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Make a WishDAY SIX
By Staff Writer COLLINS CONNER
Linda cried when Milt's finches died. She cried when she saw a fund-raising brochure from Moffitt Cancer Center with a picture of Milt's doctor. "How could you let him die?" she thought. "You were supposed to be so good." She watched a made-for-TV movie, in which a man slipped toward death with his eyes closed. "No! No! That's not right," she wailed. "Your eyes are supposed to open up like Milt's did!" Through the end of September and into October, she harbored a single thought: "Milt is gone and he's not coming back. I'll never be able to hold him. He'll never touch me." She tripped over the words "our house" or "our children." She wouldn't eat at Outback Steakhouse, because she thought it a "couples only" restaurant. She questioned whether to take pictures of places she visited. "Who's going to look at them? I always brought them home for him." She felt flutters of euphoria, that she was released from the burden of Milt's care. "It's like being sprung from jail or something," she said. Then she whiplashed into guilt for feeling free. She went to another bereavement support group meeting. A woman in the group said: "Can I ask a question of everybody? After your loved one died, did you feel him in the house? I've had six experiences at home, that I just know that my friend has been there and is there." A widow said she regularly heard her late husband's voice. "And I turn around and I call, 'Fran?' " Linda knew exactly what they meant. She felt Milt flinch every time she sat in his tan glider-rocker. She told all this to Patti Colligan, the counselor from Hernando-Pasco Hospice, who came to Linda's house every two weeks to talk her through her ricocheting emotions. At their third meeting, Patti wanted to talk about anger. Linda was full of anger, old anger she had tamped down for years and trapped behind her cheerfulness. Secretly, she feared that her rage, once loosed, would run rampant and consume her. So she didn't want to acknowledge it and she didn't want to discuss it. But Patti kept coming back to the topic. As Patti talked, Linda reached down to Bear, her Yorkshire Terrier, and tugged a toy chain from his mouth. Patti said: "You're probably angry in a lot of different directions, Linda." Linda said nothing. She fiddled with the plastic chain, pulling the links apart, pushing them together. Patti persisted: "You're angry at the world right now." "No, I'm not." But tears rushed to Linda's eyes and she flung the toy at Patti. "You did it to me again," she snapped. "You made me cry." Patti moved to a safer subject. Anger could wait for another meeting, and she needed to focus Linda on the tasks at hand. You have four jobs, Patti said: Accept Milt's death, work through the pain of his absence, adjust to life without him and carve out a new life for yourself. "When someone dies, the role of wife has been taken, the role of caregiver is lost. Whatever you were to Milton, whatever roles you played for him, lover, best friend, they're all gone." Linda said: "How do I start becoming someone?"
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