Rita was 68 years old when her husband Ed died. They’d been married fifty years.
Everyone in our neighborhood, as well as her three children, were worried about how she would manage without him. I made a casserole of macaroni, ground beef, and spaghetti sauce as my two toddlers played on the kitchen floor banging pots and pans with wooden spoons. My dish would join a smorgasbord of others on Rita’s large dining room table to feed the masses expected to congregate at her home after the funeral.
Ed had suffered from emphysema brought on by his exposure to fine particles floating in the air at the fertilizer plant where he’d worked. I was told that he had been on workman’s comp—debilitated by his affliction—for the past ten years. During his long-term disability, he developed a penchant for collecting other people’s trash, and was often heard justifying his compulsion to do so saying, “This is good stuff that people throw out. I could use this someday.” The stuff he collected included jars of nails, screws, washers, rubber bands, and paperclips; old tools—broken and discarded for good reason—pipes, scrap metal, framing wood, and bricks from tear downs; and half empty paint cans and various cleaning fluids. He even had a few old claw-foot bathtubs, several porcelain sinks, and a couple toilets he’d picked up after local contractors got started on a sub-division that took over the Tolsen farm on the east side of town. He brought home a trunk load of leftover linoleum tiles—the kind you can peel off the backs and stick into place—thinking he’d redo Rita’s kitchen floor someday.
As the junk kept coming, piling up in the basement and filing up the attic, Rita kept up her domestic duties. She cooked Ed three squares a day, using vegetables she grew each summer in her enormous garden. Rita peppered the garden with wild flowers because, “I just love the way Queen Anne’s lace looks when it blows in the wind,” she said.
During the last two months of Ed’s life, he kept mostly to the hospital bed set up for him in the downstairs parlor. Rita called the room by its old-fashioned name, making me think of my great-grandmother who also had kept a parlor. Rita dragged her canister-style Electrolux around the wood floors everyday to keep the house free of dust. Too much dust in the air could send Ed into a coughing, spluttering, full-blown asthma attack that made her want to break down and cry.
At the wintry gravesite, Rita stood flanked by her children and their spouses and their children—seven grandchildren in all. Dressed in black with a heavy veil covering her face, her posture was stoic, and I admired her courage as the casket was lowered into the ground. I walked with a few of my neighbors back to the cemetery parking lot, shivering against the chilly wind, and we called out to one another, “See you back at the house.”
My casserole was sitting in my own oven turned to the lowest setting to keep it warm. My husband had stayed home with the children so I could attend the service and funeral. They were not home when I arrived to pick up my dish, and for a moment I was struck by the silence of a house with no other occupants. I was a stranger to silence, as was Rita, who had lived with Ed’s comings and goings, putterings, constant needs for food and service, and medical needs for fifty years. How awful it would now be for Rita in that huge home all by herself. I speculated that she might sell and move to one of the newly built condos where residents had to be at least fifty years old. I wondered at the difficulty of adjusting to a routine with so much less to do. I’d read that when a spouse dies, the other often follows closely behind because of a “broken heart.” I knew Rita’s children were worried that their mother, who had been such a devoted wife—her main role throughout her life—might succumb to this kind of grief.
I walked in the back door of Rita’s home with my casserole held between two potholders, greeted people who were already in the house, and headed to the dining room. I placed my dish on the side where the main courses were, making sure my potholders protected her table from its heat, and then looked around to find Rita in order to pay my respects. The hospital bed and other medical accoutrements of Ed’s final days had been carted off the day before by Rita’s son, and her parlor was looking just as elegant as I remembered it before illness took over the space. White doilies under the lamps situated on end tables on either side of the couch softened the darkened oak veneers of the furniture. Rita sat demurely in one of the wingback chairs. She’d removed the heavy veil and I expected to see the tell tale signs of mourning on her face, but that was not the case. She conversed easily in her soft-spoken way to the groups and individuals who came by to hold her hand or give her a respectful kiss on the cheek as they offered their condolences. She graciously accepted each one before directing them to, “Get yourself a plate and have some food. There’s plenty.”
