Awe, Widowhood and 50th Birthdays…! After trying to write about it a couple of times, I decided to slack off and just make a video…!
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Once in a while on my “Fridays” I like to stop at the Park-n-Ride halfway between work and home and have a smoke as I sit on the tailgate of my truck. It’s just nice to sit, not move, and take a breath… filled with all sorts of nasty shit… before I start my weekend. The other day I stopped, had my smoke, and when I closed the tailgate and was heading for the driver’s side door, I heard the older man who had parked not far away ask if I could help, “move a dog from one car to another?”… and being in a friendly mood I immediately said, “Sure!”.
We walked over to where two crossover/wagon type cars were parked at a 90-degree angle to each other with their rear hatches open. In the back of his car, I could see the shape of a large dog under blankets. The plan was for each of us to grab an end of the blanket and simply transfer the large canine from one car to the other. I would like to point out that at this point in time… because the gentleman just said “Dog”… I figured I was simply helping move an old dog because he was sick or couldn’t walk or something and was just too large for the older gentleman and woman to wrestle themselves!… I was wrong.
We each grabbed an end of the blankets and when we were about halfway between the two cars, I could see the blanket slipping from the man’s grip. I tried to lower my end to stay level with him while being as gentle on my end as possible, but unfortunately when he got to about 6 inches from the ground he couldn’t hold on anymore…! It was one of those slow-motion experiences where I saw the pup’s head pop out from the blanket… and then I heard it hit the asphalt with a slight thud! I felt horrible for the ol’ boy!… and man! We just dropped his sick and aging canine companion! Then… I realized something wasn’t lining up. Mind you, at the beginning of this experience I was just asked to help move a dog. Come to find out… I helped two strangers move a dog from one car to another… which had died the night before while sleeping in bed with its owner. Yup… wasn’t expecting that!
Honestly, I felt like a schmuck. As we were going through this process, it really wasn’t until the dog was in the second vehicle and I put my hand on his rib cage that I realized he wasn’t breathing, moving… or living. Before I had come to this realization, I had mentioned how we just had to do the same thing with our dog, Xander… pick him up to get him in the truck because it was too high for him to jump into! I was trying to provide some comfort by sharing my own experiences with old dogs… not dead ones! I felt like an asshole for a hot minute, but I was able to get on the same page without anyone noticing… or at the least, pointing out my faux pas…! The saving grace for myself was the gentleman saying, “Thank you”, “God bless you”, “You’re a good man”, and the such as I walked back to my truck, embarrassed by the lack of awareness I just demonstrated!
I thought about what I had just experienced during the rest of the drive home. The wide range of emotions were kind of surprising to me. I felt embarrassment for my lack of understanding of what was actually going on at first. I felt sadness for the owner(s) who just experienced this great loss in their Life. I felt for the pup… and hoped he had a wonderful Life of chasing chipmunks, playing tug-of-war with ratty ropes, or simply soaking up the summer sun while lying on the front porch. I thought of Xander… what he has given me… and how fucking much I love him. I thought about him dying, which made me love him even more. As I drove over the river and through the woods, all I wanted to do was get back to The Schoolhouse and feel his love when Amanda opens the front door so he can run to my truck in the driveway as he welcomes me… home.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Yesterday would have been mine and Kateri’s 14th Wedding Anniversary… yay! Although we were together for 20ish years when she died, I was slow on the draw and waited over a decade before asking her if she wanted to get married… to me… but at least we got to call each other Husband and/or Wife for more than a few years! Of course, it’s a little weird thinking about how I’ve been a widower now almost as long as I was a Husband…! Life… sometimes it wads up your list of plans, tosses them in the trash basket, and we are forced to learn that wonderful skillset of “Adapting”.
After Kateri died, I told myself I would not work on her Death Date or on our Wedding Anniversary. Luckily, I work with some great people and so far, have been able to make that happen every year. As I’ve gotten further and further away from her Death Date, I’ve needed less and less time to recover from the emotional and psychological gymnastics routine those Anniversaries can sometimes bring. It’s also nice that as I see these Anniversaries coming up on the calendar, I’m not the emotional wreck I’ve been in the past, dreading the waves of feelings that sorta crash into you while wading through the weathering effects of Widowhood.
