Today

was a hard day.  

Photo by Joseph Barrientos on Unsplash

I was in serious emotional pain and then my mind went into the loop of hating myself because I felt ashamed of my pain. And then I wanted to cut myself to get out of the loop.  Finally, I texted Sarah and told her that while I wasn't cutting myself I really, really, wanted to.  She called a little later, just before my dishwasher shift at Family Kitchen, and reminded me that this was an old script and that I am creating a new brain that doesn't need to fall into the old script. She told me to look at a familiar positive picture of Will when I got home to take the image of his death out of my head. She reminded me that Agnes the Velociraptor has my back.  So I kept crying through my first hour of dishwashing and then my brain settled down for the next two hours. I put a piece of paper towel in one ear so I wouldn't hear the fucking Christmas music and listened to OTR detective radio through my hearing aid. It was a pretty easy night as there were only two pans with serious baked on stuff. Now I'm home, drinking American whiskey and will watch a little TV before going to bed with my dog.

Count Down - 7 Days till D-Day

 Death day approaches.

Letting Go

 Dear Will --

I had the realization this morning that the reason I've been so locked into grief is that it's the only relationship I have with you, especially now that your ghost is gone.

This is the first morning I've cried since Thursday when I had my first ketamine treatment.  I was so happy after the treatment.  The drug was powerful and helped me tune into my deep self again, a self that knew how to survive and thrive even with the interior despair and self hate.  A self that managed that despair through magical thinking, humor, and sex.

Sweetheart, I need to tell the Will inside me to set my own will free. Already, the great rock of grief in my chest has been withdrawn. I feel like I can function again, can do things.  So even though I am crying this morning, I know I am becoming free. Not free of my love for you which is for as long as I live, but free from the interior command to bury my mind beside you in the cold, cold ground.

There are people who love and support me, even though I still put two spaces after a period.  If I ever want sex again, there's ample opportunity to connect through the interwebs, if I want to, even for an old unicorn like myself. I have access to more distracting entertainment than ever dreamed of in my one tv station days.  And I still have a relatively good mind, even though my memory sucks (as it has since 6th grade when I couldn't remember the names of all my classmates and had to read their names off the back of a clay skull when I was the announcer for our 6th grade version of A Cask of Amontillado).  I have enough money to support my end life in-care if I get dementia (unless I am diagnosed with Alz or LB dementia, in which case I'll off myself). My bones are still good, I don't have cancer, and I'm not in pain all the time like some of my friends. So, my life is good.

The anniversary of your death is approaching slowly.  I will create a ritual for Boxing Day and then end this blog on that day.  

Or not.  We'll see.

When I Wear Purple

 So Cindy gave us a prompt to write about what we would do when we were "mature" -- based on the famous Jenny Joseph poem, "Warning" that begins, 

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

I got so many kind words for this piece.  Cindy said she would have known that I wrote it even if I hadn't put my name on it.  Another student said that I was the most honest writer she'd ever heard.

 

Kake Wearing Purple

 

I have always worn purple with a red hat, even when I didn’t know it.

 

When I was in eighth grade, I was standing at my locker between classes when another girl said to me, “So you’re Kakie Hanson.  I’ve heard of you.”  I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask, “What have you heard” because I was so shocked anyone knew me at all.  But the way I dressed and acted made me visible to others.  I dressed in clothes my mom made, rarely fashionable.  I acted like “myself.”  My mom always told me, “Be yourself” and I have been because, frankly, there was no other person to be. 

Over time, I’ve learned how to justify, explain, or apologize for my differences from others, sometimes when I couldn’t figure out just what it was others were concerned or complaining about.  I would just apologize.  

 

When I taught college, I began by wearing suits, as any good public speaking teacher would.  But in Central Oregon in 1988, that made me look highly suspicious.  It took a few years to figure out that wearing jeans and a blazer or sweater would make me look more normal (and get me higher teacher evaluations). And I always like to do some color matching in my clothes, which also made me stand out.

