Looking at Me

Dear Will:

A forgotten stack of photos contained these from your camera, when you were still taking pictures. These are you looking at me when I wasn't aware, like the wonerful France raincoat picture and so unlike my psed pictures. I felt your live for me when i saw the photo with the cat. I miss you but feel your presence.   

The first, a picture of me petting a cat, is from our wonderful trip to Russia.  Both the University of Chicago, your old school, and the University of Utah offered a special trip that year with the onboard presence of a famous writer about Russia, with a recent best seller. I learned last year that we were part of Torstein Hagen's second year of Viking Tours.  Just his second year!  If you were still here and still well, you'd be pleased because that would make us special.

Sadly, part of that specialness was that the boat started running out of food toward in the last couple of days.

But what fun that trip was. We were great travel companions. And you were the talkative one and I was the quiet one.  The English couple we visited on the Devon coast the following year. She, at least, is still alive.  Maybe they both are.  I got a Christmas card.

I'm sad that I felt so often that I wasn't important to you.  I'm sad that I didn't really understand you.

But I'm happy that somehow we worked it out, in spite of it all. And travel, in spite of its challenges, was always good for us, once I stepped up to be in charge.

And now I'm just in charge of myself!  I mean, once I've ditched the furpals.

This is a picture from our silly and wonderful trip to France. Even though that one set of kids were terrrrible and a couple of time you and I got on each other's nerves, it was really quite wonderful, with that week in Paris on our own.

 

At first I thought this was a picture of our yard in Bend, but as i look more closely I can see that it is elsewhere.  But still woodsy. It sure looks like Bend.  But I find it among travel photos.  And it's taken from a height. And when did I get that tiny camera? Could this be Ashland?

France again

Somewhere in England?

So much Kake

 Oh my farting gopher. Last week I had such a Kake day.  Will would have prevented me from having that day because he watched out for me.  He was my working memory until he lost his.

So, anyway, I thought I'd lost my black fake fur coat, my "widow's coat." I thought I'd left it at church.  Then I thought I'd left it when I was out running errands.  

"Now where did I stop into a store and use the restroom?" I asked myself. I drove to two places I'd been and called three others.  "Do you have a black coat in your lost and found?" I imagined that it might have been stolen out of my car.  I spent a couple of hours searching searching searching around town.

In the house I looked more and more frantically at all the places I normally put clothes. I could remember hanging the coat on a hook but it wasn't on the hall hook, the bathroom hooks, or in any of the closets.

Finally, I resigned myself to having lost my fake fur and went to the basement to take out my REAL ankle length Ozzie possum coat (after spending an hour or two thinking about buying a new fake fur coat). I hung it up outside for a day to get some of the storage scent out of it then brought it in.  Sadly, it doesn't fully close so not of great use in real cold.

So just as I was finally resigned to having lost the beautiful black coat that I purchased at White House/Black Market the day after Will died, I walked past it in the kitchen.

What?!?

Yup.  I'd hung it up on the apron hook in the kitchen.

 

"Thank you God, thank you God, thank you for the delivery of my black coat!"

This was so much Kake.

If pre-dementia Will were alive he would have saved me from two days of worry about this fucking coat. Anytime I left the house when he was there, he would check that I had everything.  On work mornings when I was on my own it would take me, as it often does now, at least three exits and returns from the house before I could get on the road. If well-Will were still alive, he would have quizzed me about where I'd been last and would have walked around and spotted the coat within the hour.  My mother, Will, and various admin assistants know that I can look right at something I'm searching for and not see it.  

Will was my memory for many things. That's been one aspect of my widow's anxiety.  How do I move through the world with this crap memory without my exterior brain?  

Well, just not worry about it is the best idea.  I have plenty of practices to help me seem competent -- I learned in my thirties to put certain things in the same place all the time (keys, wallet). I sometimes write down the names of people I meet, if I might meet them again. But even then ... where did I put down the list of names?

I wonder if I'll notice if I get dementia?  I will, because there are other measures besides not having a very good memory that are aspects of dementia. At least I hope I will.

In the meantime, I'll own that I'm a ditzy broad and just accept that aspect of myself.

The Wound

 I was happy most of yesterday.  I've been pretty content since January 2. This is because I got through the awful holidays and learned what I need to do to get through them. I need to be by myself and not be criticized for my sorrow.  I need to be away from all the celebration and fucking people. I've come to realize that one of the reasons I kept wanting to kill myself was because I wasn't "healing" and "moving forward" as fast as people wanted me to do.

What I was trying to do was "heal."

What I was trying to do was find a normal that wasn't "new."

What I was imagining was that the wound would heal over and stop bleeding.

It will.  But I was wrong about the size of the wound and what cauterization of it would look like.

Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her (1992)

 

 

 I now understand that the wound has changed me and there's no going back to some former self. I have given up thinking that there will ever be a time when I won't suddenly burst into tears at realization of the absence. 

And the great thing is, I can cry anytime I want to and as long as I want to.

I can go to his grave and look at his beautiful face whenever I want to.

And I can pretend I'm okay if I need to do so but won't spend much time around anybody who needs me to do that.  

It's good that I'm an introvert.  I'm no longer bothered by going for days (weeks?) without seeing anyone as I settle into the new me.  I actually like it because when I'm by myself I don't have to hide myself. Last year I was hating people for leaving me by myself but the fire of that experience just tells me that except for two or three people, I don't care for most so why worry if they don't visit me?

I know now that I can call people, reach out to people and connect, now that I no longer actually need to do so.  That's some irony, right there.  

I'm so glad that I have tools now and that the hardest time (until I myself am dying) seems to be over.