Remarrying after the death of my wife, Part I: The impact on my daughter

In the months following Aimee's death, my daughter told me that she hoped to have a new mom someday.

Well, she has a new mom.

Some parts of that process have been good. Others, well, not bad, but difficult.

I am one of those people who likes to try and determine the worst-case scenario, and then prepare for it. If something better than that happens, great. If the worst happens, then I was ready for it. And so, our situation is not unexpected.

Life is harder if you're not silly sometimes

In our case, things are not bad by any stretch of the imagination. It's, well, normal. Sarah loves my daughter, and my daughter loves Sarah. But despite my daughter being completely on board about Sarah and I getting married, there's now this tension as she adjusts to not being the only other person getting my attention and affection. Plus, she's doing what children do - testing limits and figuring out her own dynamic with Sarah.

Sarah, for her part, had to jump into the deep end of the pool. As an employee of a school district, she has summers off. That means that when we got married in June of 2015, she went from being a single woman with her own condo to being a full-time stay-at-home mom (for a few months). The bonding time for the two of them was invaluable. But it also meant that neither got much of a break from the other, which I think would have helpful when making a major transition like this.

Things have been bumpy at times. My daughter went  into counseling for a bit. Then Sarah and I did. Then we all did some more. Daughter has recently started seeing a new therapist better suited to her current feelings. Sarah and I did another round.

No, it hasn't always been easy.

Now that we're more than two and a half years in, the situation has evolved. Our daughter (yes, I often say 'our daughter' now) is still somewhat jealous of the attention I give to Sarah, but it's better. The two of them are developing a nice relationship that continues to grow. And we all continue to grow together - sometimes with laughter and sometimes with tears, but always with love.

My marriage advice to women (and men)

Are you contemplating getting married? If so, please let me offer you some marriage advice.

So now I'm giving out marriage advice? Maybe that seems like a bit of a stretch for a blog about my experience and grief after losing my wife, doesn't it?

Trust me, this is related. And it's important.

There was something Aimee used to say to me when we were married, something that meant so much to me: "I know that if anything ever happens to me, you're going to be a great father to our daughter." When she said it, I took it as a wife and mother just being sweet to her husband. But after Aimee's sudden death, I leaned a lot on that one sentence for encouragement. Aimee had faith in me - warranted or not - and I needed to step up and show her that she wasn't wrong. It was important to me, but it was critical to our daughter that I did so.

I think men and women approach marriage differently. I can't speak for women, being a man, but I just assumed Aimee would be a great mom because of who she was as a a person. I never once considered how she'd do if something happened to me. The fact is, she would've been a rock star, just like she was before she died. When Aimee loved you, she did so with a fierce devotion and dedication to your happiness. There was nothing in the world like being loved by Aimee. That went doubly so for our daughter.

So when Aimee looked at me and said she was confident in my ability to raise our daughter alone, that spoke volumes to me about her faith in me. Either that, or she knew I'd take that as a challenge to meet her expectations.

Aimee and I on our wedding day

Regardless of exactly why she said it, it worked. Since Aimee's death, I have been almost fanatical about my parenting abilities, taking my responsibility to my daughter even more seriously than I did before. And while I of course fall short sometimes, I see the evidence that I'm doing a good job all the time - my daughter is happy, smart, funny, and most importantly, emotionally healthy and stable. Her counselors have said a number of times that I've done as great a job with her as anyone could have ever expected. It's my hope that when Aimee and I meet in heaven some day, she'll say the same thing.

