#6

(A warning ahead of time to family: You might not want to read this one. I didn't know I was going to write what I did…but out it came. So stop reading about halfway through….)

July 12, 2011….

Six years since Charley was here with us. Sigh.

I'm not really sure how I feel about today. (Then again, I've been awake and out of bed for less than an hour.) But after getting up, making coffee, and sitting down at my computer to respond to a few friends who've contacted me yesterday and today...at the moment, I'm mostly feeling cranky, sullen, and antisocial. I've been busy busy busy for the last 4 or 5 days, which has been GREAT--lots of time away from my house, with other people to talk to, with nice weather to boot--and I have a baby-sitter coming tonight so I can get out sans Anna. I'm showing a friend of mine (Stacey, a.k.a., Snickollet) the pics I took of her and the twins on Saturday, which turned out great too (hooray! phew!), this evening around 8pm and I plan to go to dinner at my favorite restaurant before that…and I was supposed to have a playdate with a friend this afternoon (AM supposed to)…but now that I'm awake, I'm really irritable and just feel like staying home. Go figure.

Six is a weird number. It's too weirdly big, and it turns out I wish it could just permanently stay at five years. Or maybe just a generic, vague, "5+" years. I know that July 12 has generally been uneventful and anticlimactic the past two years, and I know today likely will be too…and I find myself mostly wanting to ignore it…or at least not publicize it, which is really unusual for me. The majority of my friends on Facebook also knew Charley, and most years I feel compelled to put something on Facebook…and for those who are friends with me on Facebook, notice the radio silence today. Nada.

Maybe I'll eventually post something later today…but it's weird. For the first time, I don't want to. I think some of it is because I've gotten a comment or two lately from a photographer friend (who's really just an acquaintance, aside from FB) after I post something about Charley. And I don't think they're critical comments from the guy or anything, but seeing as he didn't know Charley and only knows me through photography or what I post on FB, I think it makes me a little self-conscious about what "other" people think. Which, on the one hand, I really don't give a rat's ass what they think…but I think today is a day where I don't feel like opening that window of opportunity for those "other" people. Or maybe I'm just full of shit. I don't know.

Which probably means that, in the end, I will still post something on FB, because it does help when old friends--some who knew Charley even longer than I did--say something back. And I know all too well that very few people will say something if I don't say it first. I think I'm having a magical mindset at the moment, where, if I don't post anything and acknowledge it, then nothing happened July 12, 2005. Today is just another day. And it's true--it really is just another day, no different from any other day over the past [stopping to quickly hit my computer's calculator] 2,190 days. And actually, it's a helluva lot better than probably a good half of those days, I'd bet.

But as I made my coffee, my mind rolled back to the morning of July 12, 2005, when I was working from home for the morning. I had my self-evaluation to finish for our midyear performance reviews at work, and I spent the morning finishing it up. Anna crawled--officially, honest-to-god crawled--for the first time that morning; I emailed family and friends with the exciting update. I drove into work--a sunny, nice commute, I seem to remember--happy and excited about a new project I was starting. I'd been miserable at my job for months, but it was finally starting to turn around. I spent the afternoon happily lost in my work--so lost, in fact, that I didn't notice the time until almost 5:30, when I called Charley for our usual end-of-workday chat. The phone call was almost an hour later than usual, and he was either about to leave his work for the track at PIR, or was driving there, and he was rather dismissive and almost irritable on the phone. Why are you calling? I could almost hear in his undertone. He was already in race mode, thinking about cycling, and my late phone call interrupted it. But we chatted for a little bit, with me chattering like a deranged magpie, I think, and then we said goodbye. He went to the racetrack; I eventually left work to pick up Anna from daycare and then drove us home. A totally uneventful, normal weekday evening, aside from him not being home with us….I put Anna to bed at 8pm, and she inexplicably had an irrational, hysterical, inconsolable sobbing fit as I was getting her ready for bed, which was completely unlike her…and, as it turns out, was ironically timed exactly to when her father was declared dead fifteen miles away. It's a detail of that night that I'll never forget, that still makes my hands feel hot and tingly, that makes my chest tremble and my eyes cloud with tears as I type now, six years later. Knowing now what happened at that same moment at PIR, it's the single most weirdest thing I've ever experienced in my life.

