The widower sits in his checkered lawn chair, in front of him the gravestone, framed by silk flowers. On the right side there is his wife’s name, Ouida, December 16, 1946 – January 6, 2023. On the left is his, Donald, November 4, 1944. The date of death is missing.
Between their names it says: Together forever.
He wears a blue cap on his gray hair. He says he comes here every day, pretty much. Mostly in the mornings, on the way to breakfast or on the way back.
He keeps his lawn chair in his truck all the time.
It’s 9am on a Thursday at Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, in the northwest of the city. Apart from Don, there is no one here mourning. Only the gardeners in their golf carts driving between the rows and turning on the water hoses. The sprinklers sound like a metronome. It smells of freshly mown grass.
They met in 1985, he says. He was just over 40, she was just under. He had just moved back to Austin. His family said: Don, it’s time to find a wife and have kids. So, he tried. He had a few serious, long-lasting relationships, but he never wanted to marry.
And then he decided to try at a church dating event. There she was, one of a hundred or more singles, smiling.
He says he knew within the first five minutes that he wanted to marry her.
He called her after a week. She asked: Are you the one with the holes in your shoes? He had a hole in the bottom of his shoe. And she had noticed. A few days later, he looked into his mailbox and there was a box of brownies.
After two years they married. He an engineer and programmer, she a special education teacher. Ouida had a 13-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Ashley. Now she’s Don’s daughter, too. In 1989, the couple had their son Michael. They were a family now. Vacations together, camping in Texas, skiing in Canada.
Thirty-six years of marriage. Together forever. Behind the graves, the freeway roars like radio static.
One time, Don says, she saw a tiny dog alone on the side of the road, freezing. She stopped and took him into the car, and when no animal shelter would take him – she didn’t ask Don – she just showed up with the dog. “That’s how she was,” Don says.
Sparky is still alive.
Don says the decline started in 2016. Ouida began having memory problems. They went to doctors who ran a lot of tests. Lewy body dementia, something like Parkinson’s crossed with dementia. There is no cure.
She wanted to be at home, in Austin. He says he wasn’t home enough for the first 30 years. He worked a lot, he worked out a lot, and that swallowed up the day. Now he decided to be the best husband he could be for her and care for her at home. Ashley moved back to Texas from Washington State to help care for Ouida. They hired two other caregivers to help, too, one of them Ouida’s former student.
At the cemetery, he swipes through photos and videos of her on his phone. Her as a young woman. Blonde with a blowout, dark eyes, a smile that looks like it’s on the edge of saying hello. A short clip of her dancing in the pool. Her on vacation. Her on Halloween. That was not long before she died. He says: “You see how her face changes.” Prematurely aged. Her eyes look tired. For a moment, seeing the pictures, he looks tired too.
There were some good times too. “She liked to tell stories, but as she got further along in her dementia, the stories got more interesting, because they always came out different.” He laughs, short and choppy, and when he does, it feels like a pat on the back.
The disease made her forget people. She never forgot him, Don says. When he came into the room, she smiled, like she did when they met in church, up until her last days.
The last six months were in-home hospice. “They were nice enough to bring a wide bed, and put it downstairs in the room,” Don says. They watched TV together, The Crown or whatever, she didn’t understand, but she held his hand, and that was enough.
In the last days, she could no longer swallow. She had trouble breathing. He was at the gym when the daughter called and said: I think you need to come. So he did. They lay in bed together, he on one side, the daughter on the other, holding her hand.
Don says he and his wife didn’t talk much about how they wanted to be buried. She sometimes joked that she would scatter half of his ashes at Whistler Mountain because he loved skiing there so much. The other part would go to Home Depot because he liked it there so much.
In the weeks after the death, you feel grief, but you don’t have time to grieve, Don says. The days were busy with funeral stuff. Who is going to be invited? Who is going to talk in church? Don and his son went to the cemetery to choose the grave. They wanted to bury her under a tree, but there was no free space under a tree. They chose this place, Section 6, in the middle of the grass, where Don sits on his checkered lawn chair.
He wrote the obituary. “Ouida was known for her sense of humor, her selfless love for the underprivileged and her quick response to care for anyone in need,” it reads.
At her funeral service, the church was as full as he’d ever seen it. A speaker asked her students to rise. Don says 100 people stood up.
The same minister who married them also buried her.
“We knew it was coming. For a long time. It’s not like it caught us by surprise,” Don says.
Did he ever picture her funeral before she passed away?
“Not really.”
He lives just five minutes away from the cemetery. He says he didn’t even know it existed before his wife died. He did not plan to come here every day. It just happened. When it did, that was when the grief hit. “I missed her. I missed her really deeply. I still do,” Don says.
It’s been a year and a half now.
He says he doesn’t know if heaven exists. But if there is heaven, he says, then she’s there. In front of her grave, he stretches his hands upwards. He says on her last day, when Ashley and Don laid on either side of her, she would reach like that. “It’s like she was looking to where she was going next. Who knows.”
He doesn’t think about whether she’s here or not, Don says. When he sits here, on his checkered lawn chair, he sees pictures of her living. How she wears a Santa hat and decorates the house. How she dances around the room to her favorite music, Aretha Franklin, Dolly Parton.
Sometimes he would hear a song and then remember that it was one she liked a lot.
Don says: “You don’t get over grief. You just get through it. You will always feel some grief and caring. I believe grief is important. But it can also ruin your life. People can wallow in it forever. You need to take action.”
He goes biking. He goes to the gym. And at some point, he registered on eHarmony, to not be alone anymore. He has a new girlfriend now.
At the cemetery, he talks to his wife. He sees her as his guardian angel. So he asked her if she approved.
What did she say?
“Well, she did not say no,” he says. “So I assume she means yes.” Then he laughs again, that pat-on-the-back laugh. Before he leaves, before he folds his checkered lawn chair, he always speaks the same words to his wife.
“I’ll be here to lay down beside you.”
“But,” Don says. “I am not in a big hurry.” He drives off in his green truck.
This article appears in October 11 • 2024.