When I sat down with the salesman, my eyes landed on a bobblehead Spider-Man sitting next to his computer monitor. I’d spent the last hour cleaning out Alice, crying, making fun of myself for crying while sending videos to my sisters in our group chat.
In the videos I am talking about the things that I keep inside Alice, ridiculous things, laughable things that I am somehow unable to throw away:
- Jay’s last piece of candy, which I’d found in the car two weeks after he passed.
- His aspirin bottle in the glove box (used to take one every day).
- An old magnetic name tag from Chemeketa Community College in the center console (J.D. Wolfe, I.T. Manager).
I took over the Jeep Grand Cherokee when he passed, gave my Chevy Colorado to my son who needed a reliable vehicle for college. I wanted nothing more than to climb into Jay’s Jeep and live there. It smelled like his sweat, and I liked wrapping my hands around the steering wheel that he had gripped every single day. On cold days, I liked pushing my back into the lumbar support and repeating his favorite line.
Ahhh yeah, heated seats, baby.
Throughout our marriage, we had this saying — whenever we finally bought something we had only imagined buying while in our struggling twenties. We’d say “We have arrived.” And we’d shake our heads and crack up laughing because we were far from rich.
His Jeep was one of those purchases, and I still remember him threatening divorce for the first time while I was sitting in the passenger seat.
I remember it perfectly: He took me for a ride the day he bought the Jeep. We went through a drive-thru coffee shop. The barista handed Jay the drinks one by one. He cradled my latte in both hands, leaned across the console, and waited for me to put both hands on the cup. Then he made eye contact – our noses almost touching – and said, “If you spill this, I will divorce you.” I snorted at him.
I’d spent our entire relationship jokingly launching similar, threatening one-liners at him. But Jay? He had never joked, not even once, about divorce. I took the cup in both hands while holding his gaze, gently set the cup into its holder and said,
Congratulations, Baby. You finally found something worth threatening divorce.
His cheeks blushed, he kissed me and said, “I have arrived, my love.” I don’t know why, but I fell more in love with him that day. For him to be that secure in our love – finally – so secure that he could jokingly threaten divorce – we had truly arrived. This was love. The real deal.
We took the Jeep on all our road trips, and I frequently made fun of him for getting a vehicle with “all the bells and whistles” (heated seats and steering wheel, blindspot warnings, emergency brake assist, adaptive cruise control, giant touch screen, etc.) My truck, on the other hand, was basic, got the job done, reliable, pragmatic – like I was. We evened each other out that way.
The day I added Jay’s key fob to my own keychain, I silently vowed to drive her forever.
I named her Alice, because that’s what I felt like in the world without Jay – Alice in Wonderland, lost down a rabbit hole. In 2021, Alice’s transmission started barely leaking, but the mechanic said we could keep an eye on it. She blew a cylinder last year, so I fixed it, thousand bucks.
Then I hit a few curbs and threw her alignment out, without knowing it, which cupped her tires. Her automatic start/stop no longer worked, high beams broke awhile back. I dented her back fender while learning how to back up a trailer. She got me to work, 65 miles one way, and the dashboard had a permanent coffee ring on it. I’d been driving her that way, just making ends meet until last week when her heating core broke and she overheated. Took me 45 minutes to drive 5 miles. Had to pull over three times, but I made it home. She had 165K miles on her by that point, and she was limping. I drove her for another day by adding a bunch of coolant, then brought her to the shop.
The mechanic totaled everything up, about $12,000.00 to fix it all. “The transmission is still holding for now, leak’s not that bad. We can wait on it if you want… Or…” He fished around to find my gaze. “Or maybe you could trade her in? She’s gonna keep nickel-n-diming ya from here out.”
Alice was my husband’s car, I said with barely a voice.
The mechanic didn’t say he was sorry for my loss. Instead, he told me a story about how he drives his late grandfather’s truck sometimes, and how he keeps everything the same. Fish hook on the visor, pack of reds in the glove box, carpenter’s pencil in the console. “Is there anything you might be able to transfer over? You know, from Alice to a more reliable vehicle?”
I told him about the old Sugar Babies candy, one single bean that Jay had dropped and I had found while cleaning the Jeep.
The kids and I laugh and call it ‘The Last Bean.’
I told him about the aspirin and the name tag, and we both chuckled. I called a dealership and set an appointment to test drive a few cars later that day.
I was randomly assigned to a salesman – young, blond, 6’2” fella, selling cars to provide for his wife and three-year-old daughter – and a diehard Spider-Man fan. Jay had been a Spider-Man fanatic, read the comics, had a costume, wore it at least every other Halloween. I looked around at all the other salesmen’s desks – no Spider-Man bobbleheads.
He showed me three cars to get us started – a Jeep Compass (too similar), a Ram Truck (too big), and the last one was a Ford Bronco, a bucket-list car for Jay; he’d been stoked when Ford announced the Bronco’s return. So…I bought it. I put the bean in the console, his name tag and the bottle of aspirin in the glove box.
Back in 1995 when Jay and I rented our first apartment, I had brought home three plants, which Jay promptly named Josie and the Pussycats, after the Archie Comics series about a fictional, girl punk rock band.
Of course, I named the Bronco Josie.
About Sonney Wolfe
Sonney Wolfe is a writer, educator, mother, nona (grandma), and widow. She holds a Master of Arts in English, teaches academic and professional writing for the University of Maryland, and writes features, press releases, blog posts, and personal essays for various news and social media.
Widowed in December of 2019, she soon joined the masses in COVID lockdowns, which deepened her understanding of grief as she witnessed widespread loss, especially among students. Now, she integrates grief support in her college classrooms by addressing pandemic disruptions, community loss, and mental health challenges. Her autobiographical teaching philosophy, born from her own grief journey, provides a platform to share her experiences and support students who have also lost loved ones.
In her professional writing, she sheds light on the human experience of loss and grief, particularly for widows. She explores the complex societal shift they face, transitioning from wives to widows and often single parents. This sudden change forces widows to navigate not only grief, but also a landslide of challenges: income loss, economic strain, relocation, career shifts, altered healthcare needs, and declining mental health.
Her Blog WIM Dispatches (Woman in Motion), https://sonneywolfe.com, chronicles her personal grief journey and advocates for the needs of widows, along with her IG: @WIM_Dispatches – and Facebook page: WIM Dispatches Life After Jay.