The Joyful Widower

Last night, as I was chewing over what to write about today, I realized that I have some friends who knew both Melinda and Tracy, some friends who knew Tracy but not Melinda, some who knew Melinda but not Tracy, and (if this blog takes off), a growing audience of people who’ve never met any of us. Since this is a blog about real people, marriage, and widowerhood, if you don’t know our stories, then this is all abstract thought punctuated with names of strangers. Today’s post will be biographical in nature, a “getting to know you, getting to know all about you” blog entry.

Jim

I was born in East Tennessee into an army family. We moved every few years as I was growing up, living in New York and Alaska, with a few points in between. I started swimming competitively in 5th grade through 8th, then again my last two years of high school. I did a lot of skiing when we lived in Alaska. I also picked up horseback riding from the age of 13, occasionally competing in horse shows.

I discovered computers in 7th grade when a friend up the street bought an Apple II+, and have enjoyed figuring out how to make machines do what I want them to do ever since.

For college I went to school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and double-majored in computer science and math. It was during my time at UT that I discovered the Episcopal Church and the beauty of liturgical worship. I was confirmed my sophomore year and was an active member of the Episcopal student center. Toward the end of my time in college I began to feel a sense of vocation to ordained ministry; shortly after I started considering vocation, friends began asking me if I had ever thought about it, as did my priest. I began “The Process” with the diocese of East Tennessee about that time, with an eye toward graduating and working in the world for a while first.

After a couple years working as a software developer in Huntsville, Alabama, I was approved to go to seminary. I attended Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, VA for three years. Seminary was an incredible experience, one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (and this is coming from a man twice-widowed?). It was a privilege to study theology and to forge some lifelong friendships during my time at VTS.

After I graduated with my M. Div. I moved back to Knoxville and was ordained a deacon, then six months later a priest, and served in Knoxville and later Harriman. It was a joy to serve as a priest, to preach, teach, administer the sacraments, and get to know many wonderful people. Over time, however, I had a growing sense that I was not in the right place. As I prayed and struggled about it, I had a growing conviction that Eastern Orthodoxy was where I needed to be, even though I’d had little to no direct experience of Orthodoxy. I’d arrived at the decision more on the basis of process-of-elimination. I’d ruled out every other western tradition for one reason or another, until the only option left was Orthodoxy. At this point, I was not the only person in the story; it’s time to introduce the next player.

Melinda

I remember the night I met Melinda Johnson. It was January, 1988, the first day of class for Discrete Math II. I stopped by Clement Hall to meet up with a friend of mine who was also in the class. When he came to the lobby, he told me we needed to wait a few minutes for one more person to walk with us. That’s when Melinda stepped off the elevator. 35 years later and I still remember that moment! Over the course of that year our friendship grew. We dated for a while that fall, then agreed to just be friends.

Melinda graduated before I did and moved to North Carolina to work for IBM. Over the next several years we remained best of friends, talking on the phone weekly. Our paths crossed a few times during that interval. I did my hospital chaplaincy component of seminary at Duke Medical Center in Durham, just a few miles from where Melinda lived. Eventually she moved back to Knoxville. A year after that I graduated and ended up serving the church that was only a couple miles from her house.

The day after my diaconal ordination, Melinda came by my apartment with a gift of banana bread. She told me afterward that that was primarily a pretext in case she got cold feet; if she panicked she would have just shoved it at me saying “banana bread” and beating a retreat. We ended up discussing where our friendship was going. It was then that she told me she had unilaterally decided that I was hands-off while I was in seminary, that she didn’t want to distract me or derail me from the process. We realized in pretty short-order that we were going to be dating.

After years of friendship, of living in different states, of wondering if things would ever fall into place, things fell into place. It was only a couple months later that I proposed marriage, and in January 1996 we were married.

When I began to struggle with the idea of going over to Eastern Orthodoxy, Melinda encouraged me to push on. She was always pragmatic and matter-of-fact. She very matter-of-factly told me that she’d watched me struggle and pray about it, she believed I’d heard from the Lord, and that I needed to be obedient, and that she was my wife, she needed to go with me. Even though she hadn’t been through seminary with me and hadn’t studied church history and theology, she said she’d figure it out as we went, so we needed to just do it without waiting. What a blessing that turned out to be…

We left the Episcopal Church and were enrolled as catachumens a few months later. Our chrismation was on Holy Saturday (the day before Pascha, or Easter) in 1998. It took place in Columbia, SC, because we didn’t yet have a priest for our tiny mission in Knoxville. The afternoon of Pascha was our last time together. I had a week of training in Atlanta (I’d gone back to software development to earn a living while sorting out whether to pursue ordination as an Orthodox priest), so we went our separate ways, Melinda returning home to Knoxville, me going on to Atlanta. It was on Wednesday evening that I got the phone call. Melinda had been in a car wreck on her way home from work that afternoon. She was killed instantly.

