It's a widely accepted notion that humor can help with healing and with processing traumatic events like the death of a loved one. Considering that I spent most of my formative years watching at least two reruns of M*A*S*H a week it was a pretty safe bet that I'd be relying on my ability to laugh at the absuridity of this entire process to get through it all. I learned all I need to know about using humor to deal with horrible times from Hawkeye and company.
But sometimes I forget that my sense of humor seems really weird to some people. Not to rog though. He usually got it and if he didn't he'd just laugh at how I crack myself up. And it went both ways. He used to say that before we met nobody got him. He was a big M*A*S*H fan too and we used to bastardize a Colonel Flagg quote when one of us was laughing at something that left the other shaking his head in bemusement. "Nobody gets me, I'm the wind, baby."
The language of my new life surprises me still. I have to check the widow box now. I'm a widow. I keep repeating that phrase to myself, waiting for it to fit in my mouth the way girlfriend, fiancee and wife so easily did. Widows are old ladies with gray hair in buns who sit on the porch knitting and telling the same stories over and over again to fidgety grandchildren who just want to be anywhere else. Some of that fits as my gray hair is reproducing at an enormous rate lately. And this weekend Keli taught me to knit. But I'm not old and their are no grandchildren and I find it so odd to call myself a widow.
I have a husband who died. But I find myself cleaning that phrase up for other people, saying instead that he "passed away." Inevitably when the conversation including that phrase is done I find myself really the hell pissed off. Passed away my ass. It's such a benign phrase, so gentle, evoking a peaceful crossing over marked by only a soft sigh, may Angels wing you to your rest and all that jazz. "Fuck that shit," I want to yell. "He died. It was messy and sudden and awful and 'he died' doesn't begin to sound harsh enough." Or better yet, "My husband got drunk so he got fired and then he got drunker still and drove his car into a concrete column and he died on impact and felt no pain but there's a knife in my gut that no one will remove." That's what I want to say to the bill collectors and the insurance people and the many other strangers that I have to tell about this whole damn thing. But I'm not crazy enough from grief to ever do that because I know when that happens I'll have finally snapped. And the bill collectors and insurance people and strangers don't care anyway, they just need to update their records and fix their file.
So sometimes when I want to scream at strangers (or better yet at rog but screaming at an urn is rather unsatisfying) I make a joke instead. Sometimes when little things affect me far too much and suddenly the tears overflow and an innocent bystander is caught in the awkward place of having to witness my tears I try to lighten the mood.
At work today we changed offices and moved to another floor while renovations are being done on the other floor. For six months I get my own office. I was in the middle of unpacking when the IT guys and their student workers showed up to fix whatever the hell was preventing us from accessing the network in our new offices.
I have one picture of rog at work, a 4x6 of him on our wedding day in his morning suit and goatee, his smile sort of stagey but with the joy of the day shining in his eyes. I had stuck it on top of a filing cabinet until all the boxes were off my desk.
One of the student workers set up a big ass ladder right in front of the filing cabinets and started messing around with wires in the ceiling and then climbed down the ladder. As he was climbing down he knocked against the frame and the picture wobbled. I gasped far louder and more dramatically than the situation warranted and the student looked kind of spooked and apologized. I smiled and laughed a little and said, "No problem, just try not to break the picture of my dead husband, he's not going to be posing for any more." And then the student looked extra spooked and fled my office like it was Satan's bathroom.
Not that I blame him. It was funny in head because, duh, of course rog isn't going to pose for anymore pictures, he's dead. I forgot that dead spouses aren't so funny to strangers. I forgot that I'm the wind, baby.
