Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years
Description That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
What if you came home one day and found your husband dead in his favorite chair? This grief memoir explores the author’s experience of the unexpected death of her husband from sudden cardiac arrest a mere three months after his doctors had pronounced him hale and healthy. The author shares her experiences in the immediate aftermath of the abrupt shock of discovery, reminisces about the details of the couple’s late-in-life courtship and marriage, and imparts other experiences she has had along the grieving road in the years since becoming a widow. In our society, we often don’t want to talk or even think about death, so stereotypes about widows exist. However, each person’s grief journey is unique, and sharing tales of those experiences can be helpful and useful for those who find themselves in a similar situation. Though not a self-help book, this memoir is the story of a widow who defied the stereotype that widows are expected to “get over it” and move on with their quiet lives. Instead, this widow “got through it” and is now sharing her journey in hopes of helping others in comparable circumstances.Praise That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
“Author Rebecca Daniels and I have a lot in common, We both found and married our husbands a bit later in life. We both had our marriage stories cut short in an instant by death, and we were both widowed by cardiac arrest. I needed the soothing and validating words that Daniels provides as she gently and lovingly walks us through what it’s like to be suddenly widowed. In addition to her grief story, Rebecca gives us a beautiful glimpse into the love story between her and Skip, and as readers, we almost feel as if we are losing him too. As a writer, Rebecca has a way of making the words flow, so that reading them feels less like an effort and more like floating or being guided along.”- Kelley Lynn, Certified Grief Counselor, viral TED talk speaker, and author of My Husband Is Not a Rainbow: the brutally awful, hilarious truth about Life, Love, Grief, and Loss. “That Day And What Came After is a moving story of a love found later in life and lost too soon. In this memoir, Rebecca contemplates deeper questions and chronicles navigating the minutiae of day-to-day life after losing her beloved partner. Heartbreak and loneliness are tempered by found family and precious memories. By turns sorrowful, hopeful, and reflective.”- Natalie Pinter, author of The Fragile KeepersPraise Finding Sisters by Rebecca Daniels
“I was intrigued how the author was able to use DNA and other investigative measures to find what she could about her biological family. I admired her courage and persistence in continuing her search. It was fascinating to see what she discovered, who she met along the way, and how she was able to deal with the information. I enjoyed reading how it all unfolded. I loved it.”-Amy, Locks, Hooks, and BooksExcerpt:
Excerpt From Chapter Eleven – Early Milestones (the first few years)
After I stopped writing regularly in my grief journal, I kept on writing, and what I wrote had a new, different format. By then, I knew I would write this grief memoir. Each of the shorter pieces were about experiences I had during my ongoing mourning, but they didn’t fit the format of the overarching narrative I had been crafting for the story of Skip and Rebecca. They were shorter and more focused on specific emotional memories and challenges. These experiences or thoughts that grief delivered to me over time didn’t hang together in a traditional narrative way, and they were not designed to be self-help advice for others. They were simply important milestones in my grief journey—intimate elements of my widow story—and I decided to share them. The result is the next two chapters, where these short essays are shared in a more or less chronological order. . . .
MUSINGS ON MUSCLE MEMORY AND MARRIAGE
January 10, 2013 (Three years and three months after)
Muscle memory, which the dictionary defines as “the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought, acquired as a result of frequent repetition of that movement,” is a pretty amazing thing. Just when my mind thinks that I’m adjusting to being a widow, my body betrays me with a memory so visceral I can’t ignore it. Last night in the middle of the night, I got up to pee. This is not an uncommon occurrence for women, especially of my age. When I climbed back into bed half asleep, I slid backward under the covers with my body curled up, expecting to be spooned by the other warm body in the bed, a body that would always curl around me and hold me, regardless of how sound asleep its owner had been mere moments before. But he wasn’t there. My mind already knew it, but my body forgot, and as a result I came fully awake suddenly, sobbing with the renewed shock of absence and loss.
I’m not one to go find myself a new warm body, any body, to replace the one I lost. This is why I spent almost twenty years living alone and mostly celibate after my divorce, with only a couple of affairs, both of them before I turned forty. Then Skip came along when I was in my menopausal mid-fifties and transformed my world. It would have to be a special person to jolt me out of the memory of the remarkable marriage we had. Because I found a way to negotiate a two-year paid research leave from my teaching work as a university professor, and because we were able to orchestrate those two years so that we could be together much of every single day, we had more time in each other’s immediate presence than many working couples who’ve been together for a decade or more.
