Deja Vu All Over Again

During my first year of widowhood, I took Angelic Daughter on the trip to Maine we would have taken had Mike lived just a few weeks longer. I went to a Hawks game. I went to the opera. I took Angelic Daughter to restaurants we hadn’t been to before.

I was trying to invoke Mike’s presence–trying to feel he was still here, somehow. Ultimately, those excursions just intensified my grief about the permanence of Mike’s absence.

I’ve been retired for a all of two months, and I just realized that I’m repeating a similar pattern, out of some kind of new and different grief. It’s not that I miss my job, or that I’m sad about being retired. I’m not. I’m delighted.

But I’ve been doing things that suggest an attempt to recapture my past, or my lost youth, like eating too many indulgent treats, or downing too many beers in the name of “living a little!” in my retirement.

But I’m retired! I’m supposed to be having fun, right?

Well, fun costs. Physically and financially. Beneath that superficial sense of “living a little,” there’s an undercurrent of panic and a sense of loss: I’m running out of time to do whatever it is I think I get to do now, or what I didn’t do before and will never have the chance to do again.

On Friday I went to see a show called “TJ and Dave.” I’ve been trying to get tickets to this show for over 30 years: every time I tried, it sold out so fast I didn’t have a chance.

This time, however, the show was in a larger, “legit” theater in Chicago. I scored both a ticket and companionship for Angelic Daughter so I could go.

TJ and Dave are universally acknowledged to be the best long form improvisors on the planet. Improvising a two man show requires superb listening, focus, openness, generosity, agreement, and getting out of your own head so you can accept whatever reality you’ve created with your partner, even if you’re not quite sure what it is yet. TJ and Dave are absolute masters at it.

But it’s unreasonable to expect even TJ and Dave to keep it going for longer than 45 minutes. However, legit theater audiences expect a show to last two hours, with a 15 minute intermission. So that left about 30 minutes to fill, which required an opening act.

Turns out the opening act was a guy who worked (as a doorman) with Mike (as a room service waiter) at a Chicago luxury hotel 34 years ago.

On our second date, in 1990, Mike and I went to see this guy’s band. When Mike introduced me to the guy, I jokingly asked him to tell me about Mike, and if I should keep dating him.

I don’t remember what the guy said, but I do remember that whatever he said made me think he was an asshole. Nothing about his demeanor at Friday’s show changed that opinion. But I don’t know the guy. I met him once.

Yet watching a guy from 34 years ago doing the same thing he’d been doing back then led me to wonder how well I know myself, now, as a 65 year old, retired widow with an autistic adult daughter.

I don’t feel old (except when pushing a lawn mower for two hours makes me so sore I can barely move). But I’ll admit, with some shame, that I do feel like I’ve been cheated out of something I can’t quite name.

Snap out of it, Annie. You can’t recapture the past. You don’t get a do-over of a youth that has long since exceeded its “use by” date.

And aging without Mike doesn’t give you permission to resent those happy retired couples filling your Facebook feed with sunny photos of their travels, their weekends away, and their fabulously successful adult children. You don’t get to envy those thinner, younger widows who seem to have unlimited money, not to mention fully launched, neurotypical offspring and several adorable grandchildren, whose posts show them gallivanting off on Caribbean cruises or European vacations every few weeks.

Regret, resentment, and envy are useless (and unattractive) wastes of energy. Improvisors say yes: I’ll be happy, even enchanted, with life as it is, now that the addition of rewards has lessened Angelic Daughter’s anxiety about new skills.

And maybe I’ll post about how great I feel after a long afternoon nap, or recipes I make inexpensively at home, or how I love sitting on my deck, watching birds splash in the birdbath.

Mike loved that, too.

Now I’m getting choked up, dammit.

Missing Mike and all the things that will never be, or never be again, I remain,

Your hard-on-the-outside-but-mush-on-the-inside, mad-at-myself-for-being-a-whiny-self-pitying bore, trying-to-count-my-blessings-through-my-tears,

Ridiculouswoman

Image by Veronika Andrews from Pixabay