So ladies (and men, too), here's my advice to you:

• When you're considering whether the apple of your eye is marriage material, think hard about your possible future children, and think about what kind of parent you think they'd be without you there. It is very important that you're honest with yourself about this.
• Just as importantly, or maybe more so, think about what kind of decisions they'd be likely to make about new relationships. Would he/she be careful about keeping their dating life and parenting life separate for a while, until there was some certainty the relationship would last? Will he/she protect your children's feelings? Will they continue to put your children and the child's needs ahead of their own, and ahead of this new relationship, at least for a good, long time?
• Can you even handle the thought of him/her in another relationship if something happened to you? If not, I respectfully ask you to read this post.
• Also critical (especially for women choosing a husband). are they a person who's in touch with their emotions, and knows who to handle them? Grief is a terrible thing, and many people (ahem, guys) don't always handle it well. This is bad for the person grieving, but can be especially harmful on their children. 
• Most important of all, do they have a solid foundation that they've built their life on? For me, that foundation is my faith in God, as it is for many others too. Other people may have a different foundation for theirs. In any event, there should be something they can hold onto when the world seems to have been turned completely upside down.

It's so easy and understandable to get caught up in the excitement and joy of a relationship. I know, because I've been there. And of course, considering what kind of spouse and parent they'll be is extremely important. But please don't neglect to give serious thought to how they'd do if suddenly left to lead and care for your family on their own.

The hardest wedding vow to say: "Til death do us part"

The basic, traditional wedding vows go along
these lines:

"I [name] take [name]
To be my husband/wife
To have and to hold
For better or worse
For richer or poorer
In sickness and in health
To love and to cherish
From this day forward
'Til death do us part"

'Til death do us part

Wow, do I ever know the full impact of those words.

With my and Sarah's wedding days away, I have thought about those words, and the last time I said them, and how they came back to haunt me after Aimee's death.

'Til death do us part.

We always think that'll be in some far-off future, after kids are raised, and retirement, and a long life full of all the other stuff we say in those vows, such as richer and sickness and so on. We think death comes to us at some point when we'll be more ready for it, or when we sort of expect it (if there is ever such a time for either). In other words, we think we'll have a lifetime together.

Not five and a half short years.

'Til death do us part.

One of the characteristics I approached my first marriage with will be a mainstay of my second one as well: no regrets. I will live life as fully as I can while meeting my responsibilities. I will tell my family I love them, and get over myself enough to share how I'm feeling. I will laugh, I will love, I will live. I will kiss Sarah good-bye and I will kiss her goodnight. I will do the same with Rowan.

And I will do these things...
'Til death do us part.

Dear Aimee, Happy Anniversary. I'm getting married again.

Dear Aimee,
Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart. Today would have been our eighth, and I have no doubt that the last two and a half years would have been as wonderful as the first five and half were.

If only we could have had the chance to find out.

Rowan is amazing, by the way. I mean, wow. The kid just turned SIX. Can you believe that? But what blows me away is how smart, funny, compassionate, and sweet she is. You know, just like you were. If I was going to have to be a single dad of a child, you could not possibly have left me with a better one. :)

But I guess I'm stalling here. Let me get to the real reason I wrote this letter to you.

I'm getting remarried.

I suppose if you really can see us down here from the glorious heaven above (and I hope for all of our sake that you can't), you already knew that. Sarah and I have been engaged for more than six months now, and the wedding planning began almost as long ago. But with the wedding being now less than two months away, and with today being your and my anniversary, I thought it fitting to tell you now.

I know this is what you wanted. I remember you and I talking about this once, and you making it clear you would want me to get remarried. Maybe you knew Rowan would really want a mom (she does). Maybe you you were aware of how much more work it is to run a household and raise a child on your own. Or maybe you were realistic about how long I'd really be able to last on my own as a single parent. :)  Either way, I recall you being very firm in your belief that if anything ever happened to you, that you wanted me to remarry.

Well, now that time is upon us. And Aimee, I really hope you would have approved of her, especially as she is going to have a huge influence on your daughter.

I think I've done well, choosing Sarah to join our family. First and foremost, she really loves both Rowan and me. And she has in common with you a strong faith in God, a deep desire to care for those she loves, and a healthy dose of patience (which anyone around me needs). Also like you, she is a strong woman, not easily bowled over by life's trials or my Type A episodes.

I'd like to think that the two of you would have truly liked each other, had you had the chance to know each other in this life. And so it is my sincere hope that if you are watching, if you can see us, that you know that Rowan and I both simultaneously miss you every day, but are also happy. And I hope that we would have your blessing on the upcoming marriage and life together. Because since the day you died, I have lived a great deal of my life by the standard of wanting you to be proud of what I've done and the decisions I've made, especially the ones that affect Rowan.

