2011

I had a long entry going under this title today, but I just deleted it: a lot of blathering to say that 2011 has whooshed by, that it was a very hard year, that it had its ups and downs, and that I have got to believe that 2012 will have more ups than downs... and that, with any luck, next year at this time I'll be in NY, employed, domiciled, and more at peace with the hand I've been dealt.

Happy New Year to all y'all - may 2012 bring good things for all of us.

Feast of Stephen

Wow.  Did I forget to mention I've quit my job?

Today is a day off; then three days of work; then I'm free.  I've been going back and forth about writing a letter to the Board of Directors of the organization, pointing out why they have the most incredible rate of turnover of employees (almost entirely by decision of the employees themselves) and mentioning that no one has expressed any curiosity over why I'm the latest addition to the ongoing outflow (my boss asked me what I'm doing next - which is, very deliberately I might add, not the same thing).  But after actually sitting down and writing a letter to the Board president, I came to the realization that I just did not want to have to talk to her and tell her all the things that she's showed no interest in in the past.  I wish I could make things better for the friends I leave behind at the office, but I know by now that that's not something I can accomplish.  But writing the letter did help blow off some of the steam.

On the other hand, they did give us incredibly ugly logo'd golf shirts.  What, not a fair substitute?  Remind me to run out and take up golf immediately.

And so this is Christmas, to coin a phrase.  Or, actually, the Feast of Stephen.  Jerry and I never used to make a huge deal out of Christmas, so the fact that I spent the day alone wasn't that big a deal.  We'd put up a live tree, once I got over my feelings that having a tree in a place I lived in was just too weird (I'm Jewish, y'all - a secular Jew, but still);  Jerry would enjoy the fact that he was allowed to decorate it as he liked without complaint from anyone (his previous life apparently hadn't afforded him that luxury), he'd put the lights on it, I'd put the ornaments on it; we'd do a fancy meal - but that was it.  I'd gotten so tired of the buy-gifts-because-the-calendar-says-so routine that I'd managed to get almost everyone I know that would be someone I'd exchange gifts with to agree not to do it anymore, so Jerry and I never exchanged gifts at the holidays (I love giving gifts to people, don't get me wrong - I just prefer to do it for their own special days, like birthdays, or if I see something on some random day that I think they'll like). He might go off and spend some time with his kids and their families.  But having him not here on Christmas isn't worse for me than not having him here on any other day.

On the other hand...

On the other hand, not having him here on any day at all is causing me to cry a lot these days.  My latest guess is that the antidepressants really were doing something - they were numbing me out, and now that I'm off them, nothing is protecting me from the real grieving.  Maybe.  I just hope this is something I'm going to work my way through and beyond - not, of course, that I'll ever stop missing him, but that I'll be able to come to terms with the fact that he's... well, you know, we've been through this.  Many, many, many times.

In other news, having decided on where I'm going feels so amazingly good.  I loved Jerry more than anything, and I will never, ever regret my decision to move out here to Midwestern suburbia, but oh my God, if there's somewhere I do not belong, it's Midwestern suburbia.  I left my apartment in Manhattan for the last time in tears, and every time we visited there I counted down the time left in each visit with dread, knowing the days were ticking away and soon I'd have to leave it.  The thing that made leaving it bearable was that nothing made me happier than being with Jerry, no matter where he was - but (guess what) he's not here anymore.  And the idea that I can go to New York and not have to leave?  Is it possible?  There are a lot of difficult logistics to figure out... but I'm determined to do it.  Having something clear to look forward to is amazing.

Anyone wanna buy a three-bedroom two-bathroom house with the most beautiful maple woodwork you'll ever see?  It is going to kill me to part with it, to leave this place, to... yeah, blah blah blah.  Said it before.  Said it a million times.  It's still true.  It's still what I have to do - what I want to do.  Yes.  What I want to do.  I could spend the rest of my life sitting here with the reminders of Jerry, with the results of his talent and hard, hard work - and part of me would be glad to have it.  But that wouldn't be a life that would make me happy.  And I have to believe "happy" is a possibility.  Someday.

So that's the view from here on the Feast of Stephen.

And by the way:

Empire State of Mind

Real quick, because I'm exhausted.  I gave notice at my job yesterday that December 31 will be my last day there.  It's so much the right move, so of course I celebrated it, so to speak, by coming home and having one of the worst meltdowns I've had, ever, in my entire life.  I swear it felt like something was desperately trying to claw its way out of my chest, and I was just wailing in an attempt to release it.  The trigger was pretty damn silly (final episode of season 3 of Castle, for those of you to whom that means anything), but on my drive home from work I'd already begun to feel that things were slipping, and later that evening it just fell apart.  I fell apart.  I just kept looking around the living room at the maple panels on the ceiling and the maple built-in cabinets and the mantlepiece with the photos on it of Jerry and me and I just thought, if it was thinking that was happening (felt much more deep and basic than thinking), I can't, I can't I can't I CAN'T.  HE HAS TO COME HOME TO ME.  I CAN'T KEEP GOING FORWARD WITHOUT HIM.  THIS MAKES NO SENSE, I NEED HIM.  IT HURTS TOO MUCH WITHOUT HIM.

I knew it would pass and at the same time it felt like it never would.  Happily, in the midst of it I checked my email (do NOT ask for logic here) and had an email from a friend asking how I was doing, and in responding to her I felt myself relaxing and calming down.  (Thank you, Laura.)

Anyway.  I'm here.  I think I buried a lede here: forgot to say I've come to the realization that I want to go home to NYC.  Almost 100%.  Not 100% because part of me still wants to go to Alabama and be in the midst of my dear singing family and enjoy everything I love about being down there.  But a few weeks ago I suddenly wanted to look at apartment listings in Manhattan.  I'm not sure I could even afford Manhattan anymore.  I might end up in... gasp... an outer borough. (Can I afford them anymore?)

More later.  Tired, and Glee is on.

Do I sound insane?

Keepin' on keepin' on

What am I, five weeks past surgery?  Hard to keep track; all I know is time is racing by, and it's November, and I think yesterday was my one-year anniversary of employment at The Current Place of Employment.  I was telling a friend yesterday that it's so strange the way things keep going forward without Jerry, and I do things and see things and discover things that he'll never know I did and saw and discovered.  What would he make of this person who watches football and basketball and listens to Beyoncé and is obsessed now with a Robyn video (actually, I think he would have liked the video.  Done in one take, by the way!)?  This person who's had the fortitude to end "friendships" that were bad for her and not worthy of the name, something she possibly couldn't have done in the past?  This person who... okay, this person who in many ways is stuck, not able to get herself together yet to sell the house and decide where she wants to be?  And this person who would give the rest of her life for five minutes with him as he was, healthy and lucid and the kindest heart I've ever known?

Yeah, I keep going back to that.  I still haven't gotten to the point where missing him is background rather than main narrative.  So many people talk about "a year," as if 365 days after the love of your life dies things will magically change and you'll be fine.  I know it's different for each person, but my attachment to Jerry was so all-encompassing, and our lives were so entwined, that it's probably more difficult for me to detach than it might be for others.  I guess readers of this blog might be saying "Uh, yeah, we've noticed."

So, what else is new?  A second week at work is over, and yesterday I stayed until 3:45 working on edits to the next newsletter (my Lord, some people can't punctuate.  Or write).  Discomfort varies from day to day, hour to hour, and it wasn't too bad staying that late, except that I'm worn out at the end of a workday, no matter how long it lasts.  The day before I left at 1:00, and soon the tire light came on and I had to stop at what Illinoisans call an "oasis" (and sane people, uh, sorry, I mean New Yorkers call a rest area) and put air in the tires.  Note: the air pump at the Des Plaines Oasis is free.  (I'm old: I remember when all air pumps at gas stations were free.  I was shocked in August when I had to do this and discovered I needed quarters to feed the thing.)  Now my thigh muscles are sore from my being diligent and squatting to fill the tires rather than bending at the waist.

