Category: Story of Us

If I could have just one more day with you…

Published on by kerrymckimLeave a comment

I have often thought about what we would do if we could just have one more day together.  We weren’t expecting you to get sick.  There was no way to know when you went into the hospital that you would spend five months there and never leave.  What would we have done if we could just have one more day?

Of course, our day will take place in a time that you aren’t sick.  I don’t want to spend our day in the ICU.  If we could have one more day it would be a Saturday and during a time of the year where you aren’t busy with work. I thought about reliving our wedding day or a day from one of our vacations or Christmas but I decided that while those days were filled with great memories, I miss the non-glamorous memories more.   I am also going to be selfish and pretend it’s a Saturday where there are no sporting events.  I want my family all to myself.

We would start the day with an activity that you enjoy doing in the morning.  To be clear, I like this activity too. Just not in the morning because I am definitely not a morning person.  But this would be your special day back so we will do this activity at your preferred time.  Amazingly our daughter will sleep in so we can complete this activity without rushing.

Afterwards we will wake up our daughter.  She will be so happy to see you.  She will jump up and down in her crib and yell “Daddy!”  She will know who you are, I promise.  She recognizes you in photos.  We will let her watch an episode or two of whatever show is on Disney Jr.  As long as it isn’t Miles from Tomorrowland because we both don’t understand why Miles has a pet robot ostrich and it pisses us off.  But chances are, she will want to watch Elena of Avalor, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or Doc McStuffins.

You will make coffee your favorite way which is in the French press.  I will attempt to make your favorite breakfast which is waffles but you will decide you would rather make them yourself.  You will probably use the Mickey Mouse waffle iron that Maddy bought you for her first Christmas.    We eat our waffles with real maple syrup because we don’t keep the fake stuff in our house.  You put fake butter on your waffles and I put real butter on mine.   

As we eat breakfast, we will watch soccer. Your team Chelsea is playing.  You put on your Chelsea jersey.  You make some rude comments about the other team.  You will yell a lot.  It could either be joyful or angry depending on how Chelsea is playing.  

Many Saturdays, we went to estate sales but it seems silly to spend the day shopping especially since you can’t take any of it with you.  Or we could go to Home Depot and you would most likely quote Frank the Tank because that always makes me laugh (“Well, um, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot.  Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that.  Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.”)

Or we can stay home and watch another soccer game.  It’s your choice.

Lunchtime rolls around and you get to pick. You can have a Garbage Plate at McGeary’s or a Buffalo Burger at Swifty’s.  We can go have miniature hot dogs.  Or we can stay home and make tomato soup with grilled cheese.  Whatever you want.

It’s a beautiful day so we take our daughter to the pocket park near our house.  You push her in the swing and she loves it.   After that we will hang out on our front porch and watch the cars speed down the street.   You will put our cat on his harness and leash and call him a dick when he doesn’t want to go outside.  The ice cream truck comes and you can’t resist getting our daughter an ice cream.  And you get an ice cream for me too.

For dinner, I will make chicken enchiladas because they were your favorite.  You liked to add sriracha to them.  You were always happy when I made chicken enchiladas.  Personally I don’t think the recipe is very authentic but you don’t care.

I know I said I wanted you to myself but I have to share you for a little while because you have a lot of friends who miss you and will want to see you.  So we will have a sitter come and we will meet up with friends for Karaoke.  And of course you sing some Righteous Brothers “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and all of your favorites.  You always told me that you wanted to sing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” as a duet but I always said no because you always made fun of the fact that I can’t sing.  So today I will sing that duet with you and you can make fun of me all you want.  

This ends up being a fun night.  It is great to spend time with our friends.  But the night must come to end even thought we don’t want it too.  We go home and go to bed and hold each other.  I will probably cry because I don’t want our day to end and I don’t want to say good-bye again.   But I must.  So I give you one last hug and kiss and tell you that I love you one last time.  I will be okay because I know that while it’s fun to think about this day, it will never happen.  At least I have our memories.

The mopey love song phase

Published on by kerrymckimLeave a comment

My early days of widowhood were filled with numbness as I worked through processing Bryon’s death as well as the death of all our dreams.  I am one of those people who likes to have some idea of what will happen in the future like a tentative 5 year, 10 year and 20 year plan.  I am not good at flying by the seat of my pants. I know that things can change but I was certain that Bryon, our daughter and the child we planned on having later were going to be there.  When Bryon was sick, I knew that it was possible that if he survived (which I believed he was going to) that he was probably going to have long term health problems that would have altered our plans.  But he was going to be there.  We would figure the rest out.

