Poetic License

A few days ago I made a discovery. Although it had no direct impact on my life, it impacted my soul. Some people you encounter in life are not in your life for very long, but it would be foolish to say they did not impact you or stick in your mind. This is especially true when the person in question was someone you were once intimate with. Though the tie has been long broken, the psychic image is still as real as a dusty footprint on the surface of the moon. Undisturbed. Clear as the day it was made.

I made this discovery in a quiet moment, when I was thinking about having a nap after my work day was over. Every now and then, as many people do, I poke around online to see what has become of the people of my past. First, I flipped through a couple of emails and socials, and then I typed her name into a browser, for no reason at all. Just curiosity.

She was a woman I dated for a few months in 2011-2012. The relationship went much faster than I had intended. Looking back, it was as though she had a job position to fill, and she thought I would fit that role just fine. And as for me, I went along with everything, as was my tendency at that time. I needed someone in my life, I thought, so I was too open to falling for any new and shiny thing.

Her name was Kim. We met through an online dating app, and after a week or so of messaging, went to dinner one night at a local restaurant. It was later than I would normally dine out, nearly ten o’clock, but she was a doctor and kept very different hours than mine. I accommodated her. (That was to become a pattern.)

When she showed up at the restaurant, I thought, Okay, she looks nice enough. She was as tall as me, about forty pounds heavier, but well-dressed. I knew she had recently gone through an abdominal surgery because of some loose skin (the kind you have after a sudden weight loss), so our first date was delayed by a few weeks, initially. When she arrived, she apologized for being a little late, and as though to explain why, she lifted a surgical drain out of her pocket to show me. Had I been a squeamish person, that would have thrown me. I’m not, and it didn’t.

We sat down to dinner, and we chatted easily. She had an intensely confident air, as though she were in charge in every aspect of her life (and of yours). She told me about her life as an emergency room doctor, which I found fascinating. I told her about mine as a writer. Though she was in her early 40s, she looked a little older, which told me something about the stress of her life. I was only a few years past the loss of my daughter, approaching fifty. I was thin. I’d been through quite a bit of stress, not only because of Stephanie’s death but also because of the tumultuous relationship I’d had with Denise. I can’t remember if I told her about that, but I must have. I remember her telling me about her ex, with whom she had adopted two boys.

Before we finished dinner, I knew about her sons, Thomas and Justin. She had encountered them both during her time working in a hospital. I remember her saying that her youngest son had been born to a drug-addicted mother, and that he had health issues that sprang from that rough beginning. She and her ex-partner had adopted them, with her being the primary parent.(This was before same-sex marriage became legal, and it was prior to second-parent adoption being more acceptable.) She told me she still had a friendly relationship with her ex, which I found out later would not have been how I would describe their relationship, and that they worked together to parent the boys.

It was a memorable first date for all of those reasons. I learned a lot about her in our two hours in the restaurant. When we were ready to go, we walked to her car so we could sit and talk more. At some point, I leaned over and kissed her. She seemed to like the kisses very much, blushing with pleasure and holding my gaze. They were nice kisses. I always thought you could tell a lot about someone by the way they kissed. For the first time, I saw in her face that some of her projected confidence was a ruse. I saw a tiny bit of need in her eyes.

Suddenly, she said, “You need to meet the boys.”

What a way for a first date to go, eh?

We drove off in her Lincoln Navigator, with kids’ car seats in the back and a bit of the usual kid detritus evident around them, and headed to Thurmont, just north of Frederick. We drove up to a large, two-story house in a quiet neighborhood. It was chilly out. We hadn’t yet had a first snow, but the wind bit at us, finding its way through the gaps in our coats.

The inside of the house was a bit of a disaster, to put it mildly. Whereas I’m a person who usually apologizes for the state of my house as people come in (even though my house is typically neat but not in a designer way), Kim walked around and through the mess without a care. Kid toys were everywhere, and a large bird cage sat in the den, home to a large, red macaw. The boys, who had been watching a kid’s movie with their sitter, came flying over the back of the couch to greet their mom. They seemed like nice boys, if a little wild. The macaw screeched and flapped his wings. Her kitchen had obviously been well-used and somewhat damaged by her large dogs. Because I was so careful with my own house, I found that hers rattled me. She, on the other hand, seemed to be saying, You’re going to fit in around here just fine.

I reiterate. It was our first date!

After she took me back to my car that evening, I remember feeling overwhelmed, but special, that she would want me to meet her boys. We have perfect vision in hindsight, though, and I see now how desperately she needed someone to plug into her life. Before long, she wanted me around all the time. Within a couple of months, she wanted me to move in with her. She told me that the boys would be good for healing my heart.

“I’ve got this big house,” she said. “The boys love you, and I love you.”

I was flattered right into changing my life for her, trying to wrap my busy life around hers. I was working full-time and was also working full-time on a masters program, but she felt it would all work out. If only I had seen that it would work out for her but not for me, I might have spared myself a lot of heartache. I loved the boys deeply, but it was hard for me to be patient with them while dealing with the absolute chaos of her life and of mine.

Her body was taking a long time to heal from her surgery, so she took me with her to the plastic surgeon, where they taught me to change her packing and bandages, attaching them all to a wound vac. She still had a gaping wound on her abdomen, which I saw that day in the plastic surgeon’s office.

And her dogs. Well, untrained is a mild euphemism for what they were. they had destroyed her back door and had ruined large parts of the laundry room and mud room. They, like her entire life, were chaos.

