No one looks at this blog any more so I am using it as journal to prompt my writing efforts.  If you happened along, sorry for the navel gazing.

It's now been a year since Mike died. It's a strange position to be the surviving ex-wife.  No matter the caring nor the circumstances, if one divorces the deceased for even most understandable and best of reasons, she is not given the 'honor' of the title "widow"-even if she is going through widowhood. Not the title, but Mike's friends and some family members do take my feelings into account.  After Mike died, I had two knee replacement surgeries. I lost a lot of blood; I'm still fighting anemia and low white blood cell counts. My step-daughter, Trish, a nurse,  has been very attentive and concerned. She included me in a discussion of patients with the doctors in her group. She sent me two shipments of supplements since I came to Florida for the winter. I hear from her twice a week. My sister-in-law, Ann, has also stayed in touch. I feel badly my energy is so low: I know Ann would like to read the book I'm writing, but these things go at their own pace. I envy people who have only one or even no chronic diseases. My fifteen surgeries in six years, COPD, and myriad other illnesses are my challenge. Others try to understand, but they really cannot fathom the effort necessary to feel creative.
But today, I feel like giving this a try.

In spite of the divorce, still married

by Sibyl Masquelier

 I couldn’t hear myself think. The thin walls shook with each word from the booming, British baritone in the adjoining office. With the nastiest eyes I could muster, I stood in my neighbor’s open door, hands on hips, and stared at the man on the phone. He glanced at me with an inquiring look, receiver still at his ear.

            “You’re speaking to Hamburg?” I asked, my voice quivering with anger. He nodded in the affirmative.

            “In Germany?” He nodded, again.

            “ Well, hang up the phone. They can hear you.”

Within minutes, he came to apologize. We both rented space in a Boston business incubator starting our new companies. Mike Parker was already famous in the graphic arts world. At Linotype, he had overseen the development of over a thousand typefaces; one typeface in particular earned him the nickname ‘Godfather of Helvetica’, and he co-founded the first digital font foundry, Bitstream. Now, he had a big idea, and a patent, for new forms of graphic communications. We became casual friends.

            Several years later, I was starting up my new firm in Maine when I received a call.

“Bitstream bought out all my shares. I’m a rich man,” he said. “I would love to celebrate with you. Have dinner with me?”

            A woman’s face floated through my mind. “ Aren’t you still with Annie?”

            “No, she broke up with me last year.” He sounded content with that situation.

            “ I live in Portland, two hours from Boston.”

            “I have a car.”

            I was charmed by Mike’s accent, persistence, and worldliness, but reluctant to get involved with a man only a few years younger than my parents.

 He continued, “You pick the restaurant, I’ll bring the conversation and my wallet. Please.”

That first date with Mike was like the movie ‘My Dinner with Andre’.

“ You’re a feminist, Sibyl. Do you know about the women of ancient Minoa? ..The Dukakis campaign was a fiasco. What besides the stupid tank picture and Willy Horton release, went wrong? …I heard about my friend at Monotype, John Dreyfuss, getting a divorce. I asked his wife when she knew it was over: ‘When I started throwing chairs’ Tell me your favorite typeface and I’ll tell you all the history and gossip about it.” 

             At the end of the date, he kissed me goodnight and said, “Adieu, sweet Sibyl. I’m going to marry you.”

I thought he was nuts. At my birthday party the following week, he came without a gift. “Let me take you shopping tomorrow so you can choose.” At Abacus, a tony arts and crafts shop in Portland's Old Port, I had to restrain myself from admiring merchandise. If I said “Lovely,” he yelled out “We’ll take it.”

            He never stopped talking.  “Oh my God,” startling me as he bellowed driving down Newbury Street, “when we were working on Snell Roundhand, Matthew Carter and I never envisioned it for use on dump trucks. That, my dear, is an example of travesty.”  Often, I’d call his attention to a newspaper article I wanted to discuss, and he would dismiss me with “Gaillard”, “Times Roman”, or “Caslon”, then, would wait until I chided him. “Read the damn thing.” Then, he would smile.

He taught me about Artic Ice Cores, object oriented software, Goddess worship, and pre-Christian history. “Mayan culture sums up the ebb and flow of civilization.” On eco-tourism trips in Central America, Mike talked about the creation myths, and showed me the temple glyphs, Mayan weavings, the chaos and vibrance of the Chichicastenango market. We relaxed with family and friends at the Colrain, Massachusetts homestead he had purchased fifty years earlier with his two Deerfield Academy buddies, Jack Marmaras and Gillet Griffin. We were married in Barberhill’s 1800’s era farmhouse.

            Back then, Mike’s software business idea was our focus. My consulting work kept me on the road 75% of the time, so we agreed a long distance marriage was our fate for a couple of years. I made sure I had West Coast clients so I could visit for a week each month. Mike put all his money from both Bitsteam and the sale of his program Nimbus Q behind his new company, Pages Software. I invested all my retirement savings in Pages, as well.

