Unlinked and Unhinged
My husband's dead. Does it matter that I'm still alive?
This can’t be right, I thought, as I pulled the brush against a weathered cedar post. Shielding my eyes from the sun, I looked back at the stretch of slats I’d just completed.
The color was wrong. No one would paint their fence a shade that could only be described as Addams Family Gray. This sludge was as murky as the dregs from a witch’s cauldron. But how was that possible? It wasn’t the color we chose. Not even close. Could it be fixed, before it seeped permanently into the dry wood? I reached for a rag to wipe off as much as I could.
I heard the back door open. My husband stepped out onto the deck. He stood for a moment, leaning on his cane.
“Looks nice,” he said.
Nice. Nice? This is the color of a little girl who cuts the heads off dolls!
On that clear October morning, I looked up, brush in hand, about to say something I would have regretted forever. I am grateful that I did not.
There’s no security camera footage from that day. If any images had been saved, they would show me looking up through the leaves of the horse chestnut, bright gold against the clear sky. My face, turned away from the camera. Away from my husband, so he wouldn’t see my tears.
This story may be the hardest thing I’ve ever written.
The topic is straightforward. It’s about an inconvenience. An operational glitch. We’ve all been there, right? Some issue with technology. A bureaucratic snafu. Annoying, but hey, that’s the world we live in. We haven’t achieved full Kafka, though it felt that way at the time. The issue was resolved, tamed into an anecdote. Right?
More than two dozen emails, endless phone calls, forever on hold with no way of opting out of insipid pop music. Hours spent in the airless hells known as online chats. What’s the big deal? I’m retired, with plenty of time on my hands.
Bafflement. Anger. Frustration. Any good therapist would use the soothing words appropriate to the situation. But outrage? Despair? Suicidal ideation? Book three more appointments. This is concerning. You have my number, right?
These are the thoughts that trouble me:
One: My husband is worth more in death than I am in life.
Two: My identity — my unique self, the person I’ve become — is losing the warmth, the patina acquired over the decades I’ve been alive. I’m vanishing into shadows, reverting from color to black and white.
Morticia. It. Thing.
Widow.
None of this registers on the cameras.
In 2021, my husband and I retired. Bored, he searched the Internet, and discovered Next Door, the neighborhood social media app. It featured gossip, but also local politics and crime reports.
Bikes were stolen; garages broken into. Burglars and porch pirates worked quickly, with impunity. Every Prius in the world had its catalytic converter excised. You could hear the fury of the victims in the roar of violated cars, on their way to the shop for expensive repairs.
Lots of our neighbors had security cameras.
Many threads were of the “Your dog pooped on my lawn at 11:22 a.m. on July 10. You did NOT clean it up. I caught you on camera!!!” variety, posted with the incriminating video. But when the site blazed with gunfire reports and a stabbing — a mile away, but still — he sent me a link, with the message:
My birthday wish is for us to be safe.
I shook my head. Smiled. Then I opened the Anaconda1 app and ordered a system of SadCamTMs2, along with an annual subscription for cloud storage and tech support. I linked the account to his phone and email. I tucked a sweater and pair of slippers into the virtual cart as well. I didn’t go overboard. Sixty-eight wasn’t a milestone. I was saving for a trip I hoped we could take when he turned seventy.
When he would have turned seventy.
He died in April, 2023, at the age of sixty-nine years and six months. Even at the hospice, he watched me on the footage. Shoveling. Walking to the garage and back, carrying bags of groceries and the laundry sack. I washed his clothes at home, carrying them to and from the hospice.
“Put salt on steps. Sand in the driveway.” I saw his texts when I got into the car.
My birthday wish is for you to be safe.
Every night, when I joined him in bed, I found him staring at his phone, watching the latest clips as intently as a film director looking at the day’s rushes. He fine-tuned sensitivity, calibrated distances, adjusted recording lengths.
“Anything interesting?”
The clips showed rabbits, squirrels, raccoons. The mail carrier. Drunken students, stumbling to the rental two doors down. And Susie Q, the free-range neighborhood feline.
“You should go on Instagram,” I said. “Urban wildlife porn. Cat videos.”
He put the phone back on its charger. “We can make our own porn.”
“Ha. You’ll be uploading it to Next Door.”
“We’ll wear masks.”
He nearly uploaded something worse.
“Come see this,” he called from his computer.
I looked over his shoulder: a clip from our upper back deck. The time stamp was from that morning.
“A coyote. What, in our yard?”
