They say everyone grieves in their own way. My grief after my husband, Pat, died in January of 2022 was something I was not prepared for.
I seemed OK. When I attended a grief class with others, I was stoic by comparison. I told myself that because my husband had been a Type 1 diabetic for 57 years, and we had been married for 54 years, I’d felt anticipatory grief, so it was easier for me to navigate the reality of his passing.
Unfortunately, a few months after that, two dear friends who attended Pat’s memorial died unexpectedly. Then our 8-year-old granddaughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and her 5-year-old brother was in the ICU for 11 days with RSV. In October, my mother in Texas went into the hospital and never was able to return to her apartment, although she lived another year.
During those first few months after Pat died, I was without a refrigerator for two months when the 2-year-old appliance decided to not work. I had to replace the water heater, the air conditioner/heater unit and the garage door opener component. I had an infestation of mice and ants, which we had never had before. When I tried to change our financial affairs from my husband’s name to mine, every company wanted to send a verification code to his phone, but I didn’t know his phone’s special security diagram.
In 2023, I traveled to Texas to visit my mother eight times, until she died in November. It was then, unable to be in denial, that I realized what grief really was. She was 99 and I had known her and loved her for 76 years. No one loved me like she did.
Then, before we were halfway through 2024, more deaths occurred: my mother’s loving caregiver, my 47-year-old nephew, a best friend from high school who visited us every year, a 44-year-old son of a good friend and a good friend who coached our son.
It was too much, way too much. I did not cope well.
But there were things that happened during that time that brought a smile to my face.
A few weeks after Pat died and our kids had gone back to their homes, as I tried to go to sleep one night in my very dark bedroom, I saw two rectangles of light over the closet door. They were different sizes and overlapping. I ignored them but the next night there was a single, very bright, large rectangle over the closet. It was about 1 foot wide and a perfect rectangle.
I jumped up and tried to find the source of the light. There was nowhere it could be coming from. The only light was the front porch light, but it was hidden from the bedroom.
When I told my kids about this spooky occurrence, they said, “Dad is messin’ with you.”
He had been an electrical engineer and a prankster. It didn’t surprise me.
Then one night, the doorknob fell off Pat’s office door on both sides. I found it that way in the morning.
Over the next year and a half, I saw the rectangle of light four more times. I never could find any source for it. The last time I saw it was in July 2023. Two weeks later I received a letter from Oregon Health & Science University, where Pat had donated his body. They had finally used it and cremated the remains. I haven’t seen the light since then. It doesn’t feel like coincidence.
Last week our youngest son said that he looked at the chat feature on his phone where he used to text his dad and me. He noticed his dad was still listed, and typed to him, “Hi, Dad; I miss you.”
“I miss you too” appeared. Our son said he knows it was auto-reply, but it still made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
Grieving is not easy, but when “Dad’s messin’ with you,” you can smile.
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