I Could Have Loved Him Better

My husband John has been dead over two years now. His death feels as if he just stepped out of the room; at the same time his death feels as if it happened a lifetime ago. I have written about my grief, but not about our marriage for I have trouble describing our forty-year relationship. Who were we to each other? How did we manage to stay together and remain FAITHFUL to each other when we had so many problems, problems that would have ended it for many couples?

Why did John stay? John was a Polish Roman Catholic. Just as our son says the phrase Irish Catholic is redundant, so is Polish Catholic. Like many others, John left the institution of the church, but never its teachings. And in the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament, not a two-way promise between this man and this woman, but a three-way promise. At our marriage ceremony at St. James Church in Falls Church, we promised God to love each other until death parted us.

While we kept part of that promise in that we stayed together, I could have loved him better. I could have been kinder and more patient. After we got married, I changed. I was no longer the wild woman he had fallen for. But I will cut myself some slack here, too. My husband was a difficult person. He believed strongly in many things large and small and compromise was not something he did. Take mowing the lawn. We lived on three-quarters of an acre, but John did not believe in power mowers. So we had a push mower, but guess who got to push the push mover? He claimed the height of the grass didn’t bother him. Since it bothered me, I mowed.

John despised air conditioning, both central air and unit air conditioners. In summer our house became unbearably hot. Because I couldn’t sleep in the heat, I bought two unit air conditioners. One that my son and I put in the window, a somewhat dangerous undertaking; the other I hid in the basement in case the first one broke. I could not have survived a Northern Virginia summer without the air conditioner in the window or the assurance that there was a spare in the basement.

But air conditioning and lawn mowers were mere ankle-biters in our marriage. Our real problems are harder to write about. I’ll begin at our beginning. I met John on a Saturday morning in the fall of ’75 on 19th Street a block and a half above Dupont Circle. Back then it was my habit to sit in the bay window of my row house, smoke marijuana and watch dust motes dance in the sunlight. I enjoyed getting mellow that way. Evenings I added booze to my mix. In those days I did many wild insane things I would not have done if not under the influence.

After John and I married and our son was born, after a particularly drunken scary weekend, I got help for my addiction and began the long road of happy sobriety, a road I still travel. John continued to drink. All the problems that go with alcohol abuse ensued for us: embarrassing scenes in public, arguments that simmered for days, John’s drunk driving tickets, his wild crazy antics like getting so beaten up in a bar fight he couldn’t go to work for a week.

John told me I was no fun anymore. Damn straight I wasn’t. In early sobriety I went to grad school, taught at the university, wrote and sold a lot of short stories, and continued as mother and wife. None of this did I do well–
half-ass is my middle name–yet I was happy. Our son thrived, a bright sentient being with athletic and intellectual abilities that thrilled us. But was my husband John happy?

I’m not sure. John supported me in my writing, as well as our son’s myriad of activities. His support kept us together. Did I support him? Not so much. When he took an early-out from the Department of Energy, his agency gave him a retirement party. I did not come to this party. I was leery of attending celebrations with my husband. Or that’s my excuse. By not coming, I disappointed John, who went on to become a sought-after expert witness in energy trials. My husband and I were driven to achieve, that’s what we had in common.

Yet our differences were staggering. John always believed he knew better. He believed he could accomplish anything if he put his mind to it. Although we had good health insurance, John refused to go to the doctor—ever. Instead he saw a chiropractor friend. I was always after John to get a physical, but he maintained he was healthy and had no need for one. He took lots of vitamins and holistic medicines and convinced himself he knew better about his own health. Even after his beloved sister died of metastatic breast cancer, he eschewed conventional medicine until 2010 when he could no longer urinate. Eventually he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer, which took his life in November 2015.