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.