Prior to Gordie’s passing, I knew only two widows close to my age. But that was about to change…significantly.
The Sunday morning following Gordie’s death, I took the boys to church…in my sweats. Hopefully God gives a hall pass to recent widows regarding church appropriate attire. At the end of Mass, our friend Tammy, who went to high school with Gordie and me, walked toward me with a tall, dark haired, striking, woman.
“Staci”, Tammy said, “this is Monica. She went to high school with us. She lost her husband many years ago”.
Monica reached out her hand to shake mine. I grabbed it.
“I’m so sorry about your loss. I was in the same class as Gordie’s brother. I have two daughters who were very young when my husband died. I will make sure someone gets you my contact information. Please let me know if I can ever help you”, Monica said.
That meeting in the back of church turned out to be life changing for me. Monica would become what I refer to as my “Widow Mentor”…for years. She has given me the good, the bad, and the ugly. She was the first person to tell me “this was not what you planned but there is nothing you can do about it.” She has given me advice that I did not want to hear but needed to, more than once. She also was the first and only person to tell me that the relationship I would have with my sons, as a solo Mom, would be incredible. She was right.
A week later Monica sent me an email with information about a meeting for a group called Widows and Kiddos. She wrote that it was a group she had been part of for several years and it had been helpful to her and her girls. Their next meeting was in a week. Did I want to go?
I sat on my bed reading the email.
Widows group???? I am now eligible for Widows groups? This is a fucking nightmare. Who wants to be in a Widows group?
I went back and forth on whether to attend but I finally decided to go for it. My decision to go was mostly based on Nathan: I thought it would be helpful for him to meet other children, hopefully some boys, who had lost their Dads.
On the day of the meeting, I went for a run before the meeting started at 6pm. I was nervous. What if I could not handle it? What if I cried the entire time and made a fool of myself? What if Nathan could not handle it? What if nobody played with him? What if I could not relate to anyone? I pounded the pavement of the streets trying to shake the worry off of me like droplets of sweat. I barely even noticed the music from my iPod because the voice in my head asking all of those questions seemed to be screaming.
We walked into the Church that hosts Widows and Kiddos. A pretty blonde woman walked right up to me.
“Are you Staci”, she asked?
“Yes”, I replied.
“I’m Laura. I started the group. I was widowed a couple of years ago too and I have a daughter”, she said.
I studied Laura’s face. She looked happy. She did not look dazed. She did not look pathetic. She looked like a normal woman.
She went on to say “I’m so glad you came. I know it’s a club that nobody wants to be in”. She smiled gently as she said that.
Her words were exactly what I had been thinking since I received Monica’s email about the meeting. I did not want to be here. I did not want to have this commonality with these women. But what I would soon learn is that I was part of the Widows club regardless of what I wanted. It’s like the song Hotel California, but worse. In the Eagles’ song, you can check out but you can never leave. However at least, seemingly, you checked in willingly. In the Widows Club, you did not check in voluntarily and you can never leave. It’s fucking fantastic.
Laura led me down the hall to where we drop off our kids who are watched, fed, and entertained by Youth Members and Adults from the church. They even had a separate room for little ones like Wyatt. I dropped Wyatt in the little playroom. Then I took Nathan into the bigger room with the kids his age and older. Nathan looked really tentative. Laura helped introduce him to some of the other kids. A man named Steve, who founded the group with Laura, walked up to us. He was so friendly.
“Do you like sports Nathan”, he asked?
Nathan nodded.
“Well, let’s get some kind of ball game going on”, Steve said, “C’mon”. Nathan followed him.
Laura let me back down the hall and up the stairs to a room filled with women. A dinner buffet was set on the side but I could not eat.
Women kept coming up, introducing themselves to me. Again, I studied each of their faces. What I found is that there were two categories of faces in the room. The first were the women who looked dazed, sad, and haggard. The second group was the women who looked like Laura and Monica. They did not look sad. They did not look dazed. They did not look haggard. Their faces looked like the faces of my friends. They looked happy. And as I looked closer I saw another trait in their face: determination.
I want to look like them, I thought, thinking of the second group, I AM going to look like them.
It was the first part of a bigger choice that I would eventually make.
We sat at a table with our dinners and started to chat. We did introductions around the room. It was each person’s choice if they wanted to share the story of how their husband died. I think everyone did. There was a mix of women whose husbands died suddenly and whose husbands were sick. All had kids of various ages.
As we circled around the table taking turn with introductions, it came to a woman with long dark hair. I thought I had seen her somewhere before. I was right. Her name was Eden and she also went to my High School. There were three of us there from my High School. What are the friggin’ chances?
At this meeting I met some women who were also runners: Laura, Carolyn, Barb. They too used running to help them through their grief. Additionally, Carolyn had been raising two boys alone for years. I gravitated to her immediately. Carolyn would become my Boy Mom Widow Mentor.
I came to find out that some of the “Running Widows” had done their first significant races: half marathons, marathons, after their husbands died. I told them I had never done a race of that magnitude.
“You should do the Rock and Roll San Francisco Half Marathon with us next year”, Carolyn said. “It’s a great race and a great choice for your first half marathon.”
I had never run more than 8 miles…if that. Could I run 13.2 miles in a year, I thought?
The seed of an idea was planted.
That first Widow and Kiddos meeting turned out to be not only a turning point in my running career but also the start of a lifeline for my boys and for me. I have found it critical to my survival to have a network of women, who I now call friends, who live my life everyday. Similarly, my sons have a place where we can go and they are just like everyone else.
After I put the boys to bed that night, I went to my room and sat on my bed. I looked at my running shoes sitting in the corner. Gordie had been training for his first half marathon when he died. I did sprint triathlons before Nathan was born and I had run many, many 10k races and even the 7.5 Bay to Breakers a few times. But I had never thought I had it in me to run more than that.
Gordie did not get to do his half marathon, I thought. I’m going to do it for him. I’m going to run that Rock and Roll half marathon in a year.
I was in.