JME at BNA

Jerry Enright leads at Lookout Mountain for the last time, August 2009

I figured out what I was doing wrong in trying to upload this video, so here it is: Jerry's last time leading at Lookout Mountain, just over a year ago.  (The pause at the beginning is him waiting for little Ainslie to decide whether or not she wanted to help him lead 77t, which she loves as well as Jerry did.  As you see, she decided not to, but, as I remember, stood off to the side leading it safely nearby her mother.)

We went to one more singing after this.  So this is the second-to-last Sacred Harp singing of Jerry Enright's life.

Mantra: "I will not always feel the way I feel right now."  Repeat, and breathe.

Wisdom

Something wise I just read on Alicia's blog:

"You will not always feel the way you do right now."

I need to make that my mantra.

Dancing

Jerry was not a dancer.  His response whenever I'd put my arms around him with music playing, or when I'd take his hands and try to waltz him around the kitchen, would be either to stand stock still while smiling as if he had no idea what I wanted, or to move (usually just his arms) very deliberately not in time to the music.  The only time I ever got him to dance with me for real was at Allison and David's wedding in Huntsville, AL two years ago.  Here's the photographic evidence of those moments - I particularly love the smile on Jerry's face in the first photo (and even though I'm not facing the camera, I can tell I'm laughing too, for sheer pleasure).

Numb, then not numb, then numb

I was listening to a podcast of a Fresh Air interview with Dr. Atul Gawande today - his article on end of life care and hospice in this week's New Yorker has gotten some attention on a widow bulletin board I visit - and when he got to this -

And what's sort of terrifying about it is that these were people who came into the hospital thinking that, well, maybe we'd be able to get through this, and yes, I think I could get home this time. And then the care escalated to the point that they never got to say goodbye or I love you or I'm sorry, and, you know, they've got their husband or wife or other family sitting with them, and they will pass on from this world without ever having realized that, you know what? This was the moment. This was it. And is this way you'd really want it to have happened?

- I lost it.  I'd been feeling mostly numb for a while, but this, plus a comment someone had made on the bulletin board about her husband unable to eat anything at the end of his life but sherbet and ginger ale, gave me flashbacks to Jerry's last day in the hospital, and to that time in general, and all that my honey suffered, and God, it's so hard, it was hard then and it's so hard now, remembering, and I feel so angry and helpless that there was nothing I could do to make him feel better, nothing I could do to make it all go away and make him whole again, nothing I could do just to get them to stop giving him drugs that made him so totally not himself, not until it was too late.  Nothing I could do to save him.  I don't suppose anyone deserves what he went through, but Jerry especially didn't - no one in the world had a better heart than he did, I've never met anyone kinder, I never had much conviction that this world is a good place, but with Jerry in it I knew it was all worth it - but a world in which Jerry could suffer the way he did, a world that now doesn't have him in it, is not a world I have any use for.  And yet, there's the title of this blog to mock at me - the world ended, but it didn't, and I'm still slogging through it, but why?

It's hard enough just missing him every moment of every day that I'm awake, but on top of that to be remembering what he went through - it's doing very bad things to what feels like a huge gaping cavity in my chest.  I just want those bad memories to recede, let me remember better times.  It won't stop me missing him, but maybe it'll stop me wanting to spend my time curled into a fetal position, howling.

Anyway.

Went to drop off the Corolla and pick up the Sienna after work today, and of course they were behind schedule, so I waited a while, finally got the car, got in, went to lock the doors (force of habit - first thing I do when I get in a car is lock the doors - safety thing, I guess) and discovered the lock button didn't work.  So back I went into the dealership, and they had someone immediately fix it (something was loose inside a door panel they'd opened to work on the window motor).  Fingers crossed it's now good to go for the foreseeable future.

I had a letter today from the Sacred Harp Musical Heritage Association (thanks, Jeannette) listing a number of people who've donated to the Association in Jerry's memory - thank you, guys.  I've had a few notifications from the other charities I listed back in June about donations there as well, plus I think some have gone without notification - thank you all - I appreciate it.

I may have run out of Sacred Harp DVDs to rip footage of Jerry from - the rest of the recordings I have are on VCR tapes, so for now I won't be able to upload from them.  One year I got Jerry equipment for recording video from VCR tapes onto DVDs, but he never really had time to play with it, and it requires a PC - and, as I've mentioned, Jerry's PC doesn't want to go on these days.  Someday I'll work on getting stuff off the VCR tapes and onto the computer.

I miss my honey.

Jerry Enright leads 77t in the Sacred Harp

His "Sunday song" again, at Liberty on 3 July 2005.

Jerry Enright leads 330b in the Sacred Harp

Jerry leading another song from the Sacred Harp, 330b, "Fellowship," this time at Liberty Baptist Church, Henagar, AL, on 2 July 2005.

JME on the Burren

Jerry under the Poulnabrone Dolmen, the Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland, March 2003

Corolla

Oooof.  Dropped the Sienna off at the Toyota dealer this morning, just now got the damage - much more than I expected.  Lots more going on than just the window malfunctioning (which itself requires a new motor).  I could shop around, I suppose, get second opinions, go with cheaper options, but when it comes down to it, this is a 1999 (i.e. bought in 1998) car with almost 156,500 miles on it and I want it to keep going, dare I say it, another 100,000 miles, and I know nothing, nothing about cars.  I hope someday I'll end up living somewhere that doesn't require me to have a car, or at least not to have to use it often if I do, so that buying a new car will not be a necessity.  So anyway, perhaps the Toyota dealer is taking advantage of the poor naive widder woman, but so be it - I told them to go ahead and fix what they say needs fixing.  And meanwhile I have a white loaner 2010 Corolla to get me home after work.  Jaysis, they couldn't have given me something more exciting?

In other news, the person who bought Jerry's Droid on eBay paid yesterday, so I'll drop the package off at the post office on the way home.  I'm pretty sure I'm remembering right that Jerry's last post on Facebook was that he'd been "sucked into the vortex of Droid!" - it's not there anymore since I had his Facebook profile "memorialized," to keep all his FB friends from receiving those "Reconnect with Jerry!" notifications that I was finding hard to take.  But anyway, yet another chapter in the ongoing saga "Nothing About This Doesn't Suck."

Three weeks and a wake-up until I head to Alabama.  This is so, so wrong.  He was supposed to have regained his strength and have been ready for traveling, and was supposed to be traveling down too, for what was supposed to have been his 21st Lookout Mountain Convention.  This is not the way it was supposed to be.

Jerry Enright leads 300 in the Sacred Harp at Lookout Mountain 2005

Posted these last two in reverse order: this is Jerry leading on the Saturday of the 2005 Lookout Mountain Convention; the previous video is from the next day.

I miss my honey.

Jerry Enright at Lookout Mountain 2005

Jerry was also arranging that day, which is why he's calling the next leaders before he sings.

