Category: Life After Keith

It was not long after I had lost him that Keith came to me in a dream.  He was his normal healthy self, twinkle in the eye, remote in hand, kicked back on the couch with an arm reaching across the back in both directions.  The rain was pouring down and we were in the sun room, so all I could hear was the deafening pounding on the almost tin like roof.  He was talking to me.  From the look on his face, it was idle chatter.  A casual conversation.  Yet I couldn’t understand anything.  I couldn’t make out any of the words he was forming.  I could only hear the cadence and intonation, nothing more.  I could not shake the feeling that he was trying to tell me something important despite his casual demeanor.  I leaned in to understand and only felt more lost in what he wanted me to know.

He was not the first specter to visit me after leaving behind the land of the living.  My grandmother did as well. 22 years earlier.  She had a mastectomy when she was 48, just 3 years older than I am now.  As a young girl, I remember her letting me put her prosthetic breast in my little training bra.  We both giggled at the large bulge and I was fascinated by the realistic feel and look of it.  10 years later, her breast cancer had metastasized.  She died in the spring, shortly after I had discovered I was pregnant.   When my mother called to give me the news, I crumbled against the living room wall, crying and sobbing and fearful that feelings that strong may harm the new life growing inside.

And then she came to me in a dream.  She sat at her quilting frame, dressed perfectly in a bright red vest with a gold pin, healthy again, with her crown of dark curls framing her face as she leaned over, thimbled finger pushing her needle up and back.  She was chatting to me but never looked up, focused on the stitches.   I strained to hear her.  I couldn’t.  I knew it was important.  Something about my baby? Words of wisdom to get me through life?  She looked over at me and smiled, then returned to the quilt frame and the task at hand.

This Friday, I take a major step towards my transition from breast cancer patient to breast cancer survivor.  I will undergo my own mastectomy followed by reconstruction.  Gary and my mom will physically be there.  So many people I love will be there in spirit.   I will have two top surgeons working on this body to remove the poison and replace it with the healthy parts of me.  All I have to do is sleep.  Perhaps dream.  Will I finally hear what Keith and my grandmother tried to tell me before?  Will they visit me again?  Chat for a while?  I hope so.

Through all of Keith’s illness, my grief in his absense, my recovery, my rebirth, my new love, my new life, my career, my cancer, I try to remember one thing.  I am still me.  I’ve always been Cherish, despite each bump in the road and each twist to the plans.  Come Friday, my body will be changed and yet, there is this little part of me that knows what Keith and Grandma Blades were saying – you’ll be ok.  You have always been ok.  You will always be ok.  You have it in you to do this.  To do anything.  And we are here.  We have always been here.  Don’t look to our cancer for the answers.  This is your cancer.  This is your journey.  We will be there in your dreams and when you wake, you’ll be with those you love.

I am still scared.  But I am in the best hands.  Both in the operating room and at home.  I will heal.  I will survive.  I’ll meet all of you on the other side of this like the bionic woman.  Better and stronger than before, yet still just plain ol’ Cherish.

It was spaghetti sauce making day in my house.  An age old tradition dating back to the days of Chef Keith banging around the pots and pans, chopping the onions, browning the meat, and simmering a laundry list of ingredients together all day on the stove.  He’d sample it over and over again, sharing each taste test with everyone in the house until when it was time to actually accompany the sauce with pasta, we were already full.  Then we’d pull out the freezer bags and load them up for later dinners.  Strange how some things can change and still remain the same.  I’m the one fusing over the sauce, stuffing the house with it until they are full.  Everything else about the ritual remains the same. 

One thing that has changed and still remains the same?  Keith’s birthday.  It still rolls around every January 12, regardless of the fact that he is not here to celebrate.  He would have been 57 today.  He will forever be 54.  So it seems fitting that it was spaghetti sauce day today.  There was a part of me that also wanted to rush out and buy one of those Carvel ice cream cakes.  It is what we did for every birthday under the Nielsen roof.  But of all the markers that tick by from the moment he left, this one is the hardest.  The cake would have felt so wrong.  How do you smile through the one event that started a life that no longer exists?  I’ve survived holidays, our anniversary, and the anniversary of his death with only brief moments of the darkness that rushes into the void he left behind.  Not so with his birthday.

