Kim Ramsahoye
Loss of Husband, Dave, to Brain Cancer
Hi Kim! Tell us, what’s your story?
My name is Kim Ramsahoye. I’m 47 (almost 48 – yikes!) and I live in Ontario, Canada – just outside of Toronto. I am originally from Montreal and I’m the youngest of 5 kids, my closest sibling being 13 years older than me. I have a really big tight knit family. My parents immigrated from Trinidad in the 50s – first to the U.S. where my dad did his Masters and PhD in Civil Engineering in Washington and Oklahoma and then they moved up to Montreal where I was born, when he became a university professor at Concordia University. I now work for a college in administration…something I fell into after Dave died but feels like the right spot for me after a round about path. I have two teenage daughters; Charlotte is 18 and Isabel is 15. Most of what I do revolves around them, and our two Cavapoo dogs – Archie and JJ (short for Jughead, except she’s a girl, so we call her JJ!). I’m just an average mom of teens, except I am a solo parent and I’ve been through some brutal losses in my life. We love music, singing and dancing in this family…my husband was a keyboard player in bands when he was younger, both of the girls dance competitively, and we sing non-stop in this house. It’s kind of like living in a musical.
What was life like before the loss of your husband, Dave?
Life was “normal”- suburban, married life. In the year before Dave got sick, I had just gone back to work full time for the first time since we had our kids. It was the first time we were starting to ease into have two incomes again, starting to enjoy the little things about being a couple again, having a bit of extra money for date nights or vacations. I stayed home with the girls after Isabel was born, because paying for two daycares, commuting to the rather joyless career I was in at the time just didn’t make much sense. So for almost 8 years I worked part-time (evenings and weekends) and stayed home with the kids. We never had tons of money, but we always made it work. I was that mom who volunteered in the classrooms for pizza day, field trips and reading help. We had playdates all the time and grew some pretty deep-rooted friendships in our neighbourhood with other moms I met throughout the years. Dave worked pretty close by and had lots of flexibility in his career as an audio engineer for IMAX (yup head office is here!) and we spent most of our married years with young kids doing what young families do…getting up at the crack of dawn, and catering to our children! LOL. #truth…but in all honesty it wasn’t a glamourous or fancy lifestyle, but we had a ton of fun together. Dave was the most hilarious person I have ever met in my life. He was my dream guy. We were friends for 2 years before we started dating in 2000…having met when we worked on a local tv show (Breakfast Television on City TV) where he did the live audio mixing for bands and I was a production assistant and worked in the control room. Ok maybe in those days, we had a slightly glamourous life…he did work with pretty much every band that came through Much Music including people like Sting, Janet Jackson and everyone in between. It was kind of a cool time to work in live television…the 90s. We dated for 2 years, before we were married in 2002 and then we had Charlotte 5 days before our first wedding anniversary. I was 29 and Dave was 34. The year we got married, we bought a house in the burbs, Dave changed jobs – moving over to IMAX. I had left the TV station the year before, and we settled into a more domestic kind of life which is exactly what we wanted.
You shared with me that Dave died from cancer. Can you share about the diagnosis and his experience with cancer?
In 2013 I went back to school and got a post grad in Public relations and had started more seriously down a career path in that field. I had been working at an ideal job for about 2 years out of that program, that was a few days a week but allowed me to do work I was really passionate about, in internal communications at a local hospital. The life we planned was unfolding pretty much exactly as we had hoped. Dave loved his job and was doing well there, kids were getting more self-sufficient as they got a little older, we could start going out again with our friends a bit more, having a life again separate from the kids. In 2015 my contract ended with the hospital and I took on my first full time job in 8 years, working in local politics for the region we live in, in corporate communications. It was a dream job (for a short time). I started in July on a 9-month contract to cover a mat-leave. Around the same time, Dave started having headaches. He had literally always been healthy, never going to the doctor, never missing a day at work. He was sleeping a lot and grumpy when he got home, because he kept having these bad headaches. After about a month of this, on and off, I had told him he needed to go to the doctor, see the chiropractor, get acupuncture…something to figure it out. So after a series of these types of medical visits and nothing really helping, he thought that maybe it was his eyes. He was 46 at the time and had never needed prescription glasses. He thought maybe that was the cause, so he booked himself an eye doctor appointment. I was at work that day and Dave called me to say that the eye doctor wanted him to go to emergency and get a cat scan or an MRI right away. She had looked in his eyes and seen swelling of his optic nerve. She didn’t go into any detail but knowing what I know now, that alarmed her sufficiently to send him packing out of her exam room. I told Dave I’d go with him to the ER.
