Visiting Marion

 Dear Will --

Our friend Marion is sure that she's going to be visiting spirits with our friend Lorna soon.  Lorna is for sure dying and Marion feels it as her Parkinsons is getting more difficult to manage.

On Sunday I brought a collections of pictures of you to share with her.  It was good talking about you with the only other person here who really knew you, at least as far as it was possible to know the Cat Who Walked By Himself (and all people and places were alike to him.) 

I still miss you every day but the grief is lighter, softer, and not quite so physical.

Love, 

Kake 

 

 

A Toddlin' Town!

 Dear Will --

from abc news

The new Pope was born in Chicago the same year you were going to school there!  Ish.  Within a year. (I forget your exact years - just remember you got to Poky in 1957.)  He's just two years younger than I.  He's spent most of his life outside of the US, most of it in Peru.

Anyway, that's pretty interesting to me, the pope born in Chicago.  I know you had in life a bit of a bias against "popery". 

I hope he keeps the late Francis' commitment to social justice and love.

I must admit I love the drama and pageantry of the catholic tradition.  I also love the postmodern touch of bishops wearing their long, black cassocks in the courtyards, looking at their phones. I had my eyes on the live feed during the book club discussion this morning.

I've been listening to a book called Let Them -- recommended to me by two folks at church.  It doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know but that I have forgotten during dementia-care and widowhood. It's a mix of stoicism, zen, and pop psychology.  The author tells a story early on that convict me -- about getting upset at friends not connecting with her and being driven crazy by seeing social media posts of a friend group on a trip "without me."  At the time she was very sad.  But later, when she wrote the book, after applying what she calls the "let them theory," she sees the role she plays in her own unhappiness.  The greatest unhappiness comes from wanting life to be different than it is.  The Buddha would say suffering is a result of desire.  End desire, especially the desire for things to be different than they are, and you end unhappiness.  That's the concept, anyway.  And the book is all about that  -- letting people do and be who they are.  I knew all this when I taught and I was very able to be quite detached from what students thought of me.

Your decline and death, however, kind of broke my ability to manage my emotions, even though I taught for 30 years about managing emotions.  Sigh.

But things are getting better.  The book is a good reminder for me.  And I'm getting more skilled at getting along in the world without needing to control everything around me. 

The book is helpful with new-to-me info on adult friendships -- which I really didn't think much about until I retired. And then I let my focus first on my "new work" - as a celebrant - and then my focus on you captured my limited ability to hang with people. Also it's what every fucking therapist has told me - that I need to "rescue myself" (with God's help, I always add).

You've told me through mediums to choose to be happy.  It's been hard until recently.  I still miss you. I still grieve.  But I'm also getting better at being happy around other people.

As long as there aren't too many of them all at once.

Love,

Kake

In the Midst of Life

 we are in death.  "A truer word was never said," continues Sabina, who I'll always see as Adrianne Davidson, who performed the role of the Eternal Other Woman in our high school production of The Skin of Our Teeth, a much shortened version of the too-long original play by Thornton Wilder. Although Wikipedia has forced me to pause for a moment as I fantasize about the 1942 Broadway version with Miss Tallulah Bankhead as Sabina, Frederick March as George Antrobus, and Montgomery Clift as Henry.

I quoted this line from the Book of Common Prayer (service for the dead) during our 8am zoomy sermon discussion group.  These folks are such a saving grace for me. Anyway, we're all old.  I'm second youngest. We had a great discussion circling around Gaye Lawson's sermon on fear and hope (bouncing off the Gospel reading, John 19-31). Part of the discussion was around death as we talked about a group member's learning that his senior living facility refuses to put information about clients' deaths in their in-house bulletin. 

Mainstream American culture deals so poorly with death. 

Anyway, this thoughts rose up again yesterday when I got this email notification:

 

Last year around May 4th was the last time I saw Kathy.  She was very calm about her approaching demise, one that she herself controlled. As my friend Lorna is.

I will take hope and inspiration from them.

Thank you

 Dear Will. --

Thank you for showing up again to turn off the lights without the help of Alexa.

Love you,

Kake 

PS: My friend David thinks I'm a bit delulu because he's such a strict materialist -- but his beloved wife is LDS so he's comfortable with loving someone who just believes.