At the Western Sizzlin

Oh, I love this one.  Jenna just sent me this - she took it at the Western Sizzlin in Fort Payne, Alabama in July 2005, she told me.

A night for crying over photos - first the ones Chip posted on Facebook a little while ago (can I have copies of those, Chip?), now this one. But that's not a bad thing: I'm grateful for the photos you guys are posting and sending me.  I've read postings from widows and widowers who find it too painful to look at photos and videos of the ones they've lost, but me, I just cannot stop looking at images of Jerry, even when it makes me cry.  I know it won't bring him back, but I just want to see him.  So thank you, guys.

Jerry Enright at the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention

Another video from Nate & Norma of Jerry leading a song from the Sacred Harp.  This is at the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention in Birmingham, AL on 19 June 1999, again, before I'd moved to Illinois, so we'd met up there.  (That empty chair in the first row of the altos had me in it earlier in the day: I'd moved to give someone else a chance at the front row, but apparently no one else wanted it.)

Jerry, showing good leading etiquette for a large singing like this, has the class only do one verse and only repeat on the words.  Which unfortunately means a shorter video this time.  Still, I'm grateful to have the ones I do have.  My sweetie.

Legs

I found this photo on Jerry's old PC (before it stopped letting me turn it on) - he took it in my parents' guest bedroom, I think in late December 2007/early January 2008.  His "chile-butt pants."

ETA: I've figured out why he took the photo: I'm sure it's for the pattern the sun coming through the slats of the Venetian blinds behind him is making on his legs.  Hadn't noticed that when I posted the photo.

An observation

Pretending he hasn't died only works for a few seconds at a time.

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

- e.e. cummings

More things to do

For those of you who suggested I have the car checked out... the car decided to take matters into its own hands.  Maybe I messed with the order of the universe by cleaning it out yesterday, maybe that car needed its messiness, but today, when I was getting into the car to leave the shop, the window on the driver's side stopped going up and down, randomly, not consistently, of course, sometimes stopping halfway, sometimes not going up at all.  I drove over to the Toyota dealership where Jerry bought the Sienna 12 years ago this coming autumn, and where he always took it for servicing, and ended up making an appointment for early Thursday morning, when they'll have a loaner car to give me.  So they'll look it over and make sure it's doing okay, along with dealing with the window (I hope).  Considering it's got over 156,000 miles on it, it's doing pretty well, but if any of you reading this are familiar with the Camry Jerry had before the Sienna - the car we leaned against while eating our lunch that Sunday we met at Lookout Mountain - you know this ol' Sienna has a lot farther to go if it's going to match its predecessor.  Which I hope it does: it's paid for.  And having a house and a car that are both paid for makes for at least two fewer things to have to worry about at the moment.

I sanded and lacquered drawer parts today for what I'm assuming will be Wood Bros.'s final project.  It's incredibly sad and surreal to be doing this for the last time - I've been a cabinet finisher, of a sort, for the Enrights' cabinet shop for coming on 11 years now, and it's most likely I'll never work as a cabinet finisher again.  And even if the universe got really weird and I did end up working with wood again, it wouldn't be with Jerry, it wouldn't be this.  It feels like I blinked, and it was all over in that instant: love, marriage, the cabinet shop, happiness.  While sorting through some more vendor bills in the office this afternoon, I glanced down and saw Jerry's 2010 desk calendar, open for some reason to the week of 14 June.  In the space for that day, he had written "Chemo?"  It took me a second or two to process what I was seeing: a suggestion of doubt, that question mark, possibly the awareness that having a round of chemotherapy was going to depend on everything going well with previous rounds.  And that day he was thinking he might be starting a round of chemo, my brain eventually realized, was in fact the day after he died.

Turned from the desk calendar, crying, and caught sight of an index card, his writing, "IN THE SHOP."

Land mines everywhere.

Mitali West, August 1999

I tried to scan this photo the other night, but it didn't work - serendipitously, my mother e-mailed me a copy of it this morning - thanks, Mommy.  If I'm remembering right, my father took this photo on the day before my 37th birthday, in August 1999, at Mitali West, an Indian restaurant that used to be in the West Village.  It was the first time my parents met Jerry.  The necklace I'm wearing is three amber heart-shaped charms that Jerry had given me a while before.  The happy smiles are courtesy of being in love.

Holiday Self-Portrait

We used this self-portrait on holiday cards one year, 2007 I think it was.

AAA

Got some stuff done today.  The first order of business was shoveling mud off the small concrete "driveway" in front of our garage.  My garage.  Shoveling mud off the small concrete "driveway" in front of my garage.  We... man, this is hard.  I live on a dirt road, and a lot of dirt has washed down in front of the garage with the heavy rainstorms we've had over past weeks.  So I shoveled a bunch away, then worked out how to use the power washer and washed off the garage door.  Then I tackled the car: got out the shop vac I brought home on Friday and sucked up a lot of straw out of the minivan, and I'm still not sure why there was straw in the minivan - possibly plants that Jerry ordered were packed in straw?  Finally got out the last of the pine needles from our last Christmas tree.  I so vividly remember taking that tree to the tree mulch pile at the township recycling center with Jerry not long after he was diagnosed with cancer, and crying because I was so afraid it could be our last ever tree.  And I was right.  So anyway, pine needles gone, straw gone... I went through a wooden box (an old Baltic birch drawer someone put together in the shop years ago when we made drawers out of Baltic birch) that I always assumed contained stuff it was important to have in the car, and found, yes, some important stuff, but also broken cassette tape boxes, various caps Jerry hadn't worn in years, random notes and other things that had been stuffed into the box for lack of a better place to put it in the moment and never taken out of it again.  So I cleared that out too and reloaded it with the car-related stuff.

And when I was done I just wanted to show Jerry, because I think he'd be pleased at how much neater the car is now.

As I looked at the car, I realized I had no idea where the spare tire is - I mean, I have some vague recollection that there's a compartment in there somewhere, but I didn't know where exactly it was, even though I know I've seen it (among other things, there was that time we were driving to Alabama on I-65 and got a flat).  Which caused me to remember once again how hopeless I am about cars, and how little I know about them, and how really screwed I'd be if something happened to the car, which as it is is almost 12 years old.  So when I came in I went online and joined AAA.  (I know they're politically and environmentally horrible, and with some googling I've found some alternatives, but right now I need to deal with what I need to deal with and am not going to deal with what I can't be thinking about right now.  So it's done.)

I've been stymied in my attempt to upload the video of Jerry leading 77 at Lookout Mountain last year.  The ripper program doesn't like something about the disk.  Ah well...

And Jerry's PC now will not go on.  I hope I can sort this out - I just want to make sure I get all the photos off of it.

