In Pieces

 

Piece by piece, I’m shutting everything down.

By this time next week, our house in Heber will belong to someone else. I’m disconnecting my responsibility for paying the electric bill tomorrow. And the propane. That brand new tank we were so proud to have installed—it won’t be ours anymore. Then I’m mailing back the medical test kit Rob needed every month. That’s all in the past. I have a couple of monthly bills we’ve hung onto for years that I don’t need to donate money to now. This morning I moved all the investments Rob made from one company to another. They’re all in my name now at a firm he’s never heard of.

I am systematically closing down everything we used to handle together. It hurts my heart again to have to do it, so, naturally, I got mad at Rob.

Standing in a hot shower a while later, I added my tears to those of the flowing water. “I hate shutting down every part of the life we had together!” I cried into the steamy space, hoping Rob could hear me on his end. “I just want you to know I don’t want to do these things,” I added. I don't want to live without him. but I have no choice. 

Crying in the shower works pretty well, except for that snotty nose part. Awkward.

The list of changes I have to deal with seems to be getting shorter. Every one of them could have been handled with one or two phone calls. None of them took less than ten. Some, like selling the house, seemed to take forever. All of it while my heart is broken and my red eyes are blurry and every piece of it is unfamiliar and painful. My motto for months has been, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” and yet I have to keep doing it no matter how much every bit of it reminds me of what I’ve lost.

It feels like I just keep losing what little is left of what Rob and I built together for more than four decades.

Sometimes I want nothing more than to simply run away. I keep threatening to buy a little villa in the South of France. Not because I enjoy the Riviera or sunbathers or even the sun, for that matter, but because it’s fun to say the South of France. And watch eyebrows rise in response. I’ve studied French for a few years. A long time ago. I could immerse myself in French culture for a while and forget my problems here. While I create new ones there. But running away wouldn’t leave the loss behind. It would just plant me in a foreign country where not only would there be no one around who knows me, there would be no one around who speaks English.

I’d better just stay here where I don’t know what I’m doing and can still order a Starbucks in my native tongue.

I was telling my son tonight how hard all these details are and asking his advice on a couple of those bills I don’t think I need to pay anymore, even though Rob and I took them on together because once upon a time we thought they mattered. Now all that matters is letting go of baggage that drains my bank account.

My son agreed. “Yeah, Mom. I don’t think it makes sense to keep making payments on services you don’t need any more just as a way of memorializing Dad.”

I burst out laughing at that. He was right. “Well, I am keeping his phone on for the unseen future even though no one uses it,” I said. “I can let go of pre-paid legal services but checking his phone for messages makes me feel a little like I still have a piece of him here.”

Any little piece of him I can keep around me helps me feel like I haven’t lost him completely. On my birthday last week, my sister gave me a charm to add to the thistle necklace Katy had already given me. The thistle, Scotland’s national “flower,” is a symbol of strength and courage under duress, and Katy bought one for every member of our family to wear in honor of Roby, his love of Scotland, and our own bravery in the face of overwhelming loss.

My sister’s gift was a silver circle with the words, “My Love,” stamped on one side and Rob’s initials, “RLM,” on the other. Any time I want to, I can caress these two charms, knowing that I’m still wearing his initials on a silver chain around my neck. The MVD may take his name off their list, but his name is still alive and well with me.

Today in the mail my eight-year-old granddaughter in Kentucky sent me a picture she painted of her Chief from a favorite photo she keeps on the wall above her bed. This afternoon, my daughter and son-in-law picked up one of Rob’s fire department helmets that had been borrowed for his memorial video, as well as the drum he always played with the Pipe and Drum Band. Katy handed the helmet to me the way an honor guard will soon hand me the flag folded in Rob’s memory, and I kissed the face shield and hung the sacred item on the wall in my room. It’s smudged with smoke, the visor is scratched, and the Chandler FD emblem is nearly worn away. But it’s a piece of Rob that was a major part of his life and mine, and now I can see it from the table where I write or its reflection in the mirror across the room when I sit in my chair.

Surrounded by my family, here and across the country, I realize that every time I see them, talk with them, or hug them, I’m holding a piece of Rob in my arms. They carry his blood in their veins, his DNA in their cells, and memories of him in their minds. He left a huge part of himself here in his children and grandchildren, and his mother and sisters.

For every piece of our life that I have to close down, another piece of him surfaces and takes its place of honor. The fire hydrant given to him years ago is outside my room, waiting to be planted near the casita we’ll soon be building for me to live in. The hand painted rock my friend in Tucson made for Rob when he retired is propped up beside the gardenia bush our Idaho friends sent me when we lost him.

I have to remember that his life was not the financial things I’m dealing with—those things that cause me added pain right now. His life still lives—with Jesus, as well as in the treasures he left behind that carry so many memories in them. That’s where I find comfort. And every time I see or touch or kiss the things, and especially the people, that connect me to him, I think of RLM, My Love, and ask Jesus to tell him again, for me, how much I love him.

Robert Lee McLeod IV. Always on my mind. Forever in my heart.