Christmas

 Dear Will:

I missed you yesterday but I didn’t cry, except a little when listening to “In the Bleak Midwinter” but then that always makes me tear up a bit.

I set a place for you at breakfast.

I had champagne and an ersatz cream cheese omelette with sour cream and caviar. I like sometimes having champagne and caviar for a meal just because I can. It used to be only a traveler’s frivolity. But I realized that I can also enjoy it at home. You wouldn’t like it.

We shared 47 or 48 Christmases with each other, the first nearly two decades at the Hanson then Hanson/Williams house.  Christmases in which everyone received a multitude of presents. We continued the tradition of many presents when we had our own Christmases in the Bend house.  As late at 2023 we each had a few presents under the tree, though I bought all of them except for those from my sister and maybe a friend or two.  

It strikes me, as I write this, how much I have forgotten.  You were always our memory palace.  Until the palace burned down. 

We shared our first Christmas season in the Bend house in 1990 with my Mom who had “pre-inherited” to us a bunch of furniture a short time before. She was so tiny when she visited and almost disappeared under the covers of our big bed. She told me in private how she was happy to see the two of us so settled (unsaid: “after your period of separation.”) She died on January 8, 1991, just a year older than I am now.

We had many wonderful Christmas times together here in Bend, beginning with the housewarming party that first December when I had all my invited friends and colleagues bring Christmas decorations.  I wanted to introduce you and enjoy the party “flow through” of our new house. And for years after that I could connect each one of those Christmas decorations with the person who brought it. The only ones I can actually remember now are the ones from Lilli Ann LF and Hal G.  Lilli Ann, my first friend in Bend, gave us a gold colored bauble with a picture of her baby Kit on it.  Hal gave us a silver star that I, decades later, gave to Trinity to put on one of its trees and in the complications after Christmas, it got lost.  I was sad for awhile about that because Hal, my second friend in Bend and one that I hoped you would get to know because you’d both taught similar things, died two years later of prostate cancer. I remember you saying that you purposefully didn’t get to know him because you didn’t want to lose another friend.

So yesterday, Christmas day, the household was up early.  I had a protein shake before church. I was altar guild and reader for the 10:00 am service in Trinity.  I read the selection from Titus with great gusto. During clean up, three other AG women who weren’t on duty just stepped up to help. That felt great.

Among the things I can’t remember is how I spent Christmas Day, 2021, after you screamed at me and then, a short time later, went into your death coma. 

I don’t remember how long ago I bought the “new tree” after the one of many decades started shedding. I’ve been trying to get rid of it and will probably just take it to the dump to the dump to the dump dump dump around the 12th Day of Christmas. I still have many of our old tree decorations in storage in the basement, including the last of those I made as a child and two that Sally brought back from Mexico in 1963.

I can no longer bear a tree in the house but my need for retail therapy got me to buy myself a tree forest.

I am making a new way for myself. 

Love,

Kake

Last Piece written for Writing Love and Loss

We had our last Writing Love and Loss class tonight.  I missed last week because of google calendar user error.  I wrote this for tonight.

----------------------------

December 16, 2021

As we were waiting for the funeral home to carry my husband’s body away, I talked about oral sex. 

In what I assume now were slightly hysterical tones, I talked about how we got together in 1971 when I was barely 18 and he was 41.  How I’d followed him home after my Aunt Huldah’s birthday party, a late-into-the-night gab feast where a reefer was passed around my grandfather’s great, round, oak table. I told the hospice nurse and my friend Stacey the story of how I had seduced the skinny, bearded English professor. I reveled in having experienced such a non-traditional beginning for a marriage of almost five decades.

I called our for-profit hospice early that Boxing Day after waking and finding him in the same position in the hospital bed that he’d held since the terrible morning before. His temperature was 105 and he was unconscious.  I called the hospice but no one could get to me until 3 pm.  When the nurse arrived she almost immediately “called it,” as they say on medical TV.

I had thought I would want to clean him, as I had the old fellow who had been my hospice client back in the 90s.  That gentlemen, who was almost as skinny at his death as Will became, was my “client” (I was a volunteer) for almost 6 months.  As he was dying of lung cancer, he was also teaching me to play the guitar. He left the earth with far more of himself than my sweetheart.  Sadly, I wasn’t able to be at his death. I got the call that his dying was active right before I was to give a test at the college where I worked. I felt a responsibility to the school and my students and so missed my client’s actual death.  But when I finally arrived at his home, I was able to help the hospice nurse clean his body.  I had imagined at the time that I might do the same for my older husband some day.

But the day in 2021 when Will died, the nurse wasn’t focused on cleaning him.  She just did her job then waited with my friend and me as I babbled.   I was exhausted and giddy with relief. For the seven years I lived with his dementia I knew it would end in death. My goal had been to postpone the end as long as possible – until it wasn’t.  Until his 6 foot frame reduced to 112 pounds and he was eating only lemon drops and protein juice.

At the end, his life force was so strong that his body held on past its time.  The Hospice chaplain and I had spent hours the previous week, the week Will entered the hospital bed, telling him about the glories of the “other side.” Pastor Noah spoke mostly about the joy of being with Jesus.  I told my old sweetheart he would meet up with the cat and dog he had loved, June Jumpha and Princess Birdy.

