I wonder how many of you remember Max Headroom, the TV character from the 1980s. There was a series based on the character that I never saw (I just remember advertisements), but Jerry did see it, and he liked it, and was really looking forward to it being released on DVD. I had let him know that the blog tvshowsondvd.com had it listed for release, and assumed we'd get it from Fletnix (as, of course, he called it) when it came out.
It was released on Tuesday. I just put it in my Fletnix queue.
Some things I can do, so far, and others I can't. I can continue watching things we started together, I can put Max Headroom on my queue, I can eat some of the things I bought for both of us, or even specifically for Jerry. Some of them. I can't eat the two bags of black "Twizzles" that I got for when Jerry got his appetite back (he loved black "Twizzles"). I can't move the uneaten half of a Heath bar that's wrapped up on his desk upstairs in the Buddha bedroom. I apparently can't move the green suitcase he used when I first met him and he and Lynne and I started meeting up at airports in the South to go to Sacred Harp singings, not without crying - I went downstairs and moved some things, saw the suitcase, decided (without thinking ahead) to see if he'd left anything in it and discovered an itinerary for a visit he made to NYC in October 1999 - when I'd come back to NYC from my "trial period" in Illinois to put my apartment on the market and pack up to move back here permanently (we both knew the "trial period" wasn't really that - what, I wasn't going to follow my heart to its home... which was wherever Jerry was?). Also hotel information for a trip to the Alabama State Sacred Harp Convention in November 2007. After that I decided today was going to have to be an unproductive day, I was just not up to dealing with anything.
Tomorrow Steve the contractor et al. should be here around 11 a.m. Saturday I've got an appointment for a massage and facial, using a spa gift certificate Lynne and Laura gave us for our 10th anniversary in March - as with so much else, it was meant for when Jerry felt up to it, and was ready for some pampering, and we'd have gone together. So anyway, there's some scheduling going on in my life. Not a lot... I'm thinking of Lookout Mountain as a big demarcation point: after it's over, I find myself thinking, it will be time to move forward with things. I also think, though, that I'm trying to impose scheduling on something that will not submit to it, namely this hideous grieving process. Tomorrow is two months since Jerry died, going by calendar dates, and one more week after that is not going to mean I'm actually in any better condition for "moving forward." Two months is no time at all. Not for this.
The end of summer has never been something I've liked. As a kid, of course, it meant school was around the corner - the time between my birthday and the Jerry Lewis Telethon, and the start of school the next day, always flashed by - gone before I knew it. Now that I'm older, it's the loss of warmth and light that have gotten to me - I dread the leaves turning and falling off the trees and leaving them bare, I dread the grayness and cold and dark. And now, with the disappearance of the warmth and green and light, Jerry's death will be in the process of becoming even more real to me - he won't be here. He won't be here. He said once, I think when we were driving to the shop after one of his radiation treatments, that he was really glad that it was getting towards spring as he was having to endure all of this, because it was getting warmer and lighter out, and it would have been unbearable to have to go through this and also deal with winter. And now the prospect of dealing with winter without Jerry's warmth - without Jerry, without Jerry - scares me more than I can say.
People have told me "He's still with you," "He'll always be with you." I hope someday I actually do feel something like that, somehow feel his presence in my life. Because right now I don't - I can't touch him, I can't hear him, I can't smell his lovely scent or taste his lips, he's not there to listen to me, he isn't here at all - all there is is his absence. It's the huge hole at the center of my existence. And it hurts.
I sometimes find that I find healing best when I come to it indirectly (it feels to me like letting myself be backed into a parking space, instead of my insisting on going in through the front door -- I know I'm mixing metaphors, but the feeling is a mixture of both). The indirect stuff I come to through listening to what's within me, through hearing good stuff through others, through witnessing my feelings, through cleaning up the sources of my troubling feelings, or at least naming them as a start to cleaning them up. I have to be willing to let go of doing it "my way," is what I've found -- the path is more circuitous, but it's actually more effective in the long run, at least for me, to follow that indirect path (which is not to say I don't sometimes "complain loudly" (go kicking and screaming?) along the way) and recognize that the impediments are things within me that I can work on. I think the hole "disappears" when the flow of love can become an outflow again, it's how to facilitate that that I try to work on. Also, someone once told me, from her own experience, that sometimes doing the one thing you really don't want to do, helps (for her, it was visiting a house she had grown up in -- I think it was her mother's death she was grieving).
ReplyDelete