Bringing Richard Home

By Pat Sponer Paholsky

It is 1955 when seventeen-year-old Pat Sponer first met sixteen-year-old Richard Paholsky at a wedding. Instantly attracted, they quickly discovered they were complete opposites. He was confident, bold, and social, and she collapsed into a cocoon when someone spoke to her. As their unorthodox courtship began, Pat and Rich soon fell in love and eventually married five years later.

In a retelling of their courtship, marriage, and life together until his death in 2018, Pat shares insight into their relationship that includes entertaining tales about their travels together on Route 66 a few days after they were married, their experiences in California during the sixties, and later in Michigan as they started a family. Within her short vignettes, Pat leads others through her memories and life with Rich including the time leading up to his diagnosis, death, and her eventual journey through grief after he was gone. Throughout her story, Pat provides hope for anyone suffering a loss that healing comes with reflection, gratitude, and time.

Bringing Richard Home is a story of love, loss, and healing as a widow offers a window into her sixty-plus relationship with her husband and her journey through grief after his death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781982276461

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Copyright © 2021 Pat Sponer Paholsky.

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ISBN: 978-1-9822-7642-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-7647-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-7646-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021922224

Balboa Press rev. date:   11/11/2021

To my beloved Richard

Contents

1     The Ending

2     The Beginning

3     Year of the Funeral

4     The Fifties

5     Harbinger

6     The Sixties

7     First Day in the Hospital

8     Cross-Country Moves

9     Days 2, 3, 4

10   Moving to the Farm

11   Days 5, 6, 7

12   The Seventies and Eighties

13   Days 8, 9

14   Retirement

15   Days 10, 11

16   Our Son Dies

17   The Last Day

18   Coming to an End

19   Back Home

Epilogue

Afterword

Dear Reader,

I began writing this as an homage to my husband, about whom a friend would often say, He breathes in and she breathes out. We were one. Now half of me was gone, but I gratefully realized later, only physically.

After I finished writing, I felt this would be a great model for anyone suffering a loss. If you keep a journal, you are halfway there. If you are not the journaling type, set aside an hour or so every day in a special writing corner and reminisce about all the memories that made up your life. Then feel your heart soar with gratitude that this person was in your life and how blessed you are. These short vignettes, over a period of time, will remind you of more memories. It is truly healing to put down on paper that which will be lost when you die.

I wish you peace.

And time remembered is grief forgotten.

            —Algernon Charles Swinburne

Chapter 1

The Ending

T he day before we drove into Michigan, I carried Rich up to our hotel room. With one hand. Told him that was the first time I could do that. The funeral home had put his ashes in a black leather urn and then put that in a cloth tote. Pam and I wanted to see what his remains looked like. We took the lid off the round urn and undid the twist tie holding him together. He was a fine powdery gray, and after I picked some up, I didn’t think it would be right to wipe my fingers with tissue or towel, so I licked my