Shredding, Purging and Nits

Last night I started sorting the last of the boxes of papers and other crap that I stupidly lugged from Iowa to Canada. Rob says not to be hard on myself about it, but it’s hard not to when you spend an entire afternoon shredding receipts that predate your daughter’s birth and are sorting through old check duplicates from four years ago. This was all stuff I had more than enough time to handle even before Will died and I simply let it stack up. And why? Because I let my inertia take over and I listened to people when they told me that it was okay because of my circumstances. It wasn’t okay. It still isn’t. But, it’s done. I have sorted the wheat from the chaff and can now get on to the much less fun task of filing.

I am a horizontal filer by nature being a concrete random and all. Filing just doesn’t feel natural and sticking them away in drawers even less so. Worse is that I can’t find them at all once they are neatly put away. It’s as if file cabinets are kryptonite and once the papers are securely encased within them, I lose all sense of them. When they are scattered about or in plastic totes, I can hone in on nearly anything quite quickly. But filed papers disappear from my radar and I can be rifling through the exact folder I need and never find it at all.

Fortunately the ordeal was just depressing from a self-recriminating standpoint. Last night I found a lot of the paperwork from hospice, the funereal home and the autopsy that was performed on his brain and spinal cord by the university to which I donated his tissue so that researchers working on ALD can learn from him. I also found more of the cards that my MIL has sent sporadically since November of 2006, but I didn’t bother to read them again. Today’s fun was limited mainly to pictures, Katy’s school stuff, receipts and old billing statements. And of course my regrets that I wasn’t on top of the clutter the way I should have been. It seems to me sometimes that my now is forever running into or falling over piles of debris from my then. Perhaps life is this way anyway and it was just something I didn’t notice until now, but it is still cause for heavy sighs.

And finally, would a day around here be complete without nit-picking? I think not. We find the tiniest bug. Just one. It’s dead now. And two dozen nits - picked them suckers with a vengeance. Kate’s bedding is still being washed daily and all clothing worn by each of us is tossed in the wash basket regardless. Tuesday is the next shampoo treatment and then - knocking all wood within arm’s reach - perhaps we can get back to normal. Although I think our sofa will have to go since neither Rob nor I can bring ourselves to sit on it (his nephew was an inert mass there for his whole visit and interestingly Rob remembered that the boy confessed to a very recent short haircut after Rob wondered what had happened to the long hair that adorned his Facebook photos - my loathing for SIL continues).

The List

The latest Oprah has an article by widowed freelance writer who found her current husband and soul mate by making a list of 100 characteristics that she wanted in a mate. Okay, that’s a bit too succinct. She visited a psychic some time after her second husband died because she’s had no luck dating and wanted to know if she was meant to spend the remainder of her life alone or not. The psychic instructed her to make a details list - “down to his socks” - of what she was looking for in a soul mate. The woman went home and did just that - right down to the “gray socks”. I don’t think the psychic meant the sock color thing literally. She just wanted this woman to really put careful thought into her list of preferred attributes in a potential husband. It was her theory that the universe will give us what we want if it knows what that is. And I guess there is something to that. Many of us really don’t know what we want. We only seem to know what we don’t want and that is usually after we have something or someone who turns out to be wrong for us.

I know many people who subscribe to the “list” approach to dating and mating. I remember that Rob was all set to write up a list of his own and told me about it during one of our early IM chats. I think he got the idea from another widow he’d met via a melanoma group on the Internet which is where he learned about the YWBB and came to meet me. If I am remembering correctly I teased him a bit about making a list but pointed out in all seriousness that lists are good only as guides and that a person shouldn’t be so set on a specific criteria that they let a perfectly wonderful person get away from them. Rob never did get around to writing a list as it turned out. But I actually had a list. Well, not a written down list but just things I had thought about myself and where I was and who I had become.

I am not sure that the universe divines our thoughts as much as it is driven by plans that we all had a hand in drafting in the long, long ago. Perhaps what list making really does is help us remember what it is we’d decided and agreed to do and helps us get positioned properly.

There are those who don’t believe the universe cares one way or another about what we want or don’t want. I don’t believe in the theory of random chaos. There are no accidents. Willful missteps - okay. But I don’t believe that any of us can avoid our “destinies” for very long because we authored them.

