Prior to Gordie’s passing, I knew only two widows close to my
age. But that was about to
change…significantly.
The Sunday morning following Gordie’s death, I took the boys
to church…in my sweats. Hopefully
God gives a hall pass to recent widows regarding church appropriate attire. At the end of Mass, our friend Tammy,
who went to high school with Gordie and me, walked toward me with a tall, dark
haired, striking, woman.
“Staci”, Tammy said, “this is Monica. She went to high school with us. She lost her husband many years
ago”.
Monica reached out her hand to shake mine. I grabbed it.
“I’m so sorry about your loss. I was in the same class as Gordie’s brother. I have two daughters who were very
young when my husband died. I will
make sure someone gets you my contact information. Please let me know if I can ever help you”, Monica said.
That meeting in the back of church turned out to be life
changing for me. Monica would
become what I refer to as my “Widow Mentor”…for years. She has given me the good, the bad, and
the ugly. She was the first person
to tell me “this was not what you planned but there is nothing you can do about
it.” She has given me advice that I did not want to hear but needed to, more than once. She also was
the first and only person to tell me that the relationship I would have with my
sons, as a solo Mom, would be incredible.
She was right.
A week later Monica sent me an email with information about
a meeting for a group called Widows and Kiddos. She wrote that it was a group she had been part of for
several years and it had been helpful to her and her girls. Their next meeting was in a week. Did I want to go?
I sat on my bed reading the email.
Widows group???? I am now eligible for Widows
groups? This is a fucking
nightmare. Who wants to be in a
Widows group?
I went back and forth on whether to attend but I finally
decided to go for it. My decision
to go was mostly based on Nathan:
I thought it would be helpful for him to meet other children, hopefully
some boys, who had lost their Dads.
On the day of the meeting, I went for a run before the
meeting started at 6pm. I was
nervous. What if I could not handle it?
What if I cried the entire time and made a fool of myself? What if Nathan could not handle it? What if nobody played with him? What if I could not relate to anyone? I pounded the pavement of the streets
trying to shake the worry off of me like droplets of sweat. I barely even noticed the music from my
iPod because the voice in my head asking all of those questions seemed to be
screaming.
We walked into the Church that hosts Widows and Kiddos. A pretty blonde woman walked right up
to me.
“Are you Staci”, she asked?
“Yes”, I replied.
“I’m Laura. I
started the group. I was widowed a
couple of years ago too and I have a daughter”, she said.
I studied Laura’s face. She looked happy.
She did not look dazed. She
did not look pathetic. She looked
like a normal woman.
She went on to say “I’m so glad you came. I know it’s a club that nobody wants to
be in”. She smiled gently as she
said that.
Her words were exactly what I had been thinking since I
received Monica’s email about the meeting. I did not want to be here. I did not want to have this commonality with these
women. But what I would soon learn
is that I was part of the Widows club regardless of what I wanted. It’s like the song Hotel California,
but worse. In the Eagles’ song,
you can check out but you can never leave. However at least, seemingly, you checked in willingly. In the Widows Club, you did not check in
voluntarily and you can never leave. It’s fucking fantastic.
Laura led me down the hall to where we drop off our kids who
are watched, fed, and entertained by Youth Members and Adults from the
church. They even had a separate
room for little ones like Wyatt. I
dropped Wyatt in the little playroom.
Then I took Nathan into the bigger room with the kids his age and older. Nathan looked really tentative. Laura helped introduce him to some of
the other kids. A man named Steve,
who founded the group with Laura, walked up to us. He was so friendly.
“Do you like sports Nathan”, he asked?
Nathan nodded.
“Well, let’s get some kind of ball game going on”, Steve
said, “C’mon”. Nathan followed
him.
Laura let me back down the hall and up the stairs to a room
filled with women. A dinner buffet
was set on the side but I could not eat.
Women kept coming up, introducing themselves to me. Again, I studied each of their
faces. What I found is that there
were two categories of faces in the room.
The first were the women who looked dazed, sad, and haggard. The second group was the women who
looked like Laura and Monica. They
did not look sad. They did not
look dazed. They did not look
haggard. Their faces looked like
the faces of my friends. They
looked happy. And as I looked
closer I saw another trait in their face:
determination.
I want to look like
them, I thought, thinking of the second group, I AM going to look like them.
It was the first part of a bigger choice that I would
eventually make.
We sat at a table with our dinners and started to chat. We did introductions around the
room. It was each person’s choice
if they wanted to share the story of how their husband died. I think everyone did. There was a mix of women whose husbands
died suddenly and whose husbands were sick. All had kids of various ages.
As we circled around the table taking turn with
introductions, it came to a woman with long dark hair. I thought I had seen her somewhere
before. I was right. Her name was Eden and she also went to
my High School. There were three
of us there from my High School.
What are the friggin’ chances?
At this meeting I met some women who were also runners: Laura, Carolyn, Barb. They too used running to help them
through their grief. Additionally,
Carolyn had been raising two boys alone for years. I gravitated to her immediately. Carolyn would become my Boy Mom Widow Mentor.
I came to find out that some of the "Running Widows" had done
their first significant races: half
marathons, marathons, after their husbands died. I told them I had never done a race of that magnitude.
“You should do the Rock and Roll San Francisco Half Marathon
with us next year”, Carolyn said.
“It’s a great race and a great choice for your first half marathon.”
I had never run more than 8 miles…if that. Could
I run 13.2 miles in a year, I thought?
The seed of an idea was planted.
That first Widow and Kiddos meeting turned out to be not
only a turning point in my running career but also the start of a lifeline for
my boys and for me. I have found
it critical to my survival to have a network of women, who I now call friends,
who live my life everyday.
Similarly, my sons have a place where we can go and they are just like
everyone else.
After I put the boys to bed that night, I went to my room
and sat on my bed. I looked at my running shoes sitting in the corner. Gordie had been
training for his first half marathon when he died. I did sprint triathlons before Nathan was born and I had run
many, many 10k races and even the 7.5 Bay to Breakers a few times. But I had never thought I had it in me
to run more than that.
Gordie did not get to
do his half marathon, I thought.
I’m going to do it for him. I’m going to run that Rock and Roll
half marathon in a year.
I was in.
