Grief Articles

Sleep in Heavenly Peace
By Janet P. Zinzeleta

Karen entered her apartment and flipped on the light switch. Making a half turn, she pushed the button on the answering machine, took two steps and hung her coat in the closet. Routine actions, all of them, but she was grateful for every reflex motion. If it weren’t that so much of her life ran on automatic pilot, she didn’t know how she would survive.

“You haven’t returned my last three calls, Karen,” the frustrated voice of her sister, Amy, said into the silence of the living room. “Please give me a call to let me know you’re all right.”

Three calls she hadn’t returned? Karen couldn’t remember having listened to the messages. She really must call Amy; she knew how her sister worried. But everything seemed like such an effort. When she got home from work, all she wanted to do was sleep.

The next message began. “Dick and I waited for you until nine o’clock and then went ahead and ate. Maybe you forgot you were coming to dinner last night? Give me a call.” There was no accusation in her friend’s voice; only concern.

She had made plans for dinner with Jody? Karen got her date book from her purse and looked at December 21. There it was all right. “Dinner with Jody and Dick.” Instead, she had worked late at the office.

“I don’t even remember writing it down,” she said aloud. “Maybe I’m losing my mind.” Or maybe it was because, subconsciously, she knew how painful it would be. She and Ted had seen more of Jody and Dick than any of their other friends. It would have felt strange to be with them without Ted.

Also, keeping up the facade of normalcy at the office was about all that she could manage. The additional burden of trying to remember social obligations and courtesies was more than she could handle. She went into the kitchen, put on the light and the radio and opened the freezer. Suddenly, Christmas music from the radio filled the small room. Leaving the freezer door ajar, Karen hurriedly manipulated the dial to find another station, but almost every one was broadcasting something relating to the season. “What can I expect, three days before Christmas?” she chided herself as she turned off the radio.

“Not everyone in the world wants to hear happy music,” she answered her own thought. God! Was she turning into a Scrooge at the age of twenty-nine?

Going back to the freezer, she took out a tray of vegetable lasagna. The dated label was in Ted’s neat handwriting. “Won’t this be good to have on some cold, winter night?” he had said when he put it away three weeks ago.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen overwhelmed by the realization that Ted would not be coming home to share dinner with her – not then or any other night.

“It can’t be true,” she said. “It just can’t be.” She dropped the lasagna on the counter and sat at the small kitchen table. She put her head on her folded arms and gasped out huge, gulping sobs.

“Oh, Ted, I miss you,” she cried.

Just two weeks ago she had been a partner in the happiest marriage she could imagine; now she was alone and desperate.

Ted had gone out one evening to meet with a client. “Be back soon, Honey,” he had called.

After Karen finished washing the dishes and some hand laundry, she had gotten ready for bed, propped up her pillows and begun to read a new romance novel. At an especially steamy part, she’d felt warmth and desire surge through her.

“I hope Ted’s not too tired when he gets home,” she’d thought in anticipation.

The sound of the phone had startled her. “Mrs. Peterson?” an official sounding voice had inquired. An odd time for a business call, she’d thought.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Peterson, this is Mrs. Bowman at Mercy Hospital. I’m afraid there’s been an accident. We’d like you to come right down.”

Karen had sat bolt upright. “Is it Ted?”

“Edward T. Peterson, his driver’s license says,” had come the efficient reply.

“My God! Is he badly hurt?”

A pause. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Can you come right down?”

“Of course I’ll come. But can’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

“The doctor will see you when you get here. Come to the emergency room and ask for Dr. Tolson. And Mrs. Peterson, can you bring someone with you? It’s better not to drive when you’re upset.”

“I’ll be all right. I’ll be there soon.

She hadn’t been able to stop shaking as she had thrown on jeans, a flannel shirt and her pea jacket and raced to the hospital at eighty miles an hour. She didn’t take time to call anyone. All she could think about was getting to Ted as quickly as possible. “Dear God, please let him be alive,” she’d kept repeating aloud.

But it was too late. He had died instantly the doctor told her. At least he hadn’t suffered.

“All the suffering is left for me,” she had said later. What surprised her was the enormity of the anger she felt.

“How could you leave me?” she said aloud, now. Intellectually, she knew he had not left voluntarily, but emotionally she felt betrayed, abandoned. They had never had a chance to say goodbye. She kept thinking, “If I could just talk to him for five minutes, tell him I love him and hear him say that he loves me.”

This was to have been their best Christmas, only their second as husband and wife. They had planned a holiday celebration for just the two of them. They would cut down a tree and decorate it together; they would….

But now they would never do anything together again. How would she go on? How could she possibly survive this pain?

She felt an urgent need to have something of him, to find a way to get close to him. Frantically, she ran into the bedroom and took his robe from the closet. It was permeated still with his special smell, and she hugged it to her. All of his letters and cards were in a drawer in her dresser. Still clutching the robe, she got out the box and began reading his messages.

“Thanks for the best year of my life,” he had written on the card from their first anniversary. “You are my life,” was the note on her birthday card. At the bottom of the box, she saw a letter she had almost forgotten about.

For two weeks each summer, Ted had been required to fulfill his commitment in the Army Reserve. The separation had bothered both of them a great deal this past summer, and he had written her a letter she thought was sweet, but it hadn’t had the significance then that it had now.

“Dearest Karen: You have been on my mind all day in the most special way. I miss you and need to have you near. Have I told you lately how much I love you? I imagine you next to me in my bunk at night. Not so much your physical presence – I’ll have to wait for that – but your spirit. It’s as though you are really here, so much so that I think I can reach out and touch you. Can you feel me next to you also? I am looking forward to the time when we can be together again. I love you. Ted.”

Karen was shaking. She could feel him in the room as truly as when he was alive. It seemed that he had written the letter for this moment. She felt caressed and comforted.

“Oh, Ted, yes. I do feel you near. I love you too, and someday we will be together again.”

Out in the corridor of the apartment complex, carolers were singing Silent Night, and tears streamed down Karen’s cheeks as the voices sang, “Sleep in Heavenly peace.”

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