For the last 10 weeks Amanda and I have been doing this thing we’re calling The Sourdough Stump. Basically, Amanda has been baking more sourdough bread than we can eat and has started giving it away on Sundays… on a stump of wood… next to the dirt road. It’s something that we have both gotten really… REALLY… excited about as the weeks have gone by. We’ve met neighbors. We’ve met strangers from faraway places. We’ve waved from the porch… and have spied on peeps from the living room as they pull up next to the stump, look around as if trying to figure out what’s going on, and then wave to the house hoping someone inside see’s their gratitude. It has been such a wonderful little project for us, that even though it was my Wedding Anniversary, I still wanted to be a part of The Sourdough Stump! So I decided to spend the morning hanging on the front porch with Amanda, and then at noon I decided to go for a drive… to the camp where Kateri and I got married at.
I brought a picture with me on my little cruise across Vermont. It’s a pic of the moment we were married… arms in the air, mouths open with hoots and hollers frozen in time beneath the two perfectly placed old ass trees. I wanted go see those trees again… stand in the field… see how things have changed and what things haven’t. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen!
One of my fears on the drive over was that I would be crashing a wedding taking place there at the camp! Just driving on in like I owned the place…!.. and I didn’t want that to happen. Luckily… it didn’t. No weddings were taking place, quite the contrary… there wasn’t anyone!… couldn’t find a single person!… even tried the office and it was locked…! Now, even though I thought it would be pretty cool to revisit the place we got married and maybe get a cool pic out of it, I felt uncomfortable just parking my truck on their property and then tromping all around the fields, roads, and woods! It’s a private place, after all… and its currently foliage season here in Vermont… so I also didn’t wanna be one of THOSE people. You know, the self-absorbed-“I don’t care that this is your house, I want a picture of us and our kids in our L.L. Bean scarves and duck boots petting your cow in the field with your barn, tractor, and trees in the background” type Leaf Peepers… who will then ask you for some warm cider to take the chill off and for a cider donut just for the novelty!… (Not to be confused with the Good Leaf Peepers. You guys enjoy the show… and keep spending your money). I wanted to be respectful to this place that still holds a special spot in my heart, and to respect the people who currently hold it close to theirs… so I decided to drive home.
As I sorta said earlier, Widowhood is a great exercise in “Adapting”… “Accepting”… “Rolling with the punches”… “Going with the flow”… as we learn about ourselves, our grief, loss, and Life in a world that was never on our radar. Mine and Kateri’s Wednesday Wedding is still THE day where I feel I felt the most excitement, joy, comfort, and Love since being plopped on this earth… but that was a different Time in my Life and as the years go by, I need to recognize that there will be change in how my Past fits into my Present… and I need to adapt.
This year’s Widower Wedding Anniversary was honestly a pleasurable one. It was a nice balance between being in The Present at The Schoolhouse with Amanda, Xander, and The Sourdough Stump through the morning, while also taking the time and creating the space to provide an opportunity to stick a toe in the puddle of The Past… and not getting unexpectedly splashed by it…!
ps… It didn’t hurt that the drive was absolutely gorgeous!… we live in a beautiful place… patience helps.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
In my Widowhood, I have found that thinking about and making goals pertaining to this or that has been beneficial as I am learning to live a life where I’m still sorta finding my identity… figuring out who I am… who I wanna be type shit…… we’re all a work in progress! The things I make goals for can range from big and lofty to small and mostly insignificant, but they provide me a sense of accomplishment and usually a valuable experience that allows me to take something I have put time, thought, and energy into (whether it be physical/material or experiential)… into the future. Currently, I am sitting on the side of a bed in Lubec, Maine, with my Blundstones dangling 3 inches from the tiled floor of my hotel room where I can see the ocean through the water-stained sliding glass door as I check the second coordinate off the list of my goal to visit the 4 corners of the continental U.S. Yup, I’m as far east as you can go before you need to hop on a boat!… and I have no desire to do that.
