8 Middle Adulthood 225and follow-up calls to make. I was so worried about how I would make ends
meet and it was nearly a month before I learned I would get Jack’s workman’s
compensation. Life insurance, OSHA investigators, lawyers, doctors, they all
swirled around me.
Other odd things happened though, too. The day I went back to the house
after Jack died, a three-legged deer we used to see was standing in the yard.
She usually ran away, but this time she stood there and we communed, I am
not sure what else to call it, and it felt like Jack was with us. There was also a
cat we called “White-face the cat” who would come around to the yard and
then disappear for weeks on end. The day after Jack died, White-face turned
up at the door and has never left again. He greets me every morning and night
at the back door and follows me to the barn to be fed. He is a huge connection
for me with Jack. We really cared about animals and there are these connec-
tions that still hold us together.
Early in my grief, all the calls and arrangements took over. One of the
things that stays with me over a year and a half later was how many of those
people promised to help me, promised to get the real story about what hap-
pened, and promised to get me the reports. I really believed that someone
would do the right thing and tell me what had happened in Jack’s last moments
on earth—yet over a year and a half later, I have no answers, no real report,
and many bad experiences with people who did not do what they said they
would do. When a healthy strong man leaves for work in the morning and
never comes home from work, the surviving spouse really needs to know what
happened. I am afraid I will never know.
As betrayed as I felt by many of the officials involved, I also had a tight-
knit web of friends who tried to support me, but they could never fill the place
Jack filled. Early on in my grief, those connections were comforting, but there
was so much going on. That first month, I was surprised that I slept okay
even though people warned me that might be hard. By the second month, I
was having a lot of problems sleeping. At night I cried onto his pillow (I still
have not changed his pillowcase) and held on to his kerchief. At first, I kept
feeling his presence around the house. Life insurance people and the union
would want documents I had not seen in a long time, but somehow it felt like
Jack guided me right to them as I needed them. One time, I came home and
a paperweight ashtray a friend had given him came flying off a shelf in his
pool room, and in another room, a decorative tree was down with half of the
sympathy cards. It felt like Jack was saying hi. Since then, I have had occasions
in my sleep where I feel him kiss me, but he is not around the house as he was
at first. I do not believe in lots of supernatural or religious things, but I know
he was there.
I did not go back to work for almost 4 weeks and going back was sur-
real as I returned to the desk where I got that horrible phone call. For months,
I kept having this feeling of “this is where Jack and I were only last month;
this is where we had a great time together having drinks; this is where he said
thus and so; this is where he was working when it happened... .” Everything
had meaning and a moment that was ours alone, before he died. I also had to
work really hard not to keep obsessing on what had happened in those last
moments. Had the driver deliberately hurt Jack? All of the workers said no,
but it was hard to believe. Had Jack had any awareness of what happened,