Some Writing

 Well, once again I've failed NaNoWriMo.  I just couldn't stay focused enough or disciplined enough.  Oh well. 

But, I did write some good stuff for my Writing on Love and Loss class at Sarah Lawrence.  Here's something I procrastinated about writing and then 15 minutes before class started I whipped out most of it, taking some time by not listening to other online students to fine tune it.  When I read it aloud, I had three people sending up hearts.

Terri Linton's prompt was "For this week, please think about and write into: grief as a part of daily life."

Here's what I wrote:

Living with grief is knowing that your beloved dead die every day.

Will and Max

 

You wake up every morning and there they are – dead.

 

You do your morning routine and they’re not there.

 

They are not there when you want to talk about something you like.  Sometimes we might imagine them there. A year and a half after my husband’s death I could finally watch film noir again.  I’d been avoiding all shared pleasures as they were too much associated with him and thus too hard to consume.  But I felt ready to dive into a couple of unseen 1950s gems on the Criterion Channel. As I was watching the black and white movie on my big screen tv, the corner of my eye saw his familiar shape sitting in my new red chair, a piece of furniture he never saw, his legs crossed in that way he had, one foot wiggling.

 

And I looked at the chair and called his name but he was gone.

 

I have found out that this is common for those who mourn, imagining seeing the lost.

 

And having to remember, as one must remember again and again, that the beloved is gone and with him those hunks of the self he made it possible for one to build. Made it possible for me to build.

 

I am now 35 months from his death I and can go for as long as a couple of weeks without a tear tsunami and think “Well, I’ve moved ahead” only to find myself back in the trenches of loss – loss of self, loss of community, loss of purpose.

 

Then my grief therapist, like a superhero, swoops in to remind me that heavy grief comes in waves, that I’ve been hurting this much before, and that I have also had wonderful days and will have more in the future.

 

She also says that I don’t have to be any more functional than I am.

Classes

 

Not the Sequel but the Original

I'm taking a variety of writing classes this fall: some from Sarah Lawrence and one from COCC (oh, don't get me started on the teaching style in the latter class -- I'm just too old and set in my ways to love a teacher who improvises the class, doesn't go by the syllabus, and says things like, "I haven't read Dickens but I imagine Dickens would write like this . . .").

For the Sarah Lawrence memoir class on Love and Loss, I wrote the following and shared it with the class yesterday and got some nice comments.  The prompt was to write something about loving service in 100 words.

 Christmas Gift

 

The final act of love I performed for my sweetheart of 50 years was cleaning the shit off his shrunken body. But he didn’t experience it as love. In his dementia, he thought me a childhood abuser and screamed curses. “I’ll kill you,” he shouted.  At that moment, in one stroke, his extreme rage allowed him to perform his final act of love for me -- disappearing into the feverish coma that ended in his death on Boxing Day. I was relieved that our suffering was over. I didn’t realize this respite was just a brief pause before I shattered.

 

 

 I wonder if writing and sharing this yesterday was the reason his spirit was finally back this morning, sitting down on the bed around 3:50 when Sequel woke me for no good reason.  I told him "Hello, Sweetheart" and then went back to sleep.

 

Puppy Whipped

 Wow.  

Sequel jumping Poppy

Having this puppy here is kicking my butt.  Winston is acting weird about his food. The cat is more demanding than ever when she isn't fleeing to outside or downstairs.

 The good thing is I didn't cry last week.  First week since Will died that I haven't cried for a full week.  Why? Because I was anxious and annoyed and irritated all week and that didn't leave as much time for sadness.

But previously, all the stress of managing the puppy was making me miss Will more. This week, the week that began with a friend's death at 75 and ended with another friend

But my therapist and I laughed a lot together this morning because I knew this was going to be hard and I am now experiencing the previously mentally accepted hardness. It is hard. I don't regret making this decision, though. Having her and meeting her needs for exercise, mental stimulation, food, sleep, and poo/pee time has once again convinced me that I made the right decision to not be a parent.  I'll be able to stand this for the short time a puppy takes to grow up (2 years) but I never would have made it the length of time it takes to launch a higher level primate into the universe!

I just now had a nice talk with Marie Hedeman, Sequel's breeder, about some of the issues we've been having and she gave me some great advice about taking the girl's food away an hour earlier than I've been doing, covering the ground with red or black pepper, and playing with her hard for a full half hour before we go to bed.

New Puppy

Dear Will:

I have a new puppy who looks just like Birdy but is far more wiggly and bitey than Birdy was.  But I remember we got Birdy at about a month later in her development.  But just as with Birdy, I'm not getting much sleep.

My struggle with her makes me miss my former fellow puppy wrangler.  I'm crying almost every day again. 

Some of these tears are about Kathy.  You remember her. You used to complain about how she had no other conversation but her children. She was a great leader at COCC and is facing death with strength and panache. I hope that I will be able to follow her lead when my time comes in two to twenty years.(I know I could just as easily die tomorrow as in two years but I'm basing my claim of two to twenty on the general peacefulness and healthyish nature of my existence.)

Sequel is beautiful, of course, and came to Bend with a full groom and painted nails. And beauty, as you know, is a prime motivator for me. Sadly, she also needs a bath now and I'm not looking forward to managing a shark in the tub.

Winston is annoyed with her and has spoken to her sharply.  I am so looking forward to December when we can start going to puppy socialization classes.

Missing you every fucking day.

Kake

Surprises Yet Again!

 Well, I should not have been surprised by this surprise.