Today is the anniversary of Kateri’s Death Date… April 22nd… she died 7 years ago… and I thought a little Road Trip to the Easternmost Point in the continental U.S. would be a good adventure and could provide me with Time & Space to remember Kateri, our Time together, and to think about where I’m currently at in this gig called Life. Plus, I needed to test out the newish truck I bought 3 months ago during my Mini-Mid-Life Crisis…!
Amanda and I hit the Southernmost Point in Key West last year, but for this… I decided to do it solo… sorta. I mean… Kateri is not only with me in “spirit”, but she was nestled in a little glass jar sitting on my gloves in the center console for the drive over here… and has been pulled out for photo ops at light houses by the ocean and at the summit… well, almost the summit… of a mountain. Other than that, it’s really just me spending some time with myself as I reflect on Life in an area that is new me and one in which I find interesting.
Just to let you know, Lubec is tiny and quiet… and it’s the off-season… so it’s even more quiet..er. Although I am super happy with my Road Trip and Destination for the 7th Anniversary of Kateri’s passing because of the calmness and solitariness, it would be nice if there was at least 1… ONE!… restaurant/coffee shop/bakery/teahouse/fish house/clam or lobster shack/pizza place/burger place/Chinese restaurant open…! And I’m no coffee connoisseur, but man… I just want a decent cup of coffee that’s strong enough to defend itself…! (Thank you Tom Waits)
I’ll be honest, I got here last night… saw some sights… spent an hour and a half in the truck getting a pizza… spent another couple of hours in the truck today, finding food and seeing some other closed sights… and now I’m just chillin’ in my room as the tarps flapping from the ocean breeze are accompanied by the clanking of chains off in the distance. It’s nice here. It’s quiet… besides the tarps and chains. It’s beautiful… and the people seem nice, but it’s not Home… and I’m ready to be Home… in Vermont… at The Little Red Schoolhouse… with Amanda and Xander. I guess that’s a positive indication that I have a pretty decent Life. Well, I know I have a pretty decent Life… I think I might actually even have a pretty good Life. And honestly, I’ve always had a Good Life. Have there been bumps, challenges, and the unexpected?… of course, but that’s just a part of the gig… and why someone invented Deep Breaths… and these emojis 🤷♂️🤦♂️🤪… ❤️.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The loss of a loved one and the grief that comes along with it never goes away… it just slowly changes as Time keeps marching on until one day you realize… it’s different. During the Holidays, it could be an obvious thing such as when you realize you’re not breaking down every time you open a Christmas Bin or with every ornament you unwrap from its tissue paper sleeping bag. Other times it’s simply a feeling you get when you look back on your Life and are able to recognize that you are much more firmly rooted in and excited about The Present and Future than you were a year ago, three years… or seven. You are able to look back fondly on The Past and merely recognize The Pile of Poop Times because memories of The Good Times have caught up to them and are starting to pull ahead and overshadow…! The shitty stuff will always be in the rearview mirror and they will sometimes feel closer than they appear … depending on which mirror to look at… but once they get far enough behind and the feeling of them chasing you goes away, you find there are long stretches where you can hit the cruise control, put on some Steely Dan, and enjoy the view ahead through the windshield of your cute little Jeep Renegade.
Today is December 19th, 2024. Seven years ago, Kateri and I were sitting in a doctor’s office as he informed us that Kateri had Stage 4 Metastatic Malignant Melanoma. This was three days after we learned she had a mass in her brain and two days before I left to spend what we thought was the last Christmas with my mom. Let me tell you… it was a fucked-up time!… one that I’m glad is in The Past. Nowadays, December 19th is actually kind of a special day for me and in a weird way… a good day.
I’ve dealt with (and am dealing with) the loss of Kateri in the only way I know how… and I feel I’ve done ok with it. I’m one of those people who feel the need to attach things to other things so that I can keep them in My Life, even though they mean something different to me now.