Jerry Enright leads 300 in the Sacred Harp

This took me almost two days to get done!  I ended up getting it up on YouTube in a totally different way than the previous clip.  It'll be interesting to see what it takes to get the next one up... This is from 22 August 2009 at Lookout Mountain, Jerry's 20th Lookout Mountain Convention, as he points out in introducing the song, and was recorded by Nate & Norma Green.  This was less than a year ago.

The song on page 300 of the Sacred Harp, "Calvary," was another of Jerry's favorites to lead.  In this clip he dedicates it to Barrett Ashley, a long-time Sacred Harp singer Jerry got to know well and whose leading style he strove to emulate, who died before I had met Jerry or been down to Lookout Mountain, and to Lawrence and Lula Underwood, who also sang for decades at Lookout Mountain.  I remember going with Jerry and several other singers to sing for Mr. Underwood as he lay in a hospital bed, hardly responsive to anything.  And I had no idea, no suspicion, no fear or understanding of how soon... anyway, Jerry had great love and respect for the singers who've come before.  As I've been reminded by several people since Jerry died, he said he wanted to "grow up" to be like Barrett Ashley, Kelly Beard, Lawrence Underwood and others who showed and show him and all of us Johnny-come-latelies the tradition of Sacred Harp singing, and how it's done.

One more thing about 300... at the New England Convention when it was held in Rhode Island the first time, I called 300 when it was my turn to lead and asked Jerry to come up and lead it with me.  He swept into his Barrett Ashley leading style and took off with the song, with me basically trying to stay out of his way!  He loved the song and he loved Sacred Harp singing, and I loved the joy he got out of it.

World Without You

I, I cry alone
In the night now that you're gone
And I know
I'll always be blue
How can I live here in this world without you?

The sun rises and falls
And I don't notice at all
The love that we had has fallen through
How can I live here in this world without you?

When I dream, oh my dreams are all the same
You hold me in your arms again
But I know they'll never come true
How can I live here in this world without you?

When I dream, oh my dreams are all the same
You hold me in your arms again

You must know what you've done
You've left me broken and good for no one
Oh, how it hurts to feel like I do
How can I live here in this world without you?
How can I live here in this world without you?


(Yeah... it's actually a breakup song, by Kelly Willis and Paul Kennerley.  But the question is very much to the point.)

Technology

I was defeated by technology today - managed to get a DVD's worth of video from the 2009 Lookout Mountain Convention onto Jerry's iMac, pretty sure I managed to convert it into playable format, but then iMovie just could not find it, no matter what I did.  Meanwhile, I managed to get Jerry's scanner to work, using his old PC, but the scanned photos are in a format that my computer doesn't recognize (.spp), so I'll have to try again.  But I did find a treasure trove of more photos on Jerry's PC (once it stopped shutting itself off for no reason - ah, yes, now I remember for the umpteenth time why we switched over to Macs a few years ago).  One for now, since the photo loader thingie on Blogger is also being obnoxious and not showing what I've just put on iPhoto (but does continue to show photos I've supposedly deleted from the computer):

This is the only photo taken of the two of us on our honeymoon in Ireland in 2003 (yes, three years after we got married, we finally managed a 6-day honeymoon).  All the other photos of us are of either just me or just Jerry, but luckily we had someone take a picture of us together on the Cliffs of Moher ("Mohair," per Jerry, as I've said).

Had my hair cut today - it was nice to see Lindsey, even if I didn't quite get through the entire thing without almost crying.

Rain gauge since midnight last night: 4.17 inches.  Must have slept through a bunch of the rain after finally getting to sleep at around 2 a.m.  Apparently lots of flooding in Chicago today.  Good thing we live on a hill.  And good thing I had the gutters cleaned: the basement has stayed dry through all this rain... so far.

(Good thing I live on a hill.  I.  Not "we."  Still don't want to get used to that.)

I had a dream last night that Jerry had an identical twin who was still alive - he was physically exactly like him, except he was clean-shaven, had no beard (last time Jerry was actually clean-shaven was something like 1971, he told me).  I don't remember anything except that, and a sense that this non-Jerry wasn't friendly.

Another mostly numb day.

2.09

I called Jerry lots of things - I always seemed to be coming up with a new nickname for him.  One of them was "Mr. Measure," because he loved to know measurements of things - a result of all the measuring he did in his daily life as a carpenter and then a cabinetmaker?  Or perhaps he always liked that kind of knowledge.  But anyway, one thing he liked a lot was the digital rain gauge he got, which sits on my desk and gets readouts from a cup out in the yard.  Right now it's reading 2.09 inches, which is presumably the amount of rain we've had since midnight last night, since the gauge is now showing the correct time (it hadn't been for a long time, and then the batteries ran out after Jerry died, so I put new rechargeables in and found the directions for resetting the clock).  He would have loved knowing that.

As the previous post shows, I finally figured out a way to upload video from a DVD.  I mentioned to Seamus today at the shop that I wanted to figure it out, and he showed me iMovie, which I hadn't even remembered was on the computer - I suspect there's lots of things the Mac can do that I know nothing about.  But there turned out to be more to it than just using iMovie, and it took downloading several different programs until I found a combination that worked (Mac the Ripper + iSkysoft + iMovie is what I ended up with - there might be a more streamlined way of doing it, but that's the first one I got to that actually worked).  I did it on Jerry's iMac, which is the first time I've sat in his chair, at his desk, and used his computer.  I'm back in a numb state at the moment, so I managed to do all of this without crying or feeling that sharp pain I'm now in total dread of.

I didn't even know we had DVDs from the 1999 Lookout Mountain Convention.  When I picked them up from the end table this evening, I thought they were the ones Nate and Norma had sent us from the 2009 Convention, and was very surprised when I put the first of the two disks in the computer and saw a younger me sitting in the front row, holding a 3-year-old Cheyenne in my lap!  So  I checked the label again and saw what year they were from.  Nate and Norma had sent Jerry a box of lots of DVDs earlier in the year (I've thanked them before, and I thank them again for their kindness and generosity), and either they were in that box or were ones the Greens had sent us previously.  But I loved the clip of Jerry leading 77t in this one, not that there's any clip of him that I don't love, but the humor in this one, the teasing back and forth with Miss Shelbie and the class, the easy-going feeling and the joy of it all come together to make the clip so perfect.

Tomorrow I'll see if I can upload the 2009 Lookout Mountain Convention version.  Hair grayer, everyone a decade older, joy undiminished.

