Dinner with Donna

Laura told me that the woman who had been caring for Bill, Donna, wanted to go to dinner with us and wanted to meet me. I was almost ill. I think I had been dehydrated during the night on Friday and felt flu-ish Saturday. I decided to try to flush myself with water. The plan was working, but slowly. I was working slowly on packing and cleaning out Bill's things. I was sluggish, not myself. Meeting a woman who had basically replaced me and who had probably heard horrible stories about me was not what the doctor ordered, I was sure of it. There was no way I could imagine getting out of that dinner. If I had said I was feeling ill, the kids would have thought I was having psychosomatic pain because of the situation. Donna might have thought I didn't want to meet her. I didn't want to cancel the dinner because I wanted to get past this mental image of a confrontation with a good person who was convinced I was an evil wife who divorced her husband because he had cancer. I went to dinner. We arrived at the restaurant and a woman came out the door and wrapped her arms around Laura. She was obviously open and loving. That didn't mean she was going to like me. She was very friendly as we were introduced. We shook hands. We sat down. I was across from her. I was fairly quiet for the first half hour. I had a terrible time deciding what would be the safest and tastiest thing for me to eat. As the meal moved along, I engaged more in conversation. Donna gave the latest news on the circle of friends Bill had made through his cancer connections. There was to be a memorial the next day for a close friend who had died on July 9. It had had to be postponed for two weeks, and during that time Bill had passed. Bill was such good friends with the couple, the surviving spouse had decided to include him in the memorial. Donna spoke of how upset the circle of friends had been at learning of his passing. What was beginning to emerge was a picture of my ex-husband as a 'nice and well-liked' guy. Donna thought the world of him, said they had had a 'heart connection'. They spent all kinds of time together. She would sometimes stay at his house with him. She is 75, tall, slender, and full of energy. She said Bill was always kind and always a gentleman with manners. Were we talking about the same person? After a while she took my hand. "How are you feeling? This was probably upsetting to you." I spoke honestly about my shock and sadness. I told her Bill had been the love of my life and, that despite the horrible events during our divorce, I was remembering a lot of good times now, a lot of adventures, travel, and fun. Then she said, "You can ask me anything." Ok, I thought. "Wha....what did he tell you about me?" I was suddenly a little choked up. What had he told her about his wife and why he was suddenly single with pancreatic cancer? I wanted to get to the part where he said I divorced him because he was ill. I couldn't leave that lie out there. "Well, he said he was deeply in love with you. That you were very, very bright, and that he was proud of you. He told me he had been really proud of you, and particularly when you got up and sang." All I could figure out was he was talking about when I sang in a production of Godspell. Apart from that, I don't think he enjoyed much of my singing. "He said he loved your home and he loved the work he had done when he was remodeling it, that he had taken a lot of pride in it." At that point, Kyle and Laura were getting up to leave the table. They had told me they would do that when Donna and I started talking together, that they wanted us to have some privacy. But by then it was late, the baby was cranky and Laura and Kyle both had fatigue etched deeply in their faces. Donna was sliding out of the booth and I was concerned I wouldn't get to tell her why we had divorced. As we were walking out, she said, "Bill and I were not romantically involved, you know." I said, "Thank you. I understand. But I have had a heavy burden on my heart because I had heard Bill had been telling people I divorced him because he had cancer, and that is not true. We had been married for a long time but all through the marriage he had had a gambling problem. We got divorced because one day he told me he was gambling and he wasn't going to stop and there was nothing I could do about it. I loved him. I would never have left him if he had been willing to protect me from his gambling." I think she believed me. But I didn't want to give too much more information. I added only, "He never understood how his gambling and lying about it destroyed the trust in our marriage and kept it from being rebuilt." That's when Laura came over and asked if she had known he was bipolar. She said she had and that there had been times when she could see a change in him. She had also known he occasionally went off the meds for it, and that there had been a couple of incidents where she could see the effects of his mental condition. Donna invited us to come to her house to talk which Laura sweetly declined, saying the baby was too tired and she and Kyle had a lot to do the following day. Donna gave us big hugs and said something to the effect she was so glad she had met me and that she liked me. The next day at the memorial she told Laura she had felt she had a heart connection with me.