Travels, life screech to a tragic halt; a new widow goes on
Alison Miller and Charles "Chuck" Dearing in Papago Park, Ariz., in December, on their way to California, where he died of a recurrence of a rare cancer four months later.
Alison Miller and her husband, Charles "Chuck" Dearing, sold their Westampton, Burlington County, house, and set off on their grand adventure in 2009. No address. No ties to place. Just a Ford Escape and two suitcases. The Inquirer published a May 2012 Home & Design article about the couple's adventures after one of their visits back to South Jersey, where Chuck had a reassuring follow-up visit with an oncologist about a rare cancer that had temporarily interrupted their travels. The all-clear - Miller called it a "fantastic gift" - allowed them to keep roaming.
But things changed this spring.
Here is the rest of their story.
One day in June, Alison Miller asked her best friend and daughter to bear witness to something she was about to do.
Eventually, that chin-length blond hair was sliced to the scalp.
"It was cut, sob, cut, sob, on and on . . . ," Miller, 55, remembers of that horrible day when she realized that the new status - widow - was hers to claim.
"I'd never felt so desperate, and I had to do something visible to mark the pain and the transition, something to make it real."
Despite being a bereavement counselor; despite founding Tapestries of Hope, which comforts women who have lost their mothers or mother figures; despite having lost her own mother and brother within a space of six months in 1996, she was inconsolable.
This grief was "grief of a different order, grief that paralyzed me, made me fall down on the floor in a fetal position," Miller says.
And it was a grief that followed a life lived, really, as if it were happily ever after.
All looked rosy in fall 2012, when Miller and her husband, Charles "Chuck" Dearing, spent autumn in New England with their son, and then started driving to Arizona. But subtle changes began through that winter. Dearing, always energetic, always upbeat and active, was showing signs of general malaise.
"We both assumed that because of all the treatment he'd had for his [peripheral nerve sheath tumor], his immune system was compromised. He put himself on a very strict dietary regimen, eating gluten-free and sugar-free," Miller remembers.
But that diet, so difficult to follow on the road, didn't seem to help.
"He was doing everything we had done before, including climbing mountains, but something was happening to him that we couldn't identify."
After Arizona, the couple planned a three-month stay in Cathedral City, Calif., where they arrived in March.
In the blog Miller has kept all along the way, one that now has hundreds of followers, she reflected on their arrival: "Our condominium had 14 steps and Chuck could barely get up them, and all he could carry was a pillow and our camera."
From there, everything unraveled. Dearing was in intractable pain, and about a week after arriving, ended up in an emergency room, where the couple learned that his original cancer had returned with a vengeance.
Although the medical prognosis had been a less than 10 percent chance of recurrence, this cancer defied those statistics. Now, in a short three-week period, there was a huge tumor in his left lung, his right lung already had collapsed from a tumor that overwhelmed it, and large tumors were in his groin and up and down his legs.
The dream of a 20-year road ramble was over, and both Miller and Dearing knew the end was near.
Dearing was transferred from a hospital to a hospice, where he died two weeks later, on April 21, at age 60. He was surrounded by his family, and even loving friends, who had flown across the country to say goodbye.
It was, in many ways, Miller says, a beautiful end to a life. His hospice room was often filled with laughter, with what Miller calls "love you could feel," with emotional goodbyes.
"It was important that Chuck have a chance to get closure to various parts of his life, and he spent really wonderful, important time with our children, friends and family," Miller says.
"We loved each other madly, but Chuck still wanted me to know that he hoped I'd find happiness with another, because what we had was so good."
Dearing was cremated, in accordance with his wishes, a few days after his death.
All along, Miller has been sharing her insights, and her agony, with her blogging community, including the legions of women who have been part of her Tapestries of Hope world.
Her entries have been honest, raw, sometimes raging, even occasionally mellow, as she processes what it was like to be alone in a distant place, and to lose her husband of 24 years.
"This is what is left of my husband . . . his cremains and a stack of death certificates," Miller blogged in May.
As time went by, grief ambushed her, sometimes with no explanation. When she was compelled to cut her hair, nothing new had happened. "Just pain, pain, pain."
"There is nothing gentle about grief, at least for me. . . . Chuck's absence is so real that in some ways, I feel like I've been alone forever," she blogged in August. "I look normal, I probably sound normal. But a major quake struck, and around me lie the ruins of what my life was."
But there also was her own astonishment at what she could, and did, accomplish through the blinding shock of Dearing's death.
On her own, Miller drove more than 3,000 miles in a new Ford Escape she painted pink, from California back to Lumberton, Burlington County, where she has been staying at a friend's apartment. Just buying a car without Dearing was a rite of passage - but the red one they'd shared was too road-weary to make another trip across the country.
Initially the staff at the Arizona dealership where she made her purchase was baffled that a customer was requesting a paint job on a brand-new car. When Miller told them her story of how pink always played a big role in her life with Dearing - every room in their home was painted pink, and Miller's wardrobe was, and is, mostly pink - the dealership cut the price. The technician who created the paint color even stays in touch with Miller.
Now, the dashboard of "Pink Magic" is a gallery of sorts of photos and trinkets that matter most to Miller.
"I never cared about cars before, but this one I care about," she says. "Chuck's absence is somehow a presence in it."
Miller's plans include writing a book she will title Happily Homeless . . . Once Upon a Time.
Perhaps her greatest point of pride is that she will go on with the odyssey she began with "Handsome Husband," as she calls him in her blog. With a newly acquired small trailer attached to her Ford, Miller will hit the road again soon to points south and west.
But there will be no travel before Saturday's military-style memorial service that she has spent weeks arranging for Dearing, who retired from the Air Force as a master sergeant.
About 50 local veterans of the Patriot Guard Riders will provide a motorcycle escort for Miller to the Cedar Run Wildlife Refuge in Medford, a place the couple loved.
As she looks ahead, Miller realizes what a gift she lost.
"Chuck and I had spent the last almost four years, literally, no more than two feet from each other most days. Then, sometimes, alone at night, wherever we were, we would dance in each other's arms."
Those slow dances, she says, were a metaphor for a sweet and rich past, present, and, they had hoped, future.
"How will I live without ever dancing in Chuck's arms again?"
To follow Miller's blog, go to http://happilyhomeless2.wordpress.com. She also can be reached at happilyhomeless2@gmail.com.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/living/20131009_Travels__life_screech_to_a_tragic_halt__a_new_widow_goes_on.html#pC7ptdZTOYOKCIvz.99
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