Pat Miles - Before All Is Said and Done

W HEN AN ONCOLOGIST told my husband, Charles Bucky Zimmerman, that he had advanced and incurable cancer, the doctors advice was to go home and get our affairs in order. I thought our affairs were in order. We had a will and trust, and Bucky, who was already on a path to retirement, had a partnership agreement with his firm that would provide for a comfortable future.

In our minds, we were set for life. But as it turned out, we were not set for death.

I first met Bucky in the early seventies. I was a news anchor at major network television stations in Minneapolis, and he was an up-and-coming attorney. Those were heady days; we were madly in love and enjoyed being a power couple as our careers soared. Bucky founded a law firm in Minneapolis and built it into a national powerhouse. In addition to news anchoring, I hosted a radio show and later developed a series of TV documentaries focused on notable Minnesotans called A Pat Miles Special.

After a few years of dating, our personal goals began to diverge. Although Bucky and I cared for each other deeply, our differences were too much to overcome, and we parted ways. Within a few years, we both married other people, and while Bucky did not have children, I was blessed with two daughters, Kate and Betsy.

Fast forward to 2005 when our paths crossed again. Luckily, we were both single, and our relationship rekindled as if no time had passed. We cherished our second chance and resolved not to lose one another; we were married in Santa Fe in 2006. I felt so fortunate, partnered with a man I admired and with whom I shared so many memories. I retired from the news station in Minneapolis, and we split our time between Minnesota and Arizona. Life was one adventure after another: travel, socializing, and appreciating our good fortune. Then, almost overnight, everything changed.

In November 2018, we were on a cruise with my two daughters when something seemed different. Bucky was tired. He slept all the time. This was not the man I knew, the man who could not sit still for even a moment and was always planning the next activity. As a young man, he played against tennis icon Arthur Ashe in the US Open Tennis Championship. At the age of seventy-two, he still had athletic prowess; he exercised every day, had a thirty-two-inch waist, and prided himself on his healthy lifestyle.

I attributed Buckys fatigue to his relentless work schedule. His law firm had become the go-to firm for successful big class-action suits, including the tobacco and NFL concussion cases, so his workload was never-ending. But even after we returned home from that relaxing vacation, he remained weak and fatigued.

We realized that something was not right, so we went to the emergency room at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. One hour later, Bucky was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

Bucky succumbed to the cancer on February 24, 2019.

I am sure his death was caused by a blood clot triggered by the cancer. I was trying to nap when the end came. There was not even a minute left for me to jump off the bed and reach Buckys side before he took his last breath. My daughter, Kate, was reading a poem to him when he became agitated. She called my name and said there was something wrong.

In an instant, it was over. To say I was not prepared would be an understatement. It was a shock in so many ways, both the suddenness and the finality.

Since then, I have made mistake after mistake in dealing with the aftermath of Buckys death. I have made financial and emotional blunders. I hired the wrong professionals and then lacked the will to fire them. I have spent countless nights lying awake with worryand thousands of dollars on useless or plain bad advice from people who saw me as easy prey.

I was not reluctant or afraid to ask for help and advice. But the truth is, there is not much out there that helped me face the practical challenges I encountered. Yes, there are many books written for widows, but most of them focus on grief. Many of them are authored by a woman about her singular experience.

I also found that while I could Google probate and right of survivorship, I could not Google how to be a widow for dummies. There was nothing that answered all the questions I had to face. If you have recently lost a partner, you may be faced with the same problems.

That is why I wrote this book. This is not the book I expected to write or the story I expected to tell. As a journalist and reporter who worked for thirty years in radio and television, I have great tales about the people I interviewed and the places I visited. I planned to someday write a book about those experiences. But as the saying goes, We plan, God laughs, and I learned firsthand that life is full of the unexpected.