Then one day he was gone and so were our dreams.  The family of three (with plans to be four) had become a family of two.  And I have gotten used to the fact that that will be our future.  My daughter, me and our cat.  Maybe I will get her a dog to make up for the fact that she won’t ever have a brother or sister.  I am trying to reconstruct new dreams.

I have been shifting from feeling of numbness due to his absence in our daily life to reflecting on our life together.

I never really been one to date.  I didn’t have a serious boyfriend until my senior year in college.  He was the complete opposite of Bryon.  We dated for almost three years even though he didn’t really put much effort into our relationship.  At the time, I thought that it was love and left the relationship unimpressed with the whole concept of love. It definitely was not like the love I had seen in the movies. I don’t think he was a bad guy, he just did not seem to have much passion with me or for anything else.

All my life I had kept people at a distance.  I never let anyone get too close and can be quite stand-offish at times.  This probably factored into the reason why I never dated much.  I never liked letting my guard down.  It is much easier to not let people get close instead of opening yourself up and potentially getting hurt.  I spent my 20’s immersed in Maine Republican politics and the politics of the Young Republican National Federation.  While part of me enjoyed some superficial male attention, I really wasn’t that interested in letting anyone into my own world and exposing myself to potential hurt. As a result, I probably denied myself a lot of happiness during that decade.

All that changed in the winter of 2008.  I was still living in Maine and I had traveled to Albany, NY for a leadership conference put on by the New York State Young Republicans.  I was feeling more social than usual that weekend and I chatted with several charming gentlemen.  I must have made quite an impression on a certain younger gentlemen who stood next to me all evening at the bar and kept buying me drinks.  This younger gentleman brought me back to my hotel.  I started to get nervous because I felt that this younger gentleman was interested in me and I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea.  I started to stress our age difference because he would surely lose interest if he knew how old I was.  He said he didn’t believe I was that old so I took out my driver’s license and said “That’s a ‘7’ not an ‘8’.”  He looked at it with complete disbelief and said that that can’t be right.  I said.  “Oh, yes it is.  I was born during the Carter Administration.”

The fact that I was born in the 1970’s (albeit late 1970’s) and that I am old enough to remember Ronald Reagan actually being president did not deter this young gentlemen.  For the next several months he showered me with attention on google chat and Facebook.  While I enjoyed the attention, I tried to discourage his advances.  He was too young.  Why on Earth would he want to date an old lady like me?  

I didn’t make it easy for him but Bryon eventually wore me down.  Our attraction was just too strong and it was just meant to be.   And to this day, I have no idea what he saw in me.  What made me special?  No man had ever made an effort to romance me or make me feel special but Bryon did.  What was it about me that made him think I was worth the trouble?

He was the first person I truly let get close to me.  This scared me and I am ashamed to say that I would test him even though I don’t think I did it intentionally. I just thought he was too good to be true and that he would surely lose interest in me.  Friends used to always say that I was a saint for putting up with his mischievous antics but he was just as much as a saint for putting up with me. I wasn’t always a picnic to deal with.   I have no idea why I couldn’t just accept that a great guy like Bryon would love me.

I just think about how he used to look at me during those romantic dinners, like I was the only girl in the room.  Or how he listened to every silly story I told on our first date.  I think about how sappy he got right before he proposed to me at Mahars and how happy he looked when I walked down the aisle on our wedding day.   I think about how excited he would get when I would say a one-liner that made him laugh.  He would reiterate to me that he was the funny one but once in awhile I can be really funny too.  I think about all the times he told me I was beautiful and all the times I got mad at him because I didn’t believe I was deserving of that compliment.

I think I am beginning to enter what I am thinking of as the Mopey Love Song Phase.  In the earlier days of widowhood, my sadness felt raw and intense but it still felt like an external feeling that I could fight off. My sadness doesn’t feel as raw or intense now but it feels deeper and more internalized. It is like the sadness has actually become a physical part of me and I accept that it is now a part of me. The emptiness sits like a big pit in my stomach and radiates through my bones.

