Two Women

2013 picture of the entrance to the old naval hospital in Charleston S.C. where I was stationed in 1968.

Friends. Yesterday was seismic. As seven boxes of my wife’s clothes and shoes went out the door a new recliner crashed into the room. Continents drifted. Mountains rose. New oceans formed. I discovered I very much wanted to divest myself of a coffee table and steamer trunk that once belonged to my father’s second wife. I heartily disliked her, which brings me to my mother.

She died in February 1968. I was in Charleston South Caroline at the Naval Hospital. I flew home. I had one big gasping cry the night I arrived. That was it. Really. When I got back to the hospital no one asked how I was doing. My father remarried the next year. I had an uneasy relationship with his new bride. She was a hard woman to love. Flash forward to 2000. The second wife departs this mortal coil. A counselor would probably look at me with dispassionate eyes and say, “You were happy she was gone.” I would find it hard to disagree. She wasn’t my mother, and she had her own problems. And it gets worse, if things like this are categorized as bad, worse, and worst. As my father prepared to move on, he said her daughter didn’t want the steamer trunk and table. I took them. I guess I felt if I couldn’t get love I might as well get furniture.

Now I want them gone. Because, when I took them, I also thought they might have value, and this is where it gets mighty petty, and probably, the worst. If the second wife’s daughter was too obtuse to see it, then that was her loss. So, I took them, and we used them. But when I look at them now, I realize there’s no affection, and I’d have a hard time explaining on the Antiques Roadshow, with an honest smile, how I got them. They represent no fond memories. Just pain. And if I’m going to deal with pain, I’d rather deal with the passing of my mother than the substitute who constantly tried to kill her memory. It seems more productive and freeing. So, that’s what I’m going to do. And I really wish my wife had met my mother because they would have been great friends.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale