Over the eleven years since my late wife died and I met and married my wife Suzanne, I’ve given much thought to that choice to date so soon after the loss of a spouse. My answer to that question comes down to a simple statement: “What else was I gonna do?”

I was fifty-five years (or so) old when Linda passed away. Up to that point in time, I’d been through so many transitions in life it is hard to relate them all. Our first family move from one state to another happened when I was five, a change that meant making all new friends, even though I can recall only one definite friend back in Seneca Falls, a kid named Jimmy Morris who taught me how to run without holding my arms close to my sides. That’s how I ran because I was so shy.

We lived in Lancaster for seven years, during which time I worked hard to gain popularity and become one of the best in sports. Then our family moved again, 750 west to Illinois, when I was twelve.

That meant making all new friends in the little town of Elburn, turning into a teenager, navigating a new middle school, and then entering high school where my running career began. I rose to the top of the cross-country team as a sophomore and was elected Class President. Then our family moved again, this time just twelve miles east to St. Charles at a school where I’d compete against my former teammates out at Kaneland.

I protested these family moves in some ways, even suggesting that I stay behind in Pennsylvania to live with my best friend David. We were close friends at the time, but I believe we’d have grown apart in high school as he became conservative, and I definitely developed a more liberal worldview. We met up once years later but having divorced his first wife and family, he seemed to want nothing to do with anything in his past life.

Demands for change

The life transitions and demands for change continued through college and young adulthood. I fell in love at first sight and thought I’d found a woman to marry in the last year of college but she eventually dumped me and married someone else, so I spent a year getting over her and made up my mind to move on. What else was I gonna do?

I dated an older woman for most of a year. She taught me quite a bit about life that I didn’t know before. After confessing to some mistake I’d made, she calmly advised me, “You know, it’s not the mistakes you make that matter. It’s all in the recovery.” Those words stuck with me through the years because fucking up is a big part of life. You might as well have a good attitude about fixing things if you can.

I look back at the chronology of dating life in my early 20s and realize that while there were periods when I was alone and feeling awful about my prospects, those passages didn’t last all that long. Despite my rampant lack of self-confidence, I found my way into the arms of a few great women along the way. At the same time, I grew as a runner and got about as good as I was ever gonna be. Eventually, I decided it was time to give up the competitive running gig by asking the most profound question I could ask of myself, which was familiar yet with a new meaning. “What else am I gonna do?”

A different lens

Life adopts a different lens once one gets married and has children. That answered my question in absolute ways. “What else was I gonna do?” Be the best father that I could.

I loved the role of Dad but the role of Breadwinner was often a tough one for me. Perhaps I didn’t care enough about money to earn enough. Not as much as I should have. Yet I worked hard and pushed for new roles. Bit by bit I crept up the corporate ladder. From sales to promotions. From promotions to marketing. At one point I even earned the title Chief Marketing Officer. Then my wife got sick again and the role ended. Talk about eclipsed destiny. But who knows?

Meanwhile, my instincts focused on doing “the work” of writing and art. Those endeavors were often profitable as I created posters that sold by the dozens and published articles in local and regional newspapers and magazines. I shopped a cartoon called Prez to newspaper distribution agencies but they deemed my strip “too narrow in scope” and not executed well enough to justify syndication. I still laugh at my own comics but realize that the typical reader prefers the simplest humor possible. With rare exceptions such as Doonesbury, it’s all about limiting the words people have to read in order to get to the punch line. I did fiddle with an alternative called EGGS in that vein that had potential, but was so disappointed at the Prez failure I never mounted another charge in the cartoon world.

The point here is that I’ve tried my damndest to compete at every scale possible. There were successes along the way. The Everyone’s A Loon of Some Sort poster I created in 1988 sold quite a few copies up north in Wisconsin. I issued a limited edition print of bison on the western slopes that enjoyed some success, but my mistake in choosing a matte finish paper over a gloss stock ruined the sexiness of the original painting.

During the late 90s, I placed an illustrated essay published on the back page of Runner’s World. That was a dream come true. The success of that article led to an inquiry from a race director in Texas who hired me to contribute originals as prizes for raffle winners. I turned two of those illustrations into a poster that earned a Top Five place in the Runner’s World Cream of the Crop Award. That felt like a touch of fame as I sold hundreds of those posters and signed them like a celebrity at the Brazosport Run for the Arts in Lake Jackson, Texas. The next year I produced watercolors of male and female Texas runners that proved just as popular. Then the race folded and my run of fame came to an end. I enjoyed it while it lasted. What else was I gonna do?

After that, I got poster fever and secured corporate sponsorship for Day Game and Night Game baseball posters for the Kane County Cougars. I painted the originals live at the games, and the project earned $10,000 in sponsorship, of which $4K was spent on printing. I could have done them much cheaper and earned more money, but the mistake I’d made with my limited edition bison print drove me to find the glossiest paper and most high-quality printer. The yin and yang of the art business is tricky.

