Dating for Old Men

 It has been 18 months since Other Bill died. Being a widower has more downs than ups. I fought probate, increased my happy pills, pondered the idea of selling the house and moving to a condo, renting an apartment or just living in my car for a while. Lots of work trips to the courthouse and decisions that may end up being financially devastating.

A year after Other Bill’s death, I started dating. I joined gay meetup.com groups with a neighbor friend.

An introvert like myself puts himself in a bad place when he dates. He loses his ability to speak or make eye contact. All first dates are also last dates. He has sex with someone he thought was a caregiver but turned out to be a sex worker. He dates a man whose name was the same as Other Bill’s dad just for the novelty of it. He signs on to meet up with a guy at a far-away Starbuck’s 20 minutes before they closed. After after being told to leave he asks the date, a lawyer, if he would be interested in a second date, he was told, “I didn’t feel a spark, did you?” I’m sure he noticed my jaw drop. I felt like I kept up my end of the conversation, but he was a lawyer, which is too close to being a judge. At least he paid for my iced tea that I had to rush to finish.

I took a huge step and actually paid money to join a dating site. If you know me, you know that paying for anything in the double digits, even with a coupon, requires weeks of weighing the pros and cons and thinking that there must be a better way.

In my online profile, I made it mandatory that my date be a gay widower. I figured that would immediately give us something in common and spark conversation. After a couple of days of cyberchatting, my online interest agreed to meet me for breakfast at a restaurant less than a mile away from us. He lived 10 minutes from the house of Bills.

To say I shut down would be an understatement. He was so handsome, and he had the same curly gray hair and hairline as my father, which freaked me all the way out. It hurt to look at him. He was a year older than me but looked a decade younger. Beautiful, unlined skin. A bit on the chubby side, but so was Other Bill, so I put that in the plus column.

Other Bill was a devoted fan of the reality TV show Survivor. I would watch with him with moderate and distant interest, but there was one contestant they called Boston Rob that was on way too many times and given too, too much airtime. He had a thick Boston accent, dropping every R in every word that contained one. He even married a fellow contestant named Amber, whom he called Ambah. I detested him.

My date had the same accent. Being a native Floridian, you learn to hate snowbirds from Canada and the northeast. They don’t know how to drive, get in your way, and are generally a bee-in-your-bonnet nuisance.

But he lived in South Florida for 45 years so he was as close to being a native as you can get, even if he did sound like Boston Rob. And he was charming and funny, but given my inability to prevent gaps in the conversation and divert my eyes from the window to him, I figured he would be another “no spark” date.

But apparently there may not have been a spark, but maybe a slight flicker, and he agreed to a second date, which surprised me and made me happy.

There was also a third and fourth date. And then he started showing up at my house every morning with surprises. I made him homemade granola with Greek yogurt for breakfast and toasted him pita bread and made hummus for lunch. We’ve made trips to the beach and play cribbage every day.  Mercifully he makes great dinners, and I got off the high calorie shakes. We went on a cruise and never got off the boat. He is handy and helps me keep up the yard, or yad as he calls it.

Eventually I’ll give him an Other Bill-type nickname. We have a Massachusetts summer vacation planned,  and I will meet some of his ridiculously enormous 10-sibling family. And we have tickets to see Leslie Jones, a comedian we are both crazy about, in November.

Life for me is good again. It’s different loving someone you don’t live with, but it’s nice to know there is life after devastation.

Rest in Peace, Other Bill

 

The worst thing has come to pass. Other Bill’s Ocular melanoma went metastatic on New Year’s Eve of 2023.  Or at least that’s when we found out it had spread.We could have/should have been more diligent with his scans. Not that it would have mattered that much. Once that travels through your blood into your liver, and you cannot tolerate immunotherapy, it’s pretty much curtains in a year or less.

His curtains went down September 16, 2024, the worst day of my life. I’ll never forget his body being hauled out on a sheet of plastic by a very strong man. Even as I approach the anniversary of his departure I can’t get that picture out of my head.

Needless to say, 2024 was an entire suckfest. He went from walking to crutches to a walker and finally to a wheelchair. He couldn’t eat because the fluid in his liver compressed against his stomach, making him lose his appetite. I had to give away our wonderful king bed so I could fit in his hospital bed and a twin bed for me when hospice came into the picture. I had to help him sit up and pee in a urinal several times a night and keep him comfortable with strong opiates. It was a lot of work pushing him from room to room. He slept most of the time because of the drugs, so the last conversations we had were few and far between.

I know I’m not the only gay man to lose his partner after 32 blissful years together, and now I have to figure out how to be a single man again. It isn’t easy, and it gets expensive.

The first thing I bought was a pair of back scratchers. Bill would always be there to scratch and hit the right spot, but no Bill, no itch relief.

One morning I was startled out of bed at 4 am (nothing new for a newly widowed person’s new sleep habits). I thought what would I do if the battery to my car was dead? We had sold Bill’s car after he retired, and jumper cables needed another car, so they were useless. So what would I do if that happened? Remove the battery, Uber it to a car parts store, Uber back and reinstall the new battery? I was awake until I got out of bed at 6 and saw they have these rechargeable jumpers will work as good as jumper cables, provided you keep them charged. Which I know I won’t.

Two weeks later a similar situation woke me up at 2 am regarding flat tires. My car didn’t come with a jack or a spare tire. It came with a can of Fix-a-Flat, which never does, so I ordered a battery operated tire inflator. We’ll see how far these contraptions get me. I’m coming up on owning the car for 4 years, so if I were smart, I’d buy a set of new tires and a new battery and be done with it. But frankly, I’m too cheap.

If I can get 2 more years on the tires and another year on the battery, that’ll save me some money. But in another 4 years I’ll probably give in and swap out the car while there is still tread on the tires and ample juice in the battery. I may be too old by then to drive anyway.

You’d think if they have the technology that tells you when you need air in your tires, they could also tell you when you need tread on your tires. Ditto with a battery swap out time. Maybe they do on some cars, the ones I can’t afford or want.

All I’m saying is when you’re widowed and an introvert, you have to take care of yourself  without having to burden other friends (if you have them). It’s scary to go from someone you can always depend on to no one you can depend on.

Eating is another thing that doesn’t have its shit together when it comes to eating alone. Since Bill died, I am never hungry. I’ve resorted to skipping breakfast, which I always did, and I suck down a 520 calorie protein shake for lunch.

There is nothing worse than cooking for one. You always end up throwing half of it out, because it goes bad before you can finish eating the same thing 6 days in a row, which also eases your guilt when you throw out the stinky leftovers.

I just hated turning off Other Bill’s phone, and for good reasons. First, his phone number in letters was DOGG-DICK. So whenever someone would ask him for his number, he’ say, “dog dick, two g’s”). Also it was nice to have a second phone to call my phone when my phone disappeared. And it disappears a LOT. It happened today. I got home and realized my phone was not in my pants. I searched the house quickly before hopping in my car to see if I’d left my phone there. When I was half way there, my phone rang, and I found it on the phone on the floor. 

So there are a lot of new things I have to learn, and it will probably involve burner phones. In fact, let me check Amazon now for one or two of those.