Tomorrow I also have a haircut appointment.  I know it sounds weird to say this, since most couples don't organize their lives the way Jerry and I did, but this will be my first haircut in years on my own - usually we'd make appointments to stop by the salon together on our way home from the shop.  When I started letting my hair grow longer about a year and a half ago, I would have my hair cut every second time Jerry had his cut, but even then I'd go along with him when he had his cut - it just made sense.  Our last haircut appointments were on 2 April.  When Jerry was in the hospital, I kept saying I was going to ask Lindsey, who cuts our hair, if she'd come to the house when Jerry got home and give him a haircut at home, since obviously it was going to take him a while to get his strength back.  By the time he came home, his hair and beard were longer than he'd been wearing them in a long time, which, combined with the extreme weight loss, robbed him of his usual look and made him look very different - still Jerry, but in a lot of ways very unlike the "real" Jerry.  I can still see those hugely sunken cheeks and extremely prominent cheekbones, the longer hair swept back from his forehead.  While at the same time I'm surrounded by photos of my sweetie, with his rounder face, trimmed beard, shorter hair, the way he looked in real life.  I don't want to forget what he went through, not entirely, but I want it to be way, way in the background - I want the happy memories back again, I want those to be the ones that come to my mind.  A matter of more time, I guess.

Anyway.  Other plans for the weekend include cleaning the inside of the car, which has always been a slight disaster.  I've brought home a shop vac to help in that endeavor.  I also want to clear out the bathtub drain, which is slowing up again.  And there's always more stuff to go through.

And by the end of the weekend, it will be six weeks since the end of the world.  And I'm still here.

I miss my honey.

Jerry at Lookout Mountain, 1999

It took me a few hours, once I was set off in the right direction by Seamus this afternoon (didn't remember about iMovie), and a few false starts, but I've finally managed to upload video of Jerry.  This is him leading his "Sunday song" (as you can hear Miss Shelbie call it), "The Child of Grace," at the Lookout Mountain Sacred Harp Singing Convention on 22 August 1999, so this is a year after we met there, and a few weeks before I came out to Illinois.  The video was made by Nate and Norma Green.

My sweetie.

ETA: this is the link to the video on YouTube, where it might be easier to see.

Save, Lord, Or We Perish

I keep wanting to post video of Jerry on the blog, but so far I don't know how to upload something from a DVD onto the computer.  So I looked around on YouTube and found a clip from the second disk of the Sacred Harp documentary Awake, My Soul - when the camera is facing the tenor section, Jerry is at the far end of the first row next to the wall, holding a fan.  (If you look at the still image before you play the clip, you can see him.)  The song is led by our dear friend Reba, at Liberty Church in Henagar, AL back in July 2005 (earlier in this blog I've posted photos of Jerry leading that weekend - the bright lights in the background of those photos were for the cameras the Hintons were using to shoot the singing).

Someday I'll figure out how to get video of Jerry leading on this blog.

JME, NYC, June 2004

Jerry grew to love New York as much as I did.  Here he is at the fountain at Lincoln Center again.

Hard

I spent most of today back in a numb state, thinking I was understanding rationally that I was going to have to start feeling better at some point, wondering about when that would be, blah blah blah.  I went through some more papers.  I went out and got a dowel to replace the perch on the bird feeder: it disappeared a while back, and we'd been sticking random twigs through the support holes in the feeder to replace the perch, but lately no birds had been using the feeder with the Joe Pye weed stalk I'd stuck on it last week, so I felt like it was time to make more of an effort - Jerry wouldn't have liked the birds not coming to the feeder.  I cut the dowel to length on Jerry's miter saw in the basement (never having used a miter saw before), sanded the ends and installed it in the feeder, and just now checked and saw what was probably what Jerry would call an indigo "buntning" (extra n deliberate, of course) on it.  So that was good.  Also got more acetaminophen and pseudoephedrine to deal with the headaches... second day in a row with those now.

Picked up the mail on the way back in and discovered the Illinois unemployment people are ordering me to attend some sort of job search workshop on 4 August as a condition for continuing to receive the paltry little amount of unemployment benefits they're giving me.  Whatever.  I checked job search sites again, and not having any idea what I want to do with my life, in every possible way, does not add to my longstanding inability to create a career or know what I'm even capable of or what I'd be happy... ha... doing.  I don't want to end up in clerical work again.  I can't be a cabinet finisher anywhere else because my cabinet finishing never progressed past the actual finishing part: I can't match colors, I can't choose the appropriate finish medium for a given project, I can't even fix the equipment I've been using for 11 years if something goes wrong with it.  I always just asked Jerry.  And at Wood Bros. that worked out okay.  Anywhere else, it wouldn't be enough.  I'd make a good editor (or at least a proofreader), but my only experience with editing was a few months in 1987 in St. Paul... long ago and far away.  And my not even knowing where I'm going to end up living, if I'm going to stay here or move somewhere else, makes me feel even more paralyzed about it all.

But anyway, so there I was, getting through another day, with, I thought, less pain.  Which didn't make sense for 5 1/2 weeks, but I thought, I'm managing today, this is hard, but it's happening.  And then I was looking out the window of our bedroom and the full force of the fact that I'm never, ever going to see Jerry again hit me so incredibly hard - maybe I wanted to tell him I'd fixed the bird feeder, I don't know.   But whatever it was, I knew at that moment that he's not coming back, that I'm never going to see him again, never hear him say "I love you," never be able to say it to him ever again.  Never touch him again.

How do I survive this?  All I want is him.  I just want him to come home to me.  He was everything to me, he was who I waited my whole life for, he was Mr. Right, the love of my life, and how do I keep going without him?  I miss him so much.  I just don't want to go on without him.

Pondering the future

As this blog easily shows, there is nothing about my life at this moment that is right.  I was supposed to be a happily married woman with decades of happily-marriedness still to come.  Jerry was supposed to be here.  All the consequences of those things not being true anymore are what my life consists of now, and I hate every single thing about it.

However... this is the way it is now.  And right now I can't begin to imagine how I'm going to get past this and move into any kind of existence that won't be shot through with pain every single instant I'm awake.  But...

... I do know that I am going to have to create some kind of new life for myself.  I read a lot of blogs now, and postings on bulletin boards, all by people who've experienced the death of a spouse or partner at a relatively (relatively!) young age, and I've noticed some people who are now at four years, five years "out," as they put it... and still seem to be wrestling with the intense agony of loss and bereavement, still seem to be waiting for their loved ones to walk in the door, still spend days lying on the floor wailing.  Still seem to be posting on bulletin boards for widowed people.

I do not want to be in that place years from now.  The thought that I might still be feeling this agony years from now is horrifying.  I try to imagine what Jerry would be experiencing if our roles had been reversed, if I had died and Jerry had survived me.  I cannot imagine that he would have spent the rest of his life mired in misery, and I wouldn't have wanted him to.  Jerry found enjoyment and interest in so many things in this life, and was such an optimistic person, that I have to believe he would have been able to find joy again.  And someday I need to be able to do that as well.  Right now, I can't imagine it.  But I know that getting past this pain is an absolute necessity, or what will be the point of continuing to breathe?  I don't know how or when I will get to a place in which Jerry isn't in my thoughts every single waking hour, or when I'll stop missing him so intensely that it's physically painful, or when I'll stop hoping he's really, really going to come back.  But that time has to come.  I have to be open to it coming, and I have to help it get here.  Somehow.