It tore off in a blur, then reappeared; the front porch camera caught it racing across the lawn as Susie Q trotted down the sidewalk and disappeared under a hedge. The coyote stood alert for a moment, then ambled off towards the river, leaving big prints in the slush.
Next time, he’d written below the footage. His finger was on the keyboard, ready to hit Send.
“Don’t.”
My tone was sharp. He looked up.
“I have to live in this neighborhood.”
He hesitated, then pulled his hand back.
I have to live. Not: We.
This was before his diagnosis. The question haunts me: Had some premonition fluttered into view long enough to leave a ghost image, a warning of what was to come?
A lightbulb burned out. Another. Three in one week. LED bulbs are supposed to last forever. He had faith: the basement cupboards contained only one stingy pack of four replacements.
“Where did you hide them?” I growled, as I ransacked and pillaged, pulling out drawers, slamming them shut.
The secrets of the dead: he was a doomsday prepper.
I found caches of canned goods: baked beans, clam chowder, water chestnuts, pineapple rings, split pea soup. He’d stashed them on wire shelves behind some winter coats.
He hoarded screwdrivers.
He’d hung an old bathroom cabinet in his workroom and arranged them like toothbrushes, by purpose and size. Phillips, flathead, hex, and ratchet; from massive to toylike, to ultra-small and specific. If you needed to tighten the bows of your eyeglasses after the apocalypse wiped out all the opticians, no worries! You can save the electrical tape for a variety of other emergencies.
Fortunately, Menards sells lightbulbs, and I have a daughter who’s skilled at replacing them.
She returned the stepladder to the garage and joined me in the kitchen.
“Thanks, hon!” I said. Looking at her face, I braced for accusations.
“Mom. Your cameras aren’t working.”
“They’re not?” Relief; she wasn’t going to chew me out over the gutters I’d left on the ground where they’d fallen from the eaves the previous winter.
“Why?”
Because when I see the pictures, I see a tired old woman, sagging as if every step is pulling her closer to the grave. Which is a truth I’d rather deal with privately, indoors, with a bottle of finished rye and no confirming images.
“Oh, you know. That was Dad’s thing.”
“How long has it been?” She wasn’t buying it.
“I’m not sure,” I lied. I’d paid for a year’s cloud renewal just before he died. The subscription expired in April; it was September. Five months. “A couple of weeks.”
“You live alone. You need them.” She softened. “Mom. I worry about you.”
I worry about me, too.
“I will.”
After she left, I went to the Anaconda site. After spending an more than an hour with a chatbot, Kyle, I was allowed to speak with a human, also named Kyle.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, after an additional twenty minutes, including an upgrade to Greg, Kyle’s supervisor. “You’re happy to take my money. But to get the account transferred to me, I have to call SadCamTM.”
“Right.”
“Even though I bought the equipment and paid for the subscription, and a renewal, through Anaconda.”
“Correct.”
Greg and both Kyles were cheerful and polite. I gave them five stars. Then I contacted their partner company, SadCamTM.
So began two months in customer service hell.
“I have an account with you, but it is in my husband’s name. He is deceased. I would like to transfer it to my name.”
How many times did I recite this statement?
That should not be the question. The real question is: I made a purchase and have the receipt to prove it. Why must I prove ownership of something I own?
The answer did not occur to me until three weeks ago, in mid-January: Because I am a widow, not a widower. Would they have asked a man to jump through these hoops?
And then, dear Reader, I had a breakdown. That is why you haven’t heard from me in some time. I’ll write more about that later. For now, I’ll continue with the story.
Anaconda and SadCamTM are separate entities. The former collects your money, the latter strips you of your sanity handles operations and support. I had to deal with both.
I took a photo of his death certificate. With a surge of sorrow, I blacked out the conditions that the coroner had cited as contributing to his death. Stage 4 lung cancer, yes. But anxiety? Depression? Gastritis?
No, he didn’t die of an upset stomach. I blacked out his parents, children, date of birth, and my maiden name. I gave them his email address and phone number, adding that they were no longer functional.
To get to the serial numbers, I had to pull each camera from its mounting, unscrew the back, take a photo of the number, and return everything to its place. Although he probably had the perfect screwdriver, I used a dinner knife.
I wrote:
Attached are the death certificate and serial numbers of the control module, the camera attached to the upper deck railing, and the camera we keep in reserve. Obviously, you would not ask me to risk injury while attempting to access units placed in hard-to-reach areas.