 

Here are some remembered reflections on my attire.  When I was teaching, after I wore a striped costume on Halloween, a student complained that I walked around looking like a bee and that I shouldn’t be allowed to teach because I was clearly nuts. A friend once gave me a painting of a peacock saying it reminded her of me. The vice president of instruction once asked me why I dressed to call attention to myself.

 

So pretty much all my life I’ve been annoying someone with both my clothing and my way of being in the world.

 

My favorite story is about New Years, 1980 when I found out that my hip and cool queer best friend had some of the same values as my body fearing Catholic Mom.  Mom had found an old 50s dress for me to wear to my friend Lee’s party in San Francisco.  It was sheer black net with horizontal stripes of black velvet ribbon. It fit skin tight on top and the skirt flared out.  It was intended to be worn with something under the top but it fit pretty skin tight on me.  I didn’t want to wear a dress with a bra showing. So I decided, as the current trend was toward showing body parts, that I would wear it with just a half-slip under and nothing else.  The stripes across the chest were not strategically placed.   When I showed the outfit it to my Mom and my husband, he was okay with it, having seen me in the past in similarly provocative outfits.   But Mom said, “Wouldn’t you like some band-aids with that?” We all laughed and I said, “No.”  I knew women in San Francisco and New York were not afraid of showing nipples so why should I be?

 

And then, when we got up to the tres gay household of my friend in The City and I put on the dress for the party, what did he say?  “Wouldn’t you like some band-aids with that?”

 

So then I knew that it was my older spouse, an eccentric himself, who was the real outlier, not my supposedly radical friend.

 

So when it comes to my clothing, after over a half century of being commented on, I have no fucks left to give.

 

Saving the World

photo by Louis Maniquet on Unsplash

 In this morning's sermon discussion group, we talked about Jed's 8:00 sermon which ended with the peroration that we should all be doing something to bring abut the kingdom of God on earth and that while the world needs saving, we aren't supposed to think we have to do it all ourselves.

I was remembering back in 1980 when I was also stuck and depressed and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I'd graduated, gone out into the world, and then in an attempt to get work outside of Idaho, I ran into a nervous breakdown and my first recognizable major depression*.  I did little in the world until 1979 when I went to work at McDonald's. During my McDonald's time, I knew it wasn't a career but I didn't know what to do.  I wanted to do work that could save the world but couldn't see how.

I told Will that this was my thinking and he asked me, "Wouldn't it be enough to just save one person?" meaning himself.

Well, I did that.

And now he's not here to help me figure out what to do now that he's not here.

I was told today (as if I needed to be told) that TMS makes people more emotional.

So, I've gone from being a regularly Def Con 2 emotional person to Def Con 5.  Yay.

The good thing is that all this emotion is no longer accompanied by, "Oh, fuck, why am I such an emotional person.  Why can't I be normal?  Why am I such an asshole?  I can't stand this pain.  I'm weak." 

In youth, I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes or Spock.  I hungered to not feel all the stuff I was feeling.  

I don't think that way now.  I don't hate myself for having strong emotions anymore but they are exhausting and tend to increase my self absorption.  

* I say "recognizable" because, while I'd been having suicidal ideations since childhood, I hadn't had months where I was unable to leave the house before.

crying/Laughing

 Dear Will:

Monday morning, almost a year from your death and the wound of your abscence  tore open again.  Will this pain ever stop? 

----- one hour later -----

So...Dr. Netflix told me to watch Ramesh Ranganathan and I feel way better now. I appreciate his worldview.

I'll survive, even if I have those dark hours when I don't know why.  I might even thrive, once I get past this month.

There is nothing stopping me from thriving but 

what?

This is what I'm not sure of.  So, time for The Widow's Guide to "What Color is my Parachute"

It hasn't been written yet, sadly.

Reading books feels like homework without the joy of receiving recognition for one's intelligence and hard work. My friends who gave me books to help me in my sorrow actually imagined that I had the focus to get through Didion or Oates...I basically dipped in to each, reading a paragraph here, a paragraph there.