In Canada, we can have long waits in our emergency rooms, because our health care system is free – which is awesome – but it can also be difficult to navigate and require lengthy waits for tests or special services. So I picked him up and my mum came to watch the girls and we went to the ER. We were actually enjoying our wait-time and were joking that it was our date night. After a couple hours, he was seen and the ER doc saw the same thing as the eye doc, called for further tests, and said those would be a few more hours. I decided to go home to the kids because we didn’t know how much longer it would be and my mum was 79 at the time, so we never left her babysitting for too long. An hour or so after I got home, Dave called to say he had had the tests and they wanted to admit him. In fact, they were taking him by ambulance to a sister-hospital site to be admitted right away. They had told him that he had brain swelling and needed to be admitted. I was really taken aback…I mean anything with the brain, you just don’t expect it. That was on September 24, 2015. The next couple of days are kind of fuzzy to me, but I have never been so worried in my life. As soon as he started getting steroids intravenously, he started to feel better which was a huge relief. They admitted him to the neuro ward at the other hospital which was about a 30-minute drive from our home. I was trying to be there with him as much as possible, but it was hard with the kids at home. My niece happened to be in town on business and ended up coming to my house and staying with the kids for the next few days. I remember we kept waiting and waiting to see the doctor. Nurses coming in and out kept looking at us, with these sad, sad stares. I was actually feeling pumped because for the first time in a month of these horrible headaches, he was acting like himself and feeling good. We kept waiting and waiting for the doctor, and the kids hadn’t seen their dad yet.
The doctor finally showed up and was in the middle of giving us news when I saw my kids rounding the corner with my best friend, I was shoeing her away – like “ no – they can’t be here for this” – I could tell what he was about to start telling us was bad, but I had zero expectation that he would tell us in pretty blunt terms that the lesion everyone kept referring to was a malignant tumour. I was so blissfully ignorant of cancer at the time, that I actually asked if “malignant was the bad one?” He said this was the worst one. I asked some other questions and the doctor said, “I don’t think you understand – this is a game changer” I remember thinking, well that’s rude – I have questions…not realizing the gravity of the news I was taking in. He believed Dave had Glioblastoma Multiforme, a very aggressive brain cancer, stage 4. It could not be confirmed until they did surgery to debulk the mass they had found, but he was very confident that’s what it was. So they kept him in the hospital in order to get him in for surgery as soon as possible. If they released him and tried to book a surgery it could be a longer wait and that would allow this aggressive cancer to progress even further.
At 1am on September 26th, Dave went in for his first craniotomy where they debulked his tumour. It was supposedly about the size of my fist. The thing that people may not know is that they can never get it all, there are always cells left, at least that’s the way they described it to us, but they got most of it. All the things I know now about this type of cancer cloud my memories of that time. What we understood was it was really bad. He was going to have to have chemo and radiation and our lives were about to change drastically. After his surgery, which was pretty short, like an hour or two, he woke up and was talking and joking around immediately! It was amazing. He got to come home a day or two later. Again miraculous. The only complication with this surgery was that one of his staples came out and he was bleeding a bit, but that was taken care of and he healed quite quickly from that.
Two weeks later, after the pathology on the tumour came back, we were called in for a meeting with the surgeon. It was October 7th, our daughter Charlotte’s 12th birthday. We went in together to the office, and the surgeon sat us down and told us that Dave had 14 months to live. He said, that this moment was as good as it was going to get. He handed us pamphlets and gave us other information, but I was too stunned to hear anything he said. He said terminal. He said 14 months. We left the office and both broke down in the parking lot, holding each other tightly. Dave kept saying he didn’t want to leave us alone. He kept apologizing that he was going to leave us. I was a wreck but I think this is where the split personality/compartmentalization of the caregiver kicked in. It was after all our daughter’s 12th birthday and we had to pick up the kids from school. We had promised her she could get a second ear piercing. So with the knowledge that my husband was going to die in 14 months, I drove us back home to go to the mall and get a happy 12-year-old her second ear piercing and then go out for dinner for her birthday. The pictures from that night break my heart every time I look at them. We were in so much pain but trying so hard to be ok for the kids.
I know firsthand how difficult, beautiful, and heart-wrenching it can be to be a caregiver to a spouse. What was that like for you?
Dave was “sick” for almost two years. I say that with quotations because we were really fortunate that for a good year he was really fine. With a glioblastoma diagnosis, your license is taken away right away because you could have seizures. That was a huge adjustment for us as a family and for Dave’s sense of freedom. He was reliant on me for simple things, but he was well enough for most of that year to ride his bike and walk and cook and do most things like normal. He would wake up some days and say to me… “I forgot for 3 days that I have cancer!” and while I was always so happy for him when that would happen, it was never out of my mind. His radiation was every day for 5 weeks, a month after his surgery, and then his chemo was monthly for 5 days and it was oral, which meant he could take it in a pill format at home. It was really non-invasive. He didn’t get super sick from any of it. He was on a really robust naturopathic regimen which we credited with, keeping him strong through the chemo and radiation.
