Recess

March 2003 again.  A little Googling reminds me that this is in Recess, in Connemara, County Galway.  Pretty sure we had stopped for a bathroom break in the pub behind Jerry, on the way out of Oughterard heading west.  And here we see the standard shift car that Jerry maneuvered along the narrow Irish roads (my lack of ability to drive standard saving me from driving in Ireland yet again), shifting with the left hand, driving on the left side of the road... oh, and by the way, please do say the word "maneuvered" in your best Eddie-Izzard-as-Professor-Heimlich accent.  Because Jerry definitely would.

OH FOR GOD'S SAKE.  Heimlich is not only an American, but he's also 90 years old and STILL ALIVE, Wikipedia says.  Cf. previous blog post about resentment of people getting to have longer lives than Jerry did.  Also, I wonder if Eddie Izzard knows Heimlich was born in Delaware.  Wish I could tell Jerry.

Happy about Bubbs

Things keep moving forward, little things getting taken care of (passive voice used advisedly, since, yeah, it's me doing them, but I feel like I'm moving through a fog a lot of the time, as if things aren't really real).  Yesterday I called and arranged for garbage pickup to start at the house again - Jerry canceled it back in 2005 when the price got ridiculous, and we just brought trash and recycling to the shop and put it in the dumpsters there.  I won't have that option anymore, so I called Waste Management and the price is still ridiculous ($27/month).  And considering I don't eat meat and we have a composter... I mean, I have a composter... and it's just me now, there isn't going to be enough garbage and recycling to justify that amount, but I set it up anyway.  I feel like I should just go around the house throwing out things whether I want to keep them or not, just to feel like I'm getting my money's worth.  And here's the extra annoying part: of our eight lots... I mean, of my eight lots... God, this sucks... of my eight lots, three are in the village and five are in the township.  If you live in the village, you pay for garbage pickup by buying individual stickers that you put on each garbage bag or can, and each sticker costs something like $1.50.  So if they considered me to be living in the village, I'd pay $1.50 a week for garbage pickup, if I even had enough to have picked up in a given week.  I suppose they decide based on which lots the house is on (this affects how I vote, too - I don't get to vote for village officials).

Anyway.

Today I met with the insurance agent and applied for an individual health insurance policy.  No more dental insurance (my dentist isn't in the network, so no point).  Knock wood for no more root canals in the near future.

Yesterday was the "re-employment workshop," in which a man and a woman talked to a room full of mostly white middle aged people about not chewing gum during job interviews and having a paragraph at the top of your resume stating your objective... or not (apparently HR experts can't agree on whether or not you should).  Also that most jobs are found through networking, which just brings to my mind that line from The Commitments, "so you're fucked for starters."  (Not knowing what I want to do, or am qualified to do besides things I've already done and don't particularly want to do again, doesn't help either.)  Anyhow, the man, who did most of the talking, was one of those people who is very comfortable talking in front of a crowd, very gung-ho and self-confident - in fact I think he's a high school sports coach or something of the sort - but consistently uses the wrong words while he's speaking.  I can only remember one example, because he repeated it twice, and by that time I'd noticed he was doing this - he talked about someone being at the "liberty" of someone's financial decisions, when he meant "mercy."  But then again, he's employed right now and I'm not, and there's very little I loathe more than public speaking, so I shouldn't throw stones.

Still finishing up the last project at the shop.  Seamus and I seem to have made this job last a lot longer than it had to - neither of us wants to complete it, since completing it means Wood Bros., Inc. Custom Cabinetmakers is really over.  Even though it is, of course.  I think the job is supposed to be picked up on Tuesday.  But thinking of doing my last bit of staining, thinking of spraying my last coats of lacquer, is just breaking my heart.  We're glad that if Wood Bros. had to fail, Jerry didn't have to know about it.  A small mercy.

I'm crying more and more in the shop now (and at home, and in the car, and almost at a re-employment workshop, but not quite).  I have noticed one thing that my brain is having a really hard time sorting out, which is my birthday.  On the one hand, I really, really want to ignore my birthday this year - clearly I'm in no mood to celebrate anything, nothing about turning 48 (or anything else these days) is going to be making me happy, and I just want to get through that day like any other.  But on the other hand I keep catching myself wondering if Jerry's got anything planned.  He relied a lot on the Sundance Jewelry Catalogue to get him through each August, the sweetie, and we just got... I just got... that catalogue in the mail yesterday.  And thought, for a split second, that I should save it for him, to make his life easier (we'd gotten a few earlier in the year and he smiled and said that we could recycle those, we'd get more closer to my birthday that he could use).  So yeah, for some reason I'm having a hard time remembering reality when it comes to this particular thing.

I dreamt about Jerry again last night.  I don't remember details, but somehow when I woke up I was under the impression that I'd been having to reassure him that I loved him, that in the dream somehow he wasn't sure.  I hope my dreams are going to give me a break from this sort of misery.  I know in reality he knew I loved him, I know he knew he was the love of my life, but to have to doubt that at all, just because of a stupid dream - hard to bear.

I finished up The Wire yesterday.  Jerry would have been happy about Bubbs.

P.S. To Karen, your comment on the dancing photos didn't come through.  That was a great night, though, wasn't it?

MTA photo

This is the photo Jerry used for his Metrocard.

Love that face.  Don't care for a world without that face in it.

JME in our kitchen, July 2005

2042

2042 is the year Jerry would have died if he'd got to live as long as Mitch Miller.

Someday my brain will probably stop comparing the age of every single person I hear of who's died to Jerry's age on 13 June 2010, whether or not that person got to live a longer or shorter life, how old that person was when Jerry was born (Mitch Miller was 31 on the day Jerry was born).  How unfair it is for someone to get to live a life decades and decades longer than Jerry got.  But right now, this is what my brain is doing.

JME in Ireland, Atlantic coast, March 2003

Tired

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.