The furnace is still making noises, although possibly not as loud.  I'm not motivated to call the guy back here to deal with it.

I replaced the flush mechanism on the upstairs toilet.  Go me!  I think Jerry would have been proud.  Yeah, I know, it's a fairly mindless replacement and doesn't even require any tools, but hey, I'm a pretty unhandy person, so this is an achievement.

Bye week for both Auburn and the Panthers, so that's eight hours of my life I'll have to figure out something else to do with this weekend.

And tomorrow my father, who turned 71 last month, runs his fifth NYC marathon.  Go Daddy!  I do spend marathon Sundays worrying, and am always relieved when I hear that he's finished and no ankles have been twisted or falls taken or other bad things occurred.  I can't remember if I mentioned that back when I was running in the spring and he and I went out for a run together, I felt like I should be wearing a t-shirt for other people on the trail to see that read "I'm the one slowing him down."  Running... yes, there's nothing like enforced idleness to make a person want to run.  I'm looking forward to the time when I'm cleared for exercising again, although I may not be up to it even when that happens.  And by the time I am ready to work my way back from walking to running, there will probably be snow on the ground.  Of course, my desire to exercise will fade away again as it always does, I know this.  But it's there now.

November.  Guy Fawkes Day.  Still here.

You guys... and mice

Just a quick note to thank you guys for your comments... besides the people I know by name, there's my loyal follower "Anonymous," and I don't know if there's one Anonymous or multiple Anonymi (I know that... oh, wow, I was going to say "I just made that up and I know it's not a word but I like it," but lo and behold, it's already on Urban Dictionary!), but I appreciate everyone's comments and support.

Going back to work has been okay... sort of!  Monday I went back, wore myself out, came home, had some, um, intestinal drawbacks, and woke up Tuesday with bleeding that I was pretty sure was normal, but I wasn't 100% sure so I stayed home and called the surgeon's office and got the nurse's confirmation that it was.  So today it was back to work again, and my abdomen is still not entirely thrilled with sitting upright so long... but reclining hurts my back.  Catch 22ish.

Waiting for a furnace repairman to come listen to the odd noises the furnace has been making since he repaired it in April.  Getting close to wit's end from the apparent infestation of mice in the house - maybe it's my imagination, but it feels like there are more this year than before.  Jerry and I tried to do the humane catch-and-release thing for years, but they always came back (I suppose if Jerry'd driven across the river and left them there, that might have done it), so then we resorted to a rat zapper, which worked, even though I hated doing it.  Now I'm using rat poison, and I hate that too, but I just don't know what else to do other than call an exterminator, which I assume would do the same thing.  Occasionally I find a poor little mouse corpse in the basement, but I think mostly they are expiring in the walls, and sometimes that means a really bad smell for a while.  Latest is somewhere in/near the bedroom, but I can't find it, and I certainly can't move the bed to look in the closet/crawlspace under the stairs - difficult at the best of times, impossible (and prohibited for me) right now post-surgery.  So I've been sleeping on the futon upstairs in Jerry's Buddha bedroom, which is what we called the bedroom he adorned with thangkas and Buddha statues and a framed parchment with Tibetan writing on it, even a long Tibetan trumpet.  Emotionally difficult, being in the room that was his retreat, but I suppose it should be no different than sleeping in our bedroom without him.

And of course, my first night up there, I got up to go to the bathroom at 3:30 a.m. and the flush on the toilet broke: the arm was so corroded that it disintegrated into about three pieces.  I need to go to a home store and get a replacement and cross every digit that installing it works (which seems unlikely - it's like a toilet repair just cannot possibly work on the first go, ever), but I haven't got the energy yet.  Maybe I'll do that tomorrow night: I have a very late therapy appointment, so I'll have to leave the house in the evening anyway.

Anyone wanna buy a house?  It's beautiful, really.  It's just... it's a house, and it's too much for me.  I need to be in an apartment, preferably with an on-call maintenance person.

ETA: $99 later, a strip of paper was removed from a wheel or a fan or something that spins, and the furnace won't make the weird noises anymore.  I hope.

Another ETA: I'm getting all but the good parts of Truly, Madly, Deeply in my life: bereaved translator with rodent infestation in her house that keeps needing all sorts of repairs done.  All I'm missing is Jerry's ghost coming back to comfort me and then push me onwards in life... and a Mark Damien de Grunwald.

Three weeks later

It's three weeks since my surgery, and I still find it hard to believe it's actually been done, and there are no longer a uterus, cervix, and huge fibroid inside me.  (When I saw the surgeon on Monday at my first followup appointment, he showed me a photo of what was removed - he also emailed it to me, but I'll spare y'all the fun of seeing it.  I'll just say that the fibroid mass was a lot bigger, and a lot more disgusting, than I even imagined.  But fascinating, in a sick kind of way.)

I'm scheduled to go back to work half-time starting Monday.  Financially it makes no sense, unless I can get disability for the hours I won't be working, and even then it doesn't - although financially this job doesn't make any sense at the best of times; logistically it makes no sense (more than 2 hours in traffic per day to work four hours per day?).  And I'm actually not sure I can hack it yet - I went out today to get some cheap yoga pants so I actually have pants I can fit into for work, along with the maternity belly band I got earlier to hold my other pants up when they're not zipped - anyway, just going to the local Old Navy and back was a bit rough on my abdomen, and wore me out.  So all that driving next week might be too much.  Still to be seen.  Still to be seen also is how long it will be before my swollen abdomen goes back down to its previous size (after that, I'll be interested in having it go down in size some more).

Tomorrow a haircut appointment will get me out of the house again.  Then the weekend, then work.  We'll see how it goes.

Definitely NOT Sane

Amount the hospital has charged my insurance for my 1 1/2 days there: $37,420.50.  That doesn't include doctors' fees, other institutions' fees... etc.

So many rants I could start in on.

Sane?

So how many widows get to 17 months after their husbands die and then just decide to think that their husbands will come back someday, I wonder?  I'm not sure if that's the best way to put it.  As usual, as ever, I know Jerry is dead and not coming back.  And I don't think he is coming back, I don't believe it, I don't hope for it... but somehow I look at photos of him and... yes, I know he's dead, I do know it.  But it's like I'm deciding consciously not to accept all of that right now.  I'm not even sure what I'm saying.  Just that somehow right now I feel like I'm rejecting the finality of Jerry's absence and am deciding I don't want to deal with it right now.  While also not for a second really thinking it's not real.

Yikes... sounds kind of insane.

Recovery is going well, I think.  I'm still spending most of every day watching TV and lying around, although I'm a bit more upright now than I was.  My lower back is not happy with all this lying around, and I'm actually thinking about how nice it'll be someday to start running again (let's not forget I've run twice since July, or was it once?).  My farthest ventures outside have been to the mailbox.  My first post-op appointment is a week from tomorrow, and it'll be interesting to see what the surgeon thinks of my progress.

Waiting to Sing

As long as I can remember, I've loved singing - yes, there's Sacred Harp, yes, I was in Russian choirs in college and grad school (briefly), but most of my singing is done along with recordings - I tend to sing along with anything I'm listening to (and when the lyrics are in a language I know nothing of, I hate to think what I'm saying).  And right now... I can't sing.  I forget occasionally ("Rolling in the Deep" just came on), and my abdomen reminds me right away that it's not time yet.  So a good measure of my recovery progress is going to be when I can sing again.

