Four Years
There’s an app on my phone called Days Since. It’s been silently counting for the last 1,461 days. 35,064 hours. 2.1 million minutes.
That counter began at 8:19 p.m. on April 8, 2022. Why? Because that’s when my wife died.
Four years is not, at least in a cosmological sense, a long time. Practically, though, it’s a significant period of time. It’s a presidential term. An Olympic cycle. The length of time a kid spends in high school.
Link wasn’t even in high school when Janie died. He was still in middle school, playing a small role in the high school’s musical, “High School Musical: The Musical.” (What a sentence.) The show had just opened the night before; I had gone to opening night while Janie stayed home with the kids. I tried to take video of Link’s brief performance during the Act 1 finale, to send back to Janie, but my phone stopped recording about 30 seconds in.
It was no one’s fault, except I suppose an Apple software engineer, but that didn’t stop Janie from blaming it on me when I told her. “I don’t believe you at all. Zero trust here,” she texted me. “I know better. This is typical. Just how you roll. No such thing as a mysterious phone glitch. You just hit stop.”
That was life with Janie in a nutshell. Everything was a personal slight, an attack, a purposeful mistreatment directed at her. I was always the villain in her story, no matter what was actually true in reality.
She was insistent that she was going to go the next night, to see it and record it for herself because I couldn’t be trusted, because I was a malevolent, devious, evil person out to personally wrong her.
I offered to drive her there that night. She refused, because she didn’t want to get Britt and Evan out for me to drive us over there, because we only had one car, because I was lazy and didn’t care enough to make sure she had her own car. No, she was going to drive herself, and I was going to stay home with the kids.
She called me from the car at about 6:40 p.m. that day. She’d gotten cut off in traffic, and the anxiety and panic she struggled with for years was flaring up badly. She made it to the parking lot of the school, but she was feeling short of breath and scared. As always, I immediately jumped into being the calming, supportive partner I always was, trying to talk her down.
A few minutes later, she hung up, saying she was going to call 911 because she couldn’t get it under control. I called her back a few minutes later to check on her, and she answered, scared, saying the paramedics were arriving. I told her she was going to be ok, and then there was silence. I could hear the paramedics talking in the background, but I couldn’t quite make out what they were saying.
Her phone hung up a little later. I called the local police to find out what was happening, and they told me she was being taken to the hospital.
I immediately called Shannon, a parent of one of Link’s best friends, to see if she could take me to the car. Britt and Evan stayed at home, on the phone with my dad, while I headed over there, unsure of what to expect. I thought maybe Janie just had a panic attack and that she’d be fine.
I got dropped off at school and immediately went in and grabbed Link from backstage, where he’d just come off after finishing Act 1. I told him what had happened, and we headed quickly for the hospital.
Shannon went back to our house to get Britt and Evan and bring them to the hospital, just in case, and so I had everyone together.
I remember telling the ER welcome desk who I was and that my wife had been brought in; they said they’d bring us back, and a nurse walked us past several bays to a private waiting room, and my heart instantly sank. I knew what was about to happen.
A few minutes later, Britt and Evan appeared, walked back to the same room with Link and I. They closed the door behind us.
There was a knock on the door a couple of minutes later. It was a doctor and a nurse, I know that, and they called me out into the hall away from the kids. I don’t remember much else, except they told me she was already unresponsive when the ambulance arrived. They asked if we wanted the chaplain to come by, which I declined, and if I wanted to see her with or without the kids.
Breaking the news to three kids, one of whom was still in stage makeup, that their mother was dead was one of the hardest things I think I’ll ever do in my life. We all agreed in that moment that we wanted to see her to say goodbye, and so they led the four of us down a hallway into a quiet, empty room where Janie was laying in a hospital bed. If not for the lack of her chest rising and falling, it would have been easy to believe she was just asleep.
I let each of the kids say goodbye, if they wanted to. Evan and Britt left the room fairly quickly; Link stayed a bit longer. I was the last to leave, tears in my eyes, heartbroken and unsure of what the next four hours would be like, much less the next four years.
That first night is still a blur. I remember being on the phone at 11:30 p.m. with the Gift of Life people about donating her organs, trying to piece together my own memories of her medical history with what they already knew. I remember pulling one of her oversized hoodies on as I sat in our family room, sobbing, terrified of how I was going to survive as a single parent.
Family arrived the next morning, and set to work taking care of the kids and things around the house while I tried to pull myself together. My employer told me not to worry about work for a little while; I went back after three days for want of something to do, a frankly ridiculous decision that I came to regret much later. Dear friends, and people I barely knew at the time who have since become dear friends, started organizing resources to care for us, and within days food and money and support came pouring in.
I don’t know how we’d have survived without all of you. Thank you again and again.
The days turned to weeks, turned to months, and that counter kept ticking. It’s marked every day, through the entirety of Link starting high school, getting accepted to Michigan. Through Britt becoming a great young man with a generous heart, through Evan growing from an immature kindergartner to an opinionated and bright fourth-grader, through my own transition from a sad, depressed person into the happy, confident woman I’ve become.
There have been a lot of times over the last 1,461 days where I’ve been sad about Janie, angry at her, frustrated by the choices she made. I’ve come to understand how much of our relationship was unhealthy, and how her outbursts and her attacks were unfair, unkind, even abusive. I’ve spent a lot of time processing how I married her because I loved her, a love that didn’t stop through every bit of 14 tumultuous years.
It’s even continued over the last four years, in different ways. I can remember the good times, the things I loved the most. Her Annie Lennox impression. The way we could entertain people with bantering back and forth. Her dedication to making holidays feel special. Those are the kinds of things I want to remember.
I’ve tried to forget a lot of the bad times, but some of them stay with me, like the physical scars I still bear in a few places. Those are fading, carried away by the same passage of time that has stacked 35,064 hours and counting since she left.
When Link graduated middle school about a month after Janie died, I said on Facebook, “we did it.” When he graduates high school in a little over a month, it will still be “we did it,” but the “we” won’t be Janie and I. It will be all of you, the wonderful, amazing people who have been the village our family needed, who did it. It will be Link, who has reached farther and worked harder and achieved more than I ever could have hoped for.
Tomorrow is the first day of year five. I have no idea what it’s going to bring, but I think back to what was my motto in those first few days: Survive And Advance. That’s all we have to do. Survive, and advance.