My birthday morning at the Sylvia Beach Hotel

A few of years before his death I made a couple of collections of our letters and cards and put them in saved cookie tins.  I kept the tins near Will’s daytime chair so that he could look through them. The tins got moved around after his death and found a final spot downstairs. I hadn’t looked into them since I made them.  A few days ago I opened one of these tins, expecting to find a stack of cards from myself to Will.  And yes, there were a few cards from me. But there were also a few other things mixed in, including an unsigned note from a long-ago person I don’t know, written in a thin, right-leaning script.

The issue at hand was whether Will’s work at the University of Chicago was the equivalent of a DA at Idaho State University. As Will spoke of it, he’d been unceremoniously given an increased teaching load at some point, perhaps when the college became a university, simply because he didn’t have a doctorate. As he told the story; the only other person to be so targeted was one of the few female professors, also hired before change from four year. (I always appreciated this part of the story, as it illustrated once again how he identified with women.)   This note seems to be the last page of a set of responses to six or seven questions. 

“In conclusion I might note that I have done a fairly careful analysis of Professor Huck’s transcript from Chicago and I believe a strong case can be made for the claim that Huck’s graduate work there is equivalent to a D.A.  In this case the A.M. in Religion and Art would be the primary degree.The work done towards the D.B would be taken as an interdisciplinary component.The supervised fieldwork would be analogous to the teaching component.  I would be pleased to present this case but believe it is best preserved until the committee has the interaction sought in the questions posed above.”

Yes, dear readers, it ends on a question that makes me question.  With whom was the committee seeking to interact? Someone special from the University of Chicago? One of the stars from whom Will took classes?

How and when Will found his keepsake and then slipped it into this box is beyond my knowing. But how fitting for this to pop up when I was yearning so for him - this physical reminder of one of his core stories: how he fought the academic dragon and won. 

And how nice for the heavens to play with me again.

Even Better

 Well, in spite of all my whining yesterday, I managed to get the following done:

1) Went in to the office around 5:30 until 8

2) Went to monthly book club at 9 and had plenty to say about Fever in the Heartland by Tim Egan. Great book -- a horrible true story about the era when Indiana was owned by the KKK, told like a novel.

3) Walked the dog twice, once in a new-to-us park, Alpenglow, where Winston was admired by the Jehovah's Witness ladies.

4) Went to my expensive Exercise Coach workout.

Miss Poppy invites you to her Only Fans page. 😉

5) Took Miss Poppy to a meet and greet at Muddy Paws, where her nails will be done in a week.

6) Took two baskets (about 20 cans and bottles) of paint, fertilizer, and poison to the hazardous waste collection at Knott landfill and discovered the construction on 27th.

7) Raked the front yard and got the needles into the yard waste bin and watered both front and backyard. Also chopped off the limb of the laurel that would have been in the way of the fence builders coming on Monday.

8) Exchanged information with my house and pet sitter.

9) Re-watched two episodes of you-know-what. (And noticed how Joyce became spicier as Tom's retirement approached. See the episode Secrets and Spies

10) And of course wrote and rewrote yesterday's post, which originally had far more whinging than it does now.

Better

One of these will be my new best friend.

After posting yesterday and then going to meet with Sarah, my grief therapist, I felt much better. I'm still having trouble with my reactivity to disappointment and she explained to me that my emotion was anxiety about losing control. I have huge mental issues around control. This might arise from being tied up to be babysat when I was a kid.  Might not. Maybe everything I'm experiencing is normal and I just haven't heard people talk about it.

I still have a big interior desire to feel safe and being out of control in any way is problematic for me. My logical brain knows this is ridiculous because life isn't safe or predictable. I am not in control of much outside of my house and inside my house, well, I have a cat.

I'm okay when I can let go and let God, when I'm not worrying about what is happening next. When I'm high. Sarah told me I can use the skills I use when I travel to take care of myself when not traveling. I'm fully able to manage the difficulties of traveling by myself even when, as I showed yesterday, I'm in full-on grief tsunami.  I can drive and cry. And I can be having fun and still cry. Unfortunately, not traveling means I'm in Bend where I don't fit in.

I am okay with crying every few days. I miss well Will. Sometimes I even miss sick Will. And every week at least once I have the memory of putting my hand on the cold, embalmed face of Dead Will because that was the last time I saw him. So crying is okay. Crying is normal and natural for the kind of widow I am.  What is still challenging are these other mental things:

1) I continue to have trouble caring about what I am doing in the world. I would like to care about writing enough to deal with the discomfort of writing and the promise of cruel and biting comments if I ever put it into the world. This is ridiculous because no one actually cares about my writing. So I wouldn't get negative reviews because I wouldn't get ANY reviews. 

 I would like to care about the suffering of others enough to deal with the discomfort of volunteering around other people and working in the chaos that is part of many volunteer organizations. At least with this issue, I have money that I can put in my place.

I don't understand why my "will do" isn't stronger than my "won't do." I don't understand why wanting to do something doesn't provide me with enough mental energy to actually do it, if the "it" is uncomfortable and challenging.

 I have no motivation.

2) And then when I AM motivated, when I DO care about what I'm doing, I freak the fuck out when things go wrong. I react to rejection in such a huge way.  Even tiny things.  Like I'm probably not getting into a COCC class on which, for some reason, my brain had based my entire fall writing project on.  My brain kept telling me, "OK, I'll take this class and get the motivation, being around other people, to continue with one of the novels." So when I found out Tuesday that I probably wouldn't get in, my brain started telling me how terrible I was, how I'd never do anything worthwhile, and why did I even bother trying? 

Would Eyegor please steal me a different brain?

But no need to worry about me.  I'm fine.

And I will soon have a baby to take care of and won't have time for anymore of this whining.