Finding My Voice. Nita Whitaker LaFontaine
support of our family and friends, but also by reading some enlightened spiritual books that helped illuminate the crooked and narrow path during the painful first year, after the crowds had gone and we were left to be a family, minus one.
After Don died, I was moving around in my new normal, trying to be present for my grieving children and myself. Later, when my eldest daughter had gone away to college and my high school-aged daughter was still with me, I found myself with time on my hands that I’d never before had in my married life and life as a mother. I needed a creative outlet. When I received an email invitation to a “Writing to Heal” workshop class in my neighborhood on a weekday night, I thought it could be that outlet.
I quickly discovered I couldn’t wait to get to class and began to write some of the stories of my life and love based on random prompts from my wonderful teacher and mentor, Jackie Parker. It was a neutral place and I could write, release, laugh, and cry. I found it cathartic and learned from the other students that we all use different voices to tell our stories.
This book is the journey of how Donnie and I discovered our voices and how that ultimately led us to Los Angeles to discover each other. Ours is a beautiful, rich, love story punctuated by life’s highs and lows. We each had pivotal moments that shaped our souls and crafted within us a deeper spirit and purpose. It is a story of black and white—peach and brown love that shone like the sun on the sea and lit us from within. Engraved on our wedding rings was our proclamation that we were One Voice united by a precious, real love and family. The bleak raw road that took us to the door of death when he ascended and the road that I have walked with my children is one that I hope can inspire and encourage others that may be on or will walk this road at some point in their journeys.
Elizabeth Lesser says, “I am fascinated by what it takes to stay awake in difficult times—how we resist, how we surrender, how we stay stuck and how we grow.”
I have grown. I have surrendered. I have found my own voice in a world without Don’s.
These are our stories, the moments that created our journey to each other, and the love that sustained us to the end and continues to sustain me today, even as I walk my path without Don.
I know he’s there.
I hear him all the time.
Long before Don started thinking about his own mortality, he wrote the eulogy for his favorite Aunt Gladys. His words are as poignant and relevant today as they were then, and are a perfect start to my story of journeying through grief to grace.
MAY 25, 1982
Don writes…
It happens more and more often as we grow older—
Gatherings like this.
The time of remembering.
Remembering somehow justifies the deep sense of loss –
The helplessness we feel in the face of the inevitability of death.
The words that are spoken at times like these are almost as ancient as the process of passing over, itself. The most eloquent among us becomes tongue-tied, trapped in shopworn clichés and phrases that—no matter how heartfelt and true— ring hollow. Expressions filled with emotion are somehow empty of meaning.
We find ourselves regretting the fact that we put off until another day, the good things—The thoughtful things—The loving things we wanted to do for the one who is no longer with us.
We want desperately to turn back the clock. To live, just one more time—the happy moments, and to replay the bad times—this time with a happy ending.
But of course, we can’t alter the patterns of the past. We can’t go back to the first square and start over. The moments that have gone, that chances that have passed—have passed, and can never be regained. And so, we are left with remembering. And ultimately, that’s good. Perhaps that’s all we are left with because that’s all that matters, in the long run. Each of us, in our turn, will become the centerpiece of a gathering such as this. The reason for ritual. The rational for remembering.
Remember all the great—and all the little insignificant things that made up their life and all the tender contact points where their life touched yours.
For me, as it is for everybody else, I suppose, it is a totally personal thing—
Secret and sacred—
To be held in the warmest and most private rooms of our hearts. It’s fitting enough that we feel the sorrow—
The sense of loss—
And ultimately, the joy for her or him,
Because they have moved on to another higher plane. She’s not gone. She’s just gone ahead.
We will meet again. God love you.
—Don LaFontaine
CHAPTER 1 - WAKE UP EVERYBODY
“Wake up everybody no more sleeping in bed.”
—Teddy Pendergrass
I was jolted out of my sleep early on the morning of August 22, 2008, by my husband’s voice calling, “Nita! Nita!”
I dashed down the hall from the guest room where I’d spent the night with fourteen-year-old Liisi, who was battling a bad stomach flu.
When I got to our room, Don was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to the door. He turned to look at me, his lips blue, eyes wide with fright. Even with the nasal cannula feeding him oxygen, it was clear Don was in trouble. I moved closer to him, heard his labored, rattling breathing, and saw that his nail beds were blue. “Honey, you’re in respiratory distress; I have to call someone.” The trained nurse in me went into action as I fought to keep back my fear. I turned the oxygen up to its maximum (five liters), held Don’s head against my body, and rubbed his back in an effort to calm him. If he panics, he might die, I thought.
“Don’t call 911. They’ll take me to that crappy-ass hospital,” he said, his normally booming voice gravelly and shaky, his whole body trembling. I helped him lie back on the pillows. His breathing slowed as he began to calm down. After I checked his blood pressure and pulse, I called his pulmonologist and got the number of a private ambulance service to take him to Cedars-Sinai where his doctors and all of his medical records were.
He looked up at me with his blue, blue eyes and quipped, “I guess I’ll be spending all day in bed.”
That’s Donnie.
***
On January 22, 2008, seven months before that horrible morning, I walked into my kitchen to find my invincible husband leaning against the counter with news that would shake the foundation of our lives. In twenty years of marriage, I had never seen Don show fear. This man would have torn apart a bear with his bare hands for me and our daughters Christine, Skye, and Liisi, then bellowed, “Come on, what else ya’ got?” But on his face that afternoon was the same look I’d seen when he learned his best friend, Steve Susskind, had been killed in a car accident: shock and disbelief.
“Where are the girls?” he asked.
“Upstairs. Why?”
Then Don said the word that had been lurking within both of us for the past two months. Through the bouts of shortness of breath; the fatigue and coughing; the questionable spot on his colon found in a routine colonoscopy; the collapsed lung that threatened his rich, booming baritone; the bronchoscopy about which the physician had said, “We don’t see any cancer,”; and the PET scans. Now, just back from a second consultation with an oncologist, Don said, “They found lung cancer.”
I went to him and held him, furious that the doctor had given my boy this bad diagnosis while he was alone. “Whatever it is, we’re gonna get through it,” I said. The nurse in me knew this was a condition without a cure, but with so many new drugs, his sheer will to fight, and our faith, I knew that we were going to try to beat the odds. This is my