Birth and Death are the brackets wrapped around our life.  My Pop-Pop’s birthday was Friday.  The same day as my sister-in-law, Chrissie’s.  His brackets written in cold hard dates on a tomb stone and her story still being written.  Still a dot, dot, dot after her birthday.  Yesterday, a friend also turned 57.  Born just one day before Keith – dot, dot, dot – the days and years still ahead of him, unwritten.  We breath our first as a question and we breath our last with the answer.  Everything in between is who we are, where we go, what we do, who we touch, what we dream of.  The story between the brackets.  As hard as it is to think of Keith’s would-have-been 57, as often as I think about brackets only spanning 54 years, I also remind myself that 57 years ago today, Keith breathed his first question.  The answer he breathed at his last can only be shared in bits and pieces.  By all of us telling the tale of a man that lived life the way we all should between those brackets.  He never compromised, he did everything full tilt and in technocolor, and he loved and gave unconditionally to so many.  A man who managed to sneak a Carvel cake into the house for every birthday and who would proclaim after each batch of spaghetti sauce that this is the best one he ever made.  For all of us who still have dot, dot, dot – a moment of silence – no wait – a moment of singing happy birthday.  Somewhere, out there, there’s someone who knows we miss them that can hear it. 

All I’ve wanted is a simple life.  It seems like another life time ago that I had it.  But then I lost it.  The moment we knew Keith was sick, life suddenly became complicated, or more precisely, complex.  Yet our reaction was just as simple as our lives had been before.  Doctors appointments, organizing pills, keeping the germs away, paying the bills, keeping the household running – all simple actions in a complex situation.  Then Keith slipped away, creating a simple void that I filled with complicated thoughts.   Once you’ve lived a simple life, you become addicted.  A maddening craving that never goes away.  So, just like an addict, I’ve spent over a year running after it – running from the thoughts, running to adventure and travel, running into an overloaded schedule of work and then more work, and actually flat out running across the finish line of a half marathon.  I even ran away from home.  Moved just a handful of precious chattel down the road 50 miles from the town I thought I would grow old in.

But you can only run so far and fast.  On the day I moved the last of my things out of Easton, there could be no more running.  I had it again.  By every technical definition, I was once again living a simple life.  I had a quiet house in the country. I found a new career in a beautiful little office right around the corner.  A handyman and his family became my tenants and take better care of the house than I ever could.  And yet – what was this rumbling?  This sound in my head and the pound in my heart?  I was so focused on running towards that shiny dream of simplicity that I never saw the wave of pain, confusion, grief, doubts, fears, and shaken faith that had built up so slowly at my heels.  Built to a monstrous level that could do nothing other than crest and crash over me at that precise moment that I had stopped the chase.

I had everything.  My life was better than good.  I lost it all.  And yet, I found it all over again.  It should have been glorious.  I wanted to sing and not cry.  Instead, I spent a month of sleepless nights and started to find myself wide awake and restless long before the birds would sing to the rising sun.  I would wander the house like a ghost, my stomach knotted up and leaving no room for sustenance.  On October 18 I couldn’t sleep at all.  That morning, I stood before Gary in the kitchen – a simple man willing to share a simple life with me – and I disintegrated right there in front of him.  Imploded and melted into that blinding love for Keith, sobbing madly, with every inch of my body and soul.  I couldn’t stop it.  I couldn’t calm it.  The crest of that dreaded wave of loss and pain and grief.  And I’ve been riding it ever since – until last night.

I’ve only heard of moments of clarity, brought on by meditation, prayer, drinking through stupid and into numbness.  And yet, here I was – sitting on the front step of Anita’s house last night while her daughter handed out candy to trick-or-treaters.  The guys were hanging out in the kitchen dining on chicken and dumplings.  We idly chatted about our own trick-or-treat adventure growing up while sipping on our lime-o-ritas.  The night so delightfully warm for Halloween.  A bee and a cookie monster paid us a visit.  Two Cleopatras enchanted us.  One visitor couldn’t see through his head-to-toe tied-dyed body suit so he had his sister escort him from house to house.  Every time Stella handed out candy, she’d fluff my already, as she called it, “poofy hair”.

