6AM

Went and bought an alarm clock for myself on Saturday because I wanted to start getting up before eight (or eight thirty) and try and re-establish a more work friendly routine before moving back to the States. I will never find a teaching job that lets me sleep in and for now I could use the extra time in the morning for writing and getting things in order for the initial move. I know that April/May isn’t exactly around the corner and that I made the move up here in less time (plus sold my house, car and gave away nearly all of my furniture to boot), but I would rather avoid the panicky feelings of deadlines looming like large scary monsters.

So, was I up with the sunshine? No. And just an FYI - the moon is still bright shiny and full at 6AM in northern Alberta. The reason for my spectacular failure was that I couldn’t fall asleep last night. It was probably one o’clock by the time I managed and even then it was another one of those dream filled sleeps that I am beginning to find aggravating as they are just non-sensical and exhausting.

Part of my trouble is that I don’t really wind down prior to going to bed. I am usually busy with something - writing or shredding or something too busy. Lately too I am stiff from hunching over the shredder or my daughter’s head. And finally, Wednesday will be two years since Will died. I haven’t any sense of how to commemorate it. The first one was just getting to and past it, but now that I have and the day isn’t as fraught with anxiety and dread - now what? His grave is back in Iowa. His friends fell out of touch long before he died. My own family will not remember and truthfully saw his passing as a blessing for me and although they are right on an intellectual level, the emotions don’t match up for me. His mother considers me a murderer for not intervening when the aspiration pneumonia set in that final weekend. Katy is too young to drag into this commemoration of loss thing. I think for now it is better to celebrate his birthday and remember the happier times of his life and not dwell on the illness and death. Since she is a carrier of the disease that killed him, she will have her whole adult life to consider that and the fallout as it will effect her and her children (should she choose to take that risk). So, I am a trifle bit alone in this remembering stuff and honestly - I don’t feel like it anyway. I look at pictures of him when he was well - no, he was never well - but when he was not visibly ill, and it’s hard to remember how I felt then. It’s like flipping through someone’s photo album. Would it be awful of me to just feel sad but more grateful that it’s all behind me now? Because you see, that is what is making me really sad. I am happy. Happier than I can ever remember being. I love Rob. I love our life. I am looking forward to the future and the plans we have made and the ones we are still formulating.

Getting up early is a practice thing. Just like everything else.

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.