Remembering Tom

     Last week Tom would have been 68 years old, and every year on his birthday, I think of how much older I am now than he will ever be. Some years have passed with my noting his birthday with grief but no tears. This year hit me harder, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just that emotions are high now with so much going on in our country that is cause for alarm, situations that would have angered and saddened Tom as they anger and sadden me. I so miss the comfort we provided one another during tough times. I miss his humor, his puns (!), his intelligence and knowledge, his kindness, his love.  The following photos are in no particular order, as jumbled as the memories that rise unbidden from a past we shared over 46 years.

(Click on--most--photos for a clearer view.)

 

1975-1976, our senior year in high school

on the C-6 Ranch with our son in Bryan, Texas (circa 1989 or 1990)

Tom and the kids at our home in Bryan, Texas, 1993

  

camping on Goat Island, Caddo Lake State Park, Texas (2008)

 

minus the beard

Belton, Texas (2006 or 2007) with the kids

Caddo Lake State Park, circa 1988

New Orleans marathon (2013)

planting onions in our Arizona garden (2016 or 2017)

Lake District, England, 2006

building a kayak in Abita Springs, LA (2013)

the shed Tom built at our home in Abita Springs, LA (The kids helped, and I later painted it)

with our kids in Cloquet, MN, where we lived from 2003-2006

gathering plants for his aquariums, near Abita Springs, Louisiana

camping in Big Bend National Park, TX (1988--quite a trip; I was pregnant with our first child)

overlook of Zion National Park, Utah (2009)

 

with our daughter at Cafe du Monde, New Orleans (2011 or 2012)

among tomato plants in our Abita Springs, LA, garden

with our daughter at the University of Georgia (2010)

with our son, 2018

In Nova Scotia with me and a distant Acadian cousin

Mardi Gras in Abita Springs, LA

4th of July, Eagar, Arizona, 2016

at a nephew's wedding (2016)

Seattle, Washington (2017)

our Arizona garden (2016)

Tom's 8th and last marathon (Petrified Forest, AZ, 2016)

We spent the fall of 2017 gathering firewood in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, wood which Tom chopped and split himself; enough of that wood was left to keep me warm the winter of 2019-2020, after Tom died. 

cooking at Christmas 2018

Christmas 2018, Eagar, AZ

Christmas 2018, Eagar, AZ

March 2019, Eagar, AZ

May 2019, our 41st wedding anniversary, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX

August 2019, on a trip back to our home in Eagar, AZ--Tom was no longer getting cancer treatment and was under hospice care in Texas

December 2019, Tom's ashes, his marathon medals, his hats and the walking sticks he crafted from sotol plants. He also crafted fine walking sticks from the trunks of a couple of our Christmas trees. He finished for me just a couple of weeks before he died a walking stick he made from a hackberry sapling.

Becoming a Crone

 

 

         I once asked my Grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat what it felt like to be old. She told me that she still felt like the 15-year-old she had been those many long years ago; the face in the mirror did not reflect the image she had of herself, the feelings that she still experienced. She lived to be 96 years old.  And as she was dying, she almost looked like that 15-year-old, tiny and curled up in the hospice bed, her hair in a ponytail. Her last words to me and one of my sisters who was also standing nearby were, "I love you, too."

        Since Tom's death 6.5 years ago (yes, I'm counting), I am more and more aware of my own aging, as the last photos of him will always be of his 61-year-old self, his beard graying, but his hair barely gray at all and having grown back after the chemo and all hope were abandoned. Among his last words to me were "you are so beautiful," as he reached up to stroke my face, just hours before he took his last halting breaths.

        I think of those words as I look in the mirror at the white hair I am refusing to color, at the face with the developing age spots and wrinkles, the sagging eye lids, the thinning skin. When Tom looked at me so lovingly those last few hours of his life, he saw much of that as my hair was already gray and I had gained weight and developed health issues during those years of sorrow and care. What did he see? Did he see, also, the fifteen-year-old girl with whom he fell in love? Was there in my face an image like a lenticular print that changes as one moves the image: Anita at 15, Anita at 25, Anita at 30, 40, 45...and back to Anita at 62?