And I wasn’t thinking about all I’ve lost, all that’s changed, what the future holds, my job, what I needed to do tomorrow.  The only past conjured up in that moment was my childhood memories.  I wasn’t running.  I wasn’t filling a void with complicated thoughts.  I wasn’t looking over my shoulder at the deadly wave.  There was only the calm waters of my soul.  Peace.  Everything changed in the blink of an eye.  I left the ghosts that have haunted me on that doorstep in the dark of night on all hallows eve.  This morning, I woke at my usual 4:45 AM.  Kissed Gary on the neck and slipped out of bed at 5:00 AM so I could start the coffee, started slicing venison for jerky by 5:15 AM while infused with the spirit of my early rising love, my beloved Keith.  Infused – yes – not haunted – by that infectious Tigger that would bound into the bedroom to bother this night owl’s restful sleep because he had already been up for hours.  He is here.  He always has been.  Are you proud of me, Keith?  This is all we ever wanted for each other – a simple life.  I will live it for both of us.

It’s been two years now since we got the news that Keith had cancer. Right before the Labor Day weekend of 2011. I was such a different person then that when I try to look back, I can’t remember what I was like. I do remember that we had plans, dreams, a bucket list, and that sparkling naive idea that we would be together through our golden years. But plans are subject to change.

And change they have, on a grand scale at a rapid fire pace. By December of 2011, Keith was gone. By February of 2012, my dad was on the road to a full recovery from the gall bladder issues he was going through at the same time Keith was being treated. By May of 2012, the bulk of our financial fallout from Keith’s cancer had been resolved. When summer rolled around, Zach and Brandon were both finally set for college. My parents moved in that November and Christmas found me at the Klinglesmith house just like I used to do years ago.

By March of 2013 I had realized that I was capable of loving again. It’s another leap of faith that I temper with the hope that if he isn’t destined to walk with me together into our golden years, I can once again conjure up the strength to say goodbye. What a strange notion that Keith and Gary could meet on the other side. They could shake their heads at this crazy girl’s maelstrom of thoughts and adventures. There would be endless discussions about politics, the state of the economy, our military men who fight for our country, and the nation’s current status. They’d share their love for their children with each other. Keith would give Gary a tongue lashing for taking his wife on a motorcycle. Gary would chuckle at Keith for his brief run as a guppy farmer. But that day isn’t here yet. So today, in this moment, my heart will hold all the love from both the one who is gone and the one in my here and now. As if I have found an endless treasure in the depths of my grief.

In April, I lost the same job that afforded me the opportunity to work from home to care for Keith. By May, I took on a seasonal job in Ocean City which shook off the cobwebs, got me out of the house, and gave me a diversified caring fun group of coworkers whom I now call my friends. Yesterday was my last day and they sent me off in style with pizza and homemade ice cream cake. I’m going to miss our small talk between phone calls. The way we all ran around at a mad pace on Saturdays to handle all the guests checking in and out, until the pizza showed up and we’d take turns slipping into the conference room to scarf up a slice. We’d play Pandora radio and whenever the station stopped, one of them would turn to me and say “I’m still listening” so I’d go to the website and promptly click the “I’m still listening” button to start it up again. I have an overwhelming urge to call them right now to ask if they are still listening and should we order pizza for lunch.

But like the job that kept me home ended at just the right time, this job ended at a point where I need to have time on my hands. Time to move. It’s this weekend – the two year anniversary of Keith’s diagnosis- that everything leaves the house we once shared. The family homestead where 3 kids grew up. This same house my parents lived in before moving to South Carolina in July. After all of their own moving, they still found the time to move my stuff to Salisbury. Dad and my brother Lance loaded up my washer and bedroom furniture, then the whole Lankford gypsy clan made their way to my new abode. My oldest niece held open the door so we could let all the flies in. My youngest ran around the house counting Gary’s parrots and eating cheezits. When we got down to the heavy furniture, we stood on the brink of defeat. We had already spent the whole morning moving things and now faced with the big heavy dresser and wardrobe, it seemed like an impossible task. Then Lance figured out how to take the drawers out so the frames were light enough to handle. We all laughed at ourselves for not being smart enough to do that when we moved them out of Easton.

And so it will go this weekend. Christie is driving down in a rental truck tomorrow night. Everything must go. We plan on getting all of the furniture loaded and then off to its new home. That’s the plan as it stands now but the last two years have taught me a few important things. You have to sway and give with whatever the wind brings to you. You have to know that nothing is written in stone. You’ll never cross life’s finish line with a victory smile without adjusting as you go. It isn’t a race – it’s an obstacle course. The only constant we can count on is plans are subject to change.

