I don't know

I feel like I don't know anything.  Anything.  Every time I think I've made up my mind about something, anything, I lose any certainty I thought I had about it.

I'm back, as of last night, from my vacation in the South.  I loved Miami Beach, and if I had a lotta lotta money, I could see living there.  I think.  Savannah was beautiful, as it was the last time I was there, but I found traveling on my own to be very stressful.  I don't like to go to restaurants on my own, for example, and had no better luck convincing myself to do so this time around.  Although, being a vegetarian, I wouldn't have been sampling the Low Country cuisine that's one of the tourist highlights of Savannah.  But I did takeout and such.  A day trip to Hilton Head Island, because I was curious to see what Hilton Head looked like, showed me that it's lovely (even on a blustery gray day), but not my place (I neither have lots of money nor play golf).  I enjoyed my time in Atlanta, and I wept my way through the exhibit on MLK Jr's life and times at the visitors center and visited the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Jimmy Carter Library, and partook of an amazing burrito at Bell Street Burritos (as of this writing the website doesn't show the new location, which is where I was), which I heartily recommend to anyone in the area (the owner is a Sacred Harp friend who also did this, which is how I was aware of the restaurant).  Thanks, Jenna and Kerry, for the hospitality in Atlanta!  On to Huntsville after that, and thank you Karen and David for your hospitality, too!  Singing at Liberty Baptist Church in Henagar, AL on Sunday, and wow, I need to sing more often.

Lesson 1: Don't drive from northwest of Chicago to Miami Beach in two days.  OUCH.

Lesson 2: I'm not sure where I belong.

I'm glad I'm going to New York for a week at the end of February.  It'll be the first time I've been to the city I consider home since Jerry and I were there at the end of 2009, a few days before he was diagnosed with cancer.  I want my gut to tell me if I belong there.  Because every time, every time I think I know where I belong, I find reasons not to be sure after all.

Coming back to this house after two long weeks of traveling felt like coming home, in a way.  It just felt so good to open the door and walk into my house.  Which doesn't mean at all that I think I belong in Illinois: if I don't know where I belong, I know where I don't belong, and this place is in that category.  But this is the place I've lived longer than any other one place in my entire life, and as a friend pointed out, it's where I lived with Jerry, and it's familiar, if nothing else, and it's mine.  So leaving is going to be hard, whenever I do it.

Everything is in a whirl.  I hope I get some clarity on things soon.  I hope.

I know

I know I'm now a few photos behind on the daily photo thing.  Will deal with it.  For now, watching the Bulls and procrastinating on packing for my two-day drive to Miami, which has been delayed a day due to the snow we got yesterday and overnight.

11. The loneliest place in the world

11.

(Sorry, I mean "Where I sleep.")

10. Childhood

10,

These are all James Enrights.  (I might already have this up on the blog somewhere - I can't remember.)  The smallest of these is the one who eventually became known as Jerry, after life-altering experiences as Father Jerome in a Franciscan seminary.

Look at that little boy.

The story of the rest of his life is complete now.  But there he is, on a day in the early 1940s, with all of it ahead of him.

Nothing I can come up with to write this morning is coming out right.  Just, look at that little boy.

9. Daily Routine

9.

Right now?  TV is the routine. But things are about to change.  For real.

8. My sky

8.

A cloudy gray sky today, hazy sun through the bare trees in the front yard.  I'm having one of those days where there's no energy, no motivation, nothing worth moving for.

7. Favorite

7.

I spent most of my life thinking I didn't have a favorite book.  A few months ago I realized that I do.

By request

Alicia's "Something I Wore" entry was about her engagement and wedding rings, and in response to it I originally had a long comment that turned into its own blog entry, before I decided that wasn't the place for it.  She kindly asked me to reconstruct it, so here's an approximation - variation on the theme of her "Something I Wore" post:

Jerry almost never took off his wedding ring.  At some point during his final hospitalization, he had to take it off for a procedure - MRI or something - and I took it from him and put it on my finger, next to my own wedding ring.  It felt bad - it felt like an omen of things to come - and as soon as he was out of the procedure, I put it back on his finger again.

A few weeks or days later, I can't remember how long, Jerry's son and daughter and I sat by the hideous hospice bed in our bedroom, with what was left of Jerry lying there, the body that hardly even looked like him anymore, getting colder and colder.  It was our last few minutes, as the night got later and later, before we left the body to be readied by the hospice nurse for the arrival of the people from the funeral home.  And I realized his wedding ring was still on his finger, and his son took it off and handed it to me, and I put it on the chain around my neck that had the Battlestar Galactica his 'n' hers personalized dogtags on it (Jerry never wore his - not being anywhere near as geeky as his wife - but he was remarkably tolerant of geekiness, and even spent a fun early morning with me at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer midnight singalong at a theater in Chicago).