As a working mom, my life was a busy one with getting two small children up, dressed, fed, packed for day care, and off to the sitter’s each morning before then getting myself to the office. The rest of the winter passed by and though I occasionally gave a glance over Rita’s way, she seemed to be in seclusion, and I didn’t see her until the spring.
At the end of April, a large truck backed up into Rita’s driveway one Saturday morning, the driver apparently not very experienced as the grinding of the truck’s gears gave testimony. A hydraulic lift was used to lower a boxcar-size dumpster into the backyard next to her cellar doors. While my daughter played quietly in her sandbox, I bounced my fussy son on my hip as I watched Rita sign something on a clipboard before the driver hopped back in the cab of the truck and drove off. Rita stood, arms akimbo, staring at the dumpster for a moment, and then with a determined purpose in her step, walked to the cellar doors and opened them wide.
I wandered into her yard, past her freshly tilled, but still unplanted, garden just as she disappeared down the steps. “Rita?” I called into the darkness. My son began squirming in my arms clearly impatient with my curiosity. He wanted to get down and back to his own yard where he now pointed at his sister, grunting his growing displeasure. Not wanting a full-blown temper tantrum, I reluctantly retraced my steps back to our house. While he made his first attempts to kick a ball around the lawn, I watched for Rita out of the corner of my eye until I saw her emerge with a box in her arms. She unceremoniously lifted the box up over the edge of the newly installed dumpster and let it drop into the cavernous depths. The box must have been full of metal objects of some kind. Nails? Screws? Pipes? The sound they made when they hit the bottom reverberated inside the container for several seconds. Rita brushed her hands together as if to sign “that’s that” and then turned around and entered the cellar again.
I peaked at her from time to time through my kitchen window while she worked on for the next couple hours. I went through the motions of a typical Saturday at home with my children while my husband was away coaching the cycling team of the school he worked for. At one in the afternoon, I put both my children down for their naps. Satisfied that they would sleep for at least the next hour, I walked next door to check on Rita. She was sitting in her kitchen, and when she saw me approach she stepped out on her side porch to greet me. “Grab a chair,” she said as she pointed to a stack of white plastic molded chairs stored on the side of her porch. I obeyed, and took two of them out into the yard facing her small rose garden.
We sat down and listened for a moment to the cardinals and robins chirping. Finally I asked, “How are you doing?”
Rita’s look of astonishment startled me. Her eyes widened and she reared her head back slightly as she took in a deep breath. “I am,” she paused, “Fantastic.” A wide grin appeared on her face and her eyes actually twinkled. I didn’t know what to say being completely unprepared for this particular response. I marveled that so many people had speculated the worst about how Rita would fair as a widow. She looked almost joyous. “I’m cleaning out that basement,” she began. “Ed was such a pack-rat. Just got worse and worse as the years went on. That basement is just full of junk. You’ve never seen anything like it. That dumpster is the second one I’ve had. The first one was just a regular size, like the kind you see behind restaurants, but I filled that up yesterday morning before noon. They came out and picked it up in the afternoon and I paid extra to get them to bring me this larger one delivered on a Saturday.” She nodded toward the monstrosity and I turned my head to look at it. “I figure I’ll have that one filled by the end of the weekend but I can’t lift those bathtubs and toilets. My son is going to come over tomorrow after church and bring one of his friends along to help. I can’t wait to get everything cleaned out of there. I expect I’ll need another one the same size to finish up and get everything out of the attic as well.”
There was no malice in her voice, just determination, and I wondered if she might be suffering from one of those stages of grief. Perhaps denial. “But, how are you doing?” I asked again trying to put some emphasis in my voice so she would know that I was referring to her emotional state, and not to the chore she had set before herself.
“How am I doing?” she asked back as if she hadn’t quite heard me right. I nodded, a concerned look on my face. “How am I doing?” She looked around as if she was checking to make sure no one else was listening in. “I’m free,” she said opening her arms as if to embrace the world.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2000