The really bad stuff started happening in November 2016 and progressively got worse from end of January 2017 onwards. Until around November, his symptoms were being held at bay and as the doctors had explained it to us, a tumour that was stable was as good as it would get. But around that time, he started having trouble seeing peripherally. In the late summer, he had actually gotten his license back, because he had never had a seizure and he had returned to work, because he loved his job.
That particular weekend, he had taken our older daughter to a fair about an hour away with her friends, and driving home, he said he felt off. He sat me down later that evening and said, something felt different and off. I remember feeling like I was going to vomit. When the person you love most in the world has cancer, you feel continuously anxious, elevated adrenaline, and always on the verge of breaking. I broke right then. Overnight I remember we held each other all night, crying a lot. It took me about 3 days to digest the next level of fear and brace myself for the next worst thing. That’s how it started to feel, like whatever the next thing was would be worse and I knew it, so I had to just keep going and wait.
In the meantime, everyone needed me. He stopped driving again. He stopped working again. By February he was on a lot of steroids to control the brain swelling and they wanted to start him on another protein treatment called Avastin. There were a whole bunch of issues with getting the drug coverage for that and by the time we got it, he had collapsed once, and could barely walk as the tumour, on his right parietal lobe, was affecting the entire left side of his body. This is the time of the illness that was the scariest to me. He wasn’t himself most of the time, he was just trying to survive. I was caring for him and both kids and our house. I was exhausted and terrified all the time. I remember waking up every day and feeling it hit me again, oh ya, this is how we live now, in terror. Going to bed was brutal. I would get everybody ready for bed, it was really hard to get Dave up the stairs during this period of time, I’m 5’1 and he was 5’11 and was getting weaker and weaker. He collapsed once downstairs, he nearly fell on the stairs, didn’t make it to the bathroom once, all of these indignities break my heart to think about. I tried to shield our kids from as much of this as I could, but they were always well aware of the deterioration. After getting him settled, I would go back to my youngest and snuggle with her and watch a show on the iPad in her bed. During that time, we binged “Gilmour Girls”. That show was like my little safe haven. The town they lived in was so idyllic. Nothing too scary every happened. They were adorable and funny. It was my comfort and security blanket. My daughter would fall asleep right away and I would watch 2 or 3 episodes, just delaying going to sleep, because waking back up was so scary. The kids had known from the beginning that it was cancer, brain cancer, but they never asked for more details and we never told them what kind it was. It was the last thing we wanted, for them to google “glioblastoma” (don’t do it, it's horrible) because that would have broken them. So as he got weaker, I tried to keep the family going. I want to be able to say that I was grateful to be his caregiver, but the truth is, I was so scared all the time. And I was angry. I was resentful of the additional load and burden. I tried my best not to let that part of me out, when I was helping him but by the spring, it was determined the only step we could now take was a second surgery to do another debulking. This surgery was terrible. There were so many issues. It was like 9 hours long, it went well, but he never fully healed from it. Just before the surgery date, he had developed an abscess in a very tricky and delicate area, that complicated everything. He was in so much pain. It was all so awful. He was in the intensive care step down unit right before his surgery, because of the abscess, and then he had surgery and then had to recover.
We missed his only brother’s wedding. Up until a week before that he was still aiming to go. He was still fighting then, still trying to get out of the hospital. His wound wouldn’t heal properly, and we were back and forth several times to emergency, he ended up having a third surgery to try to repair his dura (thin membrane that covers the brain). My feeling is that never healed up properly. There were so many intensely horrible nights, basically at this time 5 years ago. From May until July he was in the hospital with more frequency. Every time he went in he would fight like hell to do what they needed him to do to get out… show them he could walk, show them he could go to the bathroom. In the end of July we went to see Trevor Noah live at a concert venue. We went with my sister and her husband. Dave loved live comedy and loved Trevor Noah. By this time he was using a wheelchair regularly and could not really get around well. We had PSWs coming in to assist me at home. The changes to his brain and the progression of his own fear made him incredibly clingy with me. He was terrified. They had started the palliative conversations with us at a hospital visit in early July and started some of the services for in home care to help me out. He hated every minute of it, and wanted me to do everything, but honestly, the really specific nursing needs, I did not want to do. I felt like my role as his wife had been torn away and I was given this role of nurse, that I didn’t want. We were the kind of couple who never left the bathroom door open when we were peeing, and now I was changing surgical dressings. Just no. Not me. But I did it, with patience and care, when I had to, and tried to accept help whenever it was offered. He did not want help to come in for things like showering etc, but he fell one night in our bedroom and I couldn’t get him up and I was terrified of him falling in the shower, so I insisted on having help for that. I would go walk our dog for 15 or 20 minutes when the PSWs were here to breathe and be on my own. In the beginning of August, he went into the hospital and never came back out.
