One Year

I have written entries for a year now dealing with life as a young widow and it's impact on my life and the lives of the girls. I have cried, prayed, complained, and somehow found strength through writing about this. This entry is not going to be about me, but about a very amazing person that I found tucked away in his own little corner of the web. It would be the obituary that I would've written, although Andrew Meacham of the St. Petersburg Times did a pretty good job of that almost a year ago, even if there were a few factual inaccuracies along the way.


My late husband, Robert Alan Shaw III was born on March 23, 1970. I always joked with him that he was made during the summer of love. Do a little math and you'll know that he was in fact created in June of 1969, when his parents were fresh out of high school and engaged to be married. This pre-nuptual conception was greeted by some members of the family as not the best news in the world, given society's views on pre-marital conception. However, most of the family was thrilled to tears and his father's family welcomed his mother into their household with open arms. He was to be the first grandchild on either side of the family, an honor that I myself hold in my own family, which is a very special position indeed.


His mother had a bit of a rocky pregnancy but managed to get through it. By way of Cesarean section, Rob made his entrance into the world, but it was blatantly obvious right off the bat that something was very wrong with this baby. His color was blue and remained that way even after he took his first breath, signalling a heart defect of some kind. His poor mother didn't lay eyes on him for days because at that time it was customary for the hospital staff to shield the family from their sick babies.


Rob was diagnosed with transposition of the great vessels. His parents were told that he would most likely not make it to his first birthday, but as his mother Audrey told me "I never really paid much attention to that." They raised nurtured him along day by day and saw him through four heart surgeries, the first two being successfully performed at six months of age and at age three. Rob's surgeries were very cutting edge, ones for the books-literally. Rob and medical technology ran a neck-and-neck race with each other.


Aside from all of that, he had a really pleasant childhood. With a sister 18 months younger than him, baseball games, sledding, friends, Christmas presents, a nice family, several dogs, he had the most solid foundation any of us could ask for. He lived in a small town where family was always around the corner, had a grandmother with such a deep love for him it can make me cry just thinking about it, and parents who were devoted to just living a straight and narrow life, life was as stable as it could possibly be.


Rob's other condition kind of started to take some shape to the outside world around age 4 or 5 in the form of misbehavior, defiance, odd quirks, tenacity, and repetitiousness that challenged those around him. According to family legend, he passed certain milestones at a very young age. He was walking, talking, and potty-trained before all of his peers. In retrospect one has to wonder if the dopamine receptors in his young mind were running full speed ahead, but it really doesn't matter. Here was a child carrying a very poor prognosis from his doctors, enduring God knows what kind of pain and suffering, but at the same time hurdling through life at an unprecedented speed.

The high school years were good to him. He made many meaningful relationships that literally lasted until the day he died. Most people around him wish him well even though he was mouthy, confrontational and would always have a joke at someone else's expense. He carried this trait into his adult life and somehow people loved him for it.


After graduating high school he worked a few jobs before starting college at New Jersey City University. Most notably, he was the chef at a restaurant in Westwood called Our Daily Bread that this parent owned. He turned out to be a great cook, very meticulous. He made the best breaded chicken cutlets I have ever eaten. Throughout our relationship I mostly cooked, but whatever he made was the very best specimen of it's kind in looks and taste. You could take a picture of it for a magazine and happily eat it afterwards. This was just another good example of attention to detail.


He DJ'ed for a few years with his old buddy John Avery. I know he had a lot of fun doing this. He had a huge record collection and I'm sad to say we had to part with it before the move to FL. He kept a handful of records that meant a lot to him, so at least I have that.


Before marrying me, he had the good fortune of convincing another girl to tie the knot. Lorenza was his college sweetie. They were together for 10 years, I think 3 of them as husband and wife. She is a very petite girl, maybe 4'11" which complimented his 5'4" height. She was borne of Italian immigrants from Hoboken. They spoke very little English, which made communication difficult, but I understand that the mother-in-law made very good food. He raved about the spaghetti sauce that she made, either with bracciole or crab and other crustaceans.


He had some brothers-in-law, one he liked an awful lot. Evidently the one he like married a Russian girl and Rob was in their wedding and had to hold a crown over their heads during the ceremony for a very long period of time. The bride was Russian, I think it was some kind of ritual. He remembered sweating a lot and having to change hands many times while holding the crown.


So they married, yeah I've seen the pics, they both looked really great. He already owned the 2-family house in Lodi and they lived there for a little bit before buying the house down by the shore in Brick. For whatever reason the marriage didn't work out and Lori got the house and the dog, Phoebe.


He moved to an apartment in the shore area and they worked out their divorce. Not long after he moved into the bottom unit of the Lodi house and worked as a Webmaster at WANDL, a software company in Bound Brook, NJ. This is where he working when we met. I was a CNA (certified nurse's aide) at a very nice nursing home in Califon, NJ and taking classes at Raritan Valley to become an RN.


When I met him, I was fresh out of a catastrophic relationship and he was newly divorced. He was just a handsome picture on Yahoo personals that I surfed next to. He was from Lodi. I wondered how far that was and decided that it was in fact pretty far, but there was something about the profile that really caught my eye so I decided to say hello.

