The Newborn Widow

I’ve spent my life narrating Evan’s. Happily. Joyfully. It was all I wanted to do. I still have more stories of his to tell, our stories, but picking through those will take more time. For now I’m left with my own stories, from my own vantage point, which feels strange. But here’s one.

The last breath escaped Evan, but I breathed another. In that inhale a widow was born. Fresh, gooey, disoriented, not screaming yet but that would come. My life had turned into something else. Again, as it had so many times over the course of 7 years. This was its worst iteration.

I emerged from the delivery room - where I had acted as midwife delivering Evan over to death and I was in turn delivered over to widowhood. I was immediately cradled by a swarm of loving hands. Everyone that loves me was there. Even if you weren’t, in my mind every person who has ever loved me was sitting in that waiting room at hospice, ready to receive this little newborn widow.

They passed me around with the same gentle care of any newborn. “Easy now, gentle, support her neck, there ya go.” Bess and Graham massaged my calves, sore from walking around in my slippers for days while we’d been at hospice. I cashed in on one of Evan’s quarterly hugs from Bo while Aletha came from the other side and cradled me in. At one point I was draped across a chair sitting on someone. I don’t remember who. Someone who loves me.

Newborn widows come out like livestock. They come out walking. Shaky, but the hooves are on the ground quick. There are decisions to be made. So many. Decisions about the body, the one that used to house Evan but was now vacant. Decisions about how to memorialize the life he lived. Lots of decisions for a little newborn.

Pretty quick I turned into Beyoncé, an unexpected part of my widow life cycle. On every side table, in every cupholder, there was a decaf Americano - my coffee of choice because my nervous system lives up to its name. Anything I wanted or needed was presented to me within minutes. I could have asked someone to bring me the Declaration of Independence and they would have done it with no questions asked. (I imagine this is what Beyoncé’s life is like)

My eyes were still adjusting to the new world. The light felt harsh. But I gathered myself up onto my little hooves and got moving. They wheeled Evan out to take him to the funeral home. Well, not him. Was it him? What was left of him. It wasn’t him. It was his body. Are we our bodies?

It couldn’t be him. Because he is big smiles and infectious laughter and “I love you so much babe” and lots of kisses. But he wasn’t doing any of that. That wasn’t him. That was just his body. It makes you wonder how much we worry about our bodies when in the end they’re gonna get wheeled out on a stretcher and put in the ground (because cremation freaked Evan out). We might be more than our bodies.

I went to the funeral home. They brought me into a room of caskets. I was with my dad. I looked down at my feet. Giant fuzzy slippers. Here I was making these very serious adult decisions in giant fuzzy Target slippers.

I slowly scanned the fluorescent lit room, shuffling in my slippers, one hand slowly dragging along each casket. All of them were ugly. I could not put my very cool New Balance ad of a husband in one of these shellacked cherry wood caskets. None of these would work. I really was turning into Beyoncé.

“Dad these are all ugly.”

First of all, God bless my dad. There are a lot of milestones you reach with your children - first steps and graduation, learning to drive and getting married. The parenting literature does not cover how to navigate the funeral home with your child while they are burying their husband. He knocked it out of the park though.

He laughed, “Well, girl, we can get him one from somewhere else.”

My dad has buried tons of people. Which sounds really badass until you find out he’s a pastor. Which means he knows his way around a funeral home.

“What kind of wood are you looking for?” he asked.

“Pecky cypress,” I heard myself say.

It was the strangest thing, and a power I wish I could possess every day, but I knew the answer to every question they asked me that day. I didn’t mull over anything. My gut took over. I had never thought about any of these things out of respect for Evan. He didn’t want me planning his funeral. He wasn’t thoughtfully hopping off the cliff into The Great Beyond. He was going Thelma and Louise style, burning it out until the end. By God’s grace, he got what he wanted.

