I was under attack. Yesterday it had been daughter #1 and today it was daughter #2. They were ganging up on me and I was beginning to wilt under the pressure.
“It’s been 12 months Dad! A whole year since Gloria passed away and you promised me that you would get out and start meeting people!”
I sighed, “I know … I know I did my dear but I’ve been busy …”
“Dad! You’re retired! Retired people who stay at home are never busy! Enough with the excuses! It’s six months to Christmas, if you haven’t got a friend to bring to Christmas lunch Renata and I are going to come up there and make you meet people!”
“Yes dear, I’ll get out and meet people.”
“You had better do that Dad because you know what Renata is like when she’s on the warpath!”
Oh god, I did know what Renata was like when she was on the warpath. I would do just about anything to avoid facing a determined daughter like Renata when she was on a mission … but go out and meet people?
I wasn’t sure I could do that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to let anyone else into my life. My first wife had left me after 20 years, my second wife had died suddenly after 19 years … did I really want or need another person in my life?
I had survived the last 12 months since I had found Gloria dead on the floor when I got back from getting a haircut. The paramedics couldn’t do anything other than suggest that it must have been very sudden and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything even if I had been there.
The post-mortem showed that it had been a pulmonary embolism and the paramedics had been right, it would have been all over in less than 60 seconds, but I was sure that I could have saved her if I had been there. I don’t know what I would have done but I just knew that I could have made a difference.
Instead, my life had ended with Gloria’s and I had withdrawn into my shell. I didn’t have much of a social life of my own before, Gloria was the bubbly outgoing person who dragged me along to parties and dinners.
I had been happy to go because I could stand back and admire the way my beautiful wife brought happiness and laughter to others but, once she was gone, I was gone too.
Oh, I didn’t fade away; I ate, I exercised, I still bought and sold shares, but I lived alone in a grey world that I didn’t want to escape from. I was content to wait out my allotted time and go when my body told me that it was time give up totally, but my two adult daughters had other ideas.
They fired the opening salvo of Operation Get Dad a Life, about nine months after Gloria passed. It almost went unnoticed by me but at ten months the second salvo arrived and I knew that both of them were on a mission.
The rate of fire increased at 11 months and the all-out assault had begun the day before with Renata’s call and I knew that if I didn’t hoist the white flag and do what they demanded then it would become an unrelenting barrage of phone calls, Facebook posts and private messages.
So, after ending the call from my second daughter, I knew I had to do something, but I really didn’t want to. I was comfortable in my lonely misery and, yes, I knew how unhappy I was, but I had always been shy and had never made friends easily.
Finding a wife had been even harder for me. My first wife had found me when we were just in our early 20’s because she marched into the hospital ward where I was recovering from knee surgery and made it plain that we were about to become an item.
And we were an item for 20 years until she decided that there was someone better and she went after him with the same determination that she used on me.
I found my second wife when the team I was leading smashed down her front door and charged in expecting to find a dangerous criminal. Instead, we found that he had moved out three days before and Gloria had moved in and she was not someone who was intimidated by armed police.
Fortunately, the neighbours didn’t see a squad of heavily armed police get chased out of the house by a woman wielding a broom. But, if they were looking, they might have seen a rather shy man in jeans and a t-shirt arrive that afternoon and repair her smashed front door.
What they wouldn’t have seen was that shy man stammer through four attempts to ask Gloria out for dinner, or her soft smile when she accepted.
Now I was retired, the PTSD that grew with every encounter had taken its toll and I had taken early retirement, which meant that I didn’t have a uniform to make me feel bulletproof. Now, the real me had to face and interact with people and I wasn’t very good at doing that at all, but the real me could hide behind Gloria … until she wasn’t there anymore.
So there I was, facing an ultimatum from my daughters, find someone or they would do the job for me. Of course, I did what any man in my position would do, I tried not to think about it in the hope that my problem would just go away.
Chapter 2
Not long after taking early retirement Gloria and I moved north to live the dream in a tourist town on the Queensland coast and it was a move we never regretted. Whalers Bay was nothing like the Gold Coast with wall to wall resorts and tourist attractions, it was more suited to people who just wanted to kick back and take some time out, and that suited the locals too.
For us it was like living in Paradise and Gloria and I quickly established a daily routine of coffee by the beach at 5.30am followed by a drive along the beachfront … about 17km of it … and then home for breakfast and whatever else we were planning to do that day.
We would have walked, or maybe even run along the beachfront, as lots of the locals did as part of their exercise regime, but Gloria had injured her knee years before and even walking could be very painful for her, so we drove.
I guess that we became a familiar sight for many of those who walked or ran and there were a number of regulars who exchanged waves and smiles with us as we drove by. I had always been a bit of a fitness fanatic but I wouldn’t walk or run without Gloria so I saved my exercise for when we were at home.
I had converted part of our garage into a small home gym that could cater for my needs and provide some light exercise for Gloria as well and we would work out in our home gym every day.
When Gloria passed I didn’t even think of running or walking with the other locals. I had a pattern for every day and I stuck to it, even down to going for a drive after coffee every morning.
That’s why, at 6am, three days after the ultimatum from my daughters, I was driving along a section of the beachfront that ran through a residential area. That meant that there was the water, the beach or rocks, a running and bicycle track, the road and then houses.
There was no one on the beach that morning, two people were running separately but in the same direction along the bike track, the only vehicle on the road was mine heading in the opposite direction to the runners, and there was no sign of life coming from any of the houses.
I didn’t recognise the first runner and they paid no attention to me but, when I got closer to the second runner, I realised that it was a woman that Gloria and I had waved to for several years. She waved and I was about to return the wave when I saw her trip and fall heavily.