19. Responsibility

I met Brian when I came back to Tucson after completing my Master’s degree and was faced with “what do I do now.” A Master’s in Theatre is not quite the money maker you might think.

I suddenly had a Responsibility…

I suppose I needed to get a job. I got a temporary summer job at the University of Arizona bookstore working in the class notes section. You see, I was born before the Internet and when professors wanted students to read something but not necessarily buy the whole book they copied the chapter and I worked in the area where people came to get that copy. Brain worked restocking shelves. He was very shy but managed one day to shove a piece of paper in my direction and say “put your phone number here”. I actually got Brian's phone number as well on a scrap of paper, which I still have to this day.

We eventually got married after nine years of dating. We had mutually decided children were not in our future. But then I changed the game plan. And our son was born a couple years after we were married.

Talk about Responsibility.

Adding our beloved baby into the mix broke us as a couple, although we both loved Ian so dearly we completely lost our way. My stress went through the roof and his late night drinking went deep into the closet. I come from an alcoholic family, I remember marking bottles, searching through the trash, going through the drawers, I did not want to live that life for the rest of my life nor have my child grow up in that cycle.

Ian was my Responsibility.

So Brian and I separated when our son was nine, but we never divorced. Our lives were too intertwined, the responsibility we shared in raising this child, it just seemed easier for us to do that still married. And so we did.

I met Bret when I was in high school, all of 15, we had a brief love affair, popped up in each other's lives periodically over the years, as high school friends do,  and, well, Bret popped back into mine and we started a serous relationship. He wanted to get married, he had never been married before, and felt like I was THE ONE, but I was still married to Brian. I don't know why we didn't divorce and it just seemed easier to hold everything at bay until I figured out what I really wanted with my life. It was just a lot of responsibility.

And then Brian had his accident. I don't really understand what happened, the guess is it he had a seizure of some kind, fell backwards in the parking lot and hit his head just perfectly to jostle his brain and cause the massive swelling. I got the message from his HR representative through Facebook that it was bad, we had to go to the the emergency room immediately. Nobody knew anything.

As his wife this was my responsibility.

For 10 days I tried to make the right decisions for him, to guess what medical procedures would help, to try to navigate what he might want, and what I wanted and what Ian wanted. We wanted him alive and we wanted him better, but in the end that was not to be.

And it was my responsibility to turn off the machines. It was my responsibility to tell my son his father had died and it was my responsibility to wrap up Brian’s life.

I felt overwhelmed with dealing with everything in his life, closing all his accounts, packing up his things, making decisions about what to keep and want to give away, what to hold onto for my son, and what to let go so that Ian was not buried by the weight of the memory of his father.

But in some way I felt a sacred honor in this responsibility. I was taking care of Brian for the very last time. Every aspect of him.

I mourned the loss of my husband, of the person I knew for 27 years, of the father of my son, of all that Ian had lost and all that he would never have.

I felt a responsibility to be both parents and to keep the memory of Brian and the life of Brian in our lives every day.

Bret tried to help me through this time but I just wouldn't let him, this loss, this deep loss I felt was mine, and mine alone.

Bret continued to ask me to marry him now that I was officially a widow there was nothing in our way. But I just couldn’t, I felt this overwhelming responsibility to be Brian's widow, at least for now.

Three years to the day of Brian's death, Bret was not feeling well. I had a volunteer project to go to and he was supposed to come and help me I was annoyed that he wasn’t helping me, but it was my responsibility to go to work and lead this volunteer project in the middle of summer in this non air-conditioned space and boy, was I mad at him, and I continued to text him to let him know that. It was his responsibility to be there when I needed him.

I asked him if he would come pick up Ian and he texted back “I'm feeling better”

In the end it was just easier to have Ian with me and when we got home after 4 o'clock Bret was dead on my couch.

We called 911, I did CPR, the paramedics came and told me he been gone for a while. This meant they had to call the police, the police came and asked me all the same questions that the paramedics had asked, and the crisis team came and asked me all the questions the police had, then he coroner had to come. I wanted to go to Bret, but they wouldn't let me.

You see, he was no longer my responsibility.

I had to call his sister and his daughter because they had legal rights to him that I did not. When coroner was taking him away I asked what happens now and he said well technically, since you're not his legal partner, I don't have to tell you anything. But here's my card to give to his daughter.

Bret’s daughter dealt with the police, she dealt with the funeral home, she cleaned up his house, she closed out all his accounts, she packed his things,  she sold his car, because that was her responsibility.

In all the ways I felt rightfully entitled in handling Brian's life, for all the ways that I tried to do right by Brian in the end, and for all the ways it gave me purpose in navigating his death, and to feel a deep sense of connection to him in the end, I was denied that with Bret.

He was not, in the end, my responsibility.