Remembering My WIfe On The Anniversary Of Her Passing

When I woke up, I didn't plan to write about the passing of my dearest wife, Kathy, which happened a year ago tonight. Yet I saw Kevin had shared my Facebook thoughts on the Best of Sedalia Facebook page, and I realized that I never really had taken the time to talk to you about it.

Oh, sure. If you were listening on my first day back, I think I mentioned that my wife had passed to explain why my show might be more subdued than usual. Or maybe you heard me shed a tear the first time a song that meant something to us played; it was probably Journey's "Faithfully."

For the most part, except after a natural disaster or a tragedy, my job as a DJ is to play you cool tunes and take your mind off whatever bothers you, makes you angry or sad. So, the last thing I wanted to do was put my sadness on the radio. Sharing some emotion is good, yet a little goes a long way. I thought about copying and pasting what I wrote on Facebook about Kathy into a blog and sharing that, but I wasn't ready to share that at that moment. So I let it go.

Kathy passed in the first hours of Sunday, August 6, 2023. Yet, Saturday, August 5, was a normal Saturday. We texted a little and decided I'd come out to St. Luke's North to visit her on Sunday.

At that point, Kathy had been fighting to regain health and normalcy for eight months. She wasn't ambulatory yet. However, some good news was that her kidneys and liver seemed to have rebounded from some of her challenges. Dialysis seemed to help with the lymphedema. The only things of concern were she didn't seem to have the strength to walk, and doctors hadn't figured out why, at times, her blood pressure would drop and her O2 stats would plummet to dangerous levels.

I kicked around the house Saturday, maybe did some work, listened to records, and got ready to go to The Shrine Club, where Mike was gathering with friends to watch a wrestling pay-per-view event. I think I got a call that afternoon from the hospital, and they told me that they were moving Kathy into intensive care.

It seemed the low blood pressure/low oxygen thing was happening again. Of course, while not normal, it wasn't unexpected. It had happened numerous times. More concerning to me was why no one had seemed to figure out why it was happening.

I was also worrying about the future. How much time did I have left with my insurance for her to stay at care facilities? What if she came home but wasn't ambulatory? How would we pay for her care if she came home and wasn't ambulatory? How would I be able to balance work and care?

As the evening went on, things started to get a little concerning. At some point, a nurse called and told me that, unlike other times, Kathy didn't seem to be responding to treatments and that she was still in intensive care.

When my friend  Amanda asked after Kathy, I told her what was happening with my wife and mentioned I wasn't sure she'd make it.

Yet even that thought was rather fleeting, and I quickly attributed it to how much harder it was for me to get good information from her medical team and how much harder it was to just be present with her since her skilled nursing facility and the hospital they took her to were literally on the other side of Kansas City, beyond Worlds of Fun.

I knew Kathy wasn't doing well because I had a brat that night at the party and sent her a picture. I don't eat brats. I may have never had a brat until that night. And Kathy had certainly never seen me eat a brat, so in normal times, that photo would have generated some witty and probably funny comments from her about my eating habits. The lack of a response was a little disheartening, yet I knew the low BP and O2 tended to alter her mind and made it hard to communicate, period.

After I left Mike's party, I got another call from the hospital. I pulled into the Buffalo Wild Wings parking lot to talk to the nurse. The news wasn't good; I pushed to get her opinion on whether or not I should have her folks start toward Missouri. After some prodding, the nurse said, yes, Kathy was very ill, and getting her parents into town was probably a good idea.

And yet, Kathy, going through everything at the moment, had the strength to text me and tell me to call her parents and fill them in. I did.

When I got home, I did what I did most nights: put on a record and had a nightcap. That's how I got through eight months of her being sick, most of the time in a hospital or nursing home. A record, a Captain and Coke, and just letting the music distract me. That and therapy were the two big self-care things I made time for. I didn't expect another call from the hospital being so late.

Yet, I got one. Kathy wasn't doing well and was experiencing cardiogenic shock, and they were going to move her from St. Luke's North to St. Luke's downtown because they had a cardiology team that they thought would bring her out of it. It sounded good to me, although part of me wondered why they didn't do this earlier.

I called her folks back and left an update before I looked up cardiogenic shock. I'm glad I did, too, because had I known how serious that is and how many folks don't come out of it, I don't know if I could have made it through calling them.

After that, I poured the rest of my cocktail down the drain in case I needed to get in my car and head downtown. It's not what I wanted to do in the middle of the night, especially since I was unfamiliar with where St. Luke's was and that area of the City.