For the last few years, I’ve had my annual dermatology check-up with Dr. Dan on this particular anniversary… it just kinda worked out that way. Dr. Dan has been our dermatologist since we moved down here and is the one who initially found Kateri’s melanoma. Kateri loved Dr. Dan… and I know she had an impact on him. You could see the sorrow in his eyes as he tried to be supportive of her with the diagnosis, and I felt his empathy and compassion when he would check in with me over the phone or take me out for a meal and some music after she passed. He’s a good man… which helps make him an even better doctor.
The first few years of Widowhood were rough, and I know it’s a Lifelong process, but I’m glad I’ve been able to feel the healing effects of Time. I don’t exactly have any desire to see doctors or hear what they have to say about my health, but this is different. And although I’m pretty sure it’s not natural for anyone to look forward to going to the doctor, I will say I enjoy my annual visit with Dr. Dan. We schedule it to be the last appointment of the day to give ourselves a little extra time to catch up, fill each other in on our lives, and reflect on the special person Kateri was. Even though I’m sure he will remove something from my body to send off to some lab (Kateri called it her weight-loss program!), I’m mostly really going to the appointment for the conversation, to wish him and his family a Merry Christmas, and to personally say… Thank-you.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The Christmas Tree has been around for a while. From what I understand, back in the 1500’s those festive people The Germans are credited with starting the tradition of selling dead trees for an exorbitant amount of money to overworked, overtired, over stressed parents just searching for that specific Cabbage Patch Doll and a little Hope!… who would also appreciate it if their children stopped fighting over who gets to help Mom or Dad duct tape the tree to the roof of the Tesla. It was pretty dark times back then, so they actually started setting up and decorating the Trees in September so that the children had something to look forward to for a quarter of the year. I mean, who doesn’t get excited about waking up on Christmas Morning… after waiting four months!… to open up gifts of potatoes, sticks, and lumps of coal?! Which, back in the day, I would suspect that the lumps of coal were a good thing. I mean, I’m pretty sure it was cold back then… a little coal could go a long way!
In case you didn’t notice, I don’t actually know the full history of the Christmas Tree… and I guess it doesn’t really matter to me. What I do know is that I have wonderful memories of decorating trees throughout my younger years with my parents and sister, through my twenties and thirties with my wife Kateri as we built our Life together… by myself for five years after she died… and now with Amanda as we foster new traditions and expand on our Life together. As Amanda and I decorated our tree… for the second year…!… I noticed a few cool little things that are now attached to my memories of decorating Christmas Trees over the years.
The colored lights/white lights preference thing is really what got me thinking about my Life this Holiday Season. I’ve always put colored lights on my tree. Kateri found these cool ones that look just like the ol’ retro bulbs you picture your dad stapling to the garage while balancing on one foot halfway up a fully extended extension ladder… except tiny… and LED!… which we used for years, and I kept up with in my Widowhood. Well… now it’s not just my tree… it’s mine and Amanda’s tree… and Amanda is a White Light type Christmas Tree person! Let me tell you about the tension THAT provided us in the Little Red Schoolhouse for the weeks leading up to Decoration Day!! Actually, there wasn’t any tension because Amanda and I have a healthy relationship built on Open and Honest Communication, Respect, and an understanding that Compromise is an integral part of any decision-making process involving more than one person. There’s that… and the fact that Amanda was able to find some lights that we could change between both colored and white!… not to mention 8 other colors with varying rates of flashing from “Awe… that’s calming” to “Frank just had a seizure!”. Either way… crisis averted!
Just as it goes that everything changes over Time… my (our) Christmas Tree is different this year from last… and the year before that blah blah blah. Yes, it is filled with all sorts of familiar trinkets, decorations, and doodahs but it’s still different… even if visually just a bit. I can see the changes in the missing ornaments and the addition of new ones. When decorating the tree, it was nice taking a moment to spend on each ornament, asking myself what I had attached to it, and deciding if it made the cut or not. Amanda did the same thing with her stock of memories. We did it together, strategically hooking glass snowmen, various Santas, and pictures of Xander on tree limbs until we got to that point where you take a step back to get a good look at your work and realize… it’s done. Amanda attached her Bow. I attached the Angels and fastened the Star. We moved the step stool out of the way because we were done with it… and it’s not great for pictures, turned on the lights (white… this time), and sat on the couch with the dog to take in the beauty of this year’s Christmas Tree… perfect.