Now that I am getting over the shock of Bryon being gone, I am bombarded with memories and trying to process the emotions that go along with all of those memories.  Our love story is played over and over again in my head. I tear up to think that as we were living our lives and making memories, we never knew that we weren’t going to get many years.  And there never would have been no way to know.

A widowed Valentine’s Day

Published on by kerrymckim2 Comments

Valentine’s Day 2009 was our first Valentine’s Day together.  I had a long weekend so I planned to drive from Maine to Albany.  I decided I was going to get him a Brooks Brother’s gift card so he could buy a bow tie.  I got out of work at 4:30 in Bar Harbor, ME and I was worried that the closest store in Freeport, ME (which was about three hours into my drive) was going to be closed by the time I was driving through.  Luckily I made it there with ten minutes to spare.  Bryon cooked me chicken parm for dinner and even had candles in his small apartment.  I gave him the Brooks Brothers gift card and a box of chocolates made by my friend who has a confectionary business. (Affectionate Confections)  He gave me a box of commercial chocolates and an EZ pass because he couldn’t stand that I actually stopped at the toll plazas and paid cash to the attendant.  I won’t go into the details of the rest of the evening.  I will leave that to your imagination.

(I did find that Brooks Brother’s gift card still in the box about a month after Bryon died.  No idea if he used it or if the card is even good.  It is so old it doesn’t have a number on the back to call for a balance.)

Valentine’s Day 2016 was our last Valentine’s Day.  We started it on the cruise ship, Freedom of the Seas.  We were back in Port Canaveral after a seven night cruise to the Bahamas, U.S.V.I, and Saint Maarten.   It was debarkation day and we were concerned about the logistics of getting off the ship and getting to the airport and ultimately getting home.  We had long ago blown off the idea of Valentine’s Day.  Bryon would rather send me flowers or take me out to a fancy dinner on any other night of the year.  That morning Bryon didn’t say anything about it being Valentine’s Day to me.  Maddy woke up and he said “Maddy, will you be my Valentine?”  My heart melted.

To those who are in love, whether you are in the early stages of your relationship or have been married for decades, please don’t take each other for granted.  Listen to each other.  Really look at each other.  Spent time together, just the two of you.  Show interest in each other’s interests and lives. Don’t leave anything unsaid.  Take time to make sure you hug and feel the embrace.

Don’t live each day like it’s your last as that is just too exhausting.  But remember that things can change instantly, without warning.  Bryon’s illness happened suddenly and unexpectedly.  I don’t remember a lot of our “lasts” because I didn’t realize that those lasts were going to be our lasts.  While I am thankful I had those last five months with him, there were so many things we never got a chance to say.  So many things we didn’t get to do.

To those who are single, please don’t be discouraged.  I had given up on love when Bryon entered my life.  Please make sure you keep your heart open and never lose the faith.  Don’t settle but don’t be so stuck on what your ideal partner is that you miss out on something wonderful.  Sometimes love surprises us.  And if you are single and are happy, that is great and keep doing things that make you happy.

If Bryon were still living, we would not have had anything spectacular planned today but I still feel the emptiness.  But I am thankful I got my eight years with him.  I am thankful that he loved me.  He touched a lot of people lives and he chose me to be by his side.  I am a better person now because of him.  Because of him, I will live my life differently and love those around more.

I will continue on my journey on trying to love myself and being the best mother I can be to my daughter.  I will cherish the non-romantic love in my life from my family and friends.  I will cherish all the meals I share with friends.  All of the conversations.  These people were there for me in the darkest hours and still continue to stay by my side.  I will be ready to be there for them during their darkest hours, though I hope their darkest hours are bright compared to mine.  I will continue to try to keep my heart open to new friendships and work at not keeping myself closed off from others.

I do not know what future Valentine’s Days will bring.  I hope someday that I will get a chance to love and be loved again.  Maybe, when I am ready for it,  I will have another special man in my life who won’t be scared off by all my baggage.  But until that day arrives, should it arrive,  I will be spending this Valentine’s Day at a rocking party with the other love of my life and the twelve other two-year-olds in her daycare class.  And there is nowhere else I would rather be.

A Promise

Published on by kerrymckim5 Comments

During Bryon’s final hours, one of our closest friends and I sat in his room and we would take turns going over to him to talk to him.  He wasn’t conscious at this point but no one really knows how much he heard or if he could even hear us at this point.  But we continued to talk to him.  I am not going to tell you about everything we talked about but I am going to tell you about one promise I made to him.

