Boiled Lobster

I love lobster. I eat it all summer long in Maine. In early June, we get hard shells and you have to use a cracker and muscle power to get the meat out. By Fourth of July, the lobsters have molted and we get to eat soft shells. We can break the shells easily with our hands. I say “we” but it was only I who ate lobsters. Steve claimed he didn’t like the taste but what he really didn’t like was the effort and the attendant mess involved in eating a lobster. Of course, he never had a problem eating a messy plate of barbecued ribs or chicken wings, the sauce leaving a greasy trail on his beard and his shirt.

I’m wondering how long it will take me to shed my old shell. How long before I have a new skin to present to the world. It's the same old me inside but somehow everything feels and looks and tastes differently to me.

A Single Woman

I am a single woman now. I haven’t been a single woman since June 26, 1969, when I married Steve barely two months after my 22nd birthday, a child bride with no idea what married life was all about, let alone married life to Steve Solms.

So now I have to figure out what it means to live alone with no one but myself to answer to. It must mean more than getting rid of the TV in the bedroom or canceling the subscription to the Inquirer, both of which I’ve done already. My apartment looks just the same except there aren’t any pretzels on my pantry shelves and the hamper in my bedroom is never full.

When I’m home, I listen to my music at full volume without complaint and I make steamed kale for dinner and consider it a meal. I’ve decided to redo my bedroom and make a new space for this new self to live in. Small steps forward to my new life.

Exhausted

The days are long when you wake at 5 am especially when you go to sleep at midnight. This has been my schedule off and on since Steve died. It seems a blessing when I can go back to sleep until 7 or 8. But most mornings, I wake up before the sun and lay in bed thinking, thinking, thinking and all too conscious that I am alone in the bed. Finally, I have no choice but to get up and go downstairs, hoping the New York Times will have been delivered and I can make my smoothie and start the real day.

Everyone says I’m doing great but I’m not exactly sure what they mean by that. I have no training or experience in this role. I never watched my mom go through this. I just keep having these weird, almost out of body experiences. Like this morning when I met Joan to go through the documents in Steve’s safe deposit box. We sat together in the tiny room and I made small talk with the bank officer but inside I get saying to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” Then when we were through, I went off to buy a new pair of glasses—business as usual, in other words.

Go Phillies

My friends say I am like a homing pigeon, always looking to fly back to the nest. Maybe they are right.

As promised I have been busy, making dinner dates, going to the movies, taking the train into New York but always looking forward at the end of the evening to getting back into my own space where I feel the safest and most comfortable. Where I don’t have to worry about what people are thinking or how I should behave or what I should be feeling.

So tonight I chose not to stay over in New York but to take the train home, put on my robe and cuddle up in front to the TV and watch the Phillies. It’s what I would be doing if Steve were here with me. We would have had an early dinner, probably sushi around the corner, then we would have rushed back home in time for the first pitch. I wouldn’t have watched the whole game but I would have wandered in and out of the room checking periodically to see if the Phillies were winning and to scold Steve for eating pretzels. "Sit with me, El," he'd say. "This guy is going to hit a home run. I can feel it."

No pretzels in the house anymore but I still have the Phillies on. I'm hoping they win for Steve’s sake.

Moving Forward

I am so tired of being a widow. It’s really depressing and I don’t like being sad all the time. I have to remember that before this happened, I often looked forward to being alone, that I treasured the time I spent with just myself, that I valued my privacy maybe sometimes too much. Haven’t I always bragged about having a room of my own, a space that is just for me, where even Steve had to be invited in.

So from now on I am going to consider myself a single woman who was lucky enough to have been married for 41 years to an always interesting, often challenging but always loving man. For 41 years as a married woman, I led an extraordinarily full and rich life with that man. Now I have to make a full and rich life for myself.

I know I can do it. As Steve always said, “A busy person is a happy person. I intend to keep busy.

Sunset

I am a very private person who is often loath to express what I am really feeling even to those with whom I am most close. Indeed my husband, a veritable fountain of feeling and expression, who wore his heart on his sleeve, his emotions always boiling to the surface, often complained that I didn't tell him what I was feeling RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE. And here I am putting it all down, letting it all hang out--all the anguish, the confusion, the unedited gush of emotion--in a very public format, this blog, for anyone to read or comment on.

Like today, at sunset time, Liz and I took a walk on the beach and I suddenly realized that every house I have lived in with Steve--our apartment on Spruce Street, our house in Maine, the villa in Tuscany, the beach house in Jamaica--faced west allowing us to always mark the end of the day often together, often with friends and family and very often with a glass of wine. A ritual to which we looked forward and of which we never tired. It made me sad and a little tearful that here I was in a place, Grenada, watching the sky and the ocean turn deliquescent as the sun descended into the sea and that Steve wasn't here to enjoy that beauty with me.