A Very Fine House

It’s odd what provokes sadness in me these days. A scene on TV, where a man rises from bed, naked, and talks to his wife while she gets ready for work made my heart well up with grief almost more than anything else has since George’s death. A simple scene of day to day life.

And that is exactly what I miss. The casual intimacy of marriage. The routines. The shorthand a couple develops. Where Lily is concerned, the loss is even more exquisite. I miss the pride we shared in our daughter. On a long day together, we’d sneak looks at each other dozens of times, thrilled at her developing personality and humor, amused by her sweet naivete. Those looks that parents share when their hearts swell with love for their children. Never again will I share a look with the man who created Lily with me, shared her birth with me, passed to her some of her best qualities. Those looks fed my soul. We didn’t have to talk much about what we observed in her because those simple looks conveyed all, and I miss those looks, those routines, those effortless understandings between us so very much.

George resisted marriage, and its odd that he did. He was good at it. He liked being home. He wasn’t one of those husbands who chafe at the bit to go out with his friends. He relished his time with us, and he made the most of it. He loved it when I cooked for him, said it made him feel special. I could assemble canned food and place it in front of him and he felt like a king, because he valued my efforts. I guess you’d say he was easy to please. He didn’t wish for a lot, but really wanted a brand new car with all the bells and whistles since he’d always bought stripped down autos and kept them until they were too old to drive. We were looking for his dream vehicle when he died. He did buy me a Honda Odyssey because he wanted Lily and I to be comfortable and delayed his own dream car until that was paid off. I wish he’d have gotten the car he wanted, even if he’d only gotten to drive it one day.

It’s getting harder and harder to stand being here in Reading. I want to move so much I think about it constantly. I’m ready for a change of scene, and I can’t wait to be back in the South. When George and I broke up the first time I would think of him every time I met someone from North Carolina. He had a great, deep, voice that made everyone stop and listen. When he fussed at Lily she paid attention. He never lost his southern drawl and I loved the way he talked. It will be nice to be around people who sound like he did.

Got some pictures of my planned house, which will be attached to the house for my parents. It looks fantastic, though I sort of feel like I’m dreaming about the whole thing. They still haven’t broken ground though its very, very close. I’ll be going back to Asheville soon to finalize more details, and then be back and forth between here and there all summer.

Lily is still in the bed with me (she just rolled over and said “stop it!”) I’m torn between appreciating her company and worrying about when she’ll ever be able to sleep alone again. Her therapist says she has general anxiety disorder and not to push her (I haven’t been anyway.) I asked her if she planned to sleep in her own bed at the new house and she asked if we could make a tunnel between our rooms so she could see me at night. Somehow I think it will be a long time before she moves back to her own room. She too, feels the loss of our family’s intimacy, and she is never far from my side.

Today we had a mini-disaster. She came home from the bus (she walks the half block home with our older neighbor), and when she got to the front door she saw a bee. She is deathly afraid of insects, though she is perversely interested in them too. Convinced the bee would sting her, she wouldn’t come up to the door. She tried yelling, but we didn’t hear her. I usually watch the clock and meet her at the door, but today we were involved in something and didn’t notice the time. She went to the car and looked for a cell phone, went next door and knocked (they weren’t home), then went back to the car and started honking. About four minutes after she usually arrives, I got up to see where she was. Sara was already at the door, because she heard the horn.

When Lily got in she was nearly hysterical. Her heart was drumming in her chest so hard I could see it thump. She sat in my lap and cried for several minutes. It’s moments like these that make me realized how much this has affected her and how hard her daily life has become. I felt awful. I still do. I miss my old, confident Lily who was a bold little risk taker. She’s not who she was, but then neither am I.

I spend a lot of time hoping we both recover what we lost of ourselves, but I know we are forever changed. Our joy for life will be forever tempered by the loss of George. We talk about him all the time and I try to reinforce her memories of him as much as possible. But today, when she was afraid of the bee, I felt in my heart that what she really needed were Daddy’s arms around her.

And that, sadly, she will never have again.

Related posts:

1. The Building Begins
2. Gone Daddy Gone
3. Down and Dirty
4. Reality Bites
5. Living Between Two Worlds

Tagged as: architect, Asheville, george maddox, grief, lily maddox, lisa maddox, loss, love, marriage, missing my husband, NC, new house, reading pa, widow