Any words of wisdom you would give to others in a similar situation?
I have realized that you really don’t know what you don’t know. And when I was in the situation, I couldn’t see clearly in terms of what I could get help with and what my limitations were. I would just blaze through things to be getting them done, and then realize after, oh – someone else could have helped me with that. A particular example was that I felt bad parking in the handicap parking spot at an appointment, but then had to struggle to get Dave out of the car and walk him into the clinic. The nurse put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Next time, pull right up, come get a wheelchair and then we can help you.” I know that sounds so simple, but in the moment, it didn’t occur to me that we were allowed to do that. I guess the advice is, to allow yourself grace, allow yourself to take advantage of any and all supports, help, assistance – whether it is public or private, or family and friends. You don’t have to do everything yourself. I could have had help coming in a lot earlier than I did but didn’t think it was necessary. It is. You need help. Even if it gives you 15 minutes to sit by yourself and process what is going on. Cry. Close your eyes. Whatever brings you a moment of peace.
My other self-care tool kit items that literally saved my life are meditation, yoga, keeping a gratitude journal, walking outside and a little book called “God will see you through”, not for everyone, but it helped me. It made me feel less alone with the big scary feelings. Made me feel more connected to the fabric of life and death. That’s a whole other topic though! LOL Big thoughts…not so much clarity on how to put them on paper.
Can you talk a little about the day Dave died?
Dave died in hospice care in our local hospital on September 3, 2017. Up until writing this, I had never really talked about this day, with anyone. He died very early in the morning, so the days leading up to his death carry more impact in some ways. When I think of the day itself, I think of the outside of the hospital, the song “Fields of Gold”, by Sting, and seeing my kids laying their heads on his chest, and then the sound of his last breaths. The sound of someone taking their last breaths is the worst sound in the world and something that changes you forever. The other thing that I think about is the relief. The relief from the fear that we were on the cusp of the worst. The relief that this was the worst. The relief that Dave’s steady decline was over. That I didn’t have to be constantly afraid anymore of the next worst thing.
Leading up to that day, Dave had been transferred into the palliative ward at the hospital about a week before, which meant they stopped doing all the exhaustive treatments and just focused on pain management and physical care. I was torn on the decision, because we have a beautiful private hospice facility in our area, but it was all the way across town and the hospital was literally 5 minutes from home. I felt being able to reach him faster was better for our family, so we chose to keep him there. By the time he was moved to this area of the hospital, he wasn’t really talking or responding to anyone anymore. The previous few weeks had been a steady decline of his ability to speak, walk, even move. A few days before we moved him to palliative, the doctors had told me that his cancer was out of control, there was nothing more that could be done. I’m sure I was in shock for that whole month.
He mainly slept and occasionally would say a few words. He had a few fevered dream episodes, one when his best friend was there and he took a bunch of notes, because he had been quietly working on his laptop. He spouted off a string of hilarious diatribes that made no sense but were hysterical, nonetheless. Things like “Nice pyjamas, do those come in Men’s?” and we thought maybe something was changing and we would get our Dave back. But the reality was that he was beyond help at that point. His cancer had progressed to the point where there was nothing more they could do, they said it was now a Gliosarcoma, somehow that’s even worse that Glioblastoma. I didn’t look anything up anymore, I just survived one day to the next.
That last week in palliative, friends came from Ottawa and B.C. to see him and spend a little time with him before he died. His mum had been here the week prior, sitting quietly by his side as well, saying her own goodbyes. When he first went into the hospital, my childhood best friend had just flown in from California and came straight to the hospital and stayed with me. My family were all around. My sisters came and went from the hospital in the evening, so I could go home and spend some time with the girls. My nephew and his fiancée were with us, and they were largely taking care of my kids that week, I think. My friends came and went, Dave’s friends from work. It was a week of goodbyes. One of the last things he did before he became completely unresponsive, was eat a little bit of ice cream – those little hospital cups with the lid that peels back. After I fed that to him, I remember I leaned in and told him I loved him. And he mouthed with a barely audible “I love you too” and made a kissing motion with his mouth, I leaned in and got that kiss.
On September 2, I went home around dinner time. One of my family were there with him for the evening shift. At about 6:30am on September 3, I woke up to my cell phone ringing. It was the palliative nurse. She said, “Come now.” I don’t remember getting dressed or getting there, I just remember calling my sister Robin and telling her what they told me. She met me there, my nephew brought the girls shortly after. Two of my best friends came. His breathing was sharp and jagged, he was struggling. My sister asked what music he would like to hear, and I said, Sting. He loved Sting. A trio played Fields of Gold on our wedding day. She turned on Fields of Gold, even though I didn’t ask for that song specifically. My kids arrived and laid their heads on his chest. He drew in a jagged breath and that was it. He died with the three of us laying our heads on him. He waited for them to get there.