My Wonderful Husband

As we were getting ready for bed last night, Rob remarked, “You know, I think you have a pretty wonderful husband.” And I agreed. And I should have been the one to say so in fact. So I will do it today.

All week Rob has been the rock in this lice business. He took over the laundry duty. He was there for both rounds of delousing shampoo. He nit-picked non-stop and with the patience of Job. In between he went to work, got our personal directive stuff written, took care of the car insurance issues for Jordan, and made time for us to have tea in the city before the lawyer’s appointment. He also generously went solo one evening so I could go to my writer’s group. He is more than wonderful. In my whole life I haven’t been able to lean on someone the way he lets me lean on him. It’s a sometimes frightening thing for someone like me who was so used to having to do everything for myself and not really having anyone I could count on in all manner of situations or crises.

Last year around this time, Rob was sitting up late into the night with me as I battled some pretty awful insomnia leading up to the first anniversary of Will’s death. We talked on the phone a bit but the bulk of our conversations were carried on IM. Hours at a time. He astounded me with his selfless concern for me and what I was feeling even when I knew that he was dealing with his own grief. He would send me funnies by email everyday to take me mind off things and make sure I smiled a bit in each 24-hr period. He is still the one who cares most if the corners of my mouth inch upward every day.

Although I am sure it seems as though I do nothing but talk about Rob, there are volumes more things that I kept to myself about him and our relationship. Things that are too TMI - even for me - and things that belong to us alone or memories that are just mine to have and hold. In the absence of these details, I hope I am still able to convey the depth of my love for him and the love that we share.

I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else or with anyone else other than here and with Rob. I can’t picture a future, near or far, without him in it. My favorite place to be is wherever he is and my chief project is our life together.

Nit Picking

As no critters were discovered during this morning’s hand delousing session, Miss Katy will be returning to school today with about four inches less of hair because I realized that we couldn’t avoid cutting some of it off. Her hairs is fine but think and curly. I felt terrible about that for some reason. But Katy is more than ready to be done with Rob and I hunched over her head picking through her hair practically strand by strand and dislodging nits with our fingernails because those little nit combs are useless on the fine hair that many children, ours included, have. The laundry is nearly caught up but we’ve decided that until Katy is louse and nit free, her bedding will have to be done daily.

We slept this morning. And then I slept in more because I awoke with a horrible headache behind my eyes. When I did get up my left eye was matted and a deep angry red color possibly as a result of my fingers being in Kate’s chemically treated hair so often over the last two days. I am very sensitive to that kind of thing. I have had to give up showering at the gym because the disinfectant they use on the showers sends me into days long hay fever attacks. I can’t even use the bottled spray to wipe down equipment as it is just a watered down version of the same disinfectant. Rob told me at breakfast - following a bug hunt and nit-picking session - that I slept horribly. Startling easily and talking a lot. I know I have been dreaming constantly the last week or so. Nightmares some but usually just those exhausting dreams about searching for someone or something and hiding and running from someone or something. Not totally unexpected with the second anniversary now less than a week away and with the added stress of the lice visitation and trying to sort papers for taxes (a world of confusion awaiting there) and shredding and storage - not to mention the whole gearing up for Texas thing. I am lucky to be sleeping at all. I will take crappy sleep or insomnia any day.

I told Rob that I am having a hard time find charitable feelings for his sister. You know, poor Widowed SIL - she has it so hard, so I guess I can let the little lice thing go. But he wondered why I was bothering to think about her at all. I should just be like him and forget about her. He’s right. If not for the lice, we’d have forgotten about her already. Lord knows that I don’t waste time or thought space on my own mired in inertia youngest sis. Some people like and need the kind of misery that goes along with victimhood - whatever its original source. I guess if that kind of thing didn’t have collateral damage it wouldn’t be so irritating. I just forgot the critical rule of being related to people like that - all visiting should be done on neutral territory and confined to the phone or Facebook as much as humanly possible.

So today is Jordan’s birthday. She wanted to meet us in the city at the Muttart to visit her mom’s memorial bench before supper out. But with lice and having a lawyer appointment in the afternoon to sign wills and directives and other cheery stuff and then needing to get back home in time to meet Katy’s school bus and the insurance adjustor who is coming to appraise the damage to the car that Jordan was driving in a fender bender last week - well - just another detail that we will have to manage and figure a way to work out. Things will fall into place. They always do.