A week past surgery. Still sore, still mostly lying around. Don't know if my hormones are confused, although things I've read tell me even if you keep your ovaries, things get unsettled. But I've had some very intense crying jags, feeling Jerry's absence in a place more deep than before... if that makes any sense.  Even while it's happening I realize it's going to pass - but while it's happening, it also feels like emerging from my surgery was a huge mistake, that it all should have ended right there, so I wouldn't have to keep working so hard to continue on in this world without Jerry.  I know: sounds scary and melodramatic. It passes. I know it will pass. I'm not suicidal, never have been.

But it's hard.

Lying around a lot

I am now on Day 5 without fibroid and uterus, having undergone 4 1/2 hours of laparoscopic surgery via daVinci robot last Thursday.  So far I'm a huge fan of robotic surgery and of my surgeon - it's all gone so smoothly.  It's hard to get used to spending my time mostly lying around, and, as was pointed out to me recently, I have gotten so used to being the caregiver that being the person who needs caregiving makes me feel hugely... guilty. Anyway, more another time, when I'm not typing on my phone, but just wanted to let y'all know I'm doing well... and lying around a lot!

And again, still here

I'm sorry for not writing much over the recent months, and I'm so touched by people's concern.  The problem is, even I get tired of reading myself saying "I'm still sad..."  And the fact is, this roller coaster of emotions just isn't stopping.  Friends keep dying; people I thought were good friends turn out not to be friends at all (I do a great job of imagining people are who I desperately want them to be, when they so obviously [to everyone but me] are not... a habit my therapist and I definitely need to work on breaking me of); I do things I said I wouldn't; I don't do things I said I would.  A dear friend was fired at work for totally trumped-up and outright made-up reasons.  I went down to Alabama, to the singing where Jerry and I met, to the singing where we held his memorial last year, and a friend led Jerry's song in his honor, and next thing I knew I was crying for what seemed like forever (20 minutes?  Not sure).  I have my rescheduled hysterectomy coming up on the 29th of this month, and am getting just the slightest wee bit nervous about it.

And Jerry is still dead.  No matter how much a little vestige of my mind is pretty certain he's coming back. I catch myself having moments where it makes so little sense that he's not here that I just know it's not really true and he's coming back.  Because something so, so wrong as him being gone forever just cannot be true.

In the past few days I've gotten the sense that the things that have piled up in recent weeks, one painful thing on top of another, have reached the point where I've reacted by going numb again.  I may not know where my breaking point is, but it seems that my subconscious does and is doing its bit to make sure I don't get to it.

So yes, I'm still here.  I still go to work.  I'm trying to count Weight Watchers points again (although my therapist questions the wisdom of beginning an eating regimen with everything else that's crashed down in my life recently... when, as she put it, my life is a mess).  I wake up in the dark now...  summer took forever to go by and flew by at the same time.  I haven't gone running but twice in months.

Marie Jones Ivey was a dear woman with whom Jerry stayed for years before I met him, when he went to singings in northeastern Alabama, and she and her husband Coy had us to stay after we were married, for years, and treated us like family.  Marie and Coy were the first people in the Alabama Sacred Harp community that Jerry told about the two of us, that we were a serious couple.  He felt such love for them that he knew they were the first people who would need to know.  Although of course I'm a Yankee fan and the Iveys root for the Braves, I loved sitting in the Iveys' living room watching Braves games with Marie.  She also introduced me to the Southern expression "mash"... as in what you do to a button on a remote control.  The weekend before 9/11, Jerry and I brought a cabinet down from Illinois in our checked luggage on a flight to Nashville, to fill in a space in the Iveys' kitchen that needed a cabinet - Jerry matched the color and got the pull as close as he could.

The last time I saw Marie was at the end of July, when her son David, daughter-in-law Karen, and Lynne and I stopped by to visit at the house after the singings that weekend.  It was strange for me to be in that house without Jerry there.  The cabinet was still where we'd installed it in 2001.  There was probably a Braves game on the television.  We hugged Coy and Marie as we left, of course.

A little over a month ago Marie was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer.  Her funeral was this past Sunday at Liberty Church in Henagar, and I so wished I could have been there, both for my own sake and for Jerry's.  I keep wanting to tell Jerry about Marie.

Although she'd been sick for quite a while, the swiftness of Marie's journey from diagnosis to decline to death was shocking, as of course any death is, to me - no matter whether expected or not, whether the time for it has come or not, the absence of a person is a shock to those who are left behind to struggle on without him or her.  Or to me, anyway.  Marie should still be there.  Jerry should still be here.  This world makes no sense to me.

This is what I haven't been writing.  More pain, more incomprehensible suffering and loss.  And I'm numb and stuck in inertia, the house still not ready to sell, lots of stuff still to be cleared out, tasks to be done.  Loneliness for Jerry.  I didn't expect this to be the situation after over a year.  I guess I had no idea what the situation would be.  I just feel very stuck and very... numb.

I love you all for caring, and I guess in closing I would say, I'm still soldiering on...it's just harder than I thought it would be.  But I'm soldiering.  Someday, I have to think, I insist on thinking, things will be better.

(P.S. Auburn with a mere mortal as a quarterback is a new experience for a one-year-old Johnny-come-lately Auburn fan.  But I'm glad the season has started again, and am hoping it turns out to be as much a diversion and pleasure for me as last season's, er, season was.  Win or lose, Family All In!  And come on, NBA, give me back my Johnny-come-lately Bulls fandom, too... no lockout, please.)

Addendum re keys

My spare keys turned out to be right on top of my desk, i.e. several inches from the computer on which I'm typing this.  (Yes, the state of the desktop is a little frightening, but the keys weren't even buried by papers.)  Which is a good thing, because Honda wanted $135, not $50, to make another copy.

So at least one thing has gone right lately.

What I Have To Do

Here's what I have to do: I have to remember that who I am is someone that Jerry Enright loved, and that I deserve to be treated as well as I was treated by Jerry Enright... including by me.

I'm still here.  It's still a struggle.  Decisions are hard.  Some decisions are wrong.  Some are right.  It's a shame I can't always know which are which until afterwards, but I'm still muddling through.  Random information: I'm just under a week from being a year from being fifty, and I still don't know how that happened.  Got food poisoning a number of weeks back, drove myself to the ER, got rehydrated.  Hysterectomy has been put off until September 29.  Went to Alabama to remember an important part of who I am (Sacred Harp singer), got caught off guard a few songs after leading 77t for Jerry with no problem and had to step outside the church and sit on the front step until the sobbing stopped.  He should have been right there, over to the right  as I faced the tenor bench, or maybe at the front. He should have been.  It was all wrong that he wasn't.

Blew off running after the food poisoning, excuses tending towards "It's too hot" (which it's been) or "It's raining" (which it has).  But went out today (in the process discovering I may have lost my spare car key, which means around $50 at least to replace it at the Honda dealership).  Hard, almost like starting from scratch.  Which is what will happen again after the surgery and recovery, but at least I did it.

Going back to Alabama at the end of the month, assuming my vacation days are approved: I wasn't going to go to Lookout Mountain, where Jerry and I met in 1998 and where we held his memorial last year, since I was supposed to be having surgery the Thursday before that, but now that that's postponed until the end of September, I'll drive back down.

I'm still here.  I just haven't written a lot.  Obviously.  It's still hard.  I'm doing the two-steps-forward-one-step-back shuffle, I think.  Better than one-step-forward-two-steps-back, I guess.

Jerry Enright loved me.  What more in life could I aspire to than to live up to that love?

Passings

Although I only met Zoie once, I keep feeling that she's not really dead - that it's just impossible.  I think I felt that way about Jerry's death, too, right?  I mean, I'm not sure I really accept it even now, but I haven't seen him in so long that it must have sunk in to some extent.  But with Zoie, I keep looking at the photo I've been using as my Facebook profile photo since Friday, cropped from the photo I posted in the last entry, and thinking, this vibrant, lovely little girl, the light of her family, she was alive and well a week ago at this time - and now her family has organized her visitation and her funeral.