Fields of Gold, by Sting (Gordon Sumner)
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in fields of gold
So she took her love
For to gaze a while
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold
Will you stay with me?
Will you be my love?
Upon the fields of barley
We'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in fields of gold
See the west wind move like a lover so
Upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise when you kiss her mouth
Among the fields of gold
I never made promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold
We'll walk in fields of gold
Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold
You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You can tell the sun in his jealous sky
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
When we walked in fields of gold
What was life like in the immediate weeks after the loss? How did you cope?
I have heard other widows mention this, and other cancer caregivers, and I don’t feel guilty for saying this, but I always feel like I need to explain myself. I felt relieved when Dave died. I felt destroyed but relieved. The fear was gone. I cried non-stop for a long time. My house was full of family who stepped in and did everything. Thank God. I followed my sister around and did what she told me to do. I ate food that others prepared and took a shower when they told me to. I was a zombie that looked a lot like Kim. I tried to be a mommy but was likely scaring my kids regularly. I feel like the immediate after is spent quickly “doing” all the death things; funeral service, funeral planning, photos, people, family, mourning, visitations, funeral, after funeral gathering. I wish I had done a Eulogy. I couldn’t speak. But I wish I had. I coped by crying, reading and writing. I spent hours and hours reading grief posts online. The only thing that helped me was reading about other people’s grief in online grieving groups. I searched their words for my feelings and how to express what was happening. I searched their photos for the love and pain I was experiencing. I didn’t want to talk or give energy to anything. I wanted to think and write and think and cry. And listen to music and cry and think and write. If I had to spend more than a couple of hours with people, I was drained and needed to be alone. I walked by myself a lot. I read a lot and I cried a lot. Somehow, one month after Dave died, I went to my nephew’s wedding – on our anniversary weekend, at the same venue as our wedding, on my daughter’s 14th birthday. It was actually horrific. The wedding was beautiful and I love them dearly, but I thought being swallowed by the earth would be easier that day than being a guest at that wedding. Every glass of wine or champagne that passed by, I took. I remember approaching the reception room, and you were to pick up your little nameplate with the table number…and there was just my name. No Dave. It was a fresh kind of hell. And yet here I am to tell you the tale.
You also lost your dad when you were young. How did that loss impact your life - both before and after the death of Dave?
My dad was murdered in a mass shooting when I was 17. He was an engineering professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and was shot while on campus. He was there to pick up his mail before the start of the semester and have coffee with a colleague. He just happened to be in the wrong place when another colleague became unhinged. That was almost 30 years ago now. And the shock and horror of that day will always be with me and my family. We have not had anywhere near the number of mass shootings in Canada that the United States has had, but I empathize with every family that has ever been affected by gun violence. It is not a platitude to say it takes only one bullet to change an entire family’s life forever.
The trauma and fear that resulted from the way in which I lost my dad, impacted everything about how I became an adult. I am anxious; I have struggled on and off with depression. I was very fearful of loss and for a long-time tested Dave to see if he would leave me, because I was so certain he would, in one way or another. What came to be very clear to me when I knew Dave was going to die and I was certainly going to lose him was, that my life was infinitely better having had the opportunity, no matter how brief, of knowing him than if I had not taken the risk of opening myself up to his love. It is the most terrifying thing to give yourself over in love. To be fully open and vulnerable and trust someone. It is also, in my opinion, the only thing that makes a relationship real.
What was a specific low point or struggle you experienced?
I don’t know that there was a specific low point. For the first several months after Dave died, I could not get up early. I couldn’t really sleep at night, so the mornings were rough. Getting my younger daughter to school was challenging. I think she had something like 57 lates that year. My bad. I gave my older daughter a debit card so I didn’t have to make lunches anymore. I kind of checked out of a few parenting duties at that time. I try to forgive myself for those things, but now when I look back on them, I see them as my only way to cope then. I was doing my best. A relative kind of chastised me at this time saying “Well you really should get up and make them lunch…” I felt like saying, “You really should lose your husband and get back to me, about making school fucking lunches.”
And then our dog of almost 17 years had to be put down 6 months after Dave died. That was awful. That poor little guy, Chachi, he hung in for Dave those last couple years and then hung in for me too. I had vowed we were not getting any more pets. One month later I got a puppy. I honestly credit our new pup, Archie with saving all of us. He brought back some joy, a schedule, and got me outside and out of my head.
How did you manage to find joy in those low moments?
Honestly, keeping my gratitude journal at that time was what anchored me to the present and kept me looking for tiny things that I could be grateful for. When you know you have to write something down, it makes you start looking around more and taking stock of the most minute things that bring you joy. I just looked back at my journal from that time to see some of the things I wrote down:
My limbs working properly
Insurance coverage, benefits, Canadian health care system
(my daughter’s) snuggles
The morning sky
The lessons our love taught me
How do you live life differently from before the loss (if at all)? Has your attitude about life shifted? Any unexpected changes?