Four years later, our partner server platform Nextstep collapsed when Steve Jobs lost interest in its parent firm, NEXT Computers, and began his love affair with PIXAR. When Nextstep collapsed, our company collapsed, all our family’s money was lost. Mike found himself unemployed just as he turned seventy. I dealt with the sour twist of fate by burying myself in work, keeping both of us afloat financially but I was spending less time with Mike in San Diego. His ego was damaged but he put on a brave face. He was isolated and lonely. David Berlow and Roger Black, from the Linotype years, hired him as a consultant for The Font Bureau. Mike was grateful, but something in him had shifted.  He could write extensive histories of any typography from any time, but he started forgetting nouns, forgetting the names of people whose pictures wallpapered his office, not answering his phone. And then, crying every time he did get on the phone with me. I suspected dementia.

            I flew to the West Coast to move Mike to Maine. In his office, I knocked a stack of papers off his desk - a mix of legal documents, letters, and a diary. The legal papers said Mike was both executor and beneficiary of the will of a woman named Rosemary, whom I’d never heard of. Her death certificate was there, too. The diary described the life she had with my husband for the last five years. My body went numb.

Mike confirmed the affair and several others.  I was reeling. In between screaming and fighting, I wrote an essay called “Betrayed” and shared it with 500 of our closest friends. For the next year, we worked with a marriage counselor, went on dates and trips, cooked together, visited family, made love, but, in the end, a hot coal was stuck in my throat that I could neither swallow nor cough up. Mike moved out of my house and into a Portland Old Port apartment. We divorced in November, 2004. The day after, Mike came to my Cape Elizabeth home and proposed a second marriage. I shut the door.

Within three months of the divorce, Mike's software, Pages, was unveiled in the iWorks program of Apple. The product name was unchanged, but Mike got no credit. Our patent was still valid so Mike asked me to help him in a patent infringement suit. No lawyer we talked to would take our case on contingency, so I took out a second mortgage on my house to keep our lawyer paid. Divorce notwithstanding, I never lost faith in Mike’s vision. The product was a money maker, just not for the inventor. The stress of this lawsuit sped up Mike’s memory loss. We had to rely on my journal entries for the lawsuit chronology instead of Mike’s recollections. When Apple offered a small settlement to “just go away,” I did not have the stomach to pursue the case further. I was afraid. We had already sost so much; I couldn't bear losing my house, as well. Being the little guy going up against what would soon be the largest company in the world was more than I could manage. I now wish I had had more faith.

 Being on the same side of the legal fight quelled my fury with Mike, but, when it was over,  we went our separate ways. There was no marital reconciliation.

A year later, I ran into Mike at an Old Port Festival. He did not recognize me and was very confused. I invited him to have lunch with me at a waterfront restaurant and together, we called his son, Harry, in Boston. Harry drove up and we got Mike safely back to his apartment. The next day, Mike felt better. But a week later, I received an email from local author, Michael Erard, who found Mike wandering lost on the Eastern Promenade of Portland. With this 'stranger's' concern, the rest of Mike's family began to come out of denial about his mental state.  Harry and I began the arduous process of convincing Mike he needed help, had to stop driving, and must move to assisted living.

At the assisted living facility, Mike volunteered to be a “senior teacher” to children who visited from the local schools. The children loved his stories, which, like Mike’s memory, were now stuck in his oddly idyllic childhood in England during the time leading up to World War II, the horrors of the Battle of Britain, rationing, and Spitfire/Messerschmitt aerial fights. The kids’ nickname for him was ‘Mikey-Spikey’.

 Every time I visited him at his assisted living apartment, Mike greeted me with ” Love of my Life, Tell me stories about my life.”  And, I did, over and over. I waited to see when he would recognize the story, and chime in, or finish it. When it was time for me to leave, he kissed my forehead and said, “Everybody ought to have a Sibyl.”

Early in 2014, Mike had a massive stroke and was pronounced brain dead.  I was vacationing in Florida and immediately flew back to Portland to be with him and the family. We knew it wouldn’t be long. He’d signed a directive to not resuscitate, feed, nor hydrate.

 Alone with him in the hospital room, I re-told him the story of our thirty years together. I don’t know if he heard me, but I needed him to know I was there. I needed to tell our story to myself; I’m the one left with the memories.

“I wouldn’t have left you for anything, except those women.” I said, punching his non-responsive arm. “Why did you do that to us?”

Later that night, my stepdaughter, Trish and I were with him when he died.

Three weeks later, Trish sent me a copy of Mike’s Death Certificate.

                             “There was a glitch, Sib. Dad’s marital status was listed as ‘married’ and

                               you were named as his wife. Do you want to have it corrected?”

            Posthumously remarried. "You rascal."

            

            I didn't change the marital status on the Death Certificate.  It was Mike's last gift to me.