 And then he was dead. At last the long struggle was over. I imagined in that moment that I would soon dive into dating, find a man or woman friend with benefits and become a Merry Widow.  For some reason, because I’d experienced pretty severe grief for the final four of the dementia years, I thought I’d be freed.  

Instead, my heart and mind became a scene of devastation.  I hadn’t understood that in spite of our life as friends, as private people, as psychologically separate individuals, being with him for fifty years was my foundation. He made it possible for me to live with my melancholia and manias without flying into madness. His were the eyes and arms that told me, no matter how great my sin, I would always be loved.

I have not felt at home in the world since he left it.

Thanksgiving

 Dear Will:

Will at kitchen table in Los Gatos

I’ve been remembering all the different Thanksgivings we shared. I’m sure we began by going to Huldah Bell’s, sitting around my grandfather’s great round table with David Fortsch, K.C and Marcy, Ford, and maybe others. So much food and wonderful talk and silliness. David always finishing up the remaining salad. Wonderful food that Huldah worked on through the morning (with a few helpers chopping and setting table).

 

Did we ever have one of our own Thanksgivings while we lived in Pocatello? Or were we always at Huldah’s or other friends?  Carl and Judith’s?

And what about when I was in Utah? Did I drive home at Thanksgiving?  I don’t remember.  You were the one who kept track of our lives details … until you couldn’t.  I don’t remember having Thanksgiving with anyone in Utah.

We began to make our own holidays once we began sharing our best life in Bend.  Oh, I remember that you never liked Bend.  But I don’t think you ever liked anywhere you lived except Chicago. And neither of us were ever skilled, talented, or ambitious enough to live in a city.  I know you would have liked to live in Berkeley and there was that one year when I could have gone to work in San Jose — but I think, as much as you loved the City, you would have been miserable in any housing we could afford if I’d taken the job at San Jose State.

with Betsy's cat in the dining room, Los Gatos

Here in Bend, we sometimes made our own Thanksgiving, sometimes ate with friends like Eleanor S.-L and “the Girls” (your name for them) Dorothy and Becky.  In the late nineties we went to the Thanksgiving dinners provided to familyless congregants of the Methodist church. I remember that the men of the church did the cooking.  I think that the last time we went the quality wasn’t up to your expectations.

And I don’t remember what we did once your dementia set in and you stopped noticing the holidays.

Oh.  And I remember one of the loveliest Thanksgivings — the first November I was in Bend, when you flew in to Portland and we went to that wonderful Bed and Breakfast, with its Victorian gew gnaws and were invited to their Family Thanksgiving.  And they gave us a bottle of champagne and we spent the night and the next night getting tipsy and making love.

We had wonderful times together when we each relaxed and enjoyed the world around us.  I miss your cooking. I miss being with you with others. I miss your silliness. I miss your ability to love me with food. 

So today I did my best to love myself with food.  I made sausage gravy with sausage and oat milk and ersatz butter.  I made stuffing from a box. I baked potatoes and made my version of Susan Stamberg’s mother-in-law’s cranberry relish.  I bought two slabs of Ovengold turkey from the Newport Market.  

Love you forever,

Kake

Crisis

 I went into crisis yesterday. A bunch of events lined up along with the bodily injury called surgery and this old brain skittered to the bad place of hungering for peace through self punishment and a friend was there on the phone to talk me down. I don't want to give details. All actions seem predictable in hindsight, with physical, mental, and technological issues lining up and the old brain getting excited and the new brain not strong enough in the circumstances. But time heals.

copy of slide from COCC Theatre

Dear Will:

I needed you so yesterday.

Love,

Kake

.  

Churchy

 Awhile back I  was asked to present one of the stewardship speeches at church.  I spoke briefly the words pasted below. Three people said after it was the best pitch they ever heard:

I wrote my first thousand-dollar check to Trinity Episcopal Church on March 8, 2013, two years before I began attending regularly.  You know that date. The day the Bend Bulletin ran the story about the fire.

 

It was at that moment I realized how important the actual building called Trinity Episcopal Church was to me, even though I wasn’t an Episcopalian yet. Beauty in art, architecture, and language has long been the primary tool through which God seduces me into belief.

I love this building.

 

But it wasn’t until I retired from teaching to become a dementia carer that I became interested in regular attendance. I needed the support of a believing community. And as I learned more about the Via Media, the middle way of Anglicanism, and the focus on  using reason to interpret scripture, I began to appreciate the theology as well. And as I grew to understand the theology and history of the Episcopal tradition, I met the people of Trinity and became inspired by this loving and service-oriented community.

 

And most importantly, I found a tradition that had a decades-long history of supporting the queer community, of which my late husband and I were a part.

 

In other words, I came for the church, I came for the steeple, but I stayed when I opened the door and saw all the people.

 

So, OK.  I really dislike endless stewardship appeals. So bottom line:  You know that life is expensive and our broadcast studio, personnel, and both buildings don’t run on fairy dust. Let me remind you of

First Timothy 5:18: “For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn. And, The laborer is worthy of his hire”. 

 

Remember – you are a necessary support for all the beauty of the work and structure of this congregation. Remember to be generous.

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.