One thing that has really changed is how much energy I give away. In those early weeks, it felt sacred and like I needed to guard my energy with everything in me. I kind of have hung on to that. I do a lot less people pleasing (I am still working on the associated after-guilt) but in general, I just don’t have the energy to give to people or things that are not aligned with who I am and what my purpose is all about. If you bring drama, I don’t have time for you. If you are demanding of me and need me to fit into your little box of how we used to interact, I likely can’t find the energy for you. If you are forcing something with me and I am not responding, it’s because I can’t do it. Friends and family - please stop forcing grievers to fit back into their old lives. We just can’t. We are different. We might look the same, but we are wholly and fundamentally different.
My attitude about life hasn’t really changed, although I think some things came into sharper focus. I did learn at a young age, because of my dad, the importance of love and how things don’t really matter. Everyday life can dull your intimacy with huge concepts like that. Being in your 20s, 30s, getting caught up in normal life and doing all the things that people do – getting a job, getting married, you can fall into the “keeping up with the Jones’” or the grass is greener mentality and forget what is really important. Nothing like a brain cancer diagnosis for the love of your life to cut through the bullshit and realize that I just don’t care about why your sister-in-law doesn’t help at dinner parties! Here’s what I get angry about: cancer robbing my children of their father. Cancer destroying the brain of the funniest, most charismatic, brilliant person I had ever met. Those are things to get mad about. Not that someone wants you to move desks at work. Life is way too short to care about that shit. Get over it now. I have been known to tell people this to their faces. Hardcore, I know.
The other unexpected change I have experienced since losing Dave, was falling in love again so soon and really understanding that feeling two things at once is okay. It doesn’t feel neat and tidy though but learning to live with that is what has changed drastically for me.
What do you want others to know about grief?
That’s a hard thing to define. I want people to know that it never ends. But I also don’t want them to know that, because the blissful part of not knowing and not understanding real loss is well, blissful. The pain that you then live with is ever-present. It becomes more bearable, but it is never gone. I go between wanting to protect others from that pain, to wanting desperately to be able to define it. I think the most important thing for people to understand about grief is the duality that lives in it. It is never one thing. We are never one thing. You can be distraught and still find joy in something small. You can laugh one minute and bawl the next. You can love deeply and forever the person you lost and grieve them until your dying day AND fall in love again and live in this world and build a new life. It’s the power of the AND. Figuring out how to let the duality coexist. I love Dave AND I love Steve. I loved my life with Dave AND I love the life I am creating now. Both are 100% true and accepting both is hard, but I remind myself constantly that it just is.
How can a person best be there to support a loved one who is grieving?
Concrete supports are amazing – do things, don’t ask if you can ever do something…that person won’t ask you. Say – Do you like Chilli? I’m dropping some off on Tuesday at 5pm. Say – I’ll pick up the kids on Saturday and take them to the movies so you can have some time. Say – I’ll sit with you and hold you and be here for you in whatever you need.
One amazing act of friendship and love my best friends did for me was this: I was away at the end of November, after losing Dave in September. I was absolutely horrified at the thought of decorating and carrying out a jolly Christmas for my kids. When we came home, my best friends had fully decorated for me, put up my outside lights, my tree, decorated some of it, and left some for the kids to do. I wept with gratitude. It was the kindest thing. They allowed us to have what the kids needed while taking away the onerous heart-wrenching task of doing that work alone without my partner.
Cry with grievers. I know lots of people think they have to shelter their grief-stricken friends from the painful situation but let’s get real, we never stop thinking about our people. EVER. Bringing up our person is a JOY to us. Knowing you think about them is a JOY. Look at photos with them. Tell them stories about the person they lost. Please don’t compare losses. Do empathize by saying you feel so deeply for them and you loved their person or you love them and want to be there to listen and hold them. That’s all. And saying you’re sorry is the simplest and most earnest thing you can say, don’t try to elaborate. Just acknowledge how much it sucks.
If you could go back and spend one more day with Dave, what would you do?
After he cooked me a really great meal…He was an awesome cook and I REALLY miss his cooking…I would just lay there cuddling him. I would hold him. Hold his hand, stroke his arms, look into his eyes, tell him I loved him. And then just talk. Talk about what he wanted for us all. What he wanted for the girls. I’d be brave enough to ask the hard questions. Or if it was present day, I’d fill him in on everything they had been through in the past almost 5 years. If we had to “do” something – it would be to go see live music together or he might even perform. Second choice, see a comedian and just laugh together. But mostly I would just want to sit with him, hold him and tell him how much he is loved. And feel his physical presence.
You mentioned that you are in a new relationship now. Can you talk a little bit about how you started dating? Did you date around first or just happen to meet your current partner?
