the undertow

Death can throw a wide net.

It was tossed out yesterday morning by Donna, a neighbor-friend in a weekly Happy Hour started during lockdown and continued these years later. Our cul-de-sac group of initially five, isn't gossipy but we do catch up on the goings on in the neighborhood and in our lives. I'd say we teeter between the relevant and the personal.

Donna's text told us that the husband of her close friend, hospitalized unexpectedly as home-hospice was being arranged, had passed in the wee hours of the night. The wife was headed home to face the hospital bed doomed to remain empty.

The image brought back many sad memories for Donna. She, Carolyn, Linda (now moved), and I, all lost our husbands while being neighbors. Oddly, all those deaths didn't bring us together as better friends as much as did the forced isolation of Covid.

We met outside for months, enduring the Dallas heat and when it turned cold we gathered, bundled in coats with propane heaters keeping us comfortable enough.

Her gentleman friend's death sends out unintentional ripples as many of us, like Donna, are caught, tangled up in our own remembrances of what made most of us widows. My friend Sheryl lost her husband last fall and it was months before the hospital bed and more were picked up from their home. She slept in another room or in hotels until very recently. Carolyn has her story, Linda has hers.

I didn't expect it but I was also thrown back, harshly, to my night coming home from the hospital to an empty house, and the next night equally painful as I shopped urns for ashes yet to be. I have described that pain and the months which followed, being as if I'd fallen into a black hole. I am today happy years removed from that darkness yet within a single text I instantly relived what it felt like then.

I did what I always do to deal... I headed to the kitchen. I drowned my sorrow, literally at the sink.

Spanakopita has been in wait on my list and it seems the perfect time-consuming thing to bake. If it turns out, tomorrow I'll deliver for all the widows.

Extra servings will be set aside for W, who brings the happy with her lightness of being to our Happy Hours. W didn't lose a spouse from death but has in many ways unexpectedly suffered far worse. But that's another story for another longer day in the kitchen.