My first marriage, when I was in my late twenties and early thirties, lasted nearly eight years before our divorce was final, but we were living apart for almost three of those years. Even in the early years of the marriage, I was at work for many hours every day, especially after I founded and started to run a small theatre company and evening rehearsals started to become a regular part of my job. My second marriage was different from the first. It had all the wonderful aspects of a long marriage without having to go through all the ups and downs of growing up together that I believe happened to couples like my parents and others who married young and perhaps even raised a family together. When you meet and marry in your fifties, it’s easier to bypass some of the growing pains younger folks might experience. The only regret Skip ever voiced to me in our time as a couple was that because of our age we weren’t able to have children of our own, though we did have a treasured young friend who was like a son to us. And we had two grandchildren, which was and is a blessing that I had never expected to experience, and one that sustains me as I continue my life without him. Another blessing is that in our blended families, no one has ever thought to differentiate between the step-grandparents and the biological ones.
This second marriage—the one I can’t let go of yet—lasted just over six years from first meeting to sudden unexpected parting, but that relationship was a true marriage in all the best senses of the word. Even as my mind gets used to the identity of “widow” and learns to get through most days without emotional backsliding, my body continues to struggle. And it isn’t always big moments, either. Another surprising place where muscle memory plays a part in an occasional grief eruption has been the changing of sheets on the bed. It’s much different doing it alone, because it was something we always did together, and my body often forgets about that, too.
I used to joke with Skip that I had two women to thank for the success—and even the circumstances that created the possibility—of our marriage: Shirley, his deceased first wife, who trained him well in the ways of the household and from whom he learned (or with whom he practiced—this could have been his own innate nature as well) extraordinary love and loyalty; and Marcia, the woman he dated after Shirley’s death, who first brought him to the north country and then kicked him to the curb several months before he and I first met. I used to tease that if I were to die suddenly, he would have been married again within two years. He denied it, but I know there are some who need to be partnered to survive, some who are compelled to live single, and others who can go either way, depending on the circumstances. He was of the first category; I am of the latter. I’ve experienced the marriage of my dreams, and I feel no urgent need to look for a replacement, even though my body still aches in memory of what I have lost. My muscles will never let me forget.
©Rebecca Daniels
About Rebecca Daniels
Award winning Author, Rebecca Daniels (MFA, PhD) taught performance, writing, and speaking in liberal arts universities for over 25 years, including St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, from 1992-2015. She was the founding producing director of Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, OR, directed with many professional Portland theatre companies in the 1980s, and is the author of the groundbreaking Women Stage Directors Speak: Exploring the Effects of Gender on Their Work (McFarland, 1996, 2000) and has been published in multiple professional theatre journals.
After her retirement from teaching, she turned her focus to creative non-fiction and began her association with Sunbury Press with Keeping the Lights on for Ike: Daily Life of a Utilities Engineer at AFHQ in Europe During WWII; or, What to Say in Letters Home When You're Not Allowed to Write about the War (Sunbury Press, 2019), a book based on her father’s letter home from Europe during WWII.
Her second book with Sunbury, Finding Sisters: How One Adoptee Used DNA Testing and Determination to Uncover Family Secrets and Find Her Birth Family explores how DNA testing, combined with traditional genealogical research, helped her find her genetic parents, two half-sisters, and other relatives in spite of being given up for a closed adoption at birth.
Her newest book with Sunbury (2024) is a memoir about her late-in-life second marriage and sudden widowhood called That Day and What Came After: Finding and Losing the Love of My Life in Six Short Years.
Website: https://rebecca-daniels.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.daniels.9
Buy That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
Amazon SunburyGiveaway That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
This giveaway is for 1 print copy or 2 pdf copies. Print is open to the U.S. only. eBook is open worldwide. This giveaway ends on October 8, 2024 midnight, pacific time. Entries accepted via Rafflecopter only.
a Rafflecopter giveawayFollow That Day and What Came After by Rebecca Daniels
No comments:
Post a Comment