Widower Notes n Thougths… on Christmas Trees:
Merry Christmas n Shit, Everyone…!
One of the things I love about Vermont is it’s (our) culture and traditions. At about this time of year, when the darkness starts to lift, when the frigidness takes a break as the sun sits in the sky a bit longer than the day before and life that has been dormant for the last however many months begin to take a peek to see if it’s their time to shine, a magical thing happens in these parts which we call… Maple Sugarin’! And… well… for the first time in my life I made my own… MAPLE SYRUP!!
I know I just said that “I” made “my own” maple syrup, but that was a lie. It was actually Amanda and I that made “our own” maple syrup… which now kinda makes me want to describe the “widower” side of this experience because it’s a challenge to be fully Present when your mind is saying things such as, “I wish Kateri and I had tried to tap our trees… or boil sap… make maple syrup from resources right from our own land..!” because she would’ve absolutely, 100%, whole heartedly loved… LOVED… it. Of course, she’s not here and hasn’t been for almost 6 years, but I have been here… and have had to learn how to find happiness in my Day to Day, in this new world with new experiences… without her. I’ve had to change a lot of things about myself, how I think about things, about how I view the world with the hopes of pulling myself out of the mud pit of Loss I was trudging through and to a degree… still am.
Luckily, sometimes when you’re trudging through the mud you find things that you maybe weren’t expecting or even looking for like friendship, companionship… and Love. I might not have been able to boil sap with Kateri, but I was able to have this unique experience with someone I share my home and life with, someone who makes me laugh, someone who I always wanna spend more time with, and most notably to this conversation… someone I Love.
It started with Amanda and I walking through the woods looking for Sugar Maples to tap. This would’ve been a much easier process if we knew what Maple Trees looked like without their leaves! After checking out books with pictures and searching The Oracle for answers, we went and bought 4 taps, sap buckets, and lids to start the inaugural 2024 Little Red Schoolhouse Sugarin’ Season by tapping 3 Sugar Maples… and 1 Northern Red Oak…!.. which is no longer tapped… and we found another Maple. We also scrounged together plastic buckets (food grade) to store the sap in until we had enough to make at least a little bit of syrup… considering it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup!
After about a week we had accumulated around 8-9 gallons of sap and we figured we should boil it off before it spoiled. Now, we’ve never done this before, so we aren’t exactly set up for endeavors like this, but as I figure, and one thing I love about this process, is that at its most basic level, all we really need to do is have enough heat (fire) to boil water/sap and enough time to reduce it down to syrup. We can do that!… We’ve got the technology! So, on the windiest day of the week, we set up our Sugarin’ Station in the most inefficient way possible and spent the day… and part of the night!… chopping down trees to fuel the fire as our sap made that magical transformation from sweet water that’ll give you the shits to that golden nectar of the Gods… filled with all sorts of ash and whatever else was floating around the woods! It was a lot of fun, but we knew we could make the experience… and Maple Syrup… better.
A week. I figured we had a week until our second chance to do this boiling thing so there was a bit of time to find a better way. Contain the fire!… control the heat flow!… that was my goal. At first, I was gonna take some old, galvanized roofing that I had found in the woods (awe… Vermont) and make a firebox out of it where two hotel pans could sit in to increase the surface area and to limit ash and junk from getting into the syrup. As I was telling someone about this adventure and my plan for the firebox, someone else offered me a couple sheets of stainless steel to make the firebox out of!… how fortuitist!! So, over a couple of evenings, I figured out how to work with stainless steel and cobbled together our first firebox… with chimney and all! I gotta say, it’s pretty fun cutting and grinding metal, but I had that constant fear of accidentally slicing the palm of my hand off (even with gloves on!) or having a shard shred my eyeball or burning down the garage from the sparks flying as the grinder screeched through the stainless steel.