I am not looking for reassurance from anyone that I'll "get through this" - I don't know, no one knows, really, how I'm going to feel, what this journey is going to be like for me, how low the valleys will be, how high the peaks, how long it's going to be before things even out and become more normal.  But that normal place is what I'm aiming for.  That unimaginable place... that may or may not exist.

I don't know.  No one does.  But I have to hope.

Again with the computer camera, 14 September 2008

Sometimes there are hidden landmines

I was going through papers at the shop today, organizing bills by vendor, when I found a small piece of paper in a plastic bag in the inbox on Jerry's desk.  It turned out to be the instructions, with Jerry's name and the date 1/20/2010, for drinking contrast dye before a CT scan.  The scan from two days after the sigmoidoscopy that found the tumor, the scan that found cancer in Jerry's liver and lymph nodes.

And I learned that crying only makes a raging headache even worse.

Lots more crying these days.  Lots as in more frequent bouts, and lots as in lasting longer after it starts.

Two positive things today: one, the bidding on Jerry's Droid has reached the reserve amount I set, so unless the high bidder (who only has one rating, and that in 2009, which makes me nervous) flakes out and doesn't pay, it will sell even if no one else bids.  And two, friends in Alabama have offered to have me stay with them when I go down (see, I'm saying "when," not "if"... trying to be sure about this) in August.  The more I had thought about staying in the hotel, the more queasy about it I was feeling - it's one of the same hotels Jerry and I often stayed at, and the thought of being there without him was not getting any easier.  This doesn't take care of being without him at the Park, Ride and Fly, the airport in Chicago, the airport in Nashville, the rental car counter at BNA, or the singing itself - but it does fortuitously make one big problem go away.  So thank you, David and Karen, for the invitation.

I'm nervous about doing the drive to and from Midway by myself.  Before I moved to Illinois, I hadn't done much driving, and Jerry did pretty much most of the driving when we were together in the car until early 2004, when his left thumb met the table saw and he spent a lot of time on painkillers.  After that, he tended to have me do all the local driving just as a matter of course, including our daily commute to and from the shop - I suspect he just wanted me to feel as comfortable as possible behind the wheel of the car.  But with one exception, he always drove to Chicago, and to and from the airports, because he knew highway driving in big cities makes me nervous.  The one exception, if I'm remembering right, was when he got bronchitis while we were in Birmingham one year for the Alabama State Sacred Harp Convention and wasn't up to driving home from Midway when we got back.  And I did take someone to the airport after a visit once.  But all in all, this whole prospect makes me nervous.  Just another aspect of life on my own to deal with.

I've got today's morning-to-evening headache almost beaten into submission.  I do have a tendency to get headaches at times, and I'm sure my current really bad sleep patterns aren't helping.  The ENT doctor we used to go to until she retired had me have a scan of my sinuses a bunch of years back and said I have really small sinuses and a deviated septum, and it doesn't take much swelling to cause the tissue to hit bone and cause pain.  But she said surgery could actually make things worse, so I never pursued it.  Somehow, through sheer necessity I suppose, I managed not to have any significant health problems from the time Jerry was diagnosed with cancer until he died - now I keep expecting my body to decide it's had enough and collapse.  This is the first of those really bad headaches I've had in months and months.  Sometimes they start happening on a daily basis... I hope this isn't the start of that.

Another shot of JME on the porch, May 2009

To the bank teller:

Sorry for weeping at the teller station this afternoon.  Didn't mean to make you uncomfortable.

And to me: constantly refreshing the Droid listing on eBay will not make the bidding reach the reserve amount any faster.  Not quite there... but there are still six days to go on the listing, so with any luck someone will bid it up a few dozen dollars more and it'll sell, along with the accessories Jerry bought to go with it.  I've listed it as a charity auction, and have earmarked 10% of the selling price, if it sells, for Stand Up To Cancer.

The Latke Chef in action

Us, November 2008

What I will not be doing next month

Because I can't help it, I just watched more videos of Sacred Harp singings - this time Holly Springs and Liberty Decoration Day from 1999.  There we are, younger, so much still ahead of us.  There I am, bouncing all over the place when I lead (and probably singing alto, too, I blush to say).  There's Jerry, his hair darker, longer.  Because of the situation at the time, to the outside world then we were still just traveling buddies, if people were even connecting us at all.  Traveling buddies who were secretly in love.

I'm in most of the shots, because I'm sitting in the alto section at both singings, with the camera facing the altos most of the time.  The altos' reactions to everything are usually on full display in Sacred Harp videos, since the camera tends to face the leader, and the leader stands, most of the time, with his back to the altos.

When the camera occasionally sweeps around to the tenor, you see Jerry at Holly Springs, sitting next to Kelly Beard.  Back to the alto and there I am, sitting next to Amanda Denson.  There's Kenneth DeLong at Holly Springs.  Lamar Smith at Liberty.  Jimmie Denney at Holly Springs, Felton Denney, Mattie Townsel.

It's one of those things that happen to newcomers to Sacred Harp singing: first you sit and listen during the memorial lesson, and the names on the list of the deceased are not familiar to you.  Then you keep going to singings, and you meet people, and you start recognizing the names on the memorial lists.  They're people you've met, people you've sat beside, people you know.  Then, sometimes, things get even more personal, even more painful.

Come August, I will hear Jerry's name read aloud on a memorial list for the first time.

What I will not be doing next month at Lookout Mountain is sitting in the alto section.

If I have the courage to go at all.

JME, May 2009

In the doorway leading to the gorgeous living room he created.

Another thing gone

Jerry's cellphone number disappeared today.  Seamus and I went to a Verizon store and had them cancel Jerry's service... the service on the Droid he got a few days before he was hospitalized.  He was going to use the Droid to surf ("smurf," as he'd say) the Web when he was at home recovering from chemo treatments and didn't feel up to getting out of bed, and he was going to use the newly added text messaging to keep in touch with me at the shop on days when he didn't feel up to coming to work.  While he was recovering.  Getting stronger, regaining his health.

I wrote that cellphone number into my address book in 1998, when I met Jerry.

I bought myself a new address book a few weeks ago.

And now I have a hardly-ever-used Droid to put on eBay.

(And the Verizon store was having computer problems, so sorting out all the service plan stuff took a long time.  But that's okay... you want painful things to last as long as possible, don't you?)

In other news, binge eating was halted as of yesterday morning, and I'm back to counting Weight Watchers points again.  I figure I've gained something like 5 pounds since Jerry died, which puts me at 3 pounds over where I want to be, which doesn't sound like a lot, and isn't, except for my tendency to gain weight right in the middle of my body... which means my pants are feeling tighter around the waist, and I am not going to go out and buy bigger pants.  I find it sort of fascinating that body image anxiety seems to be so strong in me that it can outlast the worst thing that could possibly happen to me.  But I guess it's a good thing, or, given the way I've been eating since 13 June, I'd probably end up with sweatpants being the only things that fit me if I didn't rein it in.