That was back when he was bleaching out his hair. He looked really good. The profile pic was of him, up against the cabinets in the Lodi kitchen. His hair, so blond, his eyes so big and blue, a white T-shirt on. He looked edgy yet approachable.

We exchanged a few emails and then both departed on vacations for a few days. He went to Atlantic City, on a fishing trip I believe, and I traveled up to Provincetown, MA for the first time with Kevin and Tamara. Tamara and I toasted "to Bobby" in our motel room over some vodka shots. I think we both had a feeling that this was a person of significance in my life.

After the return from our trips, we graduated to sending each other IMs on AIM. This was when my screen name of Smilemaster2000 was born, in the late summer of 2001. As JustRob2k1, he was able to tentatively admit to me that he was divorced and that he had a heart condition. One night, he asked me to just ask him ANYTHING and I told him I wanted to hear his voice. He faltered a bit, but gave me his number, which I scribbled with a spare piece of Sadie's crayon onto some page in a loose leaf notebook that I still have.

973-594-something-something-something-something.

We built a relationship with each other through technology. We messaged every night, emailed every day. We asked each other a million and one questions and played backgammon. It was a beautiful way to get to know someone. Even back then I thought, if this is the guy I marry and have kids with, this will be an excellent story to re-tell.


He courted, we dated, we took our time. He didn't' tell me that he loved me until July of 2002, almost a year into our relationship. This was fine with me. I don't believe in pushing this. We were vacationing in Bermuda, a cruise, or first vacation together. While frolicking on the beach, the phrase was uttered by him first, but I think he already knew that I loved him back. Still, it was a big risk. Prior to this, he had filled his mouth with many, many stones on the shore, all polished smooth by the ocean's salty waves and time. He looked at me and smiled and loads of small, oval rocks fell out of his mouth. I don't think I have seen anything quite that funny since.
Then the words were said and I knew that I had won over a heart worth fighting for.


He met Sadie a few months later, and the rest is history. We got engaged on Saturday, March 22, 2003. I remember receiving many phone calls at work from him to find out if I was definitely going to be able to get off from work early that day, since I usually worked until 7pm but was planning to leave 3 instead. There was an urgency about it. Of course we were working short-staffed, but this was for his birthday and I needed to get off early because we had a Nets game to attend!


he usual routine ensued upon arrival to the Lodi house. I suppose I took a shower, maybe even bringing Evie along with me for our weekly doggie bath. By that time, that was routine that had taken hold. Followed by that was a sort of unusual snack of fruit and cheese piled high upon a platter. There was so much of it and yet he continued to urge me to eat. He barely ate any of it.


I spied a small, squarish object underneath the grapes and instantly knew what it was. Having spied it so early into the grapes and cheese, I didn't know when to pretend that I noticed it. While popping grapes into my mouth on the floor, I saw him grow very restless, breathing harder, turning paler, and looking mildly sweaty.


To break the tension, I pretended to notice the foil covered square for the first time. Taking it from me, he got down on one knee and proposed to me in a very time-honored way. By now, he was pale and sweating, and goddamn it-yes of course I would marry him, but at that point I was more worried about his condition than anything else.


After his recovery from the tension, we studied the ring together and he spoke of how it came to be. Evidently he and Jon went into the diamond district of Manhattan and picked out just the right rock out of a collection of loose stones. The gem weighs 1.01 karats, if of decent grade, and cut beautifully. He had it placed in a very simple Tiffany setting on white gold, which was the only bit of criteria that I provided. I like the look of silver, white gold, or platinum against my skin and I like one very cool rock as opposed to clusters of rocks. Armed with this knowledge, he created a perfect ring.


Our engagement was 5 months long and I was in the trenches in nursing school. I knew that after this experience, coordinating a very respectable, traditional wedding of 95 people by night and learning how to be a nurse by day, that I could pretty much coordinate anything that came my way. Everything about that day was beautiful, from having to fire my limo driver on the spot for showing up in a piece of crap vehicle at my parents' house, to traveling across the state of New Jersey with a veil on my well-coifed head while wearing sweat shorts and a T-shirt, to the hand-crafted ceremony, to arranging my bustle, to needing bridesmaid's assistance to manage the dress while taking a pee, to throwing the best party I've ever thrown, to making our way back to Lodi for a few hours of sleep. We honey-mooned and slept it off in Cozumel.


During this time, Rob was an employee of Globalshop, Inc. He worked here from roughly the time of our engagement until the day he died. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.


After our return from the honeymoon, we hit the ground running with selling that house and buying something a little bit bigger, a little better for a family. We fixed up Lodi completely and listed with Foxton's. In a short time we had a buyer and then negotiated with his parents to buy the house he grew up in, in Wood-Ridge.


While living there we conceived Penny. We had a little scare with her, very early on, but that turned out to be nothing. During this time Rob had his yearly check-up with his cardiologist who felt the need to refer him to another colleague because something didn't sound quite right upon auscultation of his heart. It was no secret that he had a very pronounced murmur. You could hear a very unusual swish with every beat if you laid your head on his chest. This was no surprise, because the last surgery was about 15 years in the past, and these procedures and these prosthetic parts do have a shelf-life.