It's a totally different order of things when someone dies whom you did not know personally,  or with whom you have no personal connection - celebrities, figures in the news, those sorts of people.  It's almost obscene, possibly is obscene, to mention those sorts of passings in the same post with this photo of little Zoie, whose death is causing such unbearable pain and anguish to a dear friend and his family, but I feel moved to mention two deaths this week of people whose music was part of the soundtrack of my high school years and all the time since.  The first was Clarence Clemons, the Big Man, saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band - I was lucky enough to see them play live four times (back in the late 70s and early 80s) and loved the clear and obvious love between those men as it washed out from the stage along with the music.

The other death was of a less well-known musician but one even more important in my musical life, and my life, period, than Clarence: Mike Waterson, a Yorkshire singer whose singing with his sisters and cousin, and later with his sisters and brother-in-law, and later still with his children, nieces and nephews, was a revelation to me in the 1970s when I came across it, and, without my knowing it, provided a taste of the Sacred Harp singing that would later change my life: the Watersons' 1977 record Sound, Sound Your Instruments of Joy contains renditions of several songs from the Sacred Harp, although if I read the liner notes closely enough to register the mention of it back then, it didn't stick.  When I heard Sacred Harp singing for the first time, in 1983 when the Word of Mouth Chorus sang from the book on a broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion transmitted live from the chapel of Middlebury College as I sat in the balcony being electrified by the sounds from the stage, something in my brain knew they were going to sing "Idumea" before they did, even though I had only heard that song on the Watersons LP and, as I say, I didn't remember the liner notes' mention of the Sacred Harp.  And when they did indeed sing that song, my heart was already hooked on the sound of the singing, the power of it, and the spark of needing to have it in my life was lit.

And as we know, sixteen years later I met Jerry Enright at a Sacred Harp singing.

I was lucky enough to attend a concert by the Watersons in 1987 in Minnesota, before the death of  Mike's sister Lal.  They all had colds and complained about them throughout the show, but sounded great, as I remember, nonetheless.  They, as much as anyone, helped put me on the path that has resulted in my being a widow in Illinois, for the good of that and the pain.  Everything in a person's life leads to everything else in it, I suppose - even little Zoie's death, even that, I wouldn't have had as part of my experience if I hadn't heard "Idumea," if I hadn't followed up this esoteric singing form (in pre-Internet days no less), if I hadn't gotten involved in it and gone to Alabama and met Jerry and moved to Illinois and married him, if he hadn't been stolen out of my life, if I hadn't had to look elsewhere for work, if I hadn't found friends at the place I landed up working, if one of them hadn't been Dave, who adored his little grandniece and talked about her and finally invited me to participate in the 5K last month (in his family's team in memory of Zoie's uncle Eddie, who died of a cruel degenerative disease four years ago at the age of 13), where I got to meet Zoie.  Never, ever, ever imagining that she'd be gone the next month.  Never.

A memorial site for Zoie is here.

Zoie

There's a little girl lying in Loyola Hospital - at least, she was last night when I last heard.  Yesterday this little girl was being watched by someone while her parents were elsewhere - and this someone took her eyes off Zoie long enough for Zoie to wander into a swimming pool.  So as of last night, Zoie was lying in Loyola, breathing on a ventilator, not having the basic physical reactions a person is supposed to have.

What kind of world is this?  Zoie's uncle died four years ago at age 13 of a degenerative disease.

What kind of world is this?

I feel entirely and totally helpless - the way, I'm being told, people felt last year when there was nothing any of us could do to make a difference in what was happening to Jerry.  When Zoie's great-uncle, my buddy Dave, told me last night what had happened, I felt like my entire insides had been hollowed out - and now I'm in this helpless limbo, hoping with every fiber of my being that Zoie pulls through and comes out of this and knowing there is nothing I can do, either to make that happen or to help Dave or his family.

Monday was the first anniversary of Jerry's death.  I did okay, which surprised me.  And then I fell apart in the middle of the work day on Wednesday.  And now I'm feeling pain and fear and wanting so much to hear good news about little Zoie.

What kind of world is this?

Photo above: after the 5K run in Hinsdale last month.  In the front: Zoie and her dad.

Update: someone posted it on Twitter.  Zoie is dead.

Thunderstorms

I used to have problems staying in bed, early on in this process, and they lasted for months - I would be wide awake too early and not be able to stay in bed - and now I have trouble getting out of bed at all on weekends.  I wake up at the usual ridiculous times, 4:30 usually, but now I keep going back to sleep, half-sleep, my entire body feeling heavy and anchored to the bed... Jerry's side of the bed.  Because I still can't face being on my side of the bed without him on his.

It's coming on a year.  It's coming on a year that I've been alive on this earth without Jerry.  My mind knows that dates are just dates, that the planet's trip around the sun shouldn't make a difference to the way I feel about something - it doesn't make Jerry any more or less dead that it's coming up on June 13.  But we human animals must be tuned in to natural cycles more than I think, or something in my brain is just programmed by years of calendars and repetitions of days and months and years to feel like it makes a difference, and the closer I get to the first anniversary of his death, the more everything hurts, the more difficult it is to get out of bed, the more other things happening in my life hurt too.  And I still can't get over the feeling that there's got to be an ending here - a goal, a reward for getting through this year.  I can't have had to endure all this and have it just be the way things are.  I have to make it to June 13 and then have the universe say OK, we tested you, you survived it: here's your reward: here's Jerry back again, healthy and alive and walking back in the door with a comment about what a rough year that was.  And it looks like you cut your hair short again while I was gone, Sweetie - LOL.  Hmmm... looks like you didn't do much with the yard.  (I'd call the landscaper and say, Cancel those plans to kill everything and put down sod to make this house more sellable.  We aren't going anywhere.  We're home.)

I dreamt some time this morning that Fran was talking to me.  At first I was just hearing her voice, just as I'd hear the voice of anyone near me talking, although I couldn't see her - she sounded fine, no breathing problems, just some coughing.  Then the connection got a bit rough so she picked up a phone and called me.  And not just me - she could talk to anyone.  She wasn't alive anymore, but she was just in another place, and the thought I was having was, Of course she can still talk to us!  This is excellent!  And I woke up thinking, for a few seconds, that it was true... until I got out of that half-awake/half-asleep state and reality returned.

Hysterectomy is a go.  Probably in August.  I'll be talking to a scheduler next week to determine exactly when.

I've been running.  I can't remember if I've mentioned that, it's so infrequently that I blog here now.  Oh, OK, I remember now, I did mention it.  Two weeks ago I did that 5K fun run with Dave, a friend from work, and members of his family, and managed to negotiate the mountains of Hinsdale, IL in a cold rain without stopping or walking any of the route - might have been the slowest runner of all of them, but did my fastest 5K time, 38 minutes 13 seconds.  I've continued to run since then, and if the thunderstorm that's rolling in right now lets up in time I'll go out again this evening.  Although I guess I should be more concerned that we don't lose... that I don't lose electricity.  I'm not getting to the point where I'm actually enjoying running, and can't imagine that ever happening, but I'm sticking with it and it's become more of a regular part of my routine, which is good.  Hysterectomy is going to set me back, but it's only been a couple of months since I started this time around, so I'm more confident than I might have been that I'll be able to get back to it after recovery.

The evening of the fun run day, Dave and I went to the United Center and saw the only game of the Bulls' Eastern Conference Finals against the Miami Heat that they actually won - a confidence-building blow-out that turned out to be the only game of its kind, after which the Bulls would spend every game matching the Heat until the 4th quarter and then sort of collapse.  That game we went to was incredibly fun, though, and a great moment in the Finals while it lasted.  I'm sad that My Boys didn't grind LeBron and Dwyane and Chris et al. into the court, but they're young and they're learning and, to quote my sage Stacey King, "Damn this sucks! But remember #rednation it took MJ 7 years 2 get 2 the ECF and D Rose made it in 3 so the best is yet 2 come! WE R BACK!"  I can't claim, obviously, to be a long-time member of the Red Nation, but as with Auburn, I am now ALL IN and am already looking forward to next basketball season (lockout permitting).  And now I have to find a way, after football and basketball, to find baseball interesting again... and find out who's playing for the Yankees now besides Jeter, Rivera and Posada.

