Bursting into Song

One of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a musical with all the characters bursting into song and dance like Singing in the Rain or West Side Story. I got to thinking about this when I came across a group on Faceback called “Why yes, I do just burst into song”. It reminded me too of when I was young and I would string together popular songs to tell stories in much the same way they do in the movie Moulin Rogue. I would imagine my characters singing songs to tell their stories alone or in duets. I was a very odd child. When I was older, and even now, I used songs to cheer myself up or onward, narrating my own life through tunes. If my life were a musical today the musical narrative would be comprised mainly of love songs. I caught the end of Faith Hill’s Breathe on the way to deep water aerobics tonight and it captured perfectly the way I feel about Rob. Sometimes these days, I am so happy that I almost feel guilty. However, it’s not as though I have forgotten. You never forget, but I am done letting those moments that crop up on occasion dominate or interfere with my life. There will always be memories and anniversaries and times of the year that prick at the underside of consciousness in an attempt to awaken the past.

I awoke the other morning shortly before the alarm from a dream about Will. I have gone from never dreaming about him to dreams where he is part of the white noise to the current state of affairs with him turning up on occasion and interrupting dreams already in progress. He is never who he was though. Not the man I fell in love with or married. He is the sick and demented version of Will. What he became after the disease took hold and had eaten away significant portions of the white matter that covered his brain. In these dreams he is like a child or a little old man. I can’t communicate with him in any meaningful way and I spend a great deal of time comforting and caring for him. In the latest dream, he begged me to just hold him as though he were a small child and I woke up from the dream in tears. Though there is something to the theory that dreams are your unconscious mind trying to tell you something important or the way your mind problem solves while you sleep, there isn’t much to this dream that needs deep analysis on my part. I have always wished that we could have known what was wrong sooner so that he and I could have had a chance to talk about his wishes and say goodbye, and I wish I could have been able to care for him instead of putting him in the nursing home. I also wish I had been able to take time off work to be with him those last months he spent in hospice. But I couldn’t and I can’t fix that now. And I also know that it’s October. The month that Will went into hospice; where he died two years ago this coming January.

Last year around this time, I began living most of the “firsts” that lay grieving people so low during that first year. Nearly everything important was packed into those last few months of the first year and it was very hard to cope with these events when I was also dealing with personal illness, raising a small child and working a full-time job. I did it though. Not well, and I would never counsel people to do what I was told to do, which was to wallow in my misery. I was fortunate that my innate tendency to question “authority” and my inner musical buoyed me up enough that I didn’t get stuck in that mode. I know there will be moments in the coming months that will bring up memories, good and bad, but isn’t that just part of life?

The trip we took back to my folks recently provided me with a chance to visit places from my childhood. The farm where my uncle and grandmother lived for instance. By chance the call of nature (yeah, I pee outdoors now like a Canadian) put me behind the car-shed, and as I walked back to the homestead from around the barn I paused for a moment to look up at the door to the loft. It was closed and the ground beneath was covered with ankle deep grass. It was just a over and month and 35 years ago that my uncle fell to his death from that loft after having a seizure. Later that same afternoon, we stopped at the cemetery where he is buried. The first person I was close to and really loved who died and left me. And it’s been thirty-five years. I can still feel that pain. Remember with clarity the last time I saw him. Regret that I never got the chance to say goodbye. People might argue - widows would argue vehemently - that it’s not the same as losing a spouse, but they are full of shit. Loss is loss. And who is anyone to say that one type is worse or more painful? It took years to get to a point where Jimmy’s death wasn’t part of me every day. It will take as much time or more to incorporate Will’s passing into my psyche as well. And there will be more dreams. And they are just dreams. But the musical that is my life is what I hear when I am awake and living and loving and laughing, and that is what counts.

Making New Friends

On the drive to school yesterday my daughter asked me if I had made any new friends yet. This isn’t the first time she has asked me about this. Making friends is a big deal in her five year old world, and she assures me that she has made many new friends since moving here. Friends at school. At dance. With the children of people Rob and I know. And she considers herself a great friend of our next door neighbor, Charlotte. Katy can spend hours following Charlotte around as she does yard work and other outdoor chores. Of course this got me thinking, once again, about me and the friends thing. I just have never been one to make friends easily. Even when I can manage to be outgoing, I am an acquired taste it seems. Since coming here to live, I haven’t given the whole friends thing much thought. I have been more focused on activities I like and finding groups and venues that allow me to pursue them. I wonder sometimes if this will eventually lead me to friendships, but I don’t dwell on it. Still, it worries my daughter or she wouldn’t bring it up.

