Widow doesn't let loss bury her stilettos

SANTA ANA, Calif. - Carole Brody smiled when she saw the police lights flashing in her mirror.

She knew it was just Mike. Mike Fleet, an all-star Santa Ana, Calif., cop, responsible for seizing more than $50 million in drug money and 20,000 kilos of cocaine. “Uncle Mike” to Carole’s young daughter, Kendall, and one of Carole’s best friends.

A few weeks earlier, Mike had asked Carole why they weren’t a couple.

“Need a list?” she’d asked him. “City girl, cowboy. Jew, Baptist. Democrat, Republican.” She said they were too close as friends for it to work.

He courted her anyway. He’d sneak into her office and leave flowers, and visit her at lunch. He’d park along her route to work. When she drove by, he’d pull up behind her and turn on the flashing lights so he could give her a muffin and juice.

They were married in 1995.

It shook her out of a rut, personal and professional. She was coming off a divorce. Her job as a paralegal wasn’t as fulfilling as she’d hoped — not as much writing and not as much difference-making as she’d hoped.

Being married to Mike made life exciting again — “as idyllic as marriage can be,” she says now.

He was riding one day when a stray dog spooked his horse, Star. A tree branch knocked him unconscious. It didn’t seem serious.

“We can’t say with absolute certainty that that accident caused something, but I can tell you this: I had a completely healthy husband the day before the accident. And after that accident, nothing was ever the same again,” Carole says.

Mike’s body deteriorated from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In 2000, while 10-year-old Kendall held him, Mike Fleet died.

It was one of the biggest police funerals Santa Ana had seen. Carole watched the flag being folded and realized the police chief was going to present it to her, the widow.

It sounded so wrong, she thought. Widows wear sensible shoes. I wear low-rise pants and miniskirts. I listen to heavy metal and drink martinis.

She looked for support groups, but the widows she met didn’t seem much like her. They were older, sharing photos of grandkids.

She shut down. She was eating dreadfully, exercising never. She quit wearing makeup.

“When you wake up and your thought is, ‘Let’s just get through today,’ you don’t even realize you’ve quit caring for yourself.”

She asked her rabbi, “Why me?”

“Why not you?” he replied.

“That’s when I began to think, bad things really do happen to good people, and it’s horrendous. But my mission became, how am I going to make good come out of this?”

One night she was watching a TV show about servicemen killed in Iraq and their young widows.

“I’d been there, and I’d grown, and I’d sufficiently recovered,” she says.

She grabbed a legal pad and jotted ideas. A chapter on insensitive things people say. A chapter on being a single mother. On dating. On finance.

“Widows Wear Stilettos” will be published in August. It’s touching and funny, a blend of memoir and advice that includes a recipe for Mike’s green bean casserole and fashion tips.

She launched widowswearstilettos.com in Fall 2006, and she says she now gets more than 800 e-mails a week from widows.

After some awful attempts at romance, she’s in love again, with a businessman.

“As far as being the hurt woman, I don’t see myself that way. I see myself as having taken tragedy and turned it into triumph. I’m trying to take as many people with me as I possibly can on that journey.”