Page 27 of Someone to Remember
“Thank you for that. For getting it. For making him part of this and us and, well, all of it.”
“He’s always with us, Lex. I never forget that you had to lose him to get to me, and I promise I never will.”
We hold each other for a long time, until the guy who took the video runs out of patience waiting for us.
“You want the video or what?”
I wipe my face and laugh. “We want it. We definitely want it.”
Angela
Saturdays aredifferent now that Spencer is gone. What used to be family time is now just another survival day for me, with my eldest out of school, my middle one out of sorts and a baby getting molars who can’t be pacified no matter what I do for him.
Being stuck at home with two kids who desperately miss their dad, the “fun” parent, and a seventeen-month-old who refuses to nap is my idea of hell. And yes, I love my childrenwith my whole heart, the way I did before their dad died suddenly from an accidental fentanyl overdose.
But like everything since Spence died, I feel differently toward them—and everything—than I did before. The weight of being fully responsible for three small beings sits on my shoulders like a thousand-pound boulder that I won’t get out from under for almost twenty years, if then. That thought keeps me awake at night, even when the baby is finally sleeping and giving me an opportunity to do the same.
I’m attempting to feed Joshua when I get a text from my friend Brad Albright, who lost his wife, Mary Alice, to the same toxic fentanyl that killed Spencer. After being introduced by my sister Sam at one of the court hearings for the perpetrators, we’ve bonded over our common loss and become buddies as we adjust to single parenthood with five children between us.
My kids are driving me batshit crazy. You want to meet at the park?
I juggle my phone around feeding the baby to reply,God yes. We’ll be there. What time?
Two?
See you then.
This’ll be the third time in recent weeks that we’ve met Brad and his kids at the park. Last weekend, we took the kids for pizza afterward, which sparked a lot of questions from my intelligent, intuitive son Jack, who’s eight and still grieving his father hard.
“Is Mr. Brad your new boyfriend?”
“Are you going to marry him?”
“Will he be our new daddy?”
I answered no to each of his questions. “Mr. Brad lost his wife the same way we lost Daddy, and he’s become a friend who understands what we’re going through. That’s all it is.”
“Are you going to get married again?”
“I’m in no way ready to even think about something like that. Right now, I’m focused on you and Ella and baby Joshand working on the foundation we started to help other people who struggle with opioid addiction like Daddy did. That’s all I’m thinking about.”
“If you get a boyfriend, will you tell me?”
“When the time is right, I’d tell you, but that’s not going to happen any time soon, if ever.”
“You shouldn’t be alone forever. Daddy wouldn’t want that.”
“How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“What? When?”
“When we went fishing last summer, or I guess it was the summer before last now. He said if anything ever happened to him, he hoped that we’d be happy.”
I’ve been thinking about that for days now as I become more furious with my late husband with every day that goes by without him. That he could’ve burdened Jack with such a thing, as well as giving him reason to worry that something might happen to his father long before it actually did… It’s unbelievable and further proof that Spencer hadn’t been in his right mind for quite some time before his death.
All because of a back injury sustained during a football game with his college friends that I told him not to participate in, fearing he’d get hurt. I never could’ve imagined the chain of events that would result from that decision to revisit his misspent youth. If only he’d listened to me… He’d still be here with us and would’ve had no reason to tell Jack what he wanted for his family if he died.