Anyway, the nurse suggested I let them transfer and settle her and see what the doctors had to say before rushing out in the middle of the night. She pointed out they wouldn't let me in the room to see her anyway until they got her settled, a set of vitals, and did any medically necessary procedures. She said to give them 90 minutes, call St. Luke's downtown for an update, and go from there.

After 90 minutes, I called St. Luke's, and the operator said they didn't have a record of her there. However, after some checking, they showed her being in the Emergency Department at St. Luke's North. The operator knew nothing or wasn't saying or speculating about anything. She even suggested that her computer might not have the latest information. She transferred me to the Emergency Department at St. Luke's North.

Unfortunately, during the transfer, Kathy got worse. I don't even think the ambulance left the bay at St. Luke's North before they wheeled her back inside to try and save her life. Sadly, this time, there was no way to bring her back.

The medical television shows get it right. When the nurse put me on hold to talk to the doctor, I hoped it was just that something else went wrong. A heart attack, a stroke, something she might recover from. Yet, as soon as the doctor started to bring me up to speed, I knew what was coming. "We did everything we could for your wife, yet we couldn't save her. I'm so sorry for your loss."

What TV and film largely don't get right is what happens after your loved one dies. I'm not talking about the arrangements, the memorials, and the services; I'm talking about what happens after that. When the condolences have been said, the celebration of life is done, and you wake up on a random Saturday morning five or six weeks later, and you realize you've been bumming around the house and haven't done anything since the memorials except work, hang out at the record store, play music on the turntable, and watch TV.

No guide says when your grief will subside, and there's no real guide to how to go about moving on with your life. I was lucky, being on the mature side of middle age; Kathy and I had talked some about grief. How we processed the loss of our loved ones, and how we overcame the sadness of their loss.

For me, overcoming the sadness and loss is found in the good memories, the good times, and the fun we shared. Kathy tended to share those feelings, I believe. Because we rarely talked about the struggles or the hard times our loved ones who preceded us in death endured. We might acknowledge their health struggles, what a great fight they put up, or a particular obstacle life put in their way that they overcame, but in the end, we spent most of the time telling sweet stories and sharing sweet memories of them.

One of the things I realized after my Father passed was that I process grief rather quickly. So when I woke up on that Saturday morning several weeks later with cabin fever, I knew it was time to start moving forward and start the next chapter of my life.

The thing Kathy taught me in death, however, is that you don't get over the loss. You learn to live with it. There's never that magic day when things return to normal; there's just a new normal. The rub is how you deal with the new normal and move on.

Luckily, as I started that process, I had my therapist, Geni, to help guide me. What worried me about moving on was whether I would lose my memories of Kathy. Could I move on, start a new chapter, and remember the good times? Moving rather quickly to this stage, I also wanted to make sure I was still processing my grief and not just shoving it in some corner of my subconscious.

Well, it's one year later. I can tell you I still love Kathy with all my heart and soul. Her beautiful smile, kind soul, ability to tell a story, and great sense of humor are just the starting point. She was a beautiful woman who was fierce in her battles against cancer, congestive heart failure, and a staph infection that nearly killed her.

She was a determined writer who loved her craft. She loved writing so much that she wrote "Alias" fan fiction—a binder full of it. That was before she went back to school, got a creative writing degree, and had a final project that was so good that her professors wanted her to continue to develop it and see it through.

Together, we loved our shows, whether it was "E.R.," "Law and Order SVU," "The Sopranos," "C.S.I.," or any one of two or three dozen shows we loved throughout our marriage; yeah, couple time meant couch time. Not to mention, we had many long conversations about the shows, the characters, and the plots of these shows.

Patrick Mahomes even got her to follow football and become a Chiefs fan.

I mention this because Kathy was also a Swifte. She would have loved the Taylor Swift / Travis Kelce romance. At times, I daydreamed about the conversations we would have had about it, or I'd hear a bit of gossip about something sweet one of them did for the other, and I'd want to tell her about it.

You might think the above would make me sad. And from time to time, it does, but mostly, it makes me smile and giggle. And really, that's how I want to remember my wife: smiling, giggling, and full of life.

Author's note: When I sat down, I didn't intend to write this. I intended to write a shorter piece remembering my wife and sharing some of our good memories and stories about her that make me smile. Yet, I also felt that someone might benefit from hearing about what I've gone through over the past year.

People don't talk a lot about what happens after the condolences are shared and the memorials are over. As I put it, you wake up six weeks later on a Saturday morning and know that another weekend of TV, records, and bumming around the apartment is quickly becoming unhealthy. So what then?  

I hope you've learned a little about Kathy. If you've experienced loss, either recently or not so recently, maybe you can take something from my experience that's helpful for you. Or even let you know, hey, you're not the only one who has had to go through this and figure it out. 

-Rob