Stephen Colbert got me through the loss of my husband....

I wrote this eight years ago, but tonight feels like a good moment to share it again. It’s too late in the day to pour yourself a cup of coffee, but if I weren’t taking a break from wine this week I’d definitely be pouring myself a glass or two tonight.

MY MORNINGS WITH COLBERT

--with respect and admiration for Stephen Colbert, and in loving memory, forever, of my husband Jim Barringer, June 12, 1952-June 16, 2016

I met the man with whom I spent some of the happiest days of my life—also the hardest— in the fall of 2011. I married him three years later. I lay beside him when he died not quite two years after that.

I live alone now. But there is a man with whom I start my mornings , though he comes to me only on the screen of my laptop. When I think about how it is that I’ve navigated the months since 2016, and the people who helped me get through the hardest time I ever knew, one name that comes to mind is that of Stephen Colbert.

Colbert bears a striking resemblance my husband Jim. Same build, same hairline, the same lithe grace generally the province of a not particularly tall man. Though never close to wealthy, Jim always dressed beautifully, in a Colbert kind of way. He was trim long before cancer took fifty pounds off his body. Like Colbert, he had all his hair. This wasn’t why I loved him, but he was very handsome. Also, like Colbert, a churchgoer.

Colbert’s physical resemblance to Jim is only a small part of why it’s become my weekday morning ritual to sit down with my coffee at six am , with the screen of my laptop on You Tube, to hear the monologue he delivered the night before. More important than the hairline and the suit or the way he runs onto the stage every night, the same way Jim ran: Colbert says the things Jim would have been saying, if he had lived to see these dark and scary days with me. For some period of time between five and eleven minutes, it is a little bit as though I get to have my coffee with Jim.

We met online, in our fifties—both of us divorced almost twenty-five years by that point, our children grown and gone. We had waited a long time to find each other, and when we did, we called ourselves the luckiest people we knew. Though I was closing in on 60 on our wedding day, and Jim was already there, we imagined many years ahead of us still.

Jim, around the time we met, in the fall of 2011.

Fifteen months later he started complaining of back pain. I knew it must be bad, because Jim was never a complainer. Not about physical pain anyway. For Jim, it was the experience of social injustice, the desecration of the environment and affronts to civil liberties that registered as real as a knife in the gut. So when I observed my husband in an uncharacteristically bad mood that fall, I blamed it on the Republicans.

For months my husband had been talking about how bad things were getting to be in our country. As an attorney for over thirty five years, Jim held the U.S. Constitution in a place of reverence. He knew it very well; the Constitution was, for him, a nearly perfect document, but he saw its tenets in jeopardy. When he said that he loved me as he loved the law—with intellect and passion, all together—I understood that meant he loved me beyond words, and he did.

He was a romantic and an intellectual, a man who possessed heart and brain in great and equal measure, along with another essential quality: a sense of humor. But (here comes a significant difference between my husband and Colbert) the wry, incisive humor for which Jim was famous among our friends abandoned him when right wing politics entered the conversation. Now, though, his words of rage were accompanied by a grimace.

In the months leading up to his diagnosis, the topic that occupied Jim more than any other, perhaps (though fast cars, and the bass playing of Jimmy Page also featured, also the natural world) was the Supreme Court. He recognized that in the years ahead, the makeup of the court was likely to undergo huge change, and that –-more than any other issue –-seemed to him to spell grave danger for the principles he held dear. He got so fired up that more than once I had to ask him to please stop talking about this at dinner with our friends. Everyone we knew agreed anyway.

At the time nobody could have imagined the presidency of Donald Trump. My husband’s ire was directed towards the actions of people like John Boener and Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio.

That fall we were in Paris, at a restaurant with an old friend. Good food, great wine. “Please, Jimmy,” I said. “Could we take a break from politics? It’s going to make you sick. “ Now it seemed this was happening.

Finally he went for a scan. It just a week after the mid-term elections when we received Jim’s diagnosis: pancreatic cancer.

Tumor. Pancreas. Two words you never want to hear in the same sentence. “Don’t Google it, “ the oncologist told us, but we did our research. Average life expectancy for someone at Jim’s stage of the disease, a little over a year.

One of the things I urged Jim to do after we learned of the cancer—along with everything we pursued, medically, in the hope of saving his life, and we pursued every avenue—was to stay away from political news. I actually believed it might be bad for his health to get as upset as politics made him.

But Jim couldn’t stay away from the news of the world, and of politics. Through nine rounds of chemotherapy and five of radiation, he never stopped following what was going on in the upcoming election.

Stephen Colbert announced his retirement in December of that year, and then he was gone from our world for a while. We were too occupied, fighting cancer, to mourn Colbert’s disappearance.