The second boil was much more efficient and productive, although enclosing the fire also meant limiting access to the heat that kept us warm as we stood there in the woods watching water (sap) boil! Honestly though, it wasn’t that cold of a day and the fact that it was taking about half the time compared to the first boil warmed us with excitement and accomplishment. Besides, all we really had to do was keep the fire going, keep adding sap, and simply enjoy each other’s company as we chatted about this and that and here and there. It was a pretty darn nice way to spend a Monday afternoon. I mean, I got to spend the morning in the garage finishing something I made to hopefully make our experience better (which was a wonderful learnin’ lesson in and of itself!), I spent the day in the woods burning shit with someone I love, and when Monday was all said and done, there were four and a half Ball jars sitting on the pie board in the kitchen filled with… MAPLE…FRICKIN’… SYRUP! (fuck… yeah!)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I was in the shower washing all the bits, pieces, and parts when I felt my right ear lobe and noticed that the earring Jake had made for me… which was a gift I had received from Kateri not too many days after we learned of her diagnosis… was gone. It took one more slippy squeeze of the ear with the brain thinking, “Maybe I missed it…?… just wasn’t paying attention…?”, before it turned to me envisioning the mini version of myself, the one who resides in my skull… and has a full head of hair, clenching his fists and screaming, “Muuuutherrr…. FUCKER!!”.
In reality, I just stood there staring at the subway tile as the hot water massaged the top of my shaved head, shoulders, and back (…I don’t shave my shoulders… or my back). The steam cushioned my naked body from the cold sitting just on the other side of the curtain waiting for its chance to insert a little shiver to the tail end of my shower. I thought about where I might’ve lost it and when. Then I thought about how I had spent all day outside snow blowing, chain sawing, burning stuff, and running through the woods and realized it could be anywhere on my little piece of Vermont. Heck, it could’ve been shot to the property across the road after taking a ride through the snowblower!
My mind wanted to make a run for it, but I was able to calm it down. I took a deep breath and simply stood there in the shower… the outside world silenced by the white noise of water pelting the shower curtain and ceramic… thinking about my life. I knew that if I wore those earrings day in and day out, one day one or both of them may go missing. And on Monday… one did. Of course, that didn’t stop me from slowly walking around the property with my headlamp cranked up to full brightness as it beamed straight down scanning the snow, dirt, twigs, and sawdust for any sign of a silverish three-quarter hoop the size of a dime. FYI… I live on 6.5 acres and haven’t found it… yet.
This post wasn’t gonna have anything to do about an earring, I just happened to lose it as I am going through a Widower Moment brought on by the passing of someone who resided in the periphery of my world. I have been thinking quite a bit about my life as of late, of my widowhood and my relationship with it, but it was an email at work which reminded me that after 5 Years, 7 Months, and 9 Days we have the ability to remember things, people, and moments with such vividness that we could swear it just happened, we just saw them, and/or we just experienced this or that as if it was yesterday. The harder part for me was not the fact that I could remember the last Doctor’s Appointment, the last “I Love You.”, or even the Last Breath… it was the fact that the feelings I had in each of those memories… those moments… bubbled up from wherever they were hiding and decided to go back on tour. Well, maybe just a three-day engagement… or guest appearance… either way, they were annoyingly loud and played songs that I simply don’t care for anymore.
This recent experience brought up mainly some of the crappy stuff in life… cancer, loss, death and such. It was hard to go through the last few days where the memories that fill my head were mainly of when Kateri was sick, when we watched cancer wear down her body in a matter of months, when I sat next to her holding her shark bite listening to her breath, and waking up to a world where I would never get to hold her again. It took one sentence in a work email to remind me that Loss does not have an expiration date. Loss doesn’t stop existing even if you haven’t felt the pain, sorrow, and bitterness of it in a while. Loss doesn’t disappear because you’ve moved to a new apartment, house, town, or country. After 5 Years, 7 Months, and 9 Days… I was reminded that Loss doesn’t just go away because “X” number of Days, Months, or Years have passed by. But after 5 Years, 7 Months, and 9 Days I was also reminded that neither does… Love.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I bought the John Deere hat on the right in Kittery, Maine 5 days after Kateri died… five years, six months, and eight days ago… but who’s counting?! Well, I guess I am… but it’s not like I have been continually… I just had to look at the ol’ calendar to figure it out. I haven’t counted the days for a few years, but sometimes something pops up in my world that makes me take a look at… Time… and it provides me with a little clarity… a different perspective.