Last week was filled with visits from old friends colliding with my present world.  While catching up with my old high school friend, Karen, my step-daughter was at the house getting geared up for moving her Nana’s things out.  I sat next to Karen as she deftly knitted away on a scarf of lacy yarns while I wore a finished one she had given me in my favorite green and rust colors, wondering how it was going for Christie as she looked over all the things she grew up seeing around her Nana’s house.  While catching up with my old college friend, Dan, my step-son stayed by the side of our old man, Rusty, until the dear old dog had to visit the vet for the last time.  Sitting between Gary and Dan at a comedy show, I laughed just as hard at the two of them heckling away as I did at the comedian’s morose humor.  Somewhere, deep in my brain, I was with Rusty.  Thinking of all the times he made his great escapes from the yard. Keith would hop in the car and coax him into chasing behind it around the neighborhood until his tongue dragged on the ground and he stopped bounding along.  Then Rusty would be content to go home.  I could not shake the thought that he has now made his last great escape. Keith is waiting for him, engine revving, just in case Rusty wants to chase freely behind him.

These are bitter sweet days.  I’ve made the decision to move out of the house so that I can rent it.  It is a fiscal decision, simple as that.  Emotionally, there is nothing simple about it.  All the children are pitching in to clear out everything they ever wanted or think they might need.  I spend my days off, loading up the car and making hauls of stuff to the new place.  Each shift of things from old place to new place brings me joy and sorrow.  As if I’m starting with a clean slate using pieces of my life infused with memories of all that was and gone.  My grandmother’s dishes now rest on a beautiful oak hutch as if they belong there, while images of those same plates sitting on her red counter tops drift into sight.  The sewing machine the Klinglesmith family gave me 20 years ago sits perfectly next to a handsome mahogany leather couch and I think of all the miles of battenburg lace I sewed onto bed sheets with it while working on “As You Like It” at the Shakespeare Theater.  The hutch I managed to sweet talk away from the boss 10 years ago has a new home and the scrapbooks I’ve made over the years will once again live on its majestic mahogany shelves.

Once again, I’m meshing what was with what is already there, in a new abode.  Just as I did when I moved in with Keith 8 years ago.  Today I had my moment.  I had moved a desk without thinking, so I moved it back.  Sitting on the floor under it, hooking up the wires and cables to the computer, I had to stop.  The sobs were too strong to focus on the task at hand.  I couldn’t comprehend why. Tears rolled down my face while sitting under a desk in a little room, wondering if I would ever be able to stop this disjointed life I live.  To move to a place that is not yours that feels like home.  To own a home that feels like it isn’t yours any more.  It occasionally pushes me to madness.  Just as I stand on the cliff, ready to to make that final leap into that dark mad place, a couple of gentlemen show up.  They load up the truck with a mahogany book case, hang curtains, clean the weeds away from the deck where my firepit sits, and allow me to have one little room with a desk I can cry under.

Moving is stressful.  Moving on and moving is, well – I don’t know – strange.  I know the shifting from one place to another will end and I can stop this mind racing project and start a new one that might cure cancer or solve homelessness.  Something a little more productive and constructive.  I think Rusty had it right.  If you have to escape the yard, do it in style.  Run till your tongue drags the ground.  Only chase the cars driven by people you love.  Never look back unless you absolutely have to.  Feel the joy of just moving.  And take a nap when your done.

Sometimes, history moves in fluid circles.   It affords us an opportunity to use our past to tackle our today and to give us a glimpse of our future.  The circles rippling out, touching each other, intersecting delicately, changing their perfect circumferences until they become something all together different.  The trick is being present to see it unfold, knowing it for what it is and curiously wondering what it can become.

