Barb Caffrey's Blog

I’ve now been without the love of my life, Michael B. Caffrey, for twenty-one years, nine months, and twenty-three days.

Every day, when I wake up, I think about how long it’s been. Sometimes it feels like forever, and sometimes it feels like I just saw him a minute ago. I’m fortunate, as I’ve said before, that I often feel his love around me, supporting me, giving me a reason to keep trying even on the difficult days.

This is one of them.

See, while Michael never would’ve celebrated it — and I would not have talked about it when he was alive except with my closest friends — this would’ve been his sixty-eighth birthday. He did not like to celebrate his birthday whatsoever, but he liked to celebrate every other day — the unBirthdays, if you will — especially after we found each other and married.

For him, a birthday was no different than any other day. He wasn’t interested in most celebrations. But he was happy to celebrate being with me, and I was happy to celebrate being with him on his natal day or any other day.

Michael was the most positive person I’ve ever known. He had faith, kindness, goodness — though he’d say he was “as pure as the driven slush,” mind you — was faithful, loyal, honorable, ethical, had a wicked sense of humor, and showed me how much he loved me every single day.

I waited a long time before I found him. As I’ve said before, he and I were both divorced when we met, and he pretty much said to himself (not to me, not then) that I was going to be the woman he married. But he didn’t want to scare me off, as he knew I was quite gun-shy by that point.

I don’t know how he got me to hear him. To trust that he was different, that he truly cared, that he would not betray me (not cheat, not lie, not steal, not any of that), to believe that just once, in this life, I had found a mental equal along with a spiritual, physical, and emotional one. But he did, and we had that amazing conversation for thirty-six hours — our first lengthy conversation, and the longest, but it wouldn’t be the last — around Christmas Day of 2001. Neither one of us wanted to go to bed, to leave our conversation, to stop talking, because I think we both feared it wouldn’t be real and it wouldn’t have happened if we went to sleep.

In fact, if I remember right, when I got up the next day, Michael left me an email with a subject line something like, “On Further Review…” So, I opened that email with a bit of trepidation, thinking he might’ve been trying to walk back what we’d discussed the previous evening and throughout the day and night again.

His first line, after saying something like, “Hi, beautiful woman of my dreams,” was this: “I take none of it back.”

This was the first time, and maybe the only time, I’d ever met someone who’d stand by his word. Where the words mattered as much as the actions. Where the dreams we had, that we’d never told anyone about, were safe to discuss. That our creativity could flower due to our deep and incredible connectedness to each other…I had no idea that someone could be this enthused about anything I wanted to do that was positive.

I mean, I’d write music, and he’d read it. He could read all clefs, too. I don’t know if he ever played an instrument, but he read music and understood it.

I’d write words, and he’d sit down with me, read them over, show me some stuff he was doing, I’d read that over…I think we both grew as writers and editors because of each other.

And the wide-ranging interests he had…he knew so much about so many different subjects, and he always wanted to learn more. He looked for deeper and richer experiences all the days of his life, did not suffer fools gladly (or at all), was ethical, principled, constantly made me laugh, was always learning, and was always so present in the moment. (I think that was due to his practice of Zen Buddhism.)

The bone-deep sincerity of him, along with his maturity, his wisdom, his serenity…it was and remains an incredibly attractive combination, one I’ve seen matched nowhere else, by no one else.

(Aside: While I do hope, now, to eventually meet another good man, long-time readers of my blog know this took me almost twelve years — twelve full years — after Michael died to admit I still wanted. It hasn’t happened since. But I know that Michael’s love for me was profound and he’d never want to stand in my way for any potential happiness. End aside.)

So, my grief has been profound for my wonderful, incredible, amazing, sexy, smart, funny, ethical, principled, and intelligent man, my Michael. The three days that are the hardest for me to bear are this one, our wedding anniversary (in June), and the day of his death in September. It’s hard to believe that such a huge presence, someone I still feel around me to the point I wake up and am immediately disappointed as Michael is still dead…well. It’s hard to believe I’ll never hold him in the circle of my arms again.

Grief comes in waves. Some days, it’s like a tsunami and all you can do is try to withstand it however you may, so you’re standing…albeit in a bunch of floating wreckage. Some days, it’s more bittersweet, because the good things that happened make you smile, and knowing that this astonishing person was your husband, is your husband still and always will be no matter what happens to our bodies after this life on Earth ends, outweighs anything else.

Mostly, though, I have a form of PTSD, something my last two counselors discussed with me. I saw Michael fall, behind me, with the first of his four heart attacks. (He was too far away for me to catch, and as I’ve said before here on my blog, I would’ve dislocated both arms had I tried. But I would’ve tried. I would’ve done anything to stop that from happening.) I heard his last words, which were “where’s my wife?” as I’d been sent up to our apartment to get the meds he took, as that potentially might save his life (the guy next door was a paramedic, and he said to do this; it made sense to me). I told him I’d be right back and for him to hold on…but when I got back down there, he was being loaded into the ambulance, no pulse, no breathing.

I knew what that was. Bad, bad, and more bad.