The ADHD bounce

I bounced in and out of full-time jobs during the 90s due to my ADHD but put programs and creative campaigns together that far exceeded the company’s appreciation of my work. Perhaps I wasn’t the best at self-promotion or just didn’t want to suck up to egotistical publishers and Presidents. Thus I was disposable when it came time to position the company for sale for profit. Even my first job out of college as an admissions counselor was a risky endeavor recruiting students during a time of great transition for the institution I attended. I drove 15,000 miles across the state of Illinois recruiting kids from deeply rural towns to the deepest inner city, hitting my quota of 70 new students by the end of the year, but the Director of Admissions thought I “didn’t have me head in the game.” That hit a sour note with me, so I took a job back in Chicago with a financial firm whose CEO commissioned paintings from me. He wanted an artist on staff to handle marketing. I took the job. What else was I gonna do?

By the early 2000s, I landed a job as an editorial writer for the Daily Herald. My kids were in elementary school and I pushed to move our family from White Bread Geneva to the more ethnically diverse town of Batavia. That proved to be a good move, and we lived in that home for twenty years before Linda passed away from ovarian cancer after my son graduated from college and my daughter was finishing up her schooling too.

I kept that house a few years, but once Sue and I decided to get married, we decided to sell that place and get our own home together. My women friends told me “Not many women want to move into the home of a late wife.”

Cleaning out that house after 28 years of life together was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It was emotionally and physically exhausting. After weeks of tossing boxes of old schoolwork and sorting through stained baby clothes that no one would ever use again, I lost all signs of sentiment and went whole hog into death cleaning. It nearly killed me. My daughter was mad at me for selling. My son wondered what it all meant, but at some point that work needed to be done so I did it. What else was aI gonna do? Going through all of Linda’s childhood collections, the David Cassidy magazine collection, the school notebooks scrawled with pot leaves drawn on the cover, old photos of her ex-boyfriend in all his rabid 70s phases. That was cathartic in many ways. Over many years of marriage she’d collected more than fifty baskets, tons of garden supplies, two full Christmas closets and a kitchen stuffed with grape symbols this and thats. I surveyed the kinds and saved a few keepsakes, but the rest went somewhere in the world. Where, I’ll never know. But it’s where we all go when we vanish into time.

Death cleaning

I was aware of all these demands for change long before I had to execute them. In the weeks following Linda’s passing, I found friends who could use her clothing. We had a solemn yet loving gathering to share her jewelry with her closest friends too. All this pushed me through a transition that I never imagined when we’d met way back in 1981. She was a healthy woman who took good care of herself. Perhaps too good. Research shows that the talc found in baby powder and other products may cause ovarian cancer. But there are many possible causes. STDs. Environmental toxins. Plain old human hormone excesses. If I hadn’t chased her to the gynecologist to get her heavy menstruation cycles checked she might not have lived a year. Instead, the cancer was discovered and she lived eight years. I worked hard to keep her spirits up and her body alive. What else was I gonna do? Ovarian cancer is a known killer. The typical life expectancy is five years at best.

Back when she was diagnosed in 2005 my former track coach Trent Richards called me up to say, “You’ll be good. Your whole life was a preparation for this.” He was right. As I’ve just shown, I’d been through enough difficulties to know that you have to keep moving. What else are you gonna do?

Having courage\

What I learned from a life lived “on the run” and “on the move” is to have courage in the face of change. Perhaps that’s something my kids didn’t expect from me, to move on quickly from the loss of their mom and start a new life with another woman. Yet we all have our own brand of courage and it’s not always possible to explain our deepest experiences and motivations to others. I’ve been driven in the past by many different emotions. Anger. Fear. Determination. Vengeance. Faith. Trust. Love. Sometimes these seemingly oppositional thoughts and drives reside closer together in our minds than we might think, or care to admit.

I also learned that waiting to act doesn’t often make things better or easier. As a high school sophomore, I once stood at the outskirts of the high jump pit, staring at the bar set at 5’8″. I’d only cleared that height once before, and the bar was bent a bit when I did it, so I badly wanted a legitimate clearance of that standard. For minutes I rocked back and forth trying to work up the courage to take the jump. I’d seen other jumpers run toward the pit only to veer away and try again, only to fail. Finally, after ten minutes, an older track athlete on our team called out, “Cudworth, are you gonna take a jump or not? We’re waiting.”

Technically, the rules say you must jump within two minutes of being called. I’d wasted eight more minutes and only gotten more nervous as a result. Finally, I tipped my head back to the sky and something cleared within me. For some reason, I’d lost the fear at that moment. I tipped my head down, ran in a straight line to the pit, kicked with my right leg (I was a straddle jumper at the time) and rolled my other leg over the bar. A clearance.

Crawling out of the pit, I shook my fist a little. The older jumper got up from the ground to slap my hand. “About fucking time,” he blurted.

Yes, I admitted to myself. It was about fucking time.