May this decision fall among the ones you would have approved of.

With deepest love and affection on our anniversary,
-Patrick

The year of huge changes

It's been a huge year.

Around this time last year, I went to Florida for a deposition in the civil case around Aimee's death. By now, that case is closed.

Sarah and I were dating, but had been together for less than six months. As of today, we closed on a house we're buying together, and our wedding is a little more than nine weeks away.

Speaking of houses, my house looks very different. New driveway and walkways and a new exterior paint job have completely changed the appearance of the house, and a new fence and deck are being planned. By this summer, I hope to have the house run by a property management company who'll rent it out for me.

It's the house that Aimee and I bought together, and Rowan and I won't be living there anymore.

Keys - to a house, to a marriage,
to a life

Speaking of Rowan, she's coming up on the end of her Kindergarten year. She's lost a bunch of teeth, all of them within the last year. And she's gone through and processed a lot of life's upcoming changes in her own amazing way (possibly a topic for another blog post).

But not everything has changed. Aimee's mother Donna has been an absolute rock star. She's gone above and beyond to help me with Rowan. She has embraced my relationship with Sarah, despite how difficult it is for her to see me with someone other than her daughter. And she has continued to help Rowan learn a little more about her mommy each time they see each other, which is pretty frequent.

Yes, a lot has changed in the last year, and more changes are coming soon.

But some things have not changed. Some things will never change.

I miss Aimee. I feel it more strongly at some times than at others, but it's always there. Time hasn't changed it. Falling in love with Sarah hasn't changed it. I doubt anything will change it.

And the process of planning a wedding and more importantly, a marriage, have me reflecting a great deal on doing this exact same thing a mere eight years ago.

It seems like so much longer ago, a lifetime in fact. It was a life in which I'd never been married before. A life in which I didn't have any children to worry about. A life which didn't know what it was like to have someone walk through the front door and tell you your wife just suddenly, tragically died, while your three year old daughter gripped the back of your leg.

A completely different life from the one I have now. I'm living a much different life than the one I was leading eight years ago. And I am a much different person in many ways than I was eight years ago.

I am happy, for the most part. Rowan is doing so well, it's just amazing. Sarah and I are working very hard at creating a foundation for a wonderful marriage. But always in the background (and sometimes right in front), is Aimee and her death, and the undeniable impact that has on our lives.

Yes, it's been a huge year with a great many changes. But it feels like I've been through huge changes before, yes?

The Big Announcement

With the continuation of legal proceedings in Florida over the last couple of years, I have stayed pretty quiet about my relationship with the woman I have referred to as 'Sandra' on this blog. Her name is actually Sarah, and now that the legal crap is pretty much out of the way, I plan to be a lot more open about our relationship.

The significance of this is that while she and I have undergone a number of struggles and experiences that are directly related to my dealing with Aimee's death, I haven't felt free to talk about that here. It's one of the main reasons I haven't posted much this year - most of what I've gone through has been in the intersection between Aimee's death and my relationship with Sarah. So in the coming weeks, I plan to share some of those things here, in hopes that people who've gone through similar situations might learn from my mistakes experiences.

By next summer the last name on
the jersey will be her last name too!

But for now, I am just going to share this one small, insignificant bit of news:

We're getting married!

Yes, Sarah and I became engaged about a month and a half ago (a little more than a year after we started dating), and are already full steam into planning our wedding, which will happen next summer. 

This development has brought on a whole new set of things we're dealing with, which will also be the topic of some future blog post.

I feel I would be remiss if I did not mention that although Sarah is walking into a very complicated situation, she's handled it with an incredible amount of grace, patience, understanding, and humor. She's going from being a single woman with no children (or in-laws) to becoming a wife and mother with what amounts to TWO sets of in-laws. Because I'll tell all of you this: Aimee's family is still exactly that - family. Not just Aimee's, but mine and Rowan's as well. And soon, Sarah's. And as I saw on Thanksgiving, they are embracing her and she them.

