CHELSEA CONABOY
cconaboy@gmail.com • (603) 770-9139
(Published Dec. 8, 2007)
Three months after Carolynne St. Pierre died, her husband, Rich, started going to a grief support group. It helped some, he said, though he didn’t feel like he belonged.
When Carolynne was alive and fighting an uncommon liver cancer with chemotherapy, she often would look at other patients in the treatment suite and notice that most were older and grayer. She would feel like the odd one out. Members of Rich’s support group were older, too, and had lived decades with their spouses. He and Carolynne had less than seven years together.
“Here I am saying the same exact thing,” Rich said. “I don’t belong here right now. . . . I’m in my mid-40s. I lost my wife.”
For the past seven years, Carolynne had guided Rich into parenthood, first with her children from a previous marriage, Melissa and Brian Thone, now 15 and 13, and then with their son, Elijah, now 5.
After Carolynne died at age 44 on Feb. 10, Rich was a single parent to three kids. Melissa was a teenager beginning to push for more independence, who had to take on more responsibility at home. Brian was a middle-schooler who resisted Rich’s authority and spent a lot of time in the principal's office. Elijah was an aggressive boy on his way to kindergarten struggling to understand that his mother was gone.
Carolynne wasn’t there to help.
An image kept returning to Rich in the first months without her: He was slogging through waist-deep mud. He was pulling a sled upon which sat his responsibilities: Melissa, Brian, Elijah. Dry ground was far from sight, and darkness was all around him.
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Preston Gannaway/Concord Monitor