This blog probably tells when I took my own wedding ring off, when I stopped wearing the chain with the rings on it, but I can't remember.  For a long time, I kept the BSG tags in the urn his son made, too, along with other mementos we put into it after we'd scattered Jerry's ashes in Alabama.  I felt something like all or nothing: I had to move on, I couldn't hang on to something that was no longer true: that I was married, that I had a husband.  I have nothing against widowed people who consider themselves married forever, even after death has parted them from their spouses, but at some point I realized I didn't feel married anymore - I felt widowed, and for me, those two things are in no way the same.  Then again, as I've mentioned before, I'm also someone who doesn't believe my sweetie is somewhere "watching over me," sending me messages through coincidental songs on the car radio, waiting for me to join him somewhere, etc. etc. etc.  He died.  He's dead.  To me, that's the reality.

Anyway: today I put the chain with the BSG tags back around my neck.  Last weekend my therapist shared with me that in the past she had experienced the loss of a partner too, and that she still, to this day,  does little things that remind her of him.  I haven't been trying to block Jerry out, God knows, but I felt like I couldn't do certain things either, like wear my wedding ring - that that would be a lie to myself.  I still feel like that about the wedding ring - but I'm thinking I need to relax some of the things I find myself doing to try to stave off pain, since they're clearly not doing the trick, and bringing out the silly dogtags again is the abandonment of one of those things.  Because yes, he's dead, he's lost to me, but he will always be who he was, the love of my life, and I can allow myself to hang on to that without keeping myself from moving forward.  At least, I'm going to try.  And if someday there were to be another love of my life?  It wouldn't negate anything about how I felt and feel about Jerry.

I have a feeling the above is a total muddle, but that's my life these days: a muddle.  So it's apt.

And by the way:

6. Makes Me Smile

6.

No words needed, I'm thinking.

5. Something You Wore

5.

Something I wore.

It's a sort of grey-lavender shapeless velvet J. Jill dress, which, like most J. Jill dresses in the late 1990s/early 2000s, looked much better in the catalogue than it did on me.  I was bigger than I like to be, in part due to as yet undiagnosed hypothyroidism.  But see those two up there?  They'd just gotten married about five minutes earlier in the courtroom on the other side of that wall, and when they came out, another person waiting on line to get married offered to take a picture.  So that's it, right there: our wedding album.

I'm keeping the dress - I'm not sure what for.

Day 4: Letterbox

Or, as we colonials would say, mailbox:

4.

This isn't the mailbox that was here when we bought the house: that one got trashed by someone driving by who thought smashing in a mailbox would be a fun thing to do.  Have I mentioned lately that I'm a total misanthrope?  OK, maybe not total: but a species that brings forth such specimens as the person who stove in our mailbox for fun and also Rick Santorum?  Hard to like.

Okaaaay.  Interesting what these photos inspire me to write!

Got my exercise today walking around a big shopping mall - because when you quit your job and stop having an income, don't you want to go to a place for which the entire purpose is to part you from your money?  Got some beautifying products, but at this point the wrinkly bags under my eyes are a lost cause.  Stopped in a sports-fan store and listened at length to a salesguy there talking about the Bulls, which, hello, interesting, and who am I again???  Didn't buy anything, so yay me.  Got some groceries on the way home, including FRESH GREENS.  To try to keep myself from being the Vegetarian Who Doesn't Eat Any Vegetables.

Did I mention I got a ticket to yet another Bulls game, this one on March 17th?  That would have been our 12th wedding anniversary.  Choices: stay at home by myself, or sit cheering on a bunch of attractive young men with 20,000+ of my closest friends?  No-brainer, I'm relieved to say.

Finally: my eyes were swollen and slightly crusty (sorry, TMI) this morning when I woke up.  Lots and lots and LOTS of crying will do that to you, I guess.  Man.  This is just not what I expected a year and a half later.  I remember reading somewhere that Paul McCartney said he cried every day for a year after Linda died.  He didn't say "That year started after I got off the antidepressants."

I wonder what's in store for me this year.

Day 3: Something you adore

3.

The Sacred Harp: when we're talking "adoring" and "things," this is pretty much up at the top of the list.   This book changed my life.  See all previous entries in this blog to read how.  (By the way: not the original binding - a friend in Alabama had it rebound for me when it started falling apart from use.)

The top of the credenza

OK... so I've accomplished the first thing I set out to do in 2012.  Good omen?

New Year's Photo Challenge

Via Alicia via Amanda comes this:

Considering what an infrequent blogger I've become over the months, and how much I keep getting stuck on grief when I do blog, perhaps this will generate some material.  Or at least keep me amused.  So, following their leads, here I go:

1.

Me, today.  No makeup, no hair product, no blow dryer.

2. 

Breakfast (with apologies to Alicia for theft of intellectual property, but it's the constant!).  Yeah, that's powdered creamer.  One Weight Watchers Points Plus point per serving.  Anyone finds a non-pointy creamer, you let me know.  I didn't even drink regular non-decaffeinated coffee for several decades, but this past year the antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds I was on were making me so sleepy that driving to work was scaring me, so I decided to see if regular coffee still upset my stomach.  It doesn't.  And now it's part of the routine.

OK, so so far this exercise hasn't resulted in fascinating prose.  Still... it's an entry!

Back to cleaning the dining room/office - I'm determined to see the top of the credenza by the end of today.