Well, this is probably pretty unique. I met Steve at my grief group. When I told a friend about 9 or 10 months later that’s where we met, she asked, “How does one pick up someone at a grief group?” HA! It didn’t happen like that. We had about 10 people in the group, at a local Cancer support center. For me, it was 3 months after Dave died. For Steve, it was 7 months after he had lost his wife Vicki to Acute Myeloid Leukemia. I arrived late to the first meeting (not surprising if you know me), and the only seat left was beside Steve, he looked at me and smiled, and gestured a hand to welcome me to the spot. He was one of the first people to share his story in the group and the love with which he described his relationship with his late wife was so evident. He then described the reason he was there was that they had created a plan together before she died, for his healing, and that this group was part of it. She was a project manager, and she spent a lot of time before she died talking with Steve and their two boys about how they could go on without her. What a gift. I thought that she sounded like an amazing person, and I got the feeling immediately from him, that he was “my kind of people” in a friend way.
Throughout that group session, we became friends, and had one email exchange I think, about movies. After the group ended, the members had one last get-together at a pub for lunch. We were at opposite ends of the table, but he sought me out in the parking lot after and asked if I wanted to get together again, for coffee. I did not think anything romantic at the time at all. We started chatting on social media a bit more, and then met for that coffee and then made plans to go to a movie a few weeks later. When the movie came around, I was telling my best friend and she was like, “Oh this is a date!” and I was like “NO. This is definitely NOT a date!” I consciously was super casual to go the movie, so it wouldn’t seem like I had gotten ready for a date! I got there, and he was in a dress shirt and nice pants and dress shoes! I looked at him and thought “Crap – this IS A DATE!” I felt like a total dork. Welcome to dating! But the rest of that evening felt like a date. And the possibility opened in my mind from there. At this point, it was about 10 months since Dave had passed away. I think over the next few weeks, we went on a few more dates, and then we kissed at the end of one of those. It was super weird, but good. It was the first time I had kissed anyone but Dave in 16 years. If I’m honest, I was excited to kiss him, but so nervous.
Being a solo parent and dating is VERY HARD. At the time, my kids were 11 and 14. My 14-year-old was cool with it from the beginning. Very early on, she said to me that she just wanted me to be happy. I had not fed her that line, so it was very touching. My little one though, it was extremely hard for her. She was openly hostile. She was hurting so bad, but so unable to talk about her loss directly. She did say one thing that was like a knife in my heart: “But it’s been less than one year”. Again, no telling where she got that from (a friend’s parent, tv, or she truly felt that?!) but it still hurts a lot to think about. I think she was really feeling incredibly disloyal to her dad and of course, thought that’s what I was being as well. I tried to talk to her about it in the sense that when I had her older sister, I wasn’t sure I could ever love another child as much or in the same way as I loved her. I was even scared having my second child – will I love this kid as much? And then boom, you have another baby and it’s like your heart doubles in size. Your capacity to love just expands. It is not an either/or. It is not one replacing the other. It is not about one getting less than the other. You just love more. It’s the power of the AND again. I mean I had heard that analogy in relation to second loves, but really had no clue that it could be true for me. My love with Dave was so all-encompassing and created and permeated my whole world. I was quite certain that would never happen again. And to an extent I don’t think about love in those terms anymore, because I met Steve when I was becoming a new person. We shared in that grief group on an emotional level, the worst and darkest parts of experiences, so the foundation of this relationship started in a completely different way than my relationship with Dave. But different can be good, albeit painful, too. This August we will have been together for 4 years. I wasn’t sure at the beginning if it would last like this, but after about 6 months of dating, I was quite certain he was a long-haul guy! It’s kind of uncanny how we fell into each other’s lives and just fit. This year we are planning to move in together. He is an awesome person. We often say that there are four people in our relationship, because we can talk, laugh, grieve and share about our lost loves 100% openly and honestly. We support each other continuously through our ongoing grief and never lose sight of how the love we had for Dave and Vicki shaped who we are and why we are together. It’s pretty special. We say all the time that we are incredibly lucky.
Was it difficult for your friends or family when you started dating again?
It took about 2 years for my youngest to be accepting of our relationship and to begin to develop her own friendship with Steve. All of my other friends and family were completely supportive. Including my mother-in-law and brother-in-law. They are so happy that we are happy. They see how Dave is very much a part of our relationship. Steve came to Dave’s family reunion with me two summers ago and he was the hit of the party! The only person who it is a little tense with is my father-in-law (Dave’s parents were divorced a long time ago), but I don’t have too much contact with him, and honestly, he can judge me if he’d like, I can’t control his feelings on the subject and I don’t live my life to please him. I had one cousin who reached out to me after my first social media post announcing my relationship (like 4 or 5 months after we started dating). She reached out a few months later and said, at first, she was mad at me for starting to date again, but something I had posted about, changed her mind. That sticks out as being weird and judgmental and like I have no idea why she even felt it necessary to tell me because it’s not like I ever see her. But – you do you cuz’. Whether you approved or not was of no concern to me. I also worried about how Dave’s friends would react. Most of them have been super supportive and loving as well. Including his best friend whom we have had dinner and spent time with together.