And as I sit here in my darkened bedroom as I type--Anna ensconced with a PBS Kids cartoon on the Tivo in the living room--I can still feel those memories from six years ago. I can still remember how I felt throughout all of the day, how I felt that evening as I woke up at 9pm after falling asleep on the couch while reading the fifth Harry Potter book (because the sixth one was coming out that following Saturday, and I wanted to be caught up, of course) and realized Charley wasn't home yet and that he was very, very late. I remember how drowsy I felt, and then how the uncertain worry set in. I called his cell phone and left a message--a message that was impossibly hard to listen to the next day. No, no, everything's fine, I told myself as I tried to figure out what I should do, what I could do. What do you do? Call the police? He's only an hour late. I'm sure he's fine…just got a flat tire on the car or something. I remember pulling out my laptop, to check the local news websites and see if there was a bad traffic accident on I-5 that could account for his delay. Nothing. It was approaching 9:30, over an hour and a half since he should have been home. He always would have called to say he was on his way home. I found myself praying that he'd been in a car accident, or that the car was broken down on the side of the road, that he'd gotten a speeding ticket, crashed and broken a leg during the race…anything. I got back on my computer to search for the phone numbers for local emergency rooms, mentally calculating which ones were closest to the racetrack, along I-5, that were the major trauma centers for the area. But then my phone rang.

It was my next-door neighbor. "Is everything okay?" she asked. "I saw a police car outside your house and he was looking around your house and up into your windows," she said.

"Charley's really late getting home," I said, "but as far as I know, everything's okay," I answered, but started to tremble as I heard my own words. I went to my front door and peered out the window in it. Two police cars now sat in front of my house. My heart sunk. "I have to go," I said and hung up the phone. I don't remember having any really rational thought as I walked out my door, barefoot, and went to the edge of the sidewalk where the police officers were getting out of their cars. Maybe I can just tell them that Charley's late, ask them what I do, how I can find him, I remember saying to myself as I walked to them.

"Are you Candice Christensen?" one of them asked me as I reached them.

My stomach dropped to my knees. And in that moment, I knew. I knew something awful had happened, that whatever I'd feared for the last 45 minutes but couldn't name, had actually happened. "Yes?" I answered back, and then turned back toward my house. They followed me.

I don't remember climbing the steps to my front porch or walking into the house, but I remember frantically praying that he'd been arrested for something, was sitting in jail. The police officers sat on my couch, facing me. I backed up next to an ottoman diagonally from them. "Just tell me, please," I think I said. Or maybe I didn't.

"Your husband was killed…" one man said, and I collapsed onto the footstool, the rest of his words not registering in my ears. Something about a crash, a concrete barrier, PIR…I couldn't absorb it. The next thing I knew, my neighbor rushed into my living room, grabbed me into her arms as I sobbed and sunk to the floor. She'd heard my reaction, heard my careening cries from 75 feet away, from her house, and come running.

The next few minutes are a blur. "Is there anyone I can call?" I remember one police man asking me. I sobbed. "His parents?…His sister?" I asked, then changed my mind. No, I can't have them find out from a police officer, I thought. I called his sister, who became hysterical when I told her. Her husband called me back a few minutes later. "Can you call Dana and Judy and tell them, please?" I asked him, because I couldn't make that phone call. I couldn't call Charley's parents and tell them their son was dead. (And I'll be forever grateful, to the end of my dying days, for him making that impossible phone call.) I called my sister and choked out the news, called one of my best friends--the only person to whom I didn't have to repeat the awful truth twice, so they could believe what they'd heard.

And life has never been the same since. And I didn't really know I was going to write all that I did in this post, either. This year is the first time that the death anniversary has fallen on the same day that he died, on a Tuesday…so perhaps it's one reason why the memories of the police coming to my house, of the mundane normalcy of earlier in the day, came back to me so much as I wrote. Plus, I've never really written about that night before (I don't think). But who knows why, really?

And now I'm overdue at my friend's house, and while part of me would rather pull the covers over my head and hide for the rest of the morning, I know I'll feel better for getting out of the house and spending time with a friend. Plus, the cat keeps scratching at the door and Anna would be a little perplexed why Mommy isn't answering to anything she says/yells from the living room (I have headphones and my iPod going loud enough to cover up any other noises). Getting alone time in my own head doesn't work very well with a six-year-old and a people-loving cat at home.

So is #6 any worse than other years? Probably not, but who knows? (And it's only 2 or 3 hours into the day. Ask me again tomorrow, after it's all done.) But at the same time, the tears and occasional silent sobs as I had to briefly stop what I was writing to react, do help. The tears feel more honest than my usual shrugs when people ask how this day went.

Because six years doesn't change that I wish this day had never happened, that Charley were still here with us….

But six years does help me know that these harder days and mornings are few and far between anymore. A few times a year now, compared to virtually every day that first year or two. And it's a relief to know that, while this morning has been hard, it's nowhere near as awful as other days and years….

But it's nowhere near as good as the worst days with Charley, either. How I miss that man….

Fall 2004