Chi Chi Chi, le le le

Just watched the last rescuer emerge from that gold and copper mine in Chile, as Anderson Cooper babbled.  (How is it that I didn't know until yesterday or the day before that Gloria Vanderbilt is Anderson Cooper's mother?  I usually end up with trivia like that in my brain, but somehow it had escaped my notice before.)  Nice that something in this world had a happy outcome.  Also happy to hear the last rescuer out tell the president of Chile that mines need to operate safely.  Good for him.

I'm sitting in the living room, wondering what sort of beast or bird is out in the yard making an insistent loud cheeping sound - it's been happening every night for weeks now, and only after dark.  An owlet? That's what I keep thinking it might be.  And I keep wanting to tell Jerry.  Of course.

Today is the 13th of the month - four months now since Jerry died.  And I'm right on schedule to be more depressed, I guess, according to what's out there to read about bereavement.  Had a session with the counselor this afternoon, and while I can't say for sure that the sessions are improving things at all, I'm still finding them worthwhile while they're happening, so again, to her question "Next week?" I said yes.  The most helpful thing about today's session was being reminded that there's really not any rush for me to make huge life decisions.  I can't help feeling like there is - like I must decide where I'll live right away, now - but I feel totally paralyzed at the same time, since, as I've said before, I am not yet ready even to go through a single backpack of Jerry's, let alone an entire house full of things.  I can't move his slippers from next to his night stand, I can't even throw out the wrapped-up half of a Heath bar he left next to his computer.  I can't face having someone come to the house to work on the yard (Steve gave me a name and phone number), which would clearly need to be done before I even considered putting the house on the (extremely lousy) market, because I can't face having someone change anything that Jerry planted out there - even though the yard is being totally overrun by the buckthorn he was constantly battling against.

I feel torn because every day that I don't make a decision is a day I'm still here in this house without him. But I'm not ready to leave it yet.  But I'm alone in this house without him.  But I can't bear to leave.

So, yeah.  Torn.  Paralyzed.  Slightly frantic, but in a lethargic, exhausted kind of way.  And sort of wishing I could just go to sleep for a while and then wake up in a few years with everything having been decided and dealt with and settled.

Got home to find a letter from Blue Cross, wanting information on any medical providers I might have seen in the past five years that weren't listed on my original application.  Sounds to me like they really really want to find reasons not to pay out on claims, or to rescind my policy entirely.  As it is, I'm going to be over $400 out of pocket just for the baseline bloodwork the primary care doctor ordered.  And that's on top of the hundreds of dollars the ultrasound is going to cost me (and the result of that ultrasound was that nothing needs to be done, the fibroid is 2 cm larger than last year, but since it's not causing new symptoms, I can continue to watch and wait and hope menopause arrives in time to avoid having to do anything about it).  Anyway, I called Blue Cross to ask what this was about, and the woman I finally got hold of, after minutes of press-one-for-this and press-three-for-that had ticked by, said this was triggered by a claim that included a diagnosis of "depressive disorder" - and they wanted to see if that was a pre-existing condition, I suppose.  I said "Oh - well, my husband died four months ago - I didn't have that before."  And she did the usual "Oh, I'm so sorry" thing.  But they'll still go ahead and see if they can somehow disqualify me and claim it was a pre-existing condition that I didn't mention and rescind my coverage, I'm sure.  They'd have to lie to do it, though (which I'm sure wouldn't be unusual).  After all, I'm the idiot who was honest on her application and listed all sorts of pre-existing stuff and now has a permanent rider excluding something I occasionally do need diagnostic work for.

[Assume infuriated rant about the US healthcare industry here.  Saw a few moments of Smiles of a Summer Night as I channel-surfed this evening and thought maybe I should move to Sweden, even though the language sounds rather insane and I don't speak a word of it.  No, I lie, I can say "no," based on having just heard it.  And "dream," thanks to having looked it up for that blog title a few weeks back when I dreamt about Skarsgård.  But I'd have to get used to a totally different pronunciation of my own name.

And yes, I'm rambling.  Does depression cause incoherent stream of consciousness and lots of non sequiturs?  Widow-brain strikes again.  And speaking of widow-brain, I'm just glad it was a rather empty intersection and no cops were around when I drove on through that stop sign over the weekend.  Got halfway down the block when I realized I had done it.  I really need to work on focussing better.]

The power went off just after 6 p.m., and I have no idea why - no storms, no particularly strong wind.  It came back on just after 8 p.m.  Followed by the usual routine of resetting clocks on the stove, the microwave, the Bose, the answering machine, the VCR/DVD player, the Zen alarm clock, and the clock by the bed.

In other news... “James D. Enright and Mary A. Culhane were united in marriage on the 13th day of September, 1868 at Holy Family Church, 10180 W. Roosevelt, Chicago, Illinois in the presence of Thomas Madigan and Mary Madigan."  There's nothing intrinsically heartbreaking about that bit of information, nothing except the timing of our having it.  My parents are both serious genealogists, and in recent years my father had been delving into Jerry's family history, Jerry not having the time to work on it much himself.  The biggest question for Jerry was always where in Ireland his great grandfather had come from.  He mostly thought Clare, but also thought that Cork had come up in family lore too.  When we were in Clare in 2003, we met with a genealogical service and he paid them to search records for Enrights, but with no luck.

We still don't know (yet?) where James D. Enright, Jerry's great grandfather, came from, but now we know where he was married and when.  And Jerry didn't live long enough to know that my father had tracked that information down.  And he would have been so excited to know it.