I started up my DVD workouts again yesterday as well.  I had thought that exercising would be a good way to get out of my head a bit, which was just more magical thinking on my part - especially since the DVD I did yesterday is one Jerry would occasionally do part of with me, so every move brought memories of him working out next to me, and Leslie Sansone's chanting of "Walk, walk, walk" reminded me of Jerry's slightly amused/ slightly exasperated imitation of her.  Tonight I'll go back to what we called "the Shred," the Jillian Michaels torture DVD - Jerry only tried that one once, and decided it definitely wasn't for him.

A definite case of "fake it 'til you make it" - maybe at some point I'll care more about all this.  But going through the motions of something physical is at least doing something physical.

JME, Latke Chef

Every December, I'd make up the batch of batter for the latkes, but Jerry would do the cooking - he was always in charge of cooking anything that required flipping.  Every year at that time I called him the Latke Chef - he'd have pronounced that second word with a ch as in "chalk," because he loved playing with words.  This is the Latke Chef in December 2008, enjoying the fruits... or should I say pancakes... of his labors.

Purple Coneflowers (Echinachea purpurea)

Jerry would have loved this so much.  He planted wildflower seeds (which he got from the same company that supplies the flowers planted along I-24 in Tennessee, which we always loved to see as we drove down from BNA to singings in Alabama) in the yard last fall, and this spring there've been waves of flowers - the first batch I took photos of with my cellphone, which he looked at in the hospital - although they were awful little photos and he couldn't have made out much - and now there are lots of purple coneflowers, a flower he liked and planted a lot, which are attracting so many large, colorful butterflies.  He would have loved it.  He would have been taking photo after photo with the camera he got for his birthday in February and never had a chance to enjoy.

I miss him so much.  Everything that happens is something he's not here for, something I can't share with him, and that's how it will be for the rest of my life, and it just hurts so, so much.  I don't understand how I'm supposed to keep going, or why.

OK...  blot tears, blow nose, take deep breath.

Went through a few more things in the basement today (not sure why there were LL Bean catalogues from the late 1990s - I think they probably migrated with us from Hendee Street when we moved into the house and just got stowed in the basement and forgotten.  Although, ahem, we moved in midway through 2000, so they were already past their usefulness by then).  There's still a lot of boxes and piles to be sorted, some of which are Jerry's things and will have to wait until I can face doing that.  I did find a wooden box, which possibly Jerry made, with a few old family photos in them, which I'll give to Seamus tomorrow for him and Erin to have.  Photos of little boy Jerry, before he was Jerry, back when he was Jim, make me cry as much as everything else does, even though obviously I never knew that little boy - but I just think about what that little boy ended up going through at the end of his life and it just breaks my shattered heart all over again.

I keep reading that eventually the details of sickness and suffering fade away and are replaced by happier, older memories of better times.  I hope that happens soon.  Last night I was lying in bed and started thinking of the tubing that stretched from the oxygen concentrator, which made so much noise that we put it in the dining room, into the bedroom during Jerry's final days, and how much the cannula bothered him, and then I remembered that soon after he died I realized the cannula was still there and I took it off of him so he was finally free of yet another of all those tubes, so many damn tubes.  I don't want to remember those things anymore.  It was painful when he was having to go through it - and now it's painful to have to remember it.  I hope these memories fade away soon.

I want to take a moment again to thank all of you who've been sending messages and cards: I appreciate your words and your kindness.  Thank you.

P.S. I finished the Didion.  I didn't expect a happy, upbeat resolution and the assurance that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine, and I didn't get it.  I have no more wisdom about surviving this than I had before.  So no more magical thinking about The Year of Magical Thinking.

My sweetie

(When I've posted all the photos I can find, I suppose I'll have to go back and start from the beginning again...)

JME, Cabinetmaker

June 2009, in the office Jerry built and installed in a walk-in closet in my parents' NYC apartment.

Still trudging onward

More small accomplishments.  Laundry, for one thing, yesterday (just my own clothes.  Hate it).  Remembering to empty the dehumidifiers so they can keep running.  On a slightly larger scale, taking clothing and other things of mine that I've sorted through off to Goodwill today, taking the old cellphones up to the Verizon store for them to recycle.  Receiving a retainer request from the lawyer (that seems like an encouraging sign, although the typos in the agreement, whereby Seamus and I in one section are turned into "Jams" and I, are less encouraging).  And so on.

As for me... yesterday morning I woke up with one image in my mind... Jerry's forehead, not his whole face, for some reason, just his forehead, which I was all ready to kiss until I remembered.  Today I've felt more numb and foggy again - which doesn't mean there haven't been the daily episodes of howling and wailing and such - there have, there always are.  But I feel like I'm wandering around in a fog, that nothing is totally clear or totally real.

My honey

Playing with the camera in the Mac

(2008, I think.)

But all I've got is a photograph

Met with the new lawyer - seems nice, seems competent, seems willing to return phone calls.  Also has a secretary and partners, which I've put on a list of requirements for any lawyer I may need to engage in the future (well, a secretary, anyway).  And an office.  Not sure how exactly everything's going to go, nor exactly how much it's going to cost us to deal with Jerry's "estate," such as it is, and winding up the business.  But, foolish as I may be for this, I feel more confident we're actually dealing with a professional now.  Still a lawyer, though.  So I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself.

The previous lawyer actually called this evening - I let the answering machine pick up.  All sorts of excuses - was out of the office - apparently didn't have her cell phone all this time, I have to guess, since I left messages there too - apparently also didn't check her office messages for a couple of weeks.  Not that I think she really has an office, since when I met with her, it was at the offices of a title insurance company.  But anyway, no matter how you look at it, it won't wash.  Plus, her cell phone rang a few times during that one meeting I had with her, and I saw her look at it when it rang and let the call go to voicemail - so I've seen her modus operandi with her phone.  Anyway, she said a bunch of other stuff, but the upshot is, she doesn't sound like she's going to be surprised when I leave her a message saying I've found another lawyer.  (Definitely plan to make this call when I'm pretty sure she'll be out of the office - she doesn't have time to talk to me, I certainly don't have time to talk to her.)

So anyway, slight progress, I guess.