I did see Sugarland way back at the beginning of May, at the Allstate Arena right near where I work (for now).  I loved it; however, I had no idea so much alcohol was sold at these events, and before the show I'd been talking to the woman sitting next to me, and mentioned being widowed, and at some point she told her husband.  He was sympathetic ("My wife told me - I'm sorry for your loss") but he also got increasingly drunk, and decided, while dancing with his wife, that "comforting" the widow would take the form of occasionally reaching over and pawing her arm and shoulder a bit and trying to drag her over into a threesome of close-up dancing.  Glad I had my purse on my shoulder to intervene.  Otherwise, great show, and the close seat I had was worth the $12 I paid to join Sugarland's fan club and get early access to ticket sales.

Rain, thunder, lightning.

Memorial Day weekend.  Last Memorial Day I remember standing at the window of Jerry's hospital room and watching a huge thunderstorm roll in from the west.

Fran Elise Lipman

Those of you who have ventured over to the blogs I have linked over there to the right might have read Since When, a furious, all-encompassing chronicle of life uprooted, tossed, and made overwhelmingly challenging in the aftermath of serious illness.  The author of that blog was Fran Lipman.  Fran and I met  in Mrs. Dubie's 9th grade "English Vocabulary" class at Carrie Palmer Weber Junior High School in Port Washington, NY.  Our lives after high school took us in different directions, hers to Penn and then into advertising and life in Manhattan (to my abiding envy at the time), where she met the fabulous Chip Sleeper and his little son Lydon.  Fran and I would lose touch for a while and then always get back in touch again - there was never any question of any loss of touch being permanent, it was always just a phase - and I still remember vividly being home on leave from Moscow in something like 1990? - and her serendipitously calling my parents' house and her bringing Chip out to Port Washington and my meeting him for the first time - I'm pretty sure the power was out and it was by candlelight - and me thinking, she's found a good'un.

Fran was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma a number of years back, that very "treatable" cancer, and the odds were excellent that she'd be just fine after treatment.  I remember Jerry and me in NY for our annual New Year's trip, and me going with Fran to the barber shop on Astor Place and both of us getting our heads buzzed when her hair started thinning and falling out due to the chemo.

But things didn't go as planned with the "treatable" cancer treatment, Fran got sick with infection, and months later emerged from hospitalization and near-death with ARDS - go here, among other places, if you've never heard of it - as I hadn't before Fran's experience.  She spent the rest of her life at home, dealing with ongoing physical and emotional torment, but was always our Frannie when Jerry and I would have the rare chance to see her on our visits to New York.  The top photo is from one of those visits.

Fran died yesterday.  Every fiber of my being wishes I could spare Chip everything that he's going through and will go through, because individual as it is and will be to him, I know it's going to be hell.  A hell I don't wish on my worst enemy.

There's other news, of course.  Talked to a landscaper yesterday, and pending plans and estimates, will be having him turn the yard back into manageable "lawn."  So there goes the last of what Jerry was planning for our yard, the native plants and wild flowers.  "Lawn" will be more sellable.  The "estate" documents have been finalized, and yesterday I impulsively went and traded in Jerry's minivan for a more fuel-efficient Honda Fit... and cried in the dealership as I took my things out of the Sienna and put them in the Honda.  So there goes another basic of our life together, the van we drove to work in every day, the van we drove to NY and to Alabama and to Iowa, the van he picked me up in the first time I visited him here in Illinois, the van that was the last vehicle he rode in, to the hospital just about a year ago, except for the ambulance that brought him back home to die.

I'm having a hysterectomy.  I don't know when exactly or how it will be done, but the enlarged uterus and the fibroid (sorry for the TMI) are making this the right choice, finally, and I have a consultation with a surgeon in a couple of weeks.  Either less invasive "da Vinci" robotic surgery or a "bikini" incision, my gynecologist told me.  It'll have to be after the business trip to Boston I have to go on the first week of June, to be a flunky and underpaid staff creature at the association's annual meeting.  The staff exodus has started - health insurance is keeping me there for now, and the friends I've made there make all the difference.  But I plan to keep them while not staying there... as they will not... not forever.

I will miss you for the rest of my life, Frannie.

Quick post and solicitation

Today's meltdown brought to you courtesy of the State of Illinois and Harris Bank... the State of Illinois for issuing a tax refund check made out to Enright, James M. and Karen L. (no room for my own last name, I guess) and Harris Bank for returning the check to me after I tried to deposit it in an ATM a week ago because it only had my signature on it.  Spent part of this morning looking for the copy of the death certificate I have and getting more and more upset when I couldn't find it (the place is a mess, but I usually know where the important stuff is).  WHY should I have to be doing this, I found myself saying aloud, in tears, why isn't he here, why am I having to find his DEATH CERTIFICATE, why does everything get harder instead of easier, why do people make things as hard as they possibly can?   After eventually calming down, I did find the death certificate, and will bring it to the bank and say here, this is the the man whose signature you are demanding.  What do you want to do now?

In better news, I got a ticket to go see the second game of the Bulls' first playoff round tomorrow night at the United Center.  I'm nervous about going there by myself, and to such a late game (tip-off is at 8:30), from which I probably won't get home until after midnight, but I'm a pessimist and didn't want to take a chance on the Bulls not getting into the second round (everyone assures me they will, but you never know...) and me not having had a chance to go see a game live.  I'll be practically in the rafters of the place and Derrick Rose will be the size of an ant from my perspective, but it should be fun to be there.  Now please let's just not have the game be as nerve-racking as yesterday's...

Finally, the solicitation.  I've been invited to participate in a fund-raising "fun run" (I still believe the words "fun" and "run" do not belong together) on May 15th for Wellness House, an organization in Hinsdale, IL that provides free services to cancer patients and their relatives.  This is not a place Jerry or I had any personal connection with - even if he'd had time within those four short months to take advantage of their services, we didn't know about them, and Hinsdale is a ways away from where we live.  Where I live.  But anyway, they are a place worthy of support, and I'm trying to get in shape between now and May 15th to run a 5K without making a fool of myself.  I've finished four 5Ks in my life, and none of them was pretty.  Let's see if I can make this one better... ran 2 miles today, which was .4 miles longer than the several runs I've done in the past weeks.  Even ran in sleeting weather yesterday.  Anyway... if you feel moved to make a donation to this place, my donation page is at http://wellnesshouse.donorpages.com/WalkRun2011/KarenFreund/ .

Should get to bed - up for work at 5:30 and tomorrow at this time probably on the road back from the United Center.  Go Bulls.

Time passes...

I hadn't realized it's been so long since I've written here, and to those of you who've contacted me wondering how I'm doing (and those of you who've just been wondering), deepest apologies for the silence.  It's been a rough month, and work continues to try to deal with things.  So far I've been very, very happy with my new therapist, not quite as thrilled with the psychiatrist, but we'll see how that goes and whether or not changing to a different one is warranted.  Still working on medication levels, still working on getting insurance idiocy sorted out, still dealing with a bizarrely dysfunctional workplace (but with coworkers who make going there worthwhile - we have all mentioned how nice it would be if we could all be lifted en masse to a saner place to work).  Realized this week I'm paying almost 1/4 of my salary on gas for my commute, which adds to the insanity and propelled me into my boss's office to discuss the lots and lots of extra things I'm being given to do and the lowness of my salary.  (Later that same day, worst panic attack I've had in a while.  Coincidence?  Probably not... not good at confrontation.  Boss didn't give me any kind of concrete response, by the way.  Have been wisely counseled to write down summary of "meeting" and all my duties and send it to him with a "thank you for meeting with me" note, if nothing else to have to show to a future potential employer in lieu of possible absence of recommendation from the current one.)

