Trying to do the unimaginable

Losing the love of your life once in a lifetime is tragedy enough. How do you go on when it happens twice?

My mom is finding out, very painfully.

Gloria Jean Baranick Holtz is the strongest, most resilient person I know. As I write this, I’m on a plane headed for Chicago where I’ll get a car and drive to Racine, Wisconsin, my hometown, to be by her side.

The second great love of her life, Jim Lehman, passed away today, two weeks after he suffered a catastrophic gastrointestinal bleed.

Just a week ago I left Racine after spending three days with mom at Jim’s beside in the intensive care unit. I dreaded then what has come to pass; helping my mom in the grief of losing the man she loves.

This is all-too-familiar territory. We’ve been here before. Ray William Holtz, my dad, died on December 8, 1990. 

I close my eyes and remember that night as if stepping back in time. Every sight, sound and smell of those long hours remain etched in my memory. 

My sister, Rachael, and I were home when it happened.  She upstairs with dad, then bouncing down the stairs laughing at something they shared; me downstairs getting ready to meet friends to celebrate a birthday. Twin Peaks was on the television, and I remember distinctly watching the moment where Bobby’s father, the Colonel, disappeared in a flash of light.

In that moment, Rachael tore down the stairs to tell me something was wrong with dad. I ran up the stairs thinking that CPR would be a bitch because dad’s sternum had been sawed in half for a sextuple bypass two years earlier. In the bedroom where he was sitting I knew he was gone. A final, life-ending heart attack.

I nervously called the police in the days before 911. Police cruiser, fire truck and ambulance pulled up outside the house. Mom came home from a night of Christmas shopping to the flashing lights, paramedics and the time of death pronouncement. 

I broke the news my brothers, Brian and Tim, as they came home from separate nights out with friends. Most difficult of all, I had to tell my grandparents that their only child was gone.

It’s all there…helping make the arrangements, writing the obituary, greeting friends and family at the church service, standing with my family at the graveside. All of it. Seared in my brain, captured forever in the amber of my mind.

Most searing of all, a moment only mom and I shared. Mom didn’t want to ride to the cemetery in the limousine behind the hearse. I drove  instead.

As I pulled away from the dissipating crowd at the graveside, mom looked back at dad’s final resting place. “Goodbye,” she moaned through tears, her voice gutteral and primal. Her heart shattered.

I heard echoes of that sound again today, when mom and I talked briefly after she and Jim’s children made the incredibly difficult  decision to discontinue life support. After two weeks in intensive care, things were just not progressing. Jim’s kidneys had failed. Nothing more could be done.

It is not fair to lose love twice in the same lifetime.

For her sake, though, I’m grateful mom got a second chance at love.

Jim was someone I’ve known most of my life. Mom, dad and Jim grew up on the same street, Carlisle Avenue. He was part of an extended family that includes their friends, Jon and Pat. Dear friends who have always been part of my parents’, and our, lives.

The men hunted and fished together. (I have a memory of being hotboxed in a trailer with a half dozen drunken, farting men when I went on my one and only deer hunting trip, but that’s a story for another day.) When Jim could no longer hunt, he focused on fishing. 

Mom and Jim were together for 10 years. They traveled to Arizona, Canada and, as frequently as possible, to Jim’s second home in Door County, (think the thumb of the “mitten” that is Wisconsin). They fished all over the place, and Jim just bought a new pontoon boat for fishing on Kangaroo Lake. He got out on the boat once. 

Mom’s and Jim’s relationship evolved and got more serious over time. From dating and traveling together, to mom moving into Jim’s house a few years ago. It was good to see mom so happy. She was living her best life. 

Jim was kind, generous, funny, and he loved my mom. She loved him. She was, as the obituary will read, his loving companion. They had plans that didn’t include him dying at 73. 

Now Jim is gone. 

Mom texted those words to us about 15 minutes after the medical staff discontinued life support. 

“Jim’s gone.”

She says she expected one of my brothers to respond, humorously, “Gone where?”

“Gone fishing with your dad,” she was prepared to say. 

Can you imagine?