They absolutely would put me at risk:
We are unable to read the death certificate as the file you sent was too small. Please provide a larger copy, along with the remaining serial numbers so we can continue to onboard3 your system.
My response:
You have all numbers on file. Nothing has been moved or sold. Ownership is not in question, as records show that everything was purchased in my name. The SadCamTM account was registered to my deceased spouse only because he was the primary user. Please unlink his name from the account, so that I may regain use of my system.
What I wanted to say, but did not:
I WILL RETURN YOUR SHITTY CAMERAS TO YOU FOR A FULL REFUND IF YOU CONTINUE TO F**K WITH ME.
Their response:
Please provide the requested materials. Then we will process your request.
I’d entered the first circle of hell.
The chain of twenty-six emails started on September 11 and ended two months later, on November 11.
During this time, I spent God knows how many hours trying, via phone and computer, to get my case, as they called it, settled. One call lasted forty-four minutes. Others took longer. It was surreal, this scurry of brain cells across broken wires. Yet I could not find a way out. It was like the paralysis of nightmares.
Conversations went like this:
SC representative: You first need to unlink his Anaconda* account, before you can unlink his SadCamTM account. Do that first, then call us back.
Anaconda representative: In order to unlink his Anaconda account, you first need to log out of it. Then log in again, using two-step verification.
Me: I can’t do that. His phone number is disconnected. So is his email. I don’t know his password. And he’s deceased.
Anaconda rep: I’m sorry for your loss. Please provide a death certificate to our customer service department, and we will give you the go-ahead to delete his Anaconda account. Then you may work with the SadCamTM team to unlink his SadCamTM account from your deleted husband and link it to you.
Me: (Speechless.)
I don’t know why, or how, it ended. Did someone see the light? Realize that a lawsuit might be forthcoming? Exactly two months after this debacle began, I got an email. The account had been unlinked from my dead husband, turned over to me, and I was now allowed use my own property.
I do want to make this right, since it was a mistake at our end. I would be happy to send you a complimentary camera of your choice as a consolation. Please let me know if you would like a complimentary camera.
No. I didn’t want a camera. I wanted my dignity, my humanity, and a world in which all are treated equally.
And I wanted a complimentary car.
I settled for a camera.
His phone still sits in its charger on his nightstand. I still use it with wi-fi to access books, photos and a few apps. He liked to play solitaire.
My phone vibrates at ten: Cameras are armed. I put my book aside and begin the insomniac’s descent into hell prescribed sleep rituals. The bunnies and Susie Q can wait.
From four angles, I see a tired, slow woman walking from one broken thing to another.
The fence and railings are now coated in the color of neglect. Slats hung loose on rusted nails before they fell. I collected them, setting them upright like a stiff, oversized arrangement of decapitated flowers in the pot that held my big jagged-leaf lavender for six winters. That plant thrived in our sunroom for five of them. Last spring, it shriveled into twigs and dust. Cause of death: homeowner.
We’d agreed on something warm and transparent, to protect the surface and highlight the grain of the wood. Sitting with our morning coffee, I’d pointed at one of the glossy rectangles on the paint brochure. It was the color of a golden retriever named Brandy.
“You sure?” He paused, pen in hand. “It’s a custom color. We can’t return it.”
“That’s the one,” I said. He circled it on the page, and headed off to Menards.
The online marketplace that is strangling — well, everything.
Yes, I’m projecting.
“Onboard” is not a verb. To use it as such is a crime against the English language and is subject to harsh shaming.
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Beautifully written, as ever, Mary. I'm sorry you had to go through so many hoops to sort something so simple. The worst thing is the stealing of our time, when death makes us aware of that most precious commodity like nothing else.
Mary,
First, I want to answer your rhetorical query: Yes, it matters. It doesn't escape me that I've seen you bloom and grow on Substack since your husband departed. The seismic waves of grief that echo from such a profound loss are difficult to describe. Yet you do it, over and over. There's an unteachable quality to your writing that has captivated me and thousands of others. I'm deeply saddened to hear this company caused you such fractal frustration that it resulted in damage to your mental health. They should be ashamed but alas, they have no soul.
I take solace in knowing this heart-wrenching piece has taken shape. Kudos to you and your ability to create while in a state of disrepair. This post is mesmerizing in its stark portrayal of a widow's grief. The effort you take to humanize your loss with wit and asides is your unique gift. You are a master storyteller. I'm grateful that you're here and so honored to be your friend. Peace to you.