In other news, I've started running, or "running," as I prefer to call it, and just yesterday seem to have agreed to do a 5K in just over a month.  Talk about motivation (the desire not to make a fool of myself as I rather did in the previous four 5K races I've finished in my life is strong...).  Right now it seems impossible, but it's a goal.  Other news, have become a big Chicago Bulls/Derrick Rose et al. fan in recent weeks - finally found my Auburn football/Cam Newton replacements, better late in the season than never.  And today, with my parents in town for the weekend, we went off to Best Buy and I bought a 21st-century replacement for my 14-year-old television, with installation and switch over to AT&T U-verse, and a fond farewell to my landline telephone, next weekend.

So... still here, still muddling through life, still trying to get a handle on what happens after the world ends.  And thank you, all y'all, for your care and concern.

Latest Yes-I'm-Still-Here-Don't-Worry-All-Y'all Post

The post title pretty much sums it up.  My drive to communicate is still underwhelming these days, but I just wanted to let y'all know that I'm still here.  Had my first appointment with a psychiatrist this morning, and she's changing up some of my meds and also sending me off for blood work to make sure my thyroid levels are okay and not contributing to and/or causing the panic attacks (which, when they've happened, have been less intense... maybe the Tranxene is working?).  Still in the works: finding a therapist for the talk therapy part, one that can see me either in the evening or on weekends.

Really, really anxious for spring to get here.

How the day is ending

Feeling calmer this evening.  Not sure my heart rate has slowed to normal all day today, but... calmer.  Tomorrow I'll go by the pharmacy and pick up a higher dose of Prozac plus an anti-anxiety pill - reading about the latter (Tranxene) actually caused anxiety, but I called back and talked to the nurse about it and found out it's supposedly less sedating than the Xanax, and I'll try it out tomorrow night to see about that.  Called a mental health practice the doctor referred me to and left a message, and will see what they say.

Spent the evening re-watching Dan in Real Life for the umpteenth time and finishing one of the Jayne hats.  Which is very, very sad-looking - I'm not sure even Ma Cobb would have done such a messy job.  I've been trying to cobble them together from various online patterns, and the decreases in the one I used for this last one were not good.  Next one, I'll try a different decrease approach.  I have lots of cheap Red Heart yarn - most of the online pattern makers insist that Ma Cobb wouldn't have used fancy-shmancy yarn, and I won't either.

Up too late - need to get to bed, and get up tomorrow and go to work.  And pull myself out of this.

Missing you on your birthday, Sweetie.

February 21

Today is Jerry's birthday.

Apologies to all of you who've been concerned about me due to my radio silence lately.  I've definitely been sort of shut down in the past few weeks, and have been dealing with new weird manifestations of something bad happening, mainly panic attacks.  This is the second Monday in a row I've taken off as a personal day from work, and this morning I called my doctor's office, and have discussed matters with her nurse, and am waiting for another call back to find out if they want me to come in for an appointment they've set aside for me this evening just in case.  What I really want, I think, is a psych referral - the counselor I saw a number of months ago was a nice woman and all, but I think bigger guns are warranted now.  I spend so much time thinking "Yeah, it feels bad, but it's not really that bad, others are in so much worse shape and I mostly do fine and go to work and come home," only this morning I didn't manage the "go to work" part and the weekend didn't go real well and I actually cried the way I've only cried once before during all this, right before Jerry died, couldn't breathe, couldn't stop, felt like I was out of control and in some other odd space, outside myself almost.  So yeah... bigger guns.

I thought I was doing so well.  Frighteningly well.  I thought, Well, I'm coping so much better than I ever expected I would.  Now I worry it was all just my brain doing its coping-mechanism-thing.  And that that's not working anymore.

I'm sorry for the lack of communication, but sometimes withdrawal is really the only thing I can do.  In the plus column, over the weekend I got a ticket to see Sugarland in May and one to go to Huntsville the week before that for the weekend of the Huntsville All-Day Sacred Harp Singing.  So I must have some sort of optimism hidden away somewhere that I can actually pull out of this thing I'm dealing with now and will want to do things in the future.  Also, I've started knitting again, which I wasn't sure I'd ever do again: thanks to several guys at work for being Firefly fans, so I've been motivated to make them Jayne hats.  (Google will be your friend if that last sentence sounded like gibberish to you...)  I've made a hash of the two attempts so far, but I'm soldiering on and enjoying the process again.

But apparently Jerry is dead and not coming back.  And I don't know, still, after all these months, how real that idea is to me.  I cannot tell you all how much I do not want to be dealing with all this, how much I want a "normal" life again.  I feel horrible for feeling that I don't want to be sad about Jerry's suffering and death and absence any more.  But I guess that's not really it.  I'll always be sad about that, it'll always be there, no matter how happy a life I manage to have someday.  I just want to function, I want to be happy, I want it not to be tearing my life apart and making me feel like I'm melting down and disappearing into some sort of black hole.

Or maybe this is Prozac side effects catching me up.

So... yeah.  Waiting for the doctor's office to call back.

Landmines in plain sight

I guess by definition landmines are hidden, but sometimes you see yourself approaching them from miles away.  (And can I just add here that my editing brain just cannot turn itself off: here I am, metaphorizing about something very painful and serious, and I was starting off writing "sometimes you can see them coming from miles away," when I thought, "Landmines don't have feet, they're not 'coming' at all" and almost laughed out loud.  What a warped brain...)

Where was I?  Landmines, not hidden at all.  Such as today, a Sunday the 13th.  It's the first Sunday that's been a 13th of a month since June 13, 2010, the day the world for some reason didn't actually end.  It's eight months since Jerry died.  Tomorrow is, of course, Valentine's Day.  Next day, I'm six months away from being one year away from being 50.  Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure I wasn't so frakking obsessed with my age before eight months ago.  But having gone from being the 20-years-younger wife to the exhausted, burnt-out widow has done that to me.  I look in the mirror and see more and more white hairs, my face looks grey and drawn, and so often it looks just so bleak.

One more date: a week from Monday would have been Jerry's 68th birthday.  Doesn't that look like a nice big number?  As if, you know, he had a full life, I shouldn't be so sad that he didn't get to live longer.  There was nothing about Jerry, except for health issues, that said "This is a man approaching 70."  Yes, we knew there were twenty years between us - we knew he and my parents were born within three years of one another, we knew he was old enough to be my father - but it never was a thing in our relationship except for a source of occasional humor (he had to explain who Froggy the Gremlin was, for instance - and when he did, I suddenly remembered a Froggy the Gremlin toy that had been in my grandparents' house in Queens when I was little, I guess having belonged to my mother or her sister. I spent years trying to find a decent Froggy the Gremlin toy on eBay to get Jerry for a birthday, but never managed it).  We were just us.  Sixty-seven years was not enough.  Knowing Jerry for twelve years was not enough.  Having only ten wedding anniversaries was not enough.

And of course no matter how many years he had had, it would never have been enough.  From the time we got married I told him he had to stick to the contract, that I was insisting on a Golden Wedding Anniversary.  Then I upped the number and told him I wanted a marriage that lasted 65 years.  Yes, he would have been something like 122 on our 65th wedding anniversary, and I would have been 101, but I demanded it.  Very funny, eh?

I'm taking a mental health day off from work tomorrow.  Work's gotten very weird.  People keep quitting, good people, and the vibe is incredibly dysfunctional and sour.  It could be a very good place to work, but there would have to be some fundamental changes made.  So many people are frustrated and unhappy.  Public forum, won't say more, and I hope things get at least a bit sorted out for the better, but it doesn't seem likely.  I will not be the last rat on the foundering vessel, that's for sure.  But anyway, I think that, given all the stressors that are piling up on the calendar this week, a mental health day is warranted.