I keep looking at the photos of Jerry I've been posting on this blog.  I don't quite get how posting these photos works - sometimes they can be enlarged by clicking on them a couple of times, I've noticed, and sometimes they can't, and I suppose it has something to do with how they're uploaded, but it seems to be random.  Anyway, the ones I can enlarge, I keep enlarging, so that Jerry's face is almost life size on my computer screen, and I can see the details of the hairs of his beard, his sweet blue eyes, his adorable happy smile.  It almost feels as if you could reach in to the screen and touch his skin.  Looking at these photos again and again might be crazy.  It often makes me cry.  Then again, lots of things do that, every day.  Some of them I probably could avoid, if I thought ahead more clearly.  But I'm going to cry - I've been crying since January, and I know I have lots more crying to do.  And I can't stop looking at the photos.  I miss him so much.  I want to see him, hear his voice.  I keep watching videos of him leading at Sacred Harp singings.  I listen to the tracks on Sacred Harp CDs where he's leading, to hear him introduce the song, even if it's just his voice saying the page number - except this is Jerry, the professor manqué, so in several of the recordings he doesn't just say the page number, but adds a dedication or a comment.  I used to just think it was one of his quirks and smile at it.  Now I'm so grateful he did that, so I have those recordings to listen to.

This all seems so unreal.  So unreal.  I wish it were.  I want him to come home.

What do you call 1,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?

Not surprisingly, the lawyer never answered any messages, including this morning's, in which I told her I thought it was time for me to find a new lawyer.  What a professional way to get rid of a client you don't want - by simply blowing her off and refusing to return her phone calls.  Incredible.  Then again, I've been wondering whether the thing is that law school turns people into assholes, or that assholes are the people who go to law school.

Then I contacted the only other one of the original ones I called who'd gotten back to me.  When he got back to me this time, he told me he didn't do bankruptcies (for the business), mumbled the name of a lawyer?firm? around here that he said does, and was fairly shirty about it all.  Should have known that someone who identifies himself on the phone as "Attorney Harlovic" would be a problem.

A lawyer I called in Algonquin answered his own phone, said he was in a meeting, and said he'd call me back within the hour.  Didn't.  Called back much later, and I let it go to voicemail, because by then I'd already...

... gotten home, looked lawyers up in the good ol'-fashioned Yellow Pages, called a firm in Crystal Lake, and spoken to an actual lawyer, who sounded pleasant enough... but he is a lawyer, so I'm not jumping to any conclusions.  But anyway, Seamus and I will meet with him tomorrow morning at his office in Crystal Lake.

Hate this.

(The answer is, of course, "A good start.")

JME at the ballpark on Staten Island, August 2005

Us in New York

Photos from a flashdrive from my parents, taken in the early 2000s.

Master cabinetmaker at work

Jerry measuring for cabinets for my parents' NYC kitchen.  Not sure what year - 2001?

Be my lawyer, or don't. Decide already.

So Seamus and I have been leaving messages for the lawyer for what is it - two weeks now?  None of which she's bothered to return.  Tomorrow's message will be asking if she is actually working on Jerry's estate issues, and if she has time to deal with that and the cabinet business issues, or if I should be finding another lawyer.  Enough with this shit.

Latest stupidity, besides the lawyer ("The first thing we do, let's..."), is me being first on the phone and then in an online chat with AT&T customer "service" today, trying to sort out a) why I never got my latest bill, either electronically or via regular mail and b) why I can't log in to manage my account online.  Finally, the guy on the chat said he'd found out the problem (but wouldn't tell me what it was), was taking it to an "offline group," and would call back "in 3-5 business days" to let me know what had happened.  Say what?  What the fuck he was talking about, I do not have a clue.  All I can guess is that when I called and told them the person whose name was on the account had died and had them switch the service over to my name, they somehow put the login and billing info into some sort of limbo where they send the accounts of dead people.  Or why else wouldn't he tell me what the screw-up was?  Meanwhile, if I hadn't called, I presume the month would have gone by and the balance wouldn't have been paid, since I never got a bill, interest would have accrued, who knows, maybe my phone and Internet service would have been suspended.  The guy said there would be no interruption in my service.

Then, while still chatting, he asks if I used AT&T wireless to call customer service earlier.  I say no, knowing full well where this is heading.  He types back something about some special rate and free phone I can get by switching to AT&T wireless.  I type back that maybe we should sort out the problems with my existing service before he tries to sell me something else.

And more of my tooth enamel gets ground off.

At least someone from the cancer institute finally e-mailed back and apologized for sending Jerry a newsletter after he was already dead.

ETA: One month today.  The idea of more and more and more months to get through is unbearable.

JME, Lady Liberty, Staten Island Ferry, August 2005

Somewhat unjustly maligning mostly innocent insurance agents

I just realized it wasn't the supplemental health insurance that the insurance agent told me was cancelled - it was Jerry's dental insurance.  Was feeling apologetic until it occurred to me that the agent didn't think to cancel the supplemental health insurance.

Also had the thought flit through my brain for a moment just now that all these people who are sending me cards and photographs and messages are being so kind for no reason - it's all under false pretenses - because Jerry is... well, you know by now where my brain went.  Off into the realm of "Jerry isn't really dead."  It was only a momentary thought, but it felt real for a second, real beyond whatever strangeness is going on in my thinking.  Not sure I'm being coherent, or that I'm really able to explain what I mean.  Just that I had a moment of absolute certainty that Jerry is coming back.  I know it's not true, but it felt true for a moment.  Which is definitely a case of going in the wrong direction with regard to trying to adjust to this new, horrific reality.

Went through more papers today.  If I was surprised to see them after this past decade where they sat unnoticed in the basement, I certainly hadn't missed them, and into the recycling and/or shredder they went.  Basement... hmm, reminds me that I haven't heard the dehumidifiers going for a while, which means the buckets must be full up.  I'll empty them tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow I might start work finishing parts for what could be the final job for Wood Bros., Inc. Custom Cabinetmakers, if the customers have picked a stain color and Seamus gets parts cut.  Oh, Jerry - I so wish we could save the business and keep it going.  Wood Bros. did such beautiful work, even when the finished product was in appallingly bad taste (you can't dictate to customers who have more money than taste, after all) - if only some knight in shining armor would ride in to save the day and pay off its debts.  Although I don't know if going in to work there every day would ever get less painful for Seamus and me.

I "certified for benefits" with the Illinois Department of Employment Security for the first time today - theoretically you can do it online, but obnoxiously enough IDES requires Internet Explorer to do it.  I know what Jerry would think of being forced to use one of Bill Gates's products, and I agree.  Anyway, so I called in on the automated phone line, which I'll need to do once every two weeks in order to get my teeny little unemployment payments.  I could honestly say I had looked for work, since I sent my resume off electronically in response to four different clerical job listings.  I do not want to go back to a mindless clerical position, but I needed to apply somewhere, just to have applied.  I also don't want to sell shady health insurance policies on commission, but thanks anyway, you strange people who keep e-mailing me saying you've seen my resume online and think I'd be just perfect for that, even though your e-mails don't actually tell me what job you're talking about, and telling me to call for an interview.  What in my resume would make someone think I'm cut out for selling insurance, I can't begin to guess.  (Cabinet finisher?  Russian translator?  Bilingual secretary?)  I'm sensing a scam of some sort, although I don't know enough about it to know what the scam is.

