A Thought

I’ve been thinking (again) about this life and loss stuff. There are those who believe with all their being that grief, whatever the cause, must be addressed until it can be wallowed in and analyzed and milked no more. There are those who are equally sure that it can be put away on a shelf like a book one has read and is done with forever. There are those who choose to deflect it with other activities - distractions. But does it have to be so all or nothing? So absolute? What about balance? What about moderation in all things?

I know people who live their pain and can’t conceive of a life without it. I know people who run from it and embrace all manner of distraction and are confused when the distraction is gone and the pain is still there. I know people who shelve it. And I know, for myself - and not just because of having been widowed, that it is not that simple. There is room in our existence for all things - all the time.

Life is woven like a tapestry, not a molded collection of synthetic fibers.

Odds and Ends

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with blog topics day after day. Today is one of those days. It’s not that I haven’t ideas, but many of them are vetoed by my husband as being to TMI for even him. Others just aren’t thought generating to fill an entire page of blog. Often, I self-censor. Yes, hard to believe that I would veto myself, but I do. And then there are the days when nothing comes and words limp forth “like crippled children” to badly coin a phrase from my favorite childhood book Harriet the Spy.

The ironic thing is that much is afoot but perhaps too much for me to break down into a single blog right now.

The highlights:

I have three good short stories in the works right now and very good idea of where I might get each one published.
We are all planned and booked for our honeymoon at long last. A B&B in Dubuque after we drop Katy off at my folks and a cabin on the edge of The Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois (yes, we are once again going for the non-traditional romantic spots because why mess with what works?)
My plan to get back into shape has hit a snag. I am putting on muscle and that means weight and size increase. I was really liking being bony but that is no way to approach old age, sadly.
We may be staying here in Canada after-all as the Texas thing is tied up in sky-rocketing costs and morphing into a position that might entail too much travel, but it may yet come out okay. We won’t know until late March at the earliest.
Canada Immigration has updated their turn around times on residency applications and we could have approval by early April.
We are still lice-free (knock large pieces of timber together).
I can navigate the city by myself (and with a little help from OnStar).

Oh, and I have reached a decision about wanting to give back in terms of grief and grieving. I don’t want to start/or lead any kind of group. I am not a mentor and think really that this is a silly idea. Mostly because of something Rob pointed out to me about the widow board. He noticed that people tended to group in the 1 to 6 month sections according to common dates or months and then stick together for a while lending support. He noted however that the vast majority of these groups disappeared as the people lost the need for the board and stopped interacting there. And he was right. My problem is that I never fell into any “peer” group there. I found the board too late in my first year and had already come to many of my own conclusions about a variety of things - hence my need to “give”. As Girl pointed out to me on my wordpress site, I will know what to do when the opportunity arrives. So, I think I will wait and see.

Off to Grande Prairie - Again

At some point in the next 24 hrs we will pile into the Avalanche and make our third pilgrimage up north to Grande Prairie in less than five months. Three funerals in five months. In many ways this is beginning to remind me of my childhood back in Dubuque. Around the time my Uncle Jimmy died back in 1972, there was a rash of deaths on my dad’s side of the family that had us attending wakes and funerals almost constantly, or so it seemed to me at the time. For a while, between my dad’s relatives dropping like flies and my mother’s nieces and nephews weddings, the only time I saw my extended family was in church or in a church basement after for dinner. Chicken, ham, and turkey and dressing sandwiches. Artery clogging side dishes. Homemade desserts brought in by the ladies of the various rosary societies. Food and death. Food and marriage. Linked eternally in my nine year old mind.

The only other spate of death I can remember in my life came the summer between my junior and senior year in college. All in July. My ten year old cousin died in a farm accident on the 4th. My great-uncle, Father John, one of the nastiest men I have ever know died in Texas mid-month. And Kyle died. I am fairly certain it was around the same time, but it’s been over twenty years now, so I am not totally sure. Kyle was my friend Sarah’s boyfriend’s roommate and friend at the Lambda Chi house. He was funny and very cute and a tad bit on the wild side. We ran into each other here and there over the course of my junior year. In bars or at parties. We flirted. We eyed each other and on occasion, we made out a bit. He was not interested in a girlfriend and I was not auditioning for the part - mostly because I might have gotten the job and I really didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend at that point in my life. Despite my laments to the contrary, I did my best to keep relationships at bay. For a lot of reasons.

The last time I saw Kyle was one of the last nights of finals week. It was warm. People were running around from bar to this party and that. I kept my eye out for Kyle and eventually ran across him. It was awkward. The last time I’d seen him, I’d sorta blown him off to go running about with my friend, Leslie. Guys don’t like that when they are trying to put moves on you. Anyway, we left it as “see ya in August and we’ll see”.

I was twenty-one. You don’t think at that age that you won’t see someone again. That anything bad could happen. But, Kyle drowned that summer and there was no “see ya”. I remember that I cried when I found out. I was at home in Dubuque for my uncle’s funeral, and I was owly the whole rest of my stay. My mother especially found my behavior irksome. She had never understood my aversion to the social aspects of death - the visiting and the eating. I could have explained, I suppose, but I really didn’t share much of my life with her. I still don’t really.

I went back to school. I didn’t discuss it. I am sure no one knew about how I felt about Kyle or that we had tentatively reached out to each other a bit. It was just a school girl thing and I still think of that way.

I only thought about this because Rob had mentioned that this will be the fourth funeral up there for him, starting with Shelley’s back in August of 2006. It will Jordan’s fifth funeral overall as she lost a friend to suicide around the time her grandmother died in December. It seems unfair when these cycles catch us up, but it’s life, right? Just as there are cycles of happiness and joy, there are darker periods of sadness and grief.

So, we are off to Grande Prairie.

My First Published Piece is Online Now

I have been checking and checking and today my first online submission made it to “print”, so to speak. I am psyched and hungry for more. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Yesterdays Magazette

And thank you to Karen of Ann Arbor, Michigan who copped to being my 10,000 viewer at the original blog site, Second Edition at .mac. Thank you so much. And thank you all, dear readers. Though you don’t post much, I know you are out there and I am happy to “see” you day after day.

Also, many thanks to my husband Rob who supplies me with many of the photos you see every day there at Second Edition. He is a wonderful photographer and very generously endeavors to get shots of all sorts of things that strike my fancy.