I was probably rambling at this point.  But I started talking about our travel maps.  I struggled on a good first anniversary paper gift but decided that we should buy a large map of the U.S. and a huge map of the world and put them on large bulletin boards and pin all the places we travel.  True to my nature, I even found a way to make it more complicated by adding color coded pins to denote places that only I had traveled  (blue) and places that only he had traveled (green).  We used red pins for the places we traveled together and yellow pins to denote places that we both had been but not together.

In a perfect world, I would have made these maps for him and given them to him as a gift.  But I knew that there was no way I could hide them.  So I presented my idea to Bryon and he liked the it and true to his “take charge” nature, he located the items online, purchased them and put the maps with the adhesive onto the bulletin boards. He did let me help with the assembly.   He even indulged my system of color coded pins.  Though one day as a prank, he put one of my pins in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia even though I have never been to Africa and didn’t tell me.  He waited until I figured it out.  He thought it was the funniest thing ever so I left the pin in place.

Anyway, as I was talking (or rambling) to Bryon during his last night on Earth, I started talking about these maps.  I remember saying that I couldn’t believe that there wouldn’t be any more adventures together.  We loved to travel.  We had so many plans and so many places we wanted to visit. We would never go to San Diego and visit all the Top Gun places.  We would never go to Branson, Missouri (it was always his dream to go to the Nashville of the Ozarks.  A dream I never understood).  We would never go to Scotland, or Seattle, or London or Texas.  Travelling with Bryon was amazing because he was a planner and he would make the best of wherever he was.  We could be in some random place but give him 5-10 minutes on his phone and he would figure out the top tourist attractions, the most random tourist attraction, what famous (or not-so-famous) person lived there, if there was a Waffle House or a Chick-Fil-A nearby and what the best local places to eat and grab a drink and he would come up with a plan to see it all. Literally, all I had to do was show up and enjoy the amazing vacation.

Our adventures were going to be over.  We wouldn’t put any more red pins into our map.  But I told him that I promised that I would still take our daughter on adventures even though it would be hard to do it without him. Bryon would want her to see the world.  We brought her everywhere with us.  By the time she was 16 months, she had already been on two Caribbean cruises.  Bryon wouldn’t want us to stop travelling.  I even bought special pink pins to denote our girl trips.

So today my daughter and I embark on our first adventure without Bryon.  It is going to be hard without him.  It will be the first time I will fly alone with my daughter.  We will be going to a place that Bryon had never been but always wanted to go.  We will be spending time with my best friend and her two year old daughter.

So get ready Las Vegas.  The McKim girls are coming.

Missing you a little bit more…

Published on by kerrymckimLeave a comment

Today America experienced the peaceful exchange of power between two presidents.  It was a day of mixed emotions.  Some Americans were sad to see President Obama’s term come to a close  and are dreading a Donald Trump presidency.  Some Americans were thrilled to see President Obama leave office and are excited to see President Donald Trump take office.  Some Americans didn’t like either of them and are probably sick of all of the Facebook posts.  Most of us probably watched the events on TV while some Americans from all over the country traveled to Washington, D.C. to celebrate or to protest.

This post isn’t meant to incite political feelings.  I almost didn’t write it.  I also thought about writing it and waiting to post it until feelings about the current situation died down.  But the reality is, the pendulum of time and American opinion is always swaying back and forth and this blog isn’t about that.  This is a story about me and my husband.  This is not a political blog.  This is a blog about grief, life, love and resilience.  But politics does play a backdrop in our story so I ask that you put aside partisan politics before reading this.

Bryon and I first met the weekend after the election of 2006 in Louisville, Kentucky.  It was the Fall Board meeting for the Young Republican National Federation (YRNF) and it was during the Northeast Caucus.  I was the lone Maine representative in a room that was predominantly filled with New Yorkers and one New Yorker kept interrupting me when I was giving my report.  The other New Yorkers thought he was hilarious but I thought he was obnoxious and rude.

I went back to Maine and didn’t put any more thought into that rude New Yorker until March 2008.  I was attending a leadership conference in Albany put on by the New York State Young Republicans.  There was one person who seemed to be running all the logistics of the event and I went up and introduced myself to him.  He informed me that we had already met in Louisville.  Then I remembered that he was the one that kept interrupting me.  Luckily for him, I believe in second chances and I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself.

