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Dawn Westlake
Trailor for the 2015 short film "Through the Pane," a film Donald Westlake's daughter made based on an essay he wrote.
My wife died more than five years ago. We had been married 62 years.
Helen Grace Gum and I began dating at age 16 and we married at age 22 after graduating from Northern Illinois University.
In every phase of our lives, we were partners. When I was in the Army, she gave up her teaching job to be with me. She had her professional life as a teacher and author, I had my life as a scientist, but my friends were her friends and her friends were my friends. We coordinated our graduate college plans so that she received her master's degree from Iowa State University when I received my doctorate.
After 33 years of teaching in public high schools, she taught for another 17 years at the College of DuPage. The last five of those years, I pushed her to her classes in a wheelchair.
We had traveled together extensively on six continents. At the age of 84, she had a stroke and died.
Part of my process of getting through the pain was writing an essay titled Through the Pane. My daughter, Dawn Westlake, a filmmaker, produced a seven-minute, award-winning film based on my essay that has been shown in more than 40 film festivals all over the world.
In the essay, I say, "When you lose a loved one, you can feel as if nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever be the same."
Through the Pane describes my conversion to another way of thinking.
One day, while sipping my morning coffee, I noticed a spider outside my kitchen windowpane spinning a web in exactly the same way that spiders have spun webs for eons.
Then, I noticed that the cedar branch nearly touching the pane was covered with blueberries, just as it had been all the years we lived in our house.
Courtesy of Westlake family.
Donald Westlake of Wheaton and his late wife Helen in their 50s. Their daughter Dawn turned an essay her grieving father wrote into a short film.
That meant that soon the cedar waxwings would arrive within days of their usual time, and I would find it exciting to watch them consume those berries.
Clearly, nature was not paying attention. It was moving on as if nothing had happened.
It occurred to me that if I, as a tiny element of this vast world, were to remain in sync, I must move on as well. So, I did.
All loss is difficult. But few losses are as devastating or as challenging as the loss of life’s partner. Join us as we explore this unusually personal topic with first-person accounts and through the story of one family's tragic loss.