This is what happens when a grieving husband runs out of Xanax:
I screamed at the cat tonight. For the third night in a row, she knocked down the pictures of my wife I keep on the mantel in the living room (now known as the dead room—yet I continue to inhabit it).
I went crazy. I would never hurt the cat — her name is Bella, who I got for my wife Susan when her illness became a lethal presence in our home — or any animal for that matter. But, nonetheless, tonight I yelled and screamed at her like a madman.
Since Susan’s death last Christmas, Bella is all I have, and I’m all she has. She thinks I am (and I say this as humbly as I can) the Cat God.
But when I yelled at her tonight I told her I was the Cat Devil and that I had killed the Cat God and taken over the house and I howled like a crazy Cat Devil, and Bella — who had assumed a half-hidden supine position on top of the bookcase — looked at me with detached curiosity and I told her, in my Boris Karloff voice, “You think I’m mad, don’t you?”
She just kept looking at me with the feline equivalent of ‘arched eyebrows’ as I continued my mad speech: “Well, let me tell you, I’m glad I’m mad! I’m glad I’ve gone mad, because I prefer insanity over the reality of living without Susan — the Cat Mama to you.”
Whereupon Bella jumped down from the bookcase and trotted over to my armchair and looked at me with a look that said: “I understand. I miss her too.”
Many of my posts are about the loved ones I have lost over the years. I try to write about their deaths objectively, with as little self-pity as possible, which is probably not possible. They are all gone. I am the soul survivor.
The hardest of all was the death last Christmas of my wife. She helped me through the other losses, especially the death of my son. And now she is gone.
Some people might say, Why the hell do you put all that private stuff out there? Aren’t you embarrassed? A little bit, yeah.
But here’s the other side of that. When readers from Alaska to New Zealand respond with genuine compassion and advice, that’s a good thing, certainly for me and perhaps for them.
Many people who have suffered potentially-suicidal losses join bereavement groups that meet, say, twice a month. I joined one myself and it helps, albeit slowly. But the World Wide Web is an instant help. The hopes and prayers and advice of caring people from across the planet can get to you in a matter of seconds.
As my fellow blogger in Alaska noted, the Internet can be either, or both, a diabolical instrument or an almost god-like miracle. To me it’s a miracle.
Dog the Bounty Hunter was so heartbroken after the death of his wife Beth he wanted to kill himself.
“I just hope that I don’t live very much longer without her,” said 68-year-old Duane Chapman on the season finale of “Dog’s Most Wanted” Wednesday night.
“Now she made the first step, she’s through the gate,” he said. “She paved a way for me. I want to take a goddamn pain pill so bad.”
Beth Chapman died in Juneat the age of 51 after losing her battle to throat cancer.
The dog said he doesn’t know what Beth’s reaction would be if he suddenly showed up in Heaven.
WHAT WOULD BETH SAY?
“I feel like if I did something to myself right now and passed away suicidal and I got to heaven and was like, ‘Hi honey,’ and would she go, ‘You d—k a—s, why would you do that?’ Or would she go, ‘Wow, you’re here.’ I’ll be like ‘Of course I’m here. You left me. I’m here.’ So, am I obligated to do that?”
The reality star said he hates to be left alone for too long because “That’s when I start thinking about things. I don’t realize yet psychologically that she’s gone.”
In September, Dog was hospitalized with chest pains which he said was caused by a “broken heart.”
It’s a long shot but profound grief makes one push the envelope.
First of all, let me tell you about this super hero, the Silver Surfer. Man, I can’t begin tell you what he can do (see footnote below). But just for starters, he travels throughout the Universe on a surfboard craft faster than the speed of light.
Now, as incredible as this sounds, there’s a remote chance that I can enlist the Silver Surfer to help find my wife, who, I hope beyond hope and pray beyond prayer, is somewhere out there, among the 100 billion galaxies in the Universe.
The Silver Surfer suffered his own loss of a soulmate, so he would understand my quest.
THE LONG LOST DAWN
I don’t mean to insult any reader, but in case you don’t know, the Silver Surfer is a humanoid alien with indestructible metallic skin who can travel through space on the surfboard at superluminal speed.
He used to be an astronomer, Norrin Radd, who lived on the planet Zenn-La, which was targeted for extinction by the planet devourer Galactus, a god-like figure who feeds on the energy of living planets.
GALACTUS
Radd confronted Galactus and offered to become his herald, seeking out new worlds for him to devour if Galactus would spare Zenn-La. Galactus agreed and transformed Radd into the silver-skinned, cosmic-powered super-being, imbuing him with a small portion of his Power Cosmic.* (see footnote)
Radd basically had sold his soul; he served Galactus for 100 years. But when Galactus planned to devour Earth, things changed radically for the conflicted Radd. It’s a complex story [see here] but with the help of the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer rediscovered his noble spirit and his soul.
The Silver Surfer defied Galactus and saved Earth! Galactus took his revenge by exiling him to Earth, where the Silver Surfer joined forces with the Fantastic Four and other super heroes to fight demons and destroyers throughout the Universe.
Heavy duty stuff! So here’s the deal. I have a supernatural acquaintance — I can say no more about that at this time — who has a way (again, secrecy must prevail) of contacting a certain member of the Fantastic Four, who in turn can contact the Silver Surfer.
As I said, it’s not going to be easy — in fact it’s going to be incredibly difficult — but I believe that nothing is impossible in this already impossible Universe.
*Herewith the “aesthetic evil” of the footnote: Power Cosmic is cosmic energy that allows the possessor to perform God-like feats, including creating life, resurrection, manipulating souls, memories and emotions, telepathy, telekinesis, size alteration, transmutation of matter, teleportation of objects across space, creation of force fields, inter-dimensional portals, and, the most formidable of all, mass-scale events such as re-creating dead worlds and destroying multiple solar systems simultaneously.