Needless to say that that weekend was the start of a friendship.  A friendship which turned into love soon thereafter.  We did the long distance relationship thing for a year and we both managed our political activities in our home states and with the YRNF.  A year into our relationship, I decided to take a leap of faith and I moved to Albany.  It was one of the scariest things I have ever done.  I never got involved in New York politics.  Partially because it was a whole different animal compared to Maine politics.  I let my fear of not succeeding in a more aggressive political arena keep me from even trying.  The other reason, as Bryon once accused me, was that I had spent years working my way up in Maine politics and I was simply not interested in starting from the bottom again.  He was absolutely correct.  But I also knew it was time to focus on my career, our relationship and eventually, our family.

At home we watched a lot of politics.  We watched all the debates, Republican and Democrat.  We watched Canadian and British elections.  Bryon was always fascinated with the Westminster system of government and I was mesmerized by the BBC infographics.  There even was a period of time that Bryon recorded “The Prime Minister’s Questions” each week off of C-Span.  As the title states, it is where members of Parliament ask the Prime Minister’s questions and if you think we are not civil in the U.S., then you need to watch The Prime Minister’s Questions.

Bryon was fascinated with Canadian politics and admired former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  Somewhere in our house we have a Progressive Conservative Party of  Canada winter hat.  When I was pregnant, we were visiting his parents in Buffalo, NY and we drove to Canada to go to a Canadian maternity store called Thyme.  Our visit was during the Ontario Provincial Elections and commercials about Tim Hudak played on the radio.  Tim Hudak represented the ridings of Niagara South and true to any campaign, some commercials were scathing and others sang his praises.  One commercial sang his praises and then ended with “paid for by Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.”  Bryon and I both immediately said something to the effect of  “Oh, okay, we want Tim Hudak!”

One time Bryon asked me if I thought he should run for president.  I said no.  It was not the answer he was expecting.  He expected me to tell him he was smart and that he would make a great president.  He asked me why.  I immediately told him it that he couldn’t run for president even if he wanted to because he was not 35 years old.  Bryon breaks out in a huge smile and says he loves me so much and he loved that that was how I answered his question.

Bryon and I had one of those relationships where we would talk about everything from religion and politics to trivial matters like cat videos and our bodily functions. (Sorry but it’s true.)  Even though we were both Republicans when we started dating, we disagreed on many issues.  Over the years, we seemed to disagree less.  I like to think it was from all our conversations with each other.  I know he expanded my mind and turned me into more of a critical thinker.  Maybe I had some effect on him too.

As the 2016 Presidential Election got underway, we were critical of Donald Trump.  We both liked Marco Rubio.  We both has a soft spot for “Jeb!”  We watched every debate, except the one that played on the last night of our cruise.  One night I was at the gym when one of the debates began and Bryon had recorded it on DVR and replayed the highlights when I got home.

Then Bryon got sick and was fighting for his life.  The same election I was obsessed with no longer mattered.  I remember sitting in the ICU waiting room and watching the news and it was just so foreign and removed to me.  It was hard to believe that just weeks before, I was so emotionally invested in this election and now it seemed so trivial.  I didn’t care who was running this country as long as I had Bryon with me.  Because at the end of the day, the most important thing is my family.

My first election day after his death was much more difficult than I had anticipated.  I was lost as to who to vote for.  I did not have Bryon to discuss all the options.  Ironically, I usually never saw him on election days because he was working.  Usually he came home around 3 am.  When I went to bed that night, I was half-expecting to be woken up by him at 3 am and hear all about election night. But I was only woken up by the TV that I had left on.

I thought I was indifferent about the Inauguration but this morning I was thinking that while we were not fans of President Trump, we most likely would have been in D.C. today.  We would have been visiting with old friends from our YRNF days.  We might even have been crazy enough to take our 2-year-old daughter because we took her everywhere with us and we would want her to witness history.  Bryon would have been scheming of a way for him to have his picture taken with Joe Biden because, despite partisan politics, he loved Joe Biden.

I will probably always miss him more on political days.  My life will never be the same.  Bryon is gone. This is my new reality.  It’s just me and our daughter.  Bryon was not one to sit and watch life pass.  The best I can do is try to take my daughter on as many adventures and try to teach her to live life to the fullest just like her father taught me how to do.