Everything is helpful but nothing is existentially helpful because I just need to go through this grief thing physically and this morning that included walking in circles through living/dining room and howling.  

I will always love you and miss your well self.  But I need to live in reality to be happy.

kake

Thanksgiving Memory (for class)

Here's a piece I wrote yesterday for the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute class with Cindy Beer-Fouhy

 

One turkey pardoning another, circa 1970

THANKSGIVING

 

 

My biggest thanks every Thanksgiving for the past three decades is that I am no longer required to have the meal with members of my family of origin.  This year I enjoyed a Friendsgiving hosted by Dr. Amy Harper, my friend and a professor of anthropology who studies foodways. Sadly, I was without my former companion at her meals, dead now since last Boxing Day.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed Amy’s theme for this year: an indigenous feast, complete with smoked turkey and rice-stuffed squash.  And it was fun seeing folks I hadn’t visited with since last year.

 

In my distant youth, when family was the center of the holiday, Thanksgiving was often fraught, especially after the two older girls were grown up.  One Example: picture if you will, a large rectangular, maplewood table, covered with a fine white tablecloth and set with china and silver.  Six high-backed straight chairs with carved legs matching those of the table have been joined by a piano bench because the two older girls of the four-child family are now married and the husbands have been invited.  Or rather summoned.

 

The room is heated by the large square furnace outlet between the living and dining rooms that, combined, make up the east side of the house.  It’s the only furnace outlet in this house built in 1896.  Over the years electric baseboard heaters were added in some rooms. My mom remodeled the old place and now the flow-through dining and living areas look like an upscale 19^th Century whorehouse, with red carpet and red, gold, and cream flocked wall paper.  In ordinary times, the room hosts the dining table without its leaves, an antique couch and side table, a piano, and a large console television set.  Above the TV is a three-foot high black and white drawing of teenage Jesus teaching in the temple in Luke’s version of the Gospel.

 

My mental picture of this late 60s Thanksgiving dinner has eight of us around the table: my folks, my 6^th grade sister, my high school freshman self, and our two older sisters and their husbands.  I have probably been eating so much that I’m a little sick and wobbly.  My younger sister may be avoiding as much food as possible.  There’s probably been the turkey, dressing, gravy, potatoes, green beans, pie and complaining about the dryness of the turkey from its chef, my mother.

 

My strongest memory of that meal is desperately wanting to escape the table while also desperately wanting to eat.  My flight or feast mechanism.  Intense familial disagreement triggered my flight response.  My sister Sally’s husband, Adrian, was a bearded Catholic socialist hippy.  My sister Maja’s husband, Don, was a somewhat more conservative Green Beret, on leave from Fort Brag.  Late into the consumption of food and alcohol, an argument, probably about politics, erupted.  My Mom and sister Sally kept trying to ignore the emotions with conversation changers:  “Would you please pass the sweet potatoes?” “Have you had a chance to see the movie downtown?”  But nothing worked.   I could sense what I considered the “real” existential tensions beneath the superficial argument about national politics and they frightened me.

 

I don’t have a story with a beginning, middle and end for this memory.  Just a silent, cinematic mental image of Dad, a centrist Humphrey Democrat, raising his voice over what I now suspect were Adrian’s left-wing support of Clean Eugene McCarthy and Don’s militarist support of Republican Richard Nixon, just elected president. Dad, red faced, spittle on his lips, pounding the table, insisting that he had the right to be right in his own house.

 

And me, shrinking inside myself, hungering to put more and more flavor on top of an already full stomach.

 

One of my therapists, the one who’s going to sit with me during the ketamine treatments, suggested I picture a happy memory rather than the one I just shared. But most of my happy memories of Thanksgivings make me sad right now.  Because they were spent with my true home, the home I found in the person of my beloved, now materially gone forever.

 

And I have to just fucking get used to that.

 

So thank God for Amy, an agnostic, and her tradition of Friendsgiving.  She gave me the opportunity to create new holiday memories, which will now always be just a little bit blue.

 

Cue Elvis.