Different Slants

Seeing the World from a New Angle

My Grief about Losing Joy Hit Like a Brick: April 27, 1975

Filed under: Uncategorized — Bob at 6:03 am on Thursday, April 27, 2023

First written five years ago, this memory of when I met Joyce Esther Bishop later on this day, mother to all of our children, and then when I was impacted by her death 42 years later, deserves to see light, be reread, be remembered by her countless friends and family:

by Robert M. Katzman © April 27, 2018

Never knew when it would hit, how hard it would hit, or where.

*

Didn’t think it would be in my kitchen in Wisconsin on a sunny Friday morning, on the 43rd anniversary of when I met a beautiful young love I’ll never see again.

*

It is one thing to type that.

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It is another thing to experience the totality of that slammed door all at once on the first anniversary of that endlessly shared day with her, without her.

*

Oh, she’s gone.

*

Forever.

*

And the pain of it unexpectedly just smashed into me with a suddenness that made me think I was going to break into pieces, very wet pieces. Tears poured through my fingers where I was holding my face, dripping on my greying beard, down my neck soaking my black T-shirt. And they kept flowing because there was no way to turn them off. Fifty weeks after Joy’s funeral, I’d figured whatever I was going to feel, I’d already felt.

*

Wrong.

*

After a while, still in my kitchen with yellow slanted light pouring through the windows, illuminating dozens of photos of my family at different ages, and my grandchildren’s art hanging on the walls, like my actual life was a movie set for some scripted drama, I wanted to stop the tears and sense of obliviousness.

***

So, I did what writers do.

*

I began to write about Joy.

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On Facebook.

*

I wrote an open letter to strangers everywhere about how I felt, deciding to be unguarded in my description of Joyce, us and now. I wrote for a little while, felt a little better, made some coffee, came back to look at what I wrote, changed some things, added some things, and then, taking control, or pretending to do that, posted what part of me felt was too embarrassing to say out loud in public, which is exactly what Facebook is, and what the other part of me wanted to shout about.

*

An extraordinarily easy way for any old guy to make a fool of himself, in mere seconds.

*

This was my post:

*

“I met Joyce Esther Bishop, a Lutheran girl from Dolton, Illinois, today at the Unitarian Church in Hyde Park at about 7 pm April 27, 1975. We were both 24. Years fall away like clouds floating by, like suns setting, like time eventually has no meaning because it keeps moving regardless of what happens. I married Joy 33 months later in 1978 at the same Church and added she Katzman to her other names. Then what?

*

Saying a person is the “love of my life” has no meaning for those who’ve never had one. The certainty I had one is currently ricocheting inside my heart, with sharp edges, reminding me of who she was and what we had for 42 years.

*

We married again on March 26th last year in a Jewish ceremony, and it made her happy, very happy, and she was the queen of the moment. She and I both knew that many of those people would be coming to see her again, very soon.

*

She died on Mother’s Day exactly seven weeks later. I write about this woman like this, so publicly open, and right now, as the seconds pass like leaden bullets, I see her, and I miss that girl. Better be a heaven, God, because she sure had one coming.”

*

Love, Bob

1 Comment »

Comment by David Griesemer

May 2, 2023 @ 7:30 pm

Two adjectives here most keenly display Bob’s writing gift:
Wet. As in the very wet pieces into which Bob was breaking on that Friday morning in his kitchen. Some men don’t cry. Pity those who have nothing to cry about.
Sharp. As in the sharp edges of memory, “ricocheting” inside him. Shards of beauty lost.
Note the foreshadowing in Bob’s second-to-last paragraph: At the Jewish wedding, both he and Joy knew there would be another gathering soon. And yet they lived that day.
Time keeps moving, with all it’s bricks and bullets.
Sunrise, sunset.

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