The docs didn't want to do anything until after the baby was born, but they didn't want to wait to long either. The only hold-up was the pregnancy, really. During the pregnancy, he had two cardiac catheterizations to map out the course of his circulatory system. His left lung was found to be basically non-functioning, pretty much robbing his body of blood that could potentially be delivering oxygen and nutrients to the rest of him. There was talk of removing the offending lung but they tried a different procedure instead during the second cath, which seemed to improve his oxygenation somewhat.


Penelope Lynn Shaw was born on January 2, 2006 by Cesarean section after a night of very hard labor. Rob was in misery due to an eye infection and had to help me use the bedpan between bouts of laying down with his eyes closed , over and over again, for many hours. Labor was being induced by Pitocin, my bladder was full constantly due to IV bags of saline running at full force, and the epidural was working fine in all parts of my abdomen except for my left groin, which was taking a beating from the contractions. According to the fetal monitor strips, Penny was not enjoying the ride either.


The decision was made very quickly to remove this baby through surgery. We both got our heads on straight about this rapid turn of events. I wouldn't let him watch them cut me up. Once she was out I told him that I was fine and to just get over to the baby and enjoy her. The operating room erupted into oohs and aahs and the baby crying and the doctor telling me that she was the biggest baby he'd ever seen!


The nurse called out that she was 10 lbs. 15.6 oz. and that she looked great. I knew that her size was the result of my beyond indulgent eating habits, but I was still proud. Even prouder still was a man who stood 5'4", always the smallest and physically weakest kid in his class, who had done his part in making the biggest baby either of us had ever laid eyes on. And she was his! And at that moment, he began loving someone more than he had EVER loved someone in his entire life.


He was a good dad. He was extremely attentive to her, careful with her, gingerly even. The way he babied those perfect chicken cutlets in the frying pan-well, he was even more of a perfectionist with her. Sure there were those times when he was caught on the bathroom floor, in mid-bathing duty, frozen in fear of the mustardy baby poop all over his socks, but that was my duty to solve that problem. But the after bottle naps in the easy chair, the getting on the floor and playing, the stroller rides, and bubble baths...those are the areas that enjoyed most and excelled in.


I know for a fact that he discovered a perfect love through her. Yes, of course he loved me and Sadie, but there was something that he found in the baby that he really couldn't have found anywhere else. I was not jealous. I truly didn't want him to love me more than, or even as much as, the way he loved the baby. I count it among the top 5 important things I've done in my life-to help create a person who showed Rob the truest, most simple meaning of what love is.


When Penny was about 4 months old Rob had his last surgery. For some reason, I never doubted that he would survive it. The surgery itself took an eternity. The first time I saw him afterwards he was unconscious, had a tracheal tube, another tube coming out of his nose draining bright red blood, was hooked up to a staggering number of meds, and was enveloped in a big white cocoon thingy to warm him back up. During an open-heart surgery they drop your core temperature pretty darn low to keep your cells' metabolic demands as low as possible while your blood is being processed by a machine to perform gas exchange and some other stuff. Your heart is frozen in it's place while they work on it, your lungs are functioning through a ventilator, your kidneys are supported by drugs, and a host of other very interesting things are taking place.

Let us fast forward through the long recovery, the stress it placed on us as a family, his frustrations over having quite a few physical limitations for the next 6 months. It was hard but he made it through. He began to enjoy more time outdoors, walking, doing yard work. Our personal mantra all throughout the worst of it was that once this was all over, we'd sell the house and move to Florida. It was his dream and I was at a point where it didn't really matter to me where we were, as long as he was happy, we'd all be happy. He had suffered so much and just wanted to live out the rest of his life somewhere that he really loved.

And that is exactly what he did. I used to feel as if he delivered me to Florida for some reason and that some kind of future laid her for me. Well, it did, but it wasn't what I was expecting. But I suppose it is true that both his life and his passing have each started a new kind of life for me. I am not ashamed to admit that I changed because of him.

People get very hung up on not wanting to "change" for another person, but how can it not happen? You meet the right person, someone you love deeply, and you probably will find yourself facing some opportunity to change something for positive reasons. Maybe it's kicking bad habits, or allowing your ambitions to grow, or being able to give of yourself on a deeper level.

When someone you love very deeply unexpectedly leaves your life, especially through death, you will face the very worst feelings imaginable. It's very ugly and raw, filled with opportunities to have overwhelming anxiety and panic attacks at the drop of a hat. I had to learn how to overcome that and it made me a much stronger person than I ever was before.

So, yeah, the right person can be a catalyst for a life change.

These days, I feel more like it was my job to deliver him to Florida. He fell asleep and passed away most likely feeling as if he made it, he really, really made it down here...finally. I am sad that he did not wake up the next day and see us down here with him. Still, he passed away feeling that he would be absolutely see us, and we could start our new lives down here.

That is actually a beautiful thing if you think about it.