Nothing Good About Grief

Part II Life as a Widow

There's a Flagpole Rag & the Wind Won't Stop

How do you tell your child that her father has died?

I thought about that after I got over the shock of the macabre scene at my house. My mom, still in her white fluffy housecoat and slippers, a friend of mine, in her business suit, sitting next to Mom and holding her hand, the Deputy, standing in his white and green uniform….and Rich, now an obscene blob of carbon lying in the middle of my tile floor. I pulled up a chair right in front of him, and kept staring at his chest, checking to see if it would start moving up and down.

After some time had passed, the Deputy asked me what I wanted to do with” the body”.

That’s when it hit me that what I saw on my kitchen floor was no longer my husband, but rather his physical container. Rich was already long gone. I missed him by a long shot.

And what did I want to do with it? I wanted Rich’s spirit to come back, his body to start breathing and stop with this silly nonsense. What did I want to do with it? How the hell should I know?

My friend Holly, ever the practical resource, suggested that I call a funeral home. She even had a name and number, TM Ralph in Sunrise. She’s always so prepared - even for tragedies. TM Ralph had a lovely visitation for a client of hers. Who the hell keeps track of that kind of stuff? A lovely visitation? Luckily, she did, because that is who I called.

We had to wait for about four or five hours for the coroner to arrive. Hurricane Frances caused a lot of damage. The guy was stuck in traffic on I-95 but they were going to call me when they were close. We were back and forth on the phone sharing info: name, social security number, etc.

In the interim, I was trying to find my daughter. Her cell phone was off or the battery was dead, and her boyfriend was supposedly bringing her to our house. Now picture the scene that she would be coming home to: three Broward County Sheriff Office vehicles parked in my driveway with their lights flashing, four deputies keeping “watch” outside (not sure what they were watching for, but they hung out for quite some time), and of course, the head-trip circus that was all set up inside my kitchen.

We needed a plan, and my friend Holly thought of one quickly: send Jacqui over to Holly’s house - she is best friends with Holly’s kids, so at least she’d be with people she knew and loved.

I could hear Jacqui yelling and screaming at the cops a few moments later. Obviously she wanted to come in the house. She had no idea what the hell was going on, and saw her father’s car, her mother’s car, and three cop cars. But she and her boyfriend eventually left and then she called me.
Just as I was in the middle of a call with the funeral home.

So imagine the scene. Me standing about four feet away from “the body” (it was getting to be like any other piece of furniture at that point), my mother and Holly drinking tea in the living room, the deputy sitting at my dining room table and me, in my helter-skelter mental state, making plans with the funeral home. So it should be no surprise that when the call waiting beeped, and I had Jacqui on the other line, I blurted out, “Jacqui hang on, I have the funeral home on the other line”. Obviously as the words came out of my mouth, I realized what I was saying but by then it was too late. “Funeral home?”, she asked. “Mom, what the hell is going on?”

So in my calmest voice, I told her that Rich died and that everything was going to be OK. I told her that I loved her and that I’d let her know when she could come over to the house.

Great way to tell your kid, right? Sheesh. I was so mentally deficient at that point, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Just slipped out of my mouth and by the time I realized what I had said, it was too late.