The following June—2015 now, primaries looming--Jim underwent a fourteen-hour surgery that removed not only the tumor but part of his pancreas, his gallbladder, his duodenum, a part of his small intestine, and a vein in his neck the surgeon transplanted to replace one he removed. But I knew the statistics. Only five percent of those who underwent a Whipple procedure remained alive five years later—though one of those was Jim’s revered Supreme Court justice: Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

For Jim, the surgery brought nothing but complications, too many hospitalizations to count. By the fall of 2015, three months after the surgery, he was down to 110 pounds, and never out of pain.

Colbert returned to the air around that time, but by then Jim was so sick I had little time or space for television—and what energy remained we chose to spend on programs that offered an escape from the hard truth of our days. My favorite: Hart of Dixie, a show I would never have watched if my younger son hadn’t been one of its stars, and Jim watched it with me. Our favorite parts were the ones featuring Will, but the show also gave us a weekly escape to a kind of present day Mayberry, where the problems that arose were invariably resolved within the space of forty two minutes, with the familiar face of my younger son smiling out from the screen and speaking in an Alabama accent, words that offered no trace of vitriol or racism. A pleasant fantasy. A desperately needed escape.

Elsewhere in our world, reality pulled us back. That spring –-2016 now--we followed, with growing concern, Jim’s rising CA 19 markers and a liver infection that resisted every drug we threw at it –-two strong indicators that the cancer was back . Nights in the hospital again, we followed the debates among the Republican presidential candidates. To me, Donald Trump seemed like a comical buffoon. I said the people of our nation would never vote for someone like that. Jim, hooked up to an IV, viewed him as dangerous and deadly. Cancer was everywhere now.

By early June my husband was down to ninety pounds, but he walked into our local polling place in California to cast his ballot in the primaries. Through nearly all those months since his diagnosis, we had held onto the hope that Jim might survive this. But he was on hospice now.

He died-- at home, in our bed--just two weeks later. And not quite five months after that—two years from the day, almost, that we’d received Jim’s diagnosis-- came the election of Donald Trump. That day, I grieved as I hadn’t since they took my husband’s body away. Grieved enough for two people, probably. If Jim wasn’t dead already, I said, this election would have killed him.

It was a month or so later that I tuned in again to our old friend, Stephen Colbert. I would not have supposed I was capable of laughter back then, but sitting alone in my kitchen, glued to the screen, I laughed often and hard, though unlike the typical Colbert viewer probably, I also wept.

Two years have passed since Jim’s death. Soon it will be two years since the election of this president. For me, the tragedies feel oddly and irrationally linked. Sometimes the grief I feel over one spills out onto the other. When it does, I find comfort in this unlikely place. The Colbert monologue.

I don’t really suppose, when I listen to this man--speaking from the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater to a few million people besides me-- that he is likely to change many people’s votes. Trump followers probably aren’t tuning in.

What Colbert offers—uniquely to me, perhaps, as a woman who lived through not only the loss of her candidate but the loss of her husband that election year—is more basic than this. I take in his words as a reminder that sanity and reason have not disappeared from these shores and more than that, simple goodness, simple kindness. I have never met Stephen Colbert and doubt I ever will, but I see in him a decency increasingly rare in the public forum. I like a lot of what Trevor Noah and Jimmy Kimmel have to say. Rachel Maddow of course. John Oliver. But the one I share my coffee with—I in my bathrobe, he in a very nice suit and a tie just like one Jim would have worn, heading off to work—will always be Colbert.

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I’ll be watching tonight, of course. Thinking of Jim, an Eagle Scout, a man who believed in the rule of law, and a patriotic American. And of all that he hoped for our country, and all he would be grieving if he were alive to watch with me. And here’s a link to the memoir I wrote about finding and losing my husband, Jim.

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Us-Memoir-Joyce-Maynard-ebook/dp/B06WVQCK99/ref=sr_1_1?crid=51LIM5MSY4WT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dow9cv2ankSi3KVb2Vg9GZGgonZO5VjvpmVSxHTOpVMZw71suXwRI5b5PABW4qLvkDXfFNe9zPwjnp1OrKuIHn0xYpvqfAapn3T0kraohMYy5kXKQhgi_zCfNBaH_mQabTLuBvW9VrAv7pIQOc0hkYLtAUrVZNKOmnnyLsQIDIe9oj8IOlzzIkEj5H1vcxbAK2oQr1xxA6BGj8ftxLuqT6BmuzOUVoSX-LAp010sIXE.9eR4eUu0VyKCt6NHTnpUHpmfJ0ntTbWi6jF1AMNQx40&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+best+of+us+maynard&qid=1779548008&sprefix=the+best+of+us+maynar%2Caps%2C223&sr=8-1