I wonder if I'm worn out enough yet to be able to fall asleep when I go to bed.  It's a problem.  I was falling asleep on the couch watching The Damned United, then some repeats of Mad Men episodes, but I know if I go to bed at a decent hour, I'll lie there in bed with my mind whirring.  And the whirring starts again when I wake up at 5 a.m.  What I should do is try taking the sleep aid tablets at an earlier hour - if I take them this late, I'll be groggy until 10 a.m.  I keep forgetting about them until it's too late in the evening.  Maybe tomorrow I'll remember.

Getting on to midnight.  By the time I brush my teeth and wash my face and maybe read a bit of Didion (I'll never finish that book at this rate, always picking it up right before I'm going to bed very late in the evening), maybe I'll be able to sleep.

I have my own magical thinking going on, whereby the Didion book contains some sort of wisdom that, when I finish it, will have told me how to get through this pain and be okay - all I have to do is finish the book.  All sorts of things my brain is coming up with that, when I get them done, apparently will make things better.  I'll get all the papers in the house sorted, and I'll get the foundation of the house fixed, and I'll go to Lookout Mountain in August (and Jerry will be there.  No?), and somehow, magically... except I can't even finish the sentence coherently.  What will happen then?  This nightmare will go away?  Jerry will be back?  (No.  He won't.  But he will, because he must be.  The alternative is unthinkable.  Except I was there, I saw him die.  But that isn't possible.  It's NOT POSSIBLE.  Repeat, repeat, repeat.)

The dangers of blogging late at night.

Mistletoe, July 2005

The sprig of mistletoe was kept permanently on that door frame.  Why on earth would I want to take it down?

Waiting

The chimney and the dryer vent are clean and shiny now - that was taken care of this morning.  Caleb, the technician, showed me that we had a dryer vent brush that had clearly been used before, and showed me how to do it next time, but when he asked if he should go ahead and clean it anyway, I said yes - one less thing to deal with for the moment.

Seamus came by while Caleb was at work on the chimney and loaded up his pickup truck bed with an old non-functioning lawnmower, a non-functioning chainsaw, a non-functioning bread machine, a non-functioning dehumidifier, plus sundry other appliances and objects (the old stainless steel sink that was in the kitchen when we moved into the house ten years ago was residing up in the rafters of the garage - I don't know what Jerry planned to do with it, or if he thought he might sell it someday).  There's a metal recycler next door to the cabinet shop, so he was going to drop everything off there.  He also found Jerry's trumpet, finally, up in a closet near the entrance to the attic.

When the mail came, I discovered that the insurance agent was wrong when he told me he'd cancelled Jerry's supplemental health insurance policy - that seems to be pretty basic, I would think - what else do insurance agents do but open policies and cancel them?  Sigh... so I called BlueCross and they told me to send in a copy of the death certificate and they'll refund the premium amount paid up through August from the day after Jerry died, to his "estate."  However that's done.

Then I discovered that Classmates.com had charged Jerry $15 for membership five days after he died, so it took a phone call to the credit card company and then a phone call to Classmates.com to get that charge removed. I had already had them take down Jerry's profile, after having left a note there for a while telling visitors to it that Jerry had died.

I hate doing all these things, having to tell all these strangers on the other end of the phone over and over again that my husband died a month ago.  Which is sort of schizophrenic of me, I suppose, considering my earlier posting about seeming to be unable to stop telling random strangers that my husband died.

Meanwhile, still waiting for stuff.  Waiting for word (or, preferably, a check) back from the life insurance company.  Waiting for the lawyer, who's gone incommunicado, to get back to me and tell me what's happening - left her a message this morning, and Seamus has left her several messages over the last week.  Now waiting for the scary estimate from Steve. As of this morning, after calling to organize it, waiting for a one-time "death payment" of $255 from Social Security - why they pay that, and what on earth they think a person can do with that small an amount of money that will make a difference in her life, I have no clue.  At 47, and with no dependent children, I'm not entitled to any other Social Security payments on Jerry's account, although the woman on the phone did make sure to tell me that when I'm 60 I might be eligible.  As if Social Security will still be around if I make it to 60, or as if someone born in 1962 won't have had the eligibility age pushed to 85 by then!

A singer from Michigan who takes photos of people leading at Sacred Harp conventions sent me a framed photo of Jerry, which was very sweet of her.  It's on my desk now, where I can see it as I'm typing.  In it Jerry's wearing a blue polo shirt that I loved him in - it made his baby blues just pop.  You can see the photo here.  It was taken four years ago at Lookout Mountain.

[ETA: I just noticed he's wearing that same shirt in a picture in my previous post.  My handsome husband.]

I miss my honey.

A couple more

Two photos my mother sent today - thanks, Mommy:

At my parents' apartment in NYC, January 2005

Again at my parents' apartment, 15 August 2007

Self-portraits, 2004

(The last one is blurry, obviously, but I love the photo too much not to post it anyway.)

I cannot live without my life

The lightbulb in one of the two lamps in the bedroom has burnt out, I just discovered.  It's a CFL.  I've never even seen a CFL burn out before.  Does the universe think this is funny?

I got more papers out of the basement today and went through them - fairly damp, most of them, so it's a good thing I've got those dehumidifiers going.  I also found a silver necklace that had belonged to a great aunt - I was absolutely convinced I'd lost it / it had been stolen out of a hotel room in Alabama years and years ago.  It was in a little ring box in a carton in the basement, for some reason, separate from my other jewelry.  I immediately wanted to tell Jerry about finding it.  Of course.  I know some people actually do talk to those they love after they're dead - but I guess those people have some sense, belief or feeling that their loved ones are still around in some way or other, in some form or other.  I wish I believed that.  I keep thinking of those lines of Heathcliff's, which I just googled again to get them right: "Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!...  I CANNOT live without my life!  I  CANNOT live without my soul!"  I would have to add, myself, I cannot make myself believe what I don't believe.  But I wish I could.  I want so much to think that Jerry is still here - I know he's not, I know he's dead, but I wish I believed in spirits, in ghosts, in souls that stayed connected to the people they left behind.  I wish I was one of those people on the bulletin boards who think psychics aren't cynical frauds and are actually delivering messages from their dead husbands, I wish I was someone who thought a dream about a dead husband was a message from him, I wish I was someone who thought that all I had to do was live out my life and then die, and I'd be reunited with Jerry and be with him forever.  And that in the meantime he's somehow still here, watching over me, taking care of me, loving me. 

But I don't, and I can't.  I can't make myself believe what I don't believe.  I don't feel his presence at all, I don't think he's sending me messages, I don't feel like, as long as people remember him, he "hasn't really died."  Because he has.  I was there.  I saw it.

Prove me wrong, universe.  Make a fool of me, show me how wrong I've been.  Please.  Give him back to me.