Interlude–widowerhood

Melinda’s death galvanized our little recently-named mission of St. Anne’s. The day after her funeral, ten people were enrolled as catachumens. The congregation pulled together in prayer and mutual support in a miraculous fashion. Though we met in a warehouse space and had reader’s services for several months until Fr. Stephen Freeman was ordained deacon and subsequently priest, there was a joy and sense of adventure in those humble beginnings. We all of us had to step out of the comfortable and take on jobs just for the sake of getting things done. I ended up as the first choir director at church, learning how to direct an acapella choir on the fly.

For the first few years after Melinda’s death, I wanted to pursue ordination. There was an important consideration, however. An Orthodox deacon or priest may be married one time; a second marriage is an impediment to ordination. Were I to be ordained, I could never marry again; were I to marry again, I could not pursue ordination. Of course, choosing neither was also an option, but I could not choose both.

I came to the realization about five years after Melinda’s death that, regardless of how I felt about ordination, it would be better for the welfare of my soul to marry again. I had been carrying a bitterness, a hardness, that would have eaten me alive if I tried to serve as a priest. The cross of being a widower, combined with the cross of priesthood, would have been too heavy a burden. And so, about that time that I gave any hopes or thoughts of ordination back to God and allowed myself to consider remarriage, I met Tracy.

Tracy

In 2002 I changed jobs and started working for a healthcare services company in Knoxville. It was in August that I met Tracy Castleberry. She was working as a corporate trainer for the company, instructing users in how to use the enterprise software that had been developed in-house. All the new developers sat through the trainings for the various modules. She was articulate, passionate about teaching, and exuded such energy and enthusiasm as a teacher. She was always looking for the best way to answer a question, to tailor her replies to the individual asking the question and obviously pleased when the “ah-ha!” moment happened.

I next saw Tracy in December at the office Christmas luncheon. By the time she arrived there were very few seats left, one of which was right next to me. We spent the meal talking about music. I was still serving as a choir director at St. Anne’s, and also singing in the chorus with the Oak Ridge Symphony which was preparing for a Christmas program. Tracy was singing in the choir at the Knoxville church she’d started attending, as well as ringing handbells in their handbell choir.

The next couple of months our friendship grew as we traded CDs and talked about favorite artists. Tracy had lived in Paris for several years, teaching English-as-a-second-language, and had quite a collection of CDs of French artists.

In February 2003 a couple of our friends connived at sending us together to see “La Bohème.” Things began moving a bit faster at that point, and after another outing to the opera in April, we realized that we were dating.

One of the first and greatest kindnesses Tracy showed me was on Western Easter/Eastern Palm Sunday shortly after we’d started dating (the calendar was different by one week that year). That Sunday afternoon I had visited Melinda’s grave. I was on my way back to Oak Ridge for Bridegroom Matins that night, and stopped by Tracy’s apartment for an early dinner on my way. As soon as I arrived, Tracy said, “I did something today, I hope you won’t be angry,” and then she darted out of the room. If ever there were a panic-inducing line… Moments later she returned carrying a potted lily. She had bought one of the lilies in Melinda’s memory for her church’s Easter Sunday service (even though she had never met her), and then gave it to me that evening. That she could be so generous toward the man she had just started dating!

Only one other time in my life had my instincts told me “this is a woman to marry!”, and that was with Melinda. I knew in short order that Tracy was a woman I could marry and make a go of it with. Less than two months later I proposed to her on my birthday (how could she say “no” and ruin my birthday?), and we were married in October that year.

Tracy and I were blessed with two wonderful children, Nina and Jonas. We had just over 18 years together until the night it all happened.

In February 2022, not 10 minutes after I got home from the gym, Tracy suddenly collapsed while telling me about her day. She had an aneurysm in her brain that ruptured suddenly. The last interaction we had was my handing her her icon of St. Geneviève of Paris (her patron saint) while the EMTs were loading her up on the ambulance. I arranged for a friend to stay with the kids. By the time I arrived at the hospital Tracy was unconscious and had had seizures. I stayed all that night and followed the ambulance the next morning to a larger hospital that was equipped to try to deal with the aneurysm. It was no use, however; she was gone.

The next few days were a whirlwind of activity. Taking care of my kids. Planning a funeral. Dealing with the shock of being widowed a second time. Sitting through Tracy’s funeral at the same church, sitting in the same pew, as Melinda’s funeral. Just trying to make sense of it all.

So, there you have it. The dramatis personae of the blog. These are only small vignettes of our family, but I hope it gives you some insight into both of the wonderful women I was privileged to call “wife.” Grief is not an abstract term. Nor is love. All of this that I’m blogging grows out of my experience as a particular husband, married to two particular women, and raising our particular children. Grace can never be abstract. It is always about God at work, God in our midst, God himself. My hope is that this précis will help to color in my blog posts with our experiences of God’s mercy and peace, that when I write about Christ and the cross, it is not sanctimonious platitudes but very real hope and comfort in a very real life.

Until next time, God bless and keep you all!