It’s been a while since I’ve posted about random stuff he left behind–the things he kept or did but would have flipped out if any of us had done the same thing.
I’m preparing to paint the front door, and I see how the door handle base doesn’t match where the original door handle was. The newer one is a different shape. He’d said he would fix it but never did. Sometimes he would get mad about it and direct that anger at me.
It’s a weird reminder that he would lose his mind if I did something incomplete or inaccurate. I hung a towel rod so that one side was exactly a quarter of an inch lower. I even measured it twice. He picked on me about it for years and used it against me for other projects.
Yet, he could “half-ass” (one of his favorite sayings) the front door or anything else. Sometimes he’d just ignore it (like the door handle) or he’d find a way to make it my fault. If I called him on it, he’d tell me what a horrible person I was for pointing out his shortcomings. He never saw the hypocrisy of his own behavior.
None of that really matters now, but I find it helpful and therapeutic to vent about things. Sometimes I wish there were more happy memories to balance out the bad times, but those were few and hard to find.
I’m looking forward to cleaning up the faded and grooved wood. I’m going to paint it a super dark purple, almost black that a realtor friend of mine suggested. She painted her front door that color, and it looks really nice.
I hope it helps someone to know that being a widow doesn’t necessarily mean we miss the spouse who was a horrible human or that we’re helpless “without a man” to tell us what to do or that we aren’t capable of fixing things around the house. Every single one of us is unique in our situation. There isn’t a “typical widow”–just stereotypical, unrealistic expectations from society.