Instead of being understanding of the intense pressure I was under, grieving, working, studying, and now dealing with her chaos, she grew impatient with me. She actually told me one night, when I was complaining that I wasn’t getting enough rest, that I could take a nap when the boys went to bed, and then I could get up when she came home late, to spend time with her. It began to dawn on me that she had not one care about me or how I felt, or even what I did during the sometimes eighteen hours a day when she was gone, as long as it didn’t interfere with what she needed from me.

I loved her, but she needed me to be the boys’ mom, her housemaid, her cook, and a million other “wifely” roles. My stress level was beyond anything I had felt since my daughter died. I felt that I was going to lose my mind. We began to bicker. I tried to get her attention, but she was pulling away.

One day, it broke. We had had a fight that morning before she left for work. It was crystal clear that she was not interested in actually talking to me or trying to help me find a way to manage everything around the house. I had noticed late notices and bills piling up on her counter, but I had no monetary ties with her. I worried that bad things were going to start to happen, which was just one more stressor on top of everything else. It was one more area where I had no insight or control.

During the time I lived with her, I had a surgery of my own. It was a surgery to implant a device to stimulate my bladder, which had decided to stop talking to my brain. Electrodes were threaded into my epidural space, attached to an external pack that controlled the electrical impulses to the nerves. She had no sympathy for my recovery or my experiences with the device. After all, she said, I never heard her complaining about any pain she had from her wound vac. Here’s a real kicker, though. Because – due to her life – I was delayed in getting back to my doctor to have the temporary medical device removed, Kim removed it. Because she was a doctor, I felt little compunction about letting her do it. My urologist, on the other hand, was gobsmacked when I returned to her office, carrying the device in a plastic grocery bag. She was shocked speechless. I should have recognized then that my life had become unmanageable.

During those days, Kim had also begun taking my Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication for which I had a prescription during those early years of grief. When I confronted her about it, she shrugged. “Take some of my Klonipin,” she had said. Nothing seemed like a big deal to her. I knew she had somehow lost her job as head of the emergency department at a nearby hospital, but she never wanted to talk about why. When I saw my Xanax disappearing, I began to think she had a drug problem. I didn’t want to think so, but it seemed likely.

As you can see, things were fraying, then unravelling, and finally, falling apart. On the morning we broke, I called the sitter and began packing up my car. I had some furniture in the basement that would have to come later, but I couldn’t take anymore. When we got to the point of having screaming matches, I knew it was over.

It was a difficult morning. When I, in my fully-packed car, got to the stop sign before the treacherous cross over US 15 South, I felt a sudden instinct to drive right out in front of an oncoming semi truck. I almost punched the gas as the truck bore down on me. Thankfully, I had the good sense to look over at my dog and my cat, who I had in the front seat with me. I could easily have done myself in at that moment, but I would never harm my innocent creatures. I drove the rest of the way home carefully, though tears streamed down my cheeks.

After I arrived back at my townhouse, which my ex and my son still shared, I dissolved into trembling and tears. I confessed to having nearly killed myself on the way home. I asked Paul to take me to the hospital so I could get some help. As frustrated as he was with me, he did help me. Had it been up to Kim, she couldn’t have cared less if I were dead in the middle of the highway.

So that is how things ended with Kim. I tried to see her one time after my hospitalization to explain and to talk about things, but the switch had flipped in her. Her plans for me had not worked out, so she was done with me. No friendship. No conversation. As much as it hurt, I knew I had done the right thing. I knew that leaving had quite literally saved my life.

That was the last time I ever heard from her. So imagine my surprise to find her obituary after a casual search. She died on September 1, 2013, nearly a month before I got married. Her obituary said she had died at her home in Thurmont. My first thought was that it was an overdose. After all, she was only 44. I thought of the way she drained my prescription for Xanax, and the way she casually took painkillers with it, often a lethal combination. She seemed to have such a blasé attitude toward strong medication that it was naturally my only way to interpret why a young woman, a young mother, would just died at her home. I have no idea, really, how she died. I can only guess. The way she had cut me off left me no way to maintain any kind of relationship.

After reading the obituary several times, and reading the condolences left on Legacy for her, it began to really sink in. In the way typical of my body, I began to tremble and grow cold, as though feeling the grave myself. My mind felt scattered, as though it were seeking to understand that which cannot be explained. I thought of the good times I’d had with her, but I also thought of the awful way things ended. I wondered about the boys. Searching for them, I found their Facebook profiles and saw that they were grown young men now, still in the Thurmont area. I wondered how they had dealt with losing their mom. I wondered if they had gone to their other mom. So many questions; no answers at all.

That evening, I sat out on my deck with a friend, but I don’t remember a lot about what we discussed. I was still trying to process the change that had occurred in the fabric of my life that afternoon. Even when we break things off completely with someone, their footprint on your moon’s surface remains. The breeze of their passing is not enough to erase the imprint they left behind on your heart. Though I felt used in the aftermath of the breakup, Kim left an imprint on me. Her boys certainly did. I’m sad that I wasn’t able to be there for any of them, but we often have no choice in the way things play out, do we? Sometimes the other person has all the power and chooses to exercise it in a destructive way that shuts the door and nails it forever.

I’m reminded again that it costs nothing to be kind. I don’t like to nail the door closed on relationships, but sometimes it becomes necessary. Maybe she thought it was better for the boys. Or maybe she really was just that selfish. If I couldn’t be who she needed me to be, she didn’t need me in any way at all. I have had to do the same thing in a couple of instances, but it took me a long time to get to that point. Sometimes it is healthier to make a clean break and move on. Clearly it was in this instance. Yes, my heart broke, but in the end, it all worked out for everyone except Kim.

Be kind to yourself, even when you’re not sure you deserve it.

Namaste,

Jude