I’ve seen it.  Starting with stepping on the DC metro last Thursday.  As the train moved down the tracks, images of me 20 years younger floated through my brain.  Back in a simpler time when money was tight.  My son, his father and I lived in my in-law’s basement to help us make ends meet.  I’d hustle for work in the theater scene back then.  Shifting from costume sewing with the Folger Shakespeare Theater, to running the sound for Round House Theater, to designing properties with Round House, Olney Theater and a handful of small venues around 14th street.  On those rare days off, I’d gather up Zach and pack a lunch, then we’d walk to the metro for a day trip into the city.  There were so many places to go and things to see and all it cost us was the $3.50 round trip metro fare.  A bargain adventure.  Zach’s first visit there was before he was born.  His father and I were on the mall and I was quite pregnant, waddling along and starving.  I was always starving in those 9 months.  So Jimmy and I stopped at a pretzel stand.  The vendor took one look at me and pronounced that I would have a boy because I was carrying high.  She was right.

So here I was walking around DC all these years later – heading to the Nike Women’s Marathon expo so I could take advantage of all the free stuff I could get my hands on.  My parents are living with me for a while to help me make ends meet.  I’m back to hustling, this time in the pursuit of a new job and photography customers.  My son and I still go on budget adventures.  The metro now cost $7.00 round trip but still worth the money.  I got a free makeover and a free hairdo and picked up a free coffee and was quite pleased with myself.  I got to see the C&O canal as it ran through Georgetown and watched as a construction crew hoisted a large beam into place 8 stories into the air.  I picked up enough free luna bars to stave off having to buy lunch.  Once again, working it like I used to when I was younger, this time with a little more savvy and smarts.

Just before leaving the expo, I was faced with a large blank wall and a sharpie – the attendant and the wall both stated that I was to write “Why I run . . . . ”  The crazy thing about a whirlwind mind like mine is that handing me a tool to write with is like handing me the laser pointer on my thoughts.  It takes the mental tornado and pinpoints it into what is really going on in the madding howling winds.  And this is what I wrote . . .

. . . the epitaph I wrote in my blog the night Keith died.  I took a step back and just stood there in shock.  My eyes started to feel that old familiar burn and I fought the urge to put my sunglasses on.  Just a few hours ago, I was thinking about being pregnant with my son, sharing a pretzel with his father.  Now I was standing there, in silent witness to a memorial in honor of my late husband.  The two strongest circles of my personal history colliding.  The joy of bringing life into the world and the pain of watching someone leave it.

I was back on the metro Saturday night. A young couple sat across from me.  His arm cradling her across an obviously pregnant profile with such tenderness as she laid her head on his shoulder.  Jimmy had done the same thing as we crammed into a full car coming back from an evening on the mall.  We couldn’t find a seat so he wrapped his arms around my 7 months of pregnancy while I held onto the bar.  I got off the train, leaving behind the couple and my memories and headed to the hotel.  Stepping into the lobby, I called my boyfriend to let him know I made it.  We had a conversation about keeping an eye out for suspicious behavior and things I should do to make sure I was safe at all times.  It was the kind of conversation reminiscent of the ones Keith and I would have whenever I traveled.  I found myself in my tornado thoughts again  – thinking about how I’ve managed to always be so protected by the men in my life, including my father.  At the same time, all of them have always given me total freedom to be me and do what I enjoy doing – even if they didn’t agree with my choices.  I can’t imagine any other way to feel love from another human being.

Today at lunch, I was talking about my run on Sunday with a friend.  She reminds me so much of where I was a year ago.  I had been walking a little over a year when my coworker put the thought in my head that I could do a 1/2 marathon.  “Right” I said with a great deal of sarcasm.  But the more I thought about it, the more I believed that it just might be possible.  I had thousands of questions for her.  I was a bundle of nerves when I committed to doing my first one.  I doubted myself at every training session.  I couldn’t see how I could build up to it in time or get enough training in.  But I did it – walking of course.  Then I did it again.  This Sunday, I did it again.  I ran most of it.   I shaved a half hour off my best time.  I can do it again.  When the topic of my friend doing a 1/2 marathon first came up, I could almost hear her say “right”.  Today at lunch, I answered the questions.  We compared her current walk time with the pace necessary to complete a race.  I know there are doubts and I also know that all she has to do is trust in that voice inside that says she can – and she will.  I’ve lived it.  The circles of our histories are moving across each other.

And where does all of this go?  I don’t know.  It will be behind me soon enough.  Archived into my memory to pull back up when deja vu strikes.  I’ve had a great run on my life so far so I don’t mind having parts repeat themselves.  It is that fluid movement of my history, the circles intersecting and merging, and me seeing them as they happen that is the very tool necessary to embrace my today, my tomorrow, and into my unforeseeable future.