Another Friend Transitioning

 Dear Will -- 

Another of our friends, more my friend, is transitioning soon - in a month or so.  Maybe your souls will run into each other.

Another couple of friends have experienced a less permanent but more wrenching transition as the husband has had to enter memory care.

 I didn't know when I worked on The Skin of Our Teeth in high school that Sabina was quoting a medieval chant, Media vita in morte sumus , when she says, "In the midst of life we are in death.  A truer word was never said." I have quoted Sabina since then, combining this statement with her famous, "Eat your ice cream while it's on your plate, that's my philosophy."

I cried in church on Sunday during the beautiful sermon. I contributed money to the flowers this year and dedicated some to you.  

Sometimes I want to stop missing you.  But then I worry that I will lose our relationship.  Three years ago Sarah told me that grief is now our relationship.  If this pain is what it takes to keep our relationship, I'm still willing to feel it.

As if I had a choice.

love always

kake

Interesting Times

 While I feel very blessed to have investments that should cover my commitment to memory care some years from now, I am kinda pissed off to have lost forty grand over the past couple of weeks. 

It cost me $1900 to have my taxes done, another mark that I'm well-to-do, as was the $295 charge to change a single name in my last will.

Note to MAGA: I just wish George Soros had paid me to be in the protest on Saturday.

My friend Carol had an idea of how to deal with all my friendship losses, including those from a quarter century ago that my grief therapist says I carry around like a big rock in my backpack.   Carol suggested a ritual and I think that's a terrific idea -- a ritual to release myself from caring about the people who don't care about me anymore. A ritual to remind myself that if people don't want to spend time with me, that's about them, not about me. I get to stop thinking about what a terrible, horrible, very bad person I am. And just laugh when someone who has told me they don't have time for me expresses concerns for my health to another person.  So I've been working out what would be a good series of actions and words to tell myself that if people don't want to hang with me it's okay and their loss, not mine.  Illegitimi non carborundum.

On the home front, I finally received the Vietnamese crocheted Will doll.  Sadly, it has black hair which I didn't notice when I reviewed the doll so I've had to paint the hair threads silver. Now this doll will help me watch new movies and old film noir without feeling so alone.

Bad Wednesday

So the day after I felt so good I went into a deep decline. Wednesday was terrible. After my workout I started crying and cried off and on for about an hour and I had a repeat of that later in the day, crying for a few hours.  

About what?

Missing my best friend.  Missing having anyone willing to check in on me regularly. Very narcissistic pains. Feeling alone in the world. Believing that I'm going to die alone and unwept in a city I despise.

I'd started off the morning thinking I would write about one of the great friendships I'd seen, admired, and envied.  A friendship I thought I'd be able to copy someday but never have.  The friendship of Bruce Loebs and Bob Swanson at ISU.  They had coffee together at Elmers most mornings through at least 30 years. 

Whatever it is inside a person that makes that kind of friendship possible, I've never had it, though I've hungered for it. 

Because I was thinking about him I looked up Bruce and found out that he died in 2022 and that his son Blake, a person I remember as a beautiful young man but hadn't seen since the early 80s, had preceded him in death. Bruce was a great boss and helped me get out of Pocatello. When I was first in the theatre department there, I was part of a group that teased Bruce by being noisy outside his office and making him run out and shush-yell at us. Then in my masters program, when I turned from Theatre (with its awful teachers) to speech, he became my thesis director and boss of my first teaching gig.  When I became a teacher,   I turned into the person who ran out of my office to shush people. 

And that's the kind of humorous insight I can have this morning. On Wednesday the mental pain was so severe that I could do little else but cry and walk the dogs. The mental pain was physical in that I couldn't stop crying -- the sobs came from my gut and wouldn't quit. But I didn't call anyone and I wasn't suicidal nor did I think about cutting myself. And even in those times when I have been self harming, I haven't really wanted to die or hurt -- I've just wanted the interior pain to stop.

On the plus side this week, I had coffee with another widow, got a nice note from one of my nephews, and had a good videochat with my friend Diana.  

I also decided to unfriend the folks on Facebook who didn't have time for me and not think of them as my friends anymore.  Both of them gave me nice presents in the past that I'm now going to take to the Humane Society because they just mean sorrow to me now.  One of the presents actually frees up wall space so I need to buy another picture of a Scottish loch.