They kept trying, because he was only forty-six. He’d had no signs of this. He’d passed a cardiac stress test earlier in the year — a chemical stress test, granted, as he had significant arthritis in the form of chondromalacia. But he passed it.

The ambulance driver looked at me and asked if I was his daughter. (I can’t help it. Even now, after all the stress and strain of the last twenty-one-plus years, I still look considerably younger than my age.) I said, “No, I’m his wife. Now let’s get him to the hospital!”

After eighteen minutes, Michael’s vital signs returned. They still had some hope, though he did not wake up again. They could tell he was fighting very hard. He then had a second heart attack — out again for over ten minutes — and later, a third. By this time, I’d called my parents and my father was on the way from Wisconsin. (We lived in Iowa, then.) They took him to get a brain scan, to see if he still had electrical activity in his brain, and he did — in a non-standard place, but that happened for my Mom, years ago, after she had pneumonia so bad she went into an eight-day coma. I tried to have hope.

They sent me back home to take my own meds, including my blood pressure medicine. I went online (still dialup, back then) to let our friends know that Michael was dying.

Then I got the call to go back to the hospital. He’d had a fourth heart attack, and they were still doing compressions…his blood pressure fell to 30/10, and he had a pulse rate that was so low it almost wasn’t measurable. But he was trying, he was trying to live, he didn’t want to die, he didn’t want to leave me, we’d both waited so long to find each other…it didn’t seem fair, then, and it still doesn’t seem fair now.

I had to be the one to tell him that if he couldn’t come back as himself, without brain damage, which they thought was going to be likely even if he miraculously woke up from all those manual chest compressions, that he should go into eternity and that I’d try my best to never forget his love, never forget him, never forget what we had, and that I would always try to feel his love.

After thirty more minutes (by this time, my father had made it to the hospital and was there at my side), Michael died, just shy of 9 p.m.

I still see all of what happened in Technicolor (TM), and I can’t do anything other than witness it. I know how much Michael loved me. I know how much he wanted to be with me. I know he wanted to finish his stories and keep working on his other crafts (he was an artist, among his many talents). I know he wanted to hear me play in various bands (mostly concert bands, occasionally in jazz ensembles), to hear me practice, to read the music I composed, and to read the words I wrote, too. (I wrote poetry, too, and still occasionally do.)

Life has been very, very difficult for me since he died. I am not going to lie and say that it hasn’t been. I still try my hardest to hold any sort of positive thought (today, it was petting my Mom’s seventeen-year-old dog, Bratty), or to do anything that is life-affirming, honest, and real. I also do what I can to remember all of Michael — his goodness, his kindness, his serenity, his sense of humor and eternally questing mind, all of it — and not just the way he died.

It’s hard for me to believe, even now, that he is not with me in the flesh. I’d like to think if there are multiple universes (the physicists sure seem to believe it’s possible), that Michael perhaps did not die there, and that the iteration of me there with him is still blissfully happy.

Don’t get me wrong. We never made much money. Our lives were not easy, not separately, not even together. But they were much better, much richer, much more satisfying, because I knew he understood me and he knew I understood him. It was a never-ending series of wonders even on the horrid days, like when we were served with eviction papers when we still lived in San Francisco…even on the last day of his life, before he collapsed, Michael believed we’d find our way into a better situation if we only kept trying and kept our faith in ourselves and in the Goddess Herself (as both of us tended to see the Deity as female).

I’ve done what I can since he passed. I’ve kept his Atlantean Union universe alive, albeit in a different way than he’d envisioned. I’ve been fortunate there that my good friend, Gail Sanders, is a former Army Reservist (now retired), and knows things about the military I just don’t. (We have two stories available in Tales of the E4 Mafia and Tales of the E4 Mafia 2, and we hope to have a third coming out in a new anthology later this year.) So I’ve continued to write. My Elfyverse, which I wrote and conceived when Michael was alive, is still there, and I’ve written some short stories for the Fantastic Schools anthologies. I also have written more music, more poetry, made new friends, kept up with old friends, tried to be there for my family (and am still trying)…life goes on.

Is it what I want it to be? No.

Is it better than it would’ve been had Michael never entered my life? Yes.

Ultimately, what I tell myself every day is, I can only do my best. And my best means I remember the love, the caring, the honesty, the serenity, the bone-deep kindness, and yes, also the flaws (Michael absolutely adored being right, to name one, but I thought that completely understandable). My best means that I do not shirk from the difficult truths. My best means that I have to expect the best from myself, even on a bad day, even on a tough day…and my best means that I have to stay myself, my recognizable self, so that if Michael somehow could miraculously come back to life (I know he can’t), he’d recognize me instantly.

Grief is hard. I don’t enjoy it, to put it mildly. But if this is what I have to deal with due to finding the love of my life and getting a few good years with him before his sudden and unexpected passing, that’s just the price of admission.

I wish we’d had far more time. I wish Michael would’ve been able to write more stories and finish his own novels and write more in the Atlantean Union ‘verse on his own.

But I will never regret the time we did get. It was the highlight of my existence. And I honor it, all the days of my life.