I think for my family - because we’ve had so much experience with loss and new love - they were just thrilled! One of my sisters was worried I was moving too fast, but she hadn’t really gotten to know Steve yet. Once she did, her concerns were squashed. She has also been married to the same amazing person since she was 18 and is now 61! I was their flower girl… So, like, her dating frame of reference was pretty narrow. LOL. My friends love him. One of my girlfriends after meeting him, said “He’s amazing. But what I love even more is the way he looks at you.” I don’t take stuff like that for granted.
We were most cautious (still are) about how our kids handle things. We have taken it super slow when it comes to their comfort levels. Like – we only this year, started doing more regular sleepovers. Steve’s sons are 25 and 27 now and they have been pretty cool with our relationship from the beginning, but he also has been very measured. We always say “Front seat, back seat” in terms of matters with our kids, meaning, he’s in the backseat when I need to make them the priority, and vice versa. It works for us. His family and friends have also been super welcoming and thrilled for us.
Any words of wisdom to others who are looking to start dating again?
Allow yourself to feel good. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Remember that being vulnerable is the only way you can be really authentic with anyone. Share what you want with people (like on social media, etc.) but know that means they get invested and think they can make comments. Take baby steps and only do what you can handle. Before I met Steve, I had downloaded Bumble (hetero dating app where only the woman can make contact), and just flirted with the idea of looking at guys. I was totally convinced there was NOBODY out there who would ever be interested in me again. I needed that little confidence boost to know that I could take a risk, but it was so contained because I could make all the decisions. I talked to two guys on the phone, but never took it further than that.
Any resources that have been helpful for you during your grieving process that others might be able to utilize?
The 5-minute Journal - Gratitude Journal
Journey to the Heart: daily meditations – Melody Beattie
Option B: Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant
When your Soulmate dies – A Guide to healing through Heroic Mourning – Alan D. Wolfelt PhD.
A Child’s View of Grief – Alan D. Wolfelt
All of Brené Brown’s books – but especially “The Gifts of Imperfection” and her TED talk on Vulnerability
Religious (Christian)/Spiritual:
God Will see you Through – Mary L. Kupferle (Unity Church)
Journeying Through Grief (4 booklet series) – stephenministries.org
1) A time to Grieve
2) Experiencing Grief
3) Finding Hope and Healing
4) Rebuilding and Remembering
What brings you joy now?
My girls in general…but watching my girls dance specifically is one of the greatest joys of my life.
Experiencing Art: music! movies, books, tv shows, museums, galleries, theatre, dance!
Being with loved ones and having authentic conversations
Sitting on patios and drinking (coffee or wine…either is good ☺)
A great belly laugh
Giggling babies. Cuddling babies. Playing with babies! I love babies ☺
DOGS!!!! My two fur babies – Archie and JJ (cavapoos)
Walking and breathing…hahah very basic!
Really basic meditation (like on an app)
Exercise (hot yoga, spinning -peloton, weights, walking/hiking)
Traveling
Helping other people and seeing change happen.
Getting the rare opportunity to share all of the above with someone whom I love. Again. It is not lost on me that the rarity of that is AMAZING and so JOYFUL.
Honestly, I have come to find joy in so many mundane and everyday things that it likely sounds very boring to most people, but I never realized how life is really mostly made up of those everyday mundane things, so you might as well enjoy them. Early on in our dating history, Steve and I had a day to ourselves in which we went to a garden centre, home depot, and then came back and he was helping me with a backyard thing. While he did that, I made chilli for dinner. I realized while I looked through the window at him while I was cooking that the ordinary beauty of that day was just exquisite and I at the time, hadn’t had an ordinary day like that in a few years, because cancer and fear had been the constant, not mundane joys of life. My heart fills just thinking about that afternoon and how I realized how precious simple things are.
Anything else you’d like readers to know?
Life can be sweet again. It can be ok one day. You have to work at it though and let joy back in, even when opening yourself up to it seems really scary.
How can people learn more about you and your story?
I have a blog…but I haven’t been to good at keeping it up, but I’d love for people to read my old stuff: bothandalso.home.blog
Oh…and I wrote this article: Four Things a Widowed Parent Should know about Dating about some of my take aways on dating. It’s really hard to do the right thing in this circumstance. It always feels hard for someone. But I do believe it is worth exploring if you are open to it, because closing yourself off to love “because of your kids” to protect them, is also teaching them something and it might not be what you want them to learn.