Story for the Week
Wishing a Happy Mother’s Day to every mom!
My husband Dennis always went above and beyond to make Mother’s Day special. Six years ago, the holiday started hitting a little different. I was mom to a then 13-year-old and suddenly faced with the very real possibility of becoming a single mom. I mean, theoretically, becoming a single parent is always a possibility, but you don’t really think about it until it slaps you in the face.
On May 9, 2019, three days before Mother’s Day, Corinne performed in her middle school’s opening production of Aladdin. It wasn’t her first show, and it certainly won’t be her last since she’s a musical theater major. It’s the only show I didn’t attend though.
Corinne’s school events have always been a priority. Most of the time, Dennis and I both attended, but even if we both couldn’t make it, one of us was always there. We were so present at her school events, in fact, that one of my friends told me after the fact that she knew something was wrong that day. My parents were at the show. My brother-in-law was at the show. Dennis and I, however, were nowhere to be seen.
We saw the show the next night on May 10th, and I recently came across pictures from that performance. I know we were there, but I have no recollection whatsoever of the performance. Because the day before—the evening of the show we missed—Dennis and I were at the hospital learning that he had pancreatic cancer.
The date is still marked in my calendar…not because there’s any chance I would forget. As Dennis went through treatment, his doctor and nurses suggested that he celebrate the anniversaries as milestones of surviving cancer, so I put it in the calendar. The first anniversary of his diagnosis happened during COVID, so we did a drive-by celebration. Friends and family drove by the house honking their horns and blasting music, some with posters, all with good wishes.
He didn’t make it to the second anniversary, which is not unusual for pancreatic cancer. Mentally, I’ve just never been able to delete the calendar entry. While I spent a lot of time hopeful yet quietly trying to imagine how I would navigate life as a single mom, Dennis spent his time worried that Corinne and I would move on and forget him. He always wanted to be cremated because he was afraid of being buried and having no one visit his grave. Once we agreed to that, he wanted to be cremated in his black Tottenham Hotspur jersey…and he was. And while Corinne and I had to learn to live life without Dennis, we certainly could never forget him.
Shortly after Dennis died, Corinne had a dream about him. He apparently never talks in her dreams, and he didn’t talk in this one. She was in the living room, and Dennis was leaning on the back of a recliner like he always did. In the dream, she said to him, “OK, we’ll keep your watches.” She told me about the dream the next morning, and I told her that we would keep the watches then.
Dennis had a bit of an obsession with watches. It’s the reason we chose a mantle clock to hold his ashes. What we didn’t know when I said we would keep the watches was the he had nine of them stashed away in his top dresser drawer. The quantity was definitely a surprise. It didn’t change anything because we loved him, and the dream felt to me like a message from him.
He also had two New York Yankees jackets that I gave to him. No one in our family will ever wear them, and I actually posted them on Facebook Marketplace a while back. But as soon as someone offered to buy them, I felt sick to my stomach. I told the potential buyer that I could no longer sell them, and they have hung in the closet ever since. And we still have all nine watches. When we love someone, we’ll do things that we wouldn’t do for anyone else
Dennis always made Mother’s Day special for me, so the anniversary of his diagnosis being so close every year makes it especially hard. But so many people loved him, so talking about him reminds us what a force he was.
The main characters in the book below spend a lot of time talking about their loved ones. It’s a story about loss but also of love and hope.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
5 Stars for Grave Talk by Nick Spalding
319 pages
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Publication Date: November 1, 2024
This title was an Amazon First Reads selection.
Publisher’s Description
The last thing Alice expects to see at her husband’s graveside on his birthday is a giant, talking frog. On closer inspection, it’s a grown man dressed as Kermit.
Turns out Alice’s husband is buried next to Ben’s older brother Harry, who―as a parting practical joke in his will―insisted that Ben visit his grave each year, on this specific day, dressed in an as-yet-undisclosed pageant of embarrassing fancy dress.
With little but their grief and this one day in common, Alice and Ben form a very special, very strange friendship, meeting just once a year: same day, same time, same place―different silly costume. As the years pass and grief alters, can their unique bond help them cope with the hardest part of death: life?
************
Main Characters:
- Alice Everley – a young widow in her late 30s, lost her husband Joe to a heart attack six months prior, works as a stylist in a salon, she and Joe met when she did his hair and he came back in to ask for her number
- Ben Fielding – mid-20s, studying to be a doctor, lost his older brother Harry to leukemia three months prior, both of his parents are doctors and Harry was a surgeon
Who knew a book about grief and loss could make you smile and even laugh? I discovered Nick Spalding a few years ago when I read Dry Hard and came to appreciate his humorous style in Logging Off (Poop! Is There an App for That?). Grave Talk departs from his normal style, but his humor allows us to see the light at the end of a sometimes very dark tunnel.
Alice and Ben meet in the cemetery of Popping Church where her husband and his brother are laid to rest side by side. For Alice, July 8 is Joe’s birthday and the first day she has chosen to come to his grave alone. Ben is there for the anniversary of the summer sports day 17 years before where he and Harry won a race together.
Why is he wearing a frog costume? Harry’s will instructed Ben to wear a to-be-determined costume to his graveside every year on that day and stand in silence for two minutes and 59 seconds, the duration of the song “We are the Champions.” Even though Harry would never know whether Ben complied, he tells Alice that he does it because he loved his brother.
The two spend some time talking in the cemetery, and they depart still strangers for all intents and purposes, saying that maybe they would see each other again. The next year, Ben shows up dressed as Robin (because Harry couldn’t let him be Batman, of course), and Alice appears again. They talk again, striking up an unlikely and unusual friendship that continues year after year only in this place where they share their grief and the goings-on in their lives.
I loved this story from start to finish. The author does a great job of capturing the intensity of grief as well as the sense of obligation we feel to do right by our lost loved ones. Over the course of many years, Alice and Ben begin to look forward to their annual connections. They spend time telling each other stories about Joe and Harry, but they also share details about what’s going on in their lives. It really seems like annual therapy sessions for them because they can each be an objective sounding board for the other. They talk about their personal lives, their jobs, their families. Eventually they start challenging one another to make a change or try something new.
I found myself looking forward to finding out what Harry’s costume of choice was each year…and to see if they completed the challenges. It was amazing to watch their friendship develop as they worked through their grief, sometimes feeling more hopeful and other times feeling the losses greater than prior years. That’s how grief works, and Spalding nailed it.
Each chapter alternates first-person points of view between Alice and Ben. While much of the story plays out as if we’re experiencing it in real time, it’s actually Alice and Ben sharing their lives every year for eleven years. This is a story of loss and grief, friendship and love, of powering through. It is a story of living life even when you feel like you can’t move on.
I smiled, I laughed, and I may have shed a couple of tears. And I loved every single word.
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