For Aunt Woodie

In Huntsville after two more happy and sad days of Sacred Harp singing and visiting with friends.  The happy part was the joy I'm grateful, again, to realize I can still have from singing and from being among so many friends in the Sacred Harp community.  They're seeing me, at times, at my lowest, and they're okay with me being this way.  They knew Jerry and they loved him, and they miss him too.  (I felt sad about two singers this weekend who hadn't heard about Jerry's death before now - one in particular, I was told, had asked someone "I've seen Karen without Jerry - is he okay?"  What a shock it must have been, as it's been to everyone else, of course, to learn the news.)

Sad - well, if you've read anything in this blog before, that's obvious.  Yesterday I led 442, a song Jerry hadn't led a lot in recent years (partly because I'd started leading it a bunch for a while there, probably) but whose leading of it was on Bound for Canaan, a cassette tape of singing at Antioch I had got a few years before I met him.  It went fine - no crying.  I did get weepy towards the end of the day, but unless I'm just too exhausted to remember right, mostly I got through.  Today Cheyenne called Jerry's Sunday song, and I know when she did I exchanged a big smile with Lynne - how nice that Cheyenne was going to lead his Sunday song.  I wasn't even worried about getting through it.  And then we started singing the shapes, and it didn't take long for me find myself sobbing, and my body starting that weird trembling thing again.

Later, when I was called to lead, I called 378t.  A year ago, at the Lacy Memorial, Jerry, Lynne and I led that song in memory of Aunt Woodie Walker, whom I never knew, but who used to lead that song and for whom Jerry liked to lead it, as he liked to lead other songs in memory of various singers he knew and respected.  And that turned out to be Jerry's last song at Jerry's last singing.  So today I had Lynne, and Woodie's nieces Reba and Betty, come up and lead the song with me, for Aunt Woodie and for Jerry.  And I didn't cry then, either.

146 was the closing song.  I can't remember if I cried during it or not until after it, but by the closing prayer I was sobbing again.

It's so odd and so baffling, not knowing what's going to do it, what's going to make me go to that scary, dreadful, dark place where Jerry's death and permanent, non-changeable, non-reversible absence from my life are real.  But yeah, apparently I can count on 77t.  Also, still, 47b - I was waiting on line to use the bathroom outside the church doors when they sang that, early on this morning.  More tears.

In all, another weekend of being very glad to be here, where I can re-find some morsels of joy, and try to imagine a future with more and more such morsels.  Not successfully, yet.  But I can try.  I'll spend a couple of more days with friends here before heading back to Illinois and... maybe... the commencement of work on the basement and roof?  I was promised an estimate this weekend, by e-mail.  Coming up on 11:40 p.m. - no estimate.  Come on, Steve!

Then... what I think I need to do and what I think I'm capable of doing are not quite in sync.  I think I need to make decisions about things - finding a job; where I'll live; how I'm going to face the approach of autumn, the shorter and shorter days, less light, more cold, the disappearance of green, all without Jerry.  But I don't think I'm necessarily capable of making life-altering decisions yet.  It's only, what, 12 weeks since he died?  (I can't believe the time has already come when that number is not immediately obvious to me.  I can now think clearly in months, but not weeks.)  I'm still not 100% sure I believe I'll never see him again.  (I keep wanting to tell him that Bud seemed better this weekend, that they're adjusting his medication and that might get him back on his feet.  He would want to know.)

Jerry should be here.  I don't want to make so many huge decisions without him. I don't want to move forward into a life that takes me farther and farther from our life together.  I don't want to be his widow.  He needs to come back so I can be his wife again.  He belongs here with me.