So that's the big news, and all I have for now. More - much more - coming.

Grief for guys - the toughest stretch...

Note: This post took me MONTHS to write, rewrite, rewrite, etc. I'm finally only somewhat happy with what it expresses. If it seems a bit disjointed, that's why. But I'm tired of working on it, so here it is.

So it's well known that men and women process grief differently. I mean, men and women pretty much do everything differently, right? So what I'm about to relate will probably have some truth ring to it for men (at least, if they're honest), and maybe not so much for women.

For me, the hardest stretch since Aimee died started in about February of last year, roughly 2-3 months after her death. The shock and numbness had worn off. A new routine had kind of settled in, requiring less deliberate thought.

And I got lonely.

I mean, really lonely. "Desperate" is the word that comes to mind.

My response to this was to decide that I wanted to begin dating again. As in right now, if not yesterday. I even joined a dating site to begin meeting people. I didn't care that it had only been 2-3 months. I didn't care that I was still in a lot of pain over Aimee's death. I needed companionship, and I needed it now.

Let's just say, it didn't go very well.

In all, I only ended up meeting two women for coffee, and I didn't see either of them a second time. I quickly realized that being with someone else might make me feel better on the surface, temporarily, but that if I pursued anything more serious, people were probably going to get hurt. I just couldn't do that.

The bottom line is, these experiences did nothing to make me feel better about my loss. It was a horrible few months, and it only got better slowly. I missed Aimee so badly, but her being with me wasn't an option, so I wanted someone, anyone, else. Luckily, I suppose, that really didn't work out. But that doesn't mean I didn't want it to work out. Like I said, I was desperate, and in a lot of pain.

By June, I had begun to feel a little better. I was still terribly lonely, but I was getting more used to living with it. Plus, summer was starting, and more sunshine always improves my mood. I put the idea of dating out of my head for a while, and focused on trying to enjoy the summer and the activities Rowan and I could do now that it wasn't raining so much.

I began this post describing the difference between men and women in grief. I did so because over the last year I've checked out a number of other blogs by those who've lost spouses, and they're all by women. And they pretty much all seemed to have had absolutely zero desire to begin seeing other people during the first year (or even several years). Or at least, I didn't see where any of them talked about it. They did express loneliness, but not a desire to alleviate it by getting back into dating. These women seemed to prefer to stay focused on the grieving process without getting involved in a new relationship, and do so for quite a bit longer. Men? Well, to be blunt, we're weaker and we want another woman in our lives because they'll comfort us and make us feel better. And let's face it, some men can't really take care of themselves or their kids nearly as well as their wives, either. I'm not being critical, it's just a fact in many families.

(Gladly, I take GREAT pride in being able to function at a high level on my own in regards to running the Rhoads household. A partner to help me would be awesome, but I don't need a wife to help me.)

For some of the guys who do move on quickly, it doesn't always necessarily turn out to be a bad thing. I have two good friends who lost their wives, and my mom is friends with another. All three were remarried within a year. And by all accounts, all three seem to be happy and have good marriages with the women they married following their spouse's passing. Before Aimee's death, I might have been a bit surprised that someone might move on so fast. Now, I totally get it. If things had gone a little differently for me, that might have been my road as well.

I am thankful now that it wasn't.

PS. I think this fundamental difference leads women to often be very disapproving of men who do jump right back into dating after losing their spouse. I think they see it as tremendously disrespectful to the late wife. Trust me, it's not our intent. We're just in unbearable pain, and only know one way to address it. I'm not saying we're right or that women are wrong - I'm just explaining the difference.

Countdown to disaster: T minus 9 days

This post is part of a series that reflects on what we were doing, what I was thinking and feeling, and what this time last year was like.

It's Saturday, December 10, 2011
Tonight is one of two night a year that Rowan's preschool offers a "Date Night" for the parents. For $10, they keep the kids for about five hours, feed them dinner, and show a movie. Aimee and I jump at the chance for such cheap and reliable childcare.