But that meant I had not planned any minute of my widowhood. Hadn’t even thought about it. Not one thing. Which is very, very strange for me, a chronic over-thinker. I’d pushed those worries and thoughts and plans aside and imagined only a world where Evan stayed. But he didn’t. So I was completely off script at this point.

I was shocked to find that I didn’t need to do all that planning. There was a clarity waiting for me on the other side of Evan’s death that I could not have known about until I got there. I wandered the graveyard in my fuzzy slippers, picking up lose grass clippings in the fuzz, and knew exactly where Evan should be buried. They needed clothes to bury him in and the outfit came to mind.

I went home to get it and was swallowed whole by my empty house. I wandered around, talking to Evan, trying to wrap my head around the fact that he was gone. I was keenly aware of each hour passing without him here. The widow portion of my life had begun. I was alone.

I am alone. My friends bristle when I say that. Oh they hate when I say that. They correct me every time and I love them for it. It’s the cutest, sweetest thing. I just let them tell me I’m not alone. They are with me. I nod and say, yes, yes I know. I’m not. I have you guys.

And then I load up in my car, in the driver’s seat like always, and look over at the passenger’s seat, now permanently filled with various bags full of various things because no ever rides in that seat. I get home, wrangle three strong-willed children through bedtime, put dishes away, lay clothes out, tidy, lock up, shower off, tuck into my giant empty bed and giggle at the notion that I am not alone.

“I am not alone” is the lie I let my friends believe. It’s the only way they can sleep at night in a world where I live in this much pain. They tell themselves: She’s not alone - I’m with her. I care. It’s a helpful lie for people who love me. But I know the truth. The vacancy signs are everywhere, most potently in the deepest parts of my heart - a place where a handsome and kind man used to live. I would be nothing without the love and support of my friends and family, but there are so many spaces none of them can fill.

I always hoped that Evan and I would go out like Noah and Allie in The Notebook. We had that kind of love. Our story didn’t follow their exact trajectory, but it was a tale of young love so intense you would alter the course of your life in order to keep it. In the end of the movie, elderly Noah and Allie are laying in Allie’s hospital bed, discussing their love and pondering whether it was the kind of thing that could create miracles, something I wondered often about Evan and me. Then they die there together in each other’s arms.

That’s how I wanted it to end, what I thought was the most natural perfect ending to the Megan and Evan love story. There shouldn’t be a world where Megan exists without Evan, and vice versa. We should go together. But then Evan started slipping away from me and I knew that so many of my dreams, including that one, would slip away with him.

But as I sit here now, I genuinely feel like we did go out that way. We lived that final scene of The Notebook. We were squished into his twin-sized hospice bed whispering sweet nothings to each other as the life drained from him. He died. And I died there with him.

There was a Megan that could only exist in this world with him. She’s gone now. I’ve spent months avoiding it, even telling myself I refused to turn into someone else following Evan’s death. I think this is mainly because all the grievers told me I would fundamentally change and I wanted to prove them wrong. I always want to be the exception to the rule.

Unfortunately, and also fortunately, I am no exception. I am not superhuman. I can die too. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful there are parts of me I can no longer access without Evan. What if I could? If our love was what we always boasted it to be, how could I possibly continue on unchanged without him? If I really attributed so much of who I was to the love he and I shared, how could I just remain exactly the same without his influence?

Megan and Evan are frozen in time, laying there in that hospice bed. That was the last of them the world would ever see. Two separate cocoons, side by side, wiggling, shivering, scared of what’s next, knowing that we would not know each other in our next forms. He is flying free now, wherever in time and space he may be, and I do not know that Evan. But my faith would hold that he still exists and I believe it’s his greatest iteration.

And here I am, flying. Where? I don’t know. But I am something else now, something I’m trying to get used to. The journey for me looks like learning to love this new form - to cherish her the way Evan would. He loved all the versions of me he met. He won’t get to walk through life with this version and I have to be okay with being a Megan that Evan never got to know. Born into this new life, into this new being.

Even though I can’t see him, I still hear him, faintly, cheering me on, just like he told me he would.