Tired, in so many ways. Just plain physically tired, which I'm sure is due to not being able to sleep well - if I go to bed too early, I lie there for hours thinking; if I stay up late enough so I'll be tired enough to sleep when I do go to bed, I'm up really late and then wake up before 6 a.m. anyway... no doubt from years of the alarm clock waking us up at 5:15 a.m. I only feel comfortable taking the sleep aid tablets on nights before days when I don't plan to get up at a reasonable hour.
Otherwise, just worn out, in general. Tired of being sad, tired of dealing with things I have to deal with, although, knock wood, so far things are going fairly well in the logistics department - although it's taken some things longer to happen than I'd have expected - like, when did Steve the contractor come out to the house - was it over three weeks ago? Just heard from him today, and he wants to bring the concrete guy out at the end of next week to check out what'll need to be done in the basement. I told him I've decided to take the painting of the upstairs rooms out of the proposal - looking at the rooms again, they don't look so bad, or at least the Buddha bedroom doesn't, and I can handle the rest of it, when I get around to it.
Called the insurance guy and asked him to get me a quote for an individual health insurance policy, now that Wood Bros. is winding down (which is a whole nother layer of sadness in itself). Still waiting to hear back on that. Had a message on the answering machine when I got home this afternoon reminding me of the "re-employment" workshop I'm required to attend in Woodstock on Wednesday morning, yee-ha. (By the way, for youse who don't know it, Woodstock, IL played the role of Punxsutawney, PA in the movie Groundhog Day. So now you know. Last time I was there was last fall, when Jerry and I went up to their farmers' market. We didn't repeat something we'd done a previous time up there, buying two huge buckets of chrysanthemums which brought on a bad allergic reaction in my honey, causing him to start wheezing later in that day.)
I'm tired of Jerry not being here. I've had way, way too much of his absence - it's enough, he needs to come home now, I miss him, I want him home. Last night was seven weeks since he died - I actually managed to get a few minutes past 10:02 before looking at the clock, thanks to the distraction of Mad Men. I keep going ahead with certain things we used to do, mostly TV shows we used to watch, I'm one disk into the last season of The Wire (and keep wanting to tell Jerry what's happened since he stopped watching, back in season 3 - back when I told him I'd read a spoiler about Stringer Bell but wasn't going to ruin it for him, was going to let him find out himself), the second series of Being Human is running on BBC America now, I sit there and watch the shows and most of it registers, except for the parts where I space out and start thinking about something else - if it's a DVD I can go back and re-watch the scenes, if not I just let them go. I know he didn't care that he never saw the last episodes of Lost, I know he was beyond remembering that the season of Fringe was ending, none of this was of any importance in the context of Jerry Enright's life coming to a painful and premature end, but now that I'm continuing on in the fictional TV worlds without him, it's just another reminder of his absence, just another thing I will never be able to share with him again. But it's no different from anything else: every single moment is marked by his absence, even when I'm asleep - I've dreamt about him the last two nights, and in the dreams something is wrong, I know something isn't right - he's ill, or he's not really there, or he's died but somehow is still present, except that I know it's temporary and he's going to have to leave.
I don't have any clear point to this blog entry. I'm just tired. And I miss my honey.
If you're just expressing yourself and not asking for advice, please ignore the following. Suppose you thought about Jerry's death in a different way: he had a lot of pain, seeing him in pain caused you pain, he died at age 67, you thought you would be together for longer, the loss of your partnership is very painful, learning to live as a single person under your circumstances is difficult, you preferred the life you had married to Jerry, not everybody goes through this, you no longer have the person who sees things the way you do to share them with ... Less of the should have beens and more about just the facts and the emotions they provoke, and hence facing the pain more directly and facing it for what it is -- an emotional response, rather than the (unchangeable) events themselves or secondary thinking. I worry that if one focuses on concepts like "premature," one ends up in a dead end. If you can unpack what you really mean by "premature" (like, I didn't expect this, other people live longer, I wanted more years together, I liked the way my life was when it was joined to his), you may be able to process the emotions and keep moving more easily. And if not now, then maybe at some time in the future. I think my general point is to untangle the primary emotions (e.g., pain) from the secondary editing (e.g., "this is wrong") -- pain one can work through, "this is wrong" is a dead end, I think in part because it doesn't leave the heart open, and an open heart is the entryway for healing.
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