And I'm breaking a cardinal rule this afternoon by going out and getting a haircut while in a depressive state.  Can't be helped - I've been overtaken by one of those moods where I can't stand my hair as it is for one second longer than I need to - as a matter of fact, since my usual hairstylist, whom I love, isn't working today or tomorrow, I'm going to a totally different salon near my house, one I've never been to. Crapshoot out of desperation.

One more thing: thank you to Alicia for assuring me that not being able to remember my day-to-day life with Jerry is a normal thing that will change.  After all these months, all I can think of still is the end of his life, the hell he went through.  I can't remember what it was like to share our happy marriage every day, to do ordinary things, to fight, to argue, to laugh together, to be silly together, to listen to him mangle words in the way he loved to do.  I know it all  happened, I can think about it, but I can't remember it, and I can't feel it.  I have to listen to him talking on YouTube clips to bring his voice to my mind.  I don't know if this is supposed to be some sort of coping mechanism, my mind not letting me remember these things until it thinks I can handle them?  And given how absolutely abysmal the "coping mechanisms" minds come up with usually are (great for a moment, perhaps, but lethal in the longer run), I hope I get to have my good memories back someday soon.  I've gotten to the point where I know without a doubt that I want love again, I want someone in my life to love me and to love - but I want my memories of Jerry back too, I want them to be real and vivid and I want to remember him and our beautiful marriage for the rest of my life.  Thank you, Alicia, for letting me know it will happen someday.

The brick

This is the memorial brick in the pathway at the Garden of Hope in the Huntsville Botanical Garden.  Laura, Karen and I went and saw it on Saturday.  I think it's just right.

Quick late-night hello

I'm just back from Alabama.  Friday had started out not much better than Thursday had ended - first day I've had a hard time holding it together at work at the start of the day, leading my boss to tell me I wasn't my "usual bubbly self" (first time in my entire life anyone has ever called me "bubbly" - definitely not an adjective I would have thought to apply, ever, before) and a few others to comment that I looked tired, which I was, having stayed up way too late doing last-minute packing for my trip.  By Friday afternoon, though, I had done a little analyzing and come up with a reason for my sudden mood swing Thursday: a coworker had brought her new-born son into the office that afternoon, and while the sight of a baby has never once inspired in me the thought "Wish I had one," I can only guess that hearing about the woman's plans, all the new beginnings and happiness and decisions, and watching everyone coo over the baby, just made me feel so old and over with.  I know it's not true, I know there will be good things in my life, new things even, new joys someday, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's what set me off.

Anyway, I need to make definite tracks towards bed, since I'm already going to get way too little sleep before I have to get up for work tomorrow (and my insides are not 100% happy - not sure if it was the sudden onslaught of Southern cooking in large quantities, the fact that I accidentally ate some chicken casserole at the potluck at today's singing - thought it was squash or potato casserole until it was already in my mouth - and I haven't eaten any meat in years - or possibly the Diet Dr. Pepper float from Sonic I got when Laura and I stopped on the way back to BNA - or a combination of all of the above).  But I just wanted to check in and let all y'all know I'm feeling better than I was when I last wrote here.  And to thank you for being there... again.

Tired

I just want to say that I've had enough of this widowhood shit and I want Jerry to come home.  Now.

Nothing like a quick blast-from-the-past-summer emotional wave to make me appreciate even more tomorrow's trip to Alabama.  Which is coming just in time.  I know this will pass, I know things are better than they were, I know they'll be better still in the future, I know, to quote Jennifer and Kristian, "It'll be all right again."  But I'm so tired of sadness.  I'm tired of land mines.  I'm tired of being lonely, I'm tired of being celibate for a year, I'm tired of not having someone to hold me, I'm tired of imagining someone holding me who isn't going to... someones both living and dead.  I'm tired of winter.  I'm tired of grey skies, of snow, of cold, of the car covered in road salt, of winter layers, of the woolen sweaters the moths are riddling with holes in my wardrobe.  I'm tired of coming closer to 50 and feeling old and worn out and, to use a phrase that popped into my head on the drive home, "past my sell date."  I'm tired of being in this house alone, full of reminders, full of so much stuff to go through and sort and figure out.  I'm tired of working so hard to live the semblance of a normal life, when I feel like a person apart, even more so than I already always did, a person so scarred and bizarre and different and crushed that no one is ever going to want to be that someone to hold me, ever.

And I hate it that Jerry Enright is dead.  I just hate it.

"Loneliness is a very lousy case"

I cry so infrequently these days.  Sometimes I wish I'd cry more often - it would, I don't know, make me feel more "normal"?  I worry so often that I've swung too far in the opposite direction from where I was this past summer, and done it too fast, too soon (although God knows it didn't feel fast or soon through that summer of hell, and if I had the stomach right now for reading back over the earliest entries in this blog, I'd probably not worry about these things and just be glad for not being back in that place, no matter how artificial - or not - this new place is).

So let's see, how incoherent was that first paragraph?

Anyway, my point tonight is that it's been a less happy couple of days - sometimes the loneliness is worse, sometimes my grasping of the fact that Jerry is dead is less certain.  I also notice that my dreams are reflecting way more anxiety than I'm aware of when I'm awake.  I don't always remember them, but I do remember the mood, and I do remember that Jerry is in the dreams but I'm not with him - in some of these dreams I'm even with someone else, giving in to someone else's attentions, while not necessarily choosing to of my own free will, knowing Jerry is somewhere but unable to stop myself.  Obvious much?  I don't think we need lots of analysis to know that my desire to have love in my life again someday, my loneliness for physical affection and contact, and the fact that I've started to notice men again (as opposed to the months after Jerry died, when I could not even imagine ever finding any other man attractive ever again) are all bringing up anxieties and guilt and fear - not when I'm awake, or not that I'm aware of when I'm awake, but sure enough it's coming out when I'm asleep.

I watched a bit of the movie Bounce yesterday: Jerry and I had watched it together years ago, and I know I've seen it more than once.  Gwyneth Paltrow plays Abby, the widow of a man who's died in a plane crash, and without going into lots of details about the plot, there's a point in the movie where she takes some tentative steps towards her first relationship since his death - and freaks out about it, for various plot reasons, and just because.  And then she has this exchange with another character:


Abby: Being with him is like making a choice.
Donna: You don't have that choice, Abby. You have other choices.
Abby: It just can't be him - that's all.
Donna: Ok, then fine. But whether it's Buddy or someone else a year from now, whoever you choose will be there because Greg is not. That's just how it is.

One of those times when you hear just what you need to hear.  Not that there's a Buddy, or an anyone else, in prospect at the moment.   But the thing is... I wish there were.  (Honest but vague disclosure: I've started having crushes.  In some ways it's nice, it's good.  In some ways it freaks me out because it makes me feel like I'm 13 years old again.  And in some ways it's just depressing, because I wasn't supposed to have to start over, I had found my Mr. Right, and why the hell should I be having to deal with feeling like a 13-year-old again at the age of 48!?!?!?!  And mainly depressing because after 12 years of requited, going back to unrequited is just not fun.)  And my subconscious can yell at me about it all it wants, but whoever is there someday, if he ever is, will be there because Jerry is not.  My subconscious can want me to stay true to Jerry all it wants, and if I had that option, if Jerry were here to be true to, I would be, as I always was, as I never had any thought not to be, because I loved him with all my heart.  But now I've had to receive most of that heart back again - not whole, not ever whole again, but most of it is now back in my keeping, and it's lonely.  And my subconscious can give me all the bad dreams it wants - it won't change the reality of my life now.  And the absence of Jerry.