        That's just another thing I have lost in losing Tom, a friend and lover who remembers the younger me, not just the me now, moving into old age--all that history we shared, aging together, reflected in our changing bodies.

        Today it's easier than ever to fight the outward appearances of aging. The rich can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cosmetic procedures that remove the lines from their faces, the age spots, the drooping eyelids, the "turkey" neck, that plump up the thinning lips and sagging breasts. Much less expensive procedures are available for the less well-to-do. Women in their 20s begin Botox procedures these days. According to an article in The Atlantic, "the number of Americans ages 19 and under who got injections of Botox or similar products rose 75 percent from 2019 to 2022--and then rose again in 2023."

        Despite the drawbacks of Botox (expense, temporary results--3-6 months--, potential side effects), "a person who starts baby Botox at 25 and keeps it up could still look that age a decade later. In another 10 years, they may look noticeably young for their age. Even if they stop at that point, they age on a 20-year delay." ["The Logical Extreme of Anti-aging," by Yasmin Tayag, in The Atlantic, September 25, 2024] 

    The process sounds exhausting to me. And, anyway, I'm way past 25 years old. What would I gain at my age looking slightly younger? I have been schooled too well by death and grief. No, I'm limping into old age as a crone.

        I do recognize the drawbacks of just letting natural aging take its course. The white hair is a giveaway probably sooner than the age spots on my face. But, again, trying to keep up with hair color is more than I'm willing to do--though I did a bit of that when I was younger, coloring my hair with henna. I do see sometimes in the faces of younger people the sizing up, the dismissal. To some, our graying hair and fine-lined faces suggest we are beyond all desire, all hopes and dreams, energy long spent. The aging aren't cherished in our culture, especially aging women.

        I carry my history with me, in my memories, in my body. With Tom gone, the man who traveled this distance with me from the age of 15 to 61, that will have to be enough. 

 

Goodbye to a Beloved Pet

Cassie was the last pet Tom and I shared. She was there with us when Tom was dying, sleeping by his side, licking his head those last hours of his life. The first photo is of Tom and Cassie in later summer 2014, at the animal shelter in Covington, Louisiana, where Cassie chose Tom. I so miss this cat. (That I miss Tom goes without saying. Every day... since November 2, 2019.)

 

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Still Gardening and Thinking of You

 

I am already deep into the gardening year of 2025. The two bulbs of amaryllises that were given to me over ten years ago have multiplied over and over, supplying gifts to friends and a bed of blooms here at my home in Georgia. And it's time once again to divide the ones that I have been growing in pots in my sunroom and (in season) on the screened-in deck. 

Every year as long as we gardened, Tom and I would start at least some vegetables by seed in February. Late winter was always a time to look forward to spring, to gardening together. Now I have been gardening alone for six years, and I realize that though time passes, grief doesn't. Oh, it morphs into something less visceral, less heart-searing, but it's always there, ready for a memory, a scent, a thought, to resurrect it fully. How does one get over losing a companion who had been a friend since we were fifteen years old? Today we would have celebrated our 47th wedding anniversary. Instead, today I will go into my garden and try to be thankful for the 41 years together, and the years before that of our teenage love. The heart always wants more.

This year, I didn't sprout seeds in February. Instead, I bought a few vegetable plants from a local nursery and then sowed seeds in my raised beds and front-yard flower beds when the weather warmed up enough for zinnias, sunflowers, moonflowers, scarlet runner beans, hyacinth beans, yellow squash, Armenian cucumbers, birdhouse gourds, okra, and basil. The seed potatoes I planted 3 weeks later than advised because cold weather in Montana delayed shipping have grown into such large and green plants that I fear all the energy is going into flowering plants and not the tubers. I am curious to see if I will get any potatoes from that crop.

Gardening is all about hope, and we need a lot of that these days as our country turns to cruelty, vindictiveness, and authoritarianism. Gardening also requires action, and we need that, too, to make this world a better place, to turn cruelty into kindness, vindictiveness into forgiveness, authoritarianism into egalitarianism.  

Flowering potatoes--hope the tubers are growing as well below!

 

These lovely amaryllises multiplied from one bulb that was cultivated by a friend who was a professor of horticulture in Florida.