Chris was a man who loved his family, and needed us desperately. He came from a horrible childhood, including homelessness, alcoholism, and every abuse known to children. Judge that if you want, dismiss him if you want. You can slap label after label on him and on our relationship, but you will not diminish what we had. I was his rock, his reason for living, and he, and later his daughter, were the joys of my life. And when we were together, he was NOT suicidal! He had his bad days, but I was there for him, and he knew it. We would exchange thirty e-mails a day, if that’s what it took. I am a fast typist, and he was very slow, so I could do that without feeling my work was suffering.
He loved to swim. So does his daughter. I used to tease him that since she was half dolphin, he must be all dolphin, because there wasn’t any dolphin in my side of the family. He would dive off the edge of the pool the way a dolphin dives on the downward side of a jump. He could shoot out of the water like a dolphin, too. He used to do handstands in the shallow end, and we would tickle his feet. He would come up and dunk us for trying to drown him.
We made love in the pool once. Ladies, that isn’t exactly a good idea. It’s not very comfortable. The hood of the car was much more fun.
Yes, he loved to make love. And he was very good at it.
He was learning to play guitar. He was writing me a song, but until he got it done, he tried to play Aerosmith’s “Angel” for me. Once he gave up, and played the CD over the phone, and tried to pass it off as him! Steven Tyler he was not. He could be so goofy.
He loved to play video games. The various incarnations of Metroid, StarFox, Voyager Elite Force, any flying game, racing games…he wasn’t much for fighting games.
We loved to watch movies, though it wasn’t that often our tastes coincided. He loved Freddy Krueger. I have pictures of him dressed up as Freddy for Halloween, and of Hope staring at him uncertainly. She was two, and in her Super Baby costume. Her first trick or treat!
Armageddon, The Matrix, The Fifth Element, that kind of stuff, was what we enjoyed together. I loved LOTR, I’ve read the books twenty times. He liked it pretty well, and when I found the audiobooks on CD, he listened–well, he only got through FOTR. If I get his things back, I expect I’ll find the other two. He lost them in that last move into the motel, and never had the room or the motivation to unpack and find them again.
Funny story there–we actually went to see The Fifth Element in the theater. And we were bored, and walked out. Later we watched the whole thing, and tried to remember how on Earth we could have decided to do that! It’s a great movie.
The reason I say “if I get his things back” is because the motel manager wants to hold me responsible for damages. Even though the manager allowed no one to inspect the room, and he gouged Chris by forty dollars for the second week. He is holding my husband’s things against whatever he thinks he can wring from me. Yes, people, he is probably classified as a member of our species. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?
But I have his guitar. It helps that the friends who took me over there, one was a former police officer, and the other currently an officer. The manager wasn’t there, and the maid let them in before she understood what he wanted. The guitar was the only thing they grabbed, but it was the most important thing anyway.
I took him to buy that guitar about two months ago. I had worried that he needed something to start to fill the hole inside he’d been trying to drink away. So I asked him if he still wanted to learn to play, and he was thrilled. We went to look at guitars that day, and I fiddled the finances enough to buy the one he wanted. I’m told the room was a huge mess (just a mess, in the quick glances my friends had, they didn’t see DAMAGE) but in the corner, safe and cared for and shiny and away from the mess, was his guitar.
Chris loved shrimp. On our wedding night we went to Red Lobster. I wish now I’d afforded it more often. But I won’t go there. I made him as happy as anyone could have, and you can’t live your life like there’s no tomorrow, or tomorrow you might be homeless. I loved him, and that was all he really wanted anyway.
He loved pizza. And nachos. Typical guy, huh? He could cook eggs, and throw other stuff in and call it an omelette. It looked horrible, but tasted pretty damn good.
He used to make us breakfast. Before they kicked him out, he was finally getting into the Stay At Home Dad thing. He would wake me every morning with a cup of coffee, and make breakfast while I got ready. Then he would go wake Hope, which always involved a lot of snuggling and usually some tickling, and get her ready. And he would see us off, and he would sit down and e-mail me some loving words to find in my Inbox when I got to work.
I know I make it sound idyllic, and it was not. No life on this earth is. But it was my life, and I loved it, and him. And now I will be without him until my life on this earth ends. And that hurts more than I can ever say.