(Wow.  I know I've been low on the anger part of the grieving process, but I didn't expect to find some of it aimed at my subconscious.  I need to give it a break - it's only reflecting what's there inside my head,  possibly dampened or hidden by Prozac and the desire to feel better and the determination to feel better.  But I don't want to feel guilty or wrong.  And I want to be happy.  And I want to be held.)

Anyway, I did manage some tears yesterday, brought on by a partial umpteenth viewing of Serenity.  If you've seen Serenity, you can guess what brought it on, or one of the scenes, anyway.  If you haven't - put it on your list, but don't watch it until after you've watched Firefly.

So... anyway... lonely.  Missing Jerry.  Wanting someone.  A whirl of emotions.  As usual.

(Extra credit to those of you who know the movie the line I've titled this post with comes from.)

1998

The movie You've Got Mail is one that I watch at least some part of most times I see it listed on TV, even though I own a copy of it (on VCR tape) that I hardly ever think about watching and even though it's only a so-so movie, with lots of lines that make me cringe in their clunkiness, and it pales so much in comparison with the movie it's a remake of, the exquisite Shop Around the Corner.   However... it will always have a place in my heart, because at the time it was being filmed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I lived exactly there, and I remember standing on a street corner on Broadway watching Meg Ryan and Nora Ephron and a huge amount of crew and equipment taking over a Starbucks.  (Grammar Nerd Aside: why is there no apostrophe in that name?)  When I watch the movie, I see a snapshot of that time in my life (although the movie makes the neighborhood look as idealized as any small town in a movie), recognize corners and restaurants and shops, know where things were created just for the movie (neither bookstore in the movie was really there, for instance).

And what I notice now, watching bits of the movie again, is that suddenly the year 1998, when the movie came out and when I met Jerry, the year before I put my apartment on West 73rd Street at Amsterdam Avenue on the market and moved to Illinois, feels like a long time ago.  I mean, it was: 12 years is a quarter of my life.  But it also feels like a long time ago in terms of who I was then, and who I've been over those 12 years and all I've experienced in that time, and who I am now.  (Hell, June of last year, as I keep saying, feels like a million years ago in terms of who I was then and who I am now.)

Nothing profound about this realization (and hard to write coherently when I'm half-listening to the dialogue of the movie).  Just... a realization.  My life in New York now seems as unreal as the Upper West Side of You've Got Mail does.  And it is, indeed, just as long ago.

Current life developments:  I've lost a couple of pounds (ten pounds to unrealistic goal, six pounds to realistic goal), and I've worked out three times since Tuesday.  Had a haircut yesterday, and, oh, yeah, a year and a half after I had problems with the reading part of my progressive trifocal glasses and decided, in a burst of sheer brilliance, or sheer something, that my eyes must have been improving and I must not have needed glasses at all (because I seemed to read better without the lenses), I had an eye exam and found out, no, I do need glasses... just a stronger prescription in the reading part.  I can still drive without glasses, but things are clearer with glasses again, and reading is now so much easier now that I have the right prescription.

New ink

Mike at Fox Valley Tattoo, who did the tattoo of Jerry's signature in June, did this tattoo for me this evening.  I love it.  It's on my left wrist.  As I wrote on Facebook: Heart with wings, symbolizing the unexpected, surprising healing of my own heart. It will never be entirely whole, missing the part that Jerry took with him - but I have found strength and healing when I never imagined I ever would.

And that's what this tattoo means.  I know one meaning of heart-with-wings tattoos is memorial, but that's not what this one is about - that's what the signature is.  This one is about me.  This one is about becoming someone I never thought I would.  This is about who I want to be, what I want to have in my life.

(I do forgive and understand the person who, when I mentioned that I was going to get a new tattoo, asked "Auburn Tigers, right?"  Yeah, I've become a rabid member of the Auburn Family, definitely All In, thrilled to pieces about their victory over Oregon on Monday - but no, I'm not ready to tattoo that rabidity on my body.  And I forgive those of you who just thought "...yet.")

I did wait an extra week from the time I decided to do it, to try to suss out whether or not a heart-with-wings tattoo wasn't a bit too much of a result of my recent Sugarland obsession - but a week later I still wanted it.  I looked at a lot of ideas online, and finally came across this, which jumped out at me and said "I'm the one you're looking for."  I brought a printout of the design in this afternoon and discussed it with Mike, and we agreed the wings would be filled in in black.  So this evening when he was done with other customers I went back and he drew the design and then turned it into a stencil and then inked it, and I'm just thrilled with the end result.

Made it through another month since Jerry's death.  I was surprising myself again, this time by not being sure how many months it had been on Thursday when the 13th rolled around.  I counted, on my fingers no less, several times to come up with the number seven, certain it must be eight, but no, it's only been seven months.  And already I'm such a different person.  And that's a good thing.

Another thing I haven't put down here before, but I think I need to: last week when Lynne and Bill were here, I took the chain with Jerry's wedding ring on it off when I made a stab at following the Zumba DVD Lynne brought with her... and then I didn't put it back on again.  I felt very strongly that I didn't want to.  It was the same odd feeling I had when I didn't put my own wedding ring back on.  Guilt, but also a feeling that doing it would be doing something that wasn't appropriate anymore, something that wasn't right for me... something more for appearances, for other people, to make sure they thought I was still grieving "properly," the way I "should."  As if I were afraid they'd think I was "over it," that I'd moved on - I'll bet this is the same thing I wrote about my ring.  That if people didn't see those rings on my body somewhere, they'd think I wasn't, I don't know, sad enough anymore.  That I didn't love Jerry enough.  That I don't love him anymore.

And I decided I needed to do what matters to me, and stop worrying what other people think.  I know now something I didn't know before.  If I'm ever lucky enough to find love again, it won't change how I felt about Jerry, and how I feel about him now, and how I'll always feel about him.  And if I'm lucky enough someday that another Mr. Right comes along, my love for Jerry is going to be okay with him - that'll be part of his Rightness.  I know this now.  And I know that my heart is strong, and getting stronger, and healing.

And that's what the tattoo is about.

All in

Karen and Lynne get a head start on showing Tiger Spirit, January 2011 (not entirely visible in the photo: a pair of Tibetan bead earrings Jerry gave me years ago... large orange amber beads with smaller navy blue beads... as Karen said, he knew!).

Quick note

Hey y'all - sorry I've been quiet, especially for those of you I don't communicate with in other ways.  Life mostly takes over the time I used to have to write here, either with occupation or by wearing me out so much I don't have the energy when I might have the time.  It's been sort of a rough ride these past days - I did have the pleasure of Lynne and Bill's visit for New Year's weekend, and I've enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the 143 Bowl games (not 143?  Are you sure?).  But there's been a lot of emotional dips in the past few days, abetted by some physical wear and tear and insomnia and some bad reactions to some medication, all of it building up to the point where I drove home on I-90 this evening in tears.  Which is probably a good thing, as I seem to say every time I get through a crying spell these days - they come much less frequently now than they did, and I sometimes worry that things are getting bottled up or hidden too deep.  So it's good that it can come out and pass for a spell.  It just would be more convenient if it didn't happen while I was driving at night on an Interstate, going 70 in a 55 zone to keep up with traffic.

Four days and a wake-up until the BCS Final!  Lynne will be back for a quick overnight stop on her way back east from California, and we'll cheer on the Tigers together, both sorry we can't be in Glendale or in Alabama to watch the game.

Must go to bed - the insomnia's been pretty bad the past few nights, sprinkled with some nightmares about Jerry dying and me being kept from seeing him.  Days and nights both giving me some trouble at the moment.  On the plus side, going back to work after a 5-day break at New Year's was actually a good thing (except - always except - for the commute).  It's good to be busy and good to be out of the house and seeing people.

Good night for now.