately sealed with tears of love.  Two months before, Jennifer and I sat in here together, in that same bank building in Amsterdam, joking about the number of papers we had to sign in connection with the life insurance clause.

Fucking bizarre – pardon my French – to be sitting there again, the same two chairs positioned in front of the desk, one of them occupied by my briefcase. Conflicting emotions.  On the one hand relief, since our American Dream – a house of our own – was going to come true after all, but it was also excruciating painful because that dream had been blown to smithereens, making way for a nightmare.

Changing residences without Jennifer. Each stroke of the pen on the revised mortgage papers felt like a shovelful of sand falling on a coffin.  Each time I formed those two small initials, I was deleting Jennifer from her own life. She was getting closer to becoming an administrative procedure, in settlements of something that once was. She’s dead and that fact is brought home to me with every breath I take.

Tears of sorrow, of relief, of love?  Who knows?  Tears, buckets of tears.

The woman at the bank, who had gone to a great deal of trouble to make it all possible after the whole deal had almost fallen through, asked me if I’d like to be alone for a moment. I’ve already been alone for a month, I thought, but she meant well, so I just shook my head. When the tears had dried, I broke the silence by taking over her role:  ‘Well, Mr. Overdiek,’ I purred, ‘congratulations on the purchase of your house.’

Even a gruesome joke can do wonders.