Just in time?

I have an appointment with a "counselor" tomorrow afternoon.  I put that in quotation marks because I'm not exactly sure what a counselor is as opposed to other forms of therapists, i.e. I'm guessing she isn't able to write prescriptions, which might be a problem.  If that's the case, and if I need to find someone else to take care of that, I may try my endocrinologist and see if she'd be able to give me something even though it has nothing to do with the reasons I see her (my last primary care doctor was the previous endocrinologist, the one who didn't take credit cards or call in prescriptions or even use computers much, and the last straw with whom was when I saw him, had a blood draw to have my blood levels checked, was called back to come in again the next week, went in, paid another co-pay - just to have him write a new prescription, and nothing more.  That's when I found the new endo, but she's not a primary care doctor, I was told, and currently I don't have one.  End of digression).

I think this is just in time, at any rate: today I've been too tired to function, but when I lay down and tried to take a nap, my brain kept buzzing, and, oh fun, decided it was time yet again to revisit specifics of Jerry's hospitalization (I have got to stop reading Theresa Brown's posts to the Well Blog in the New York Times - they invariably remind me of things about Jerry's time in the hospital that end up making me despondent and furious at the same time.  The other day I was commenting to Erin that I don't seem to be angry, just desolate and sad, and she mentioned things like all the colonoscopies that showed nothing was wrong, and I realized that yeah, I am angry.  Whenever the writings on grieving mention anger, I always think they mean getting angry at the person who died for some reason, and since I haven't had a shred of anger towards Jerry - about his illness and death, I mean - I'm not saying I was never angry at him during our marriage - we had an amazing marriage, not a fictitious one! -  I forget that there are lots of other people I am angry at.  I keep writing a letter in my mind to Jerry's original gastroenterologist, asking him if a lot of his patients end up dying when he doesn't see stage IV tumors in the colonoscopies and sigmoidoscopies he performs, or if Jerry was just a special case).  But anyway, yeah, napping didn't happen, but neither did much of anything else today, other than talking to various people associated with the mental health practice I contacted (the one that got back to me in less than 8 hours, that is), finally coming up with someone in the town just north of here.

(Not sure why I bothered going through the Blue Cross website for this after all - turns out, with the high deductible on my policy, I'd be paying large fees out of pocket for a long time before the insurance kicked in at all - so the counselor suggested not going through the insurance and having me pay directly a smaller fee, which makes sense, is much more reasonable, and is what I'm doing.)

In addition to being exhausted, I'm crying noticeably more, and when I do, it feels deeper, if that's the word I'm looking for - I can't think of a good word.  Like it's going deeper, that's what I keep coming up with, like previously the sorrow was somehow on the surface, but now it's... deeper.  No, I can't figure out how else to describe it.  Maybe more real.  Maybe more of that feeling that Jerry really isn't coming back, ever.  I even feel like I'm sometimes watching myself back away from it, like my mind is saying "No. No. NO," and trying somehow to come up with another explanation for his absence, his being missing for coming on three months now.  Some other reason that no one has worn those sneakers next to his nightstand in so long, or that his glasses are sitting there on that stand, or that his hearing aids are in the drawer.

So, yeah.  A good time for this appointment.

The Get-Karen-Out-Of-The-House plans for the rest of the week are: counselor tomorrow, manicure and pedicure on Thursday (thanks to more of the gift certificate from Laura and Lynne for our anniversary, and with any luck this time without the technician claiming to be channeling Jerry from the Great Beyond), and off to Atlanta on Friday, thence to Alabama for the United Sacred Harp
Musical Association.  The United used to be one of the conventions we never missed, until the state of the finances of Wood Bros. and its owners/employees intervened.  Jerry had a long association with it, having chaired it in 1994 when it was at Emmaus in Carrollton, GA (I think I've written this already...).  He told me that attendance at the United had been waning, and leading up to that year's convention he mailed a flyer to every single singer listed in the directory as living in Georgia and Alabama.  In 1998, the United was held in Huntsville, and it was the next singing Jerry and I attended after meeting at Lookout Mountain a few weeks before - we had started e-mailing each other and Jerry had suggested I go to the United.  Lynne, who hadn't been at Lookout Mountain, was at the United, and after watching Jerry walk up behind me during a break and put his hands on my shoulders and give them a rub, she later told me it was completely obvious that he "liked" me (I wasn't sure at that point) (another clue was that at that singing Jerry spent time sitting in the treble section, near to where I was in the alto section, and I had no idea until much later that he hardly ever, if ever, sang treble, and that the only reason he was sitting there was to be near me.  In retrospect, I wonder if people he usually sang with saw him in the treble and thought "What in the world is he doing over there?").

There are so many parenthetical sentences in this post, I'm losing track of things.  Sorry!  My writing used to be a lot more scattered, like this post, so it's pretty amazing more of my posts don't come out this way.

By the way - I don't mean to sound disingenuous, but I continue to be amazed, hearing from people who are reading this blog - I appreciate your comments about it, both in the blog comments themselves and in your messages and the cards I'm even now still receiving, and the fact that you're sticking with it.  I go through periods in my life when writing is absolutely vital to my mental health - and I think it's interesting that during my marriage to Jerry, I didn't feel that drive to write in the same way.  Marriage to Jerry was really, really good for my mental health, among all the other things it was really good for.  Without it - well, there's another thing.  My last go-round with psychotherapy came to an end when I moved to Illinois to be with Jerry (and also, I firmly believe, made meeting and being with Jerry possible), and although there are issues some ongoing therapy probably would have been helpful with - namely, that of jobs and careers - until my happiness came crashing to an end with Jerry's death, I was muddling along okay without it.  Now, to come around full circle in this long and scattered post, I think I'm coming back to it just in time.