The majority of friends I have made since leaving college for the adult world have been made in the workplace. The trouble with job friends is that they are relative to that job. When you leave for another workplace, you leave behind those friendships. A few have survived. Meg and I met twenty years ago now and we are still good friends. Her girls are like nieces to me and if I were to have an older sister, it would be Meg. I met Sandi at Goodrell in the mid-nineties but it wasn’t until we worked together on the 8th grade team that we became friends. We keep in touch by email now, and she read this blog (Hi Sandi!), but with as a full time teacher with a husband and three little ones she is a very busy woman. Judi taught next door to me at my last teaching assignment. She is still there and we too communicate now through email. And then of course there are those I met via the Internet. My mommy friends who I post with still after nearly seven years and though I have seen pictures of them and their families, I haven’t met a single one in person yet. There is Liz on the soap board too. I don’t watch the soap anymore but I continue to keep up with her. I don’t even know what she looks like. I have met a few people through the Widows’ board. Rob, of course. But also Cheryl, who came to our wedding and we keep in touch with on Facebook. Marsha in Illinois whose blog I read. Fi and Sarah here in Canada. Fi found me through my blog and we are friends on Facebook too. Sally too is a widow friend and fellow blogger who I hope to catch up with in person one day.

Is it odd to have so many friends that I don’t interact with in the flesh? It would seem odd to my daughter. I guess it would seem odd to many others too. Without a job I am left to meet potential friends as I may. The gym is not proving to be a fertile ground for friendship, nor is the swim class I attend twice a week. I go to workout. Like reading or writing, I get in a zone and disappear. The writing groups I have joined are still possibilities. I met some really great women in the group I belonged to back in Des Moines, but I haven’t been attending the groups here long enough to know for sure yet.

I should worry more about this, I know. One of the worst side-effects losing my first husband was that I lost many of the social contacts and friends I made while we were married. Aside from my best friend, Vicki, everyone else fell by the wayside. Not that I dwell on this much, but if something were to happen to Rob, there would really be no one here for me. Most everyone I know, I know through him and if you have ever been widowed (and I imagine the same holds true for divorce) you know that your spouse’s friends are really and truly just that. His friends. At the moment though, I am usually so busy that I don’t really notice, and I guess it helps too that I have always been able to be alone. That’s not true of everyone.

I am not going to worry about it. Friends come along, like love, when you are just living your life and making the most of every minute.

Real Writers don't Blog

A columnist in the Daily Mail and Globe (Christie Blatchford), which is the Canadian equivalent of USA-Today minus the excess pictures and celebrity suck up section, wrote her Saturday piece about bloggers. Her disdain for the genre and the poor writing. She holds the common opinion among those of us who can write that writing is not for everyone. I agree. Writing is a gift that some of us are born with and develop over the course of our lives, but it isn't something that just anyone can do. It's like singing or dancing or painting. It's an art. Having said that, I don't think being a person of average writing skill should preclude anyone from writing and seeing that writing published somewhere. There are people who sing and dance and paint who haven't much skill either but sometimes that's not the point. We all deserve an artistic outlet regardless of whether we are truly talented. What someone might call a hobby is someone else's great soul fulfilling passion.

I think what puzzled this columnist the most is why anyone would put what she considers to be no more than a diary up on the web for public display. The simple answer is that writers, good, average or really awful, want to be published. The only medium to which people have a fairly democratic access is on the Internet. To someone who writes for a living, and to whom the finished product is a matter of a paycheck, it would probably seem odd as well that anyone could write for free or without benefit of copyright. However, to someone who just wants to write and would be happy of any audience, blogging or Facebook or just an online community can be a welcome opportunity.

Another point of contention the writer had was with the concept of online communities and the idea that you can have relationships with "virtual" people. Like most who have never truly experienced this, she falls back on the snotty superiority of the fact that she not only prefers REAL friends, she actually has them too. While it is true that there are many people for whom online communities are their only social outlets, it's not true for all people. The majority of those I have met via message boards have families, friends and rich REAL lives. They came to the different boards during times in their lives when they hadn't anyone in their lives they could connect with for various reasons. One group of women I have been messaging with for over six years now came to be when we met on a site called BabyCenter. We were all "older" women trying to conceive and most of us didn't have peers are our age to relate to when it came to trying to get pregnant in your late thirties or early forties. As we one by one became mothers, we moved our group to a private message board and continued to share our lives with each other because by this time we were friends who had move to talk about than just ovulation charts and birth stories. Two of us became widows in the time we have known each other. There have been location and job changes. New babies to celebrate. Some of us know each other offline and those of us who travel quite a bit meet up from time to time when things can be arranged. I wouldn't consider any of us freaks or even freakish.

I met my husband Rob through an online community for younger widowed people. We started off as email pals much in the same vein as the old pen-pals of yore. Another member of the same community is a friend to the point that she attended our wedding, and there are several others we keep in contact with via email and their blogs. The community itself has produced a viable offline network of events and countless friendships and romances (some that also have led to marriage) have blossomed because of this. I think it is easy to look down on or even make fun of online social networks but it would be a mistake to think that everyone engaged in this rather recent means of meeting people is just for the desperate. My husband's two twenty-something daughters have met some various nice people via Facebook and we use the site as a way to keep in touch with them and with extended family and far off friends. In a world where we are so far from the "neighborhoods" we grew up in and Grandma doesn't live just a few blocks over anymore, it's a good way to stay connected.