My Facebook post from that night

After dropping Rowan off, we drive up to downtown Seattle and get dinner at Rock Bottom Brewery. It's a busy holiday Saturday night, and we have to wait for a table, but we're blissfully happy to be out on the town on a Saturday night, just the two of us, and not spending a fortune for a sitter. Despite the winter chill, it is otherwise a pretty nice evening.

After dinner we walk down 5th Avenue, and stop in a couple of stores for some Christmas shopping. We end up at a shopping center called the Westlake Center, which on its third floor has a balcony that overlooks a plaza, which is decked out for Christmas. There's a beautiful tree, tons of holiday lights, and a massive star lit up store an a nearby store. We each take the other's picture - I with my phone and Aimee with her camera. Sadly, we fail to get one together. I always hated getting my picture taken, and she gave me a bad time about getting photos together. I guess now I do wish I'd been more cooperative about that.

The conversation is both sweet and excited, because tomorrow we'll be leaving for eight days in the Florida Keys. We can't wait for the sunshine and warmth.

We get some more shopping done, including Adele's CD "21" for Aimee, and Aimee picking out a present that she plans to have Rowan give me. I would end up forgetting all about it until I stumbled across it a couple of weeks after Christmas had passed. That would end up being a very sad moment.

We wrapped up our date and headed back to pick Rowan up. Although we were actually a few minutes ahead of schedule, I was still characteristically impatient with slow drivers on the freeway. Aimee remarked that I was the only person she knew that could be mad because I was only going to be a little early instead of a lot early.

December 10, 2011 was a really good day.

My return to dating

One weekend, when Rowan was just a toddler (I can't recall exactly how old she was), I took her to a local park. She was just at the cusp of learning to walk, pulling herself up on furniture, and walking around while holding on to things. This day at the park, I held her hands and walked backwards while she walked towards me, holding on for dear life. After I felt like she had it down, I slipped my hands out of hers and eased backwards. She immediately got nervous and toddled after me, reaching for the safety of my hands.

I stayed just out of her reach.

She walked, on her own, for about 10-12 steps before she started getting really mad that I wouldn't hold still, so I finally let her grab my hands again. But she'd walked, on her own, and within another day or two, she was doing it regularly.

Baby steps.

In some ways, I feel like that now.

It's a less then a month until the anniversary of my and Aimee's first 'official' date. That was almost nine years ago, and I got to a point, when Aimee and I were engaged, that I realized that was probably going to be the last first date I ever had.

But I was wrong.

In a post I published back in August (Dating again), I wrote about feeling ready to begin dating again. Well it took almost another two months, but I have finally crept out of the shadows and made the bold leap forward. Well maybe not a leap. Maybe a step. I sat down at my laptop and set up a profile on one of the popular online dating sites, and sat back to see what would happen.

This is how people meet now, right?

Baby step.

On a side note, I've found it to be really clinical and unromantic. I mean, reading profiles of people the site sends me and deciding which ones I want to contact feels EXACTLY like screening job applicants. "Yes, I've read over your resume- er, profile, and looked over your qualifications- er characteristics, and I'd like to bring you in for an interview- er, date." Yuck.

But the process was also a little cathartic. I don't like stagnation - I like progress. Moving forward. Setting up that profiles and getting started was a step in that direction.

Then it went further.

Baby step.

So far, I have been on two dates, each with a different person. It was surreal, being out with someone other than Aimee, but it was also nice to get out of the house, talk to someone new, and daydream about the possibilities. And while both of the gals I went out with were tremendously nice, I felt enough of a connection with the second one that there will be a second date some time in the future. Other than that? Well, I'm not going to think too far ahead right now. I'll just see where things go, and take it nice and slow.

Baby steps... Baby steps...

"Dancing in the Minefields"

I'm working on a talk I'm giving tomorrow, and this song just played on my iPod. It was a favorite of Aimee's, I think because of how it describes the type of marriage she always wanted, and that we (for the most part) had. I wanted to share it with all of you.