It wasn’t until I got the new John Deere hat a few days ago that I realized just how worn the old one had gotten. I mean, I could obviously see when it first started to get sweat stains and I could feel the mesh start to soften up a bit. I noticed it when the fabric began to fray along the edge of the bill and the plastic readied itself for its unveiling. I loved it when it got to the point where it just flip flopped around and only resembled the shape of my head… until I put it on. I love the wear and tear… the visible effects of its life in this world where all it is doing is holding itself together… existing… while the sands of Time slowly erode it’s exterior as the grains roll past.
I love… LOVE!… this hat and everything I have attached to it. I’ll still throw it on from time to time and here and there, but it has done its job and now it’s… tired… so I’m gonna let it rest. I’m not gonna stuff it in a closet or hide it in a cabinet… and I’ll never throw it away, but for now it’s life will consist of more time simply chilling on The Pink Box… or maybe The Bookshelf for a change of scenery. Wherever it sits… wherever it is, I know it will be there for me for whenever I need to see it, feel it, or to put it on and find comfort in all the good, bad, fun, exciting, scary, challenging, inspiring, social, and deeply personal memories I have made with it over the last five years, six months, and eight days… but who’s counting?!
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
As I was running around work this morning, it was such a pleasant surprise to get a text from my sister reminding me that today is the anniversary of when I quit drinking alcohol… 17 years ago…! I love my sister and I… wait, I was about to write “can’t believe she remembered blah, blah, blah”… but that’s not true. I CAN believe she remembered and reached out… because she is a wonderfully caring person, and it means the world to me that if I can’t get a text from my mom wishing me a “Happy Birthday!” to remind me, I was still able to have that “Oh ya, I quit drinking today” type of feeling and slow realization of a significant accomplishment in my life… followed by the feeling of being loved by someone who I admire, respect, and unconditionally love. My sister… she’s pretty frickin’ awesome. (I mean, there’s a few conditions, but I’m not too worried about any of those happening…!)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
As I was driving home from work one day a couple of weeks ago, I noticed the leaves have started their annual metamorphosis and I realized I haven’t posted anything this summer… even though there have been a few big things that have happened in my life and in my Widowhood over the last threeish months. Ok, there was really one main big thing that happened followed by a few other fun things, but that one big thing took up some time and space in my everyday life. Luckily, I kinda had an episode yesterday where I sorta fainted, hit my face on the Jelly Cupboard, and woke up on my dining room floor in a puddle of water with a knee that… well… just doesn’t feel very good… and Amanda crouching over me with the look of worry in her eyes… yay! (Don’t worry… I’m fine. Everything’s fine.) So today I’m taking it easy… not moving cinder blocks and slate up to the firepit for our wood-fired hot tub… and am gonna catch up on getting some things down on paper…!
So… the big news on the widower front… my girlfriend Amanda and I made the decision to move in together and have her shimmy on up to The Little Red Schoolhouse…! Let me tell you, as a widower… as for me… having to go through the process of the two of us talking about it, coming up with timeframes, contemplating challenges for each of us, feeling the excitement about unknown possibilities ahead while reminiscing on memories from the past and how I would deal with combining the two… well… it was a lot…! I will say though, after the five plus years since Kateri died and having spent the bulk of that time with Amanda, it’s nice to have that feeling of sharing my life with someone I love again. I haven’t been able to look into the future very far since Kateri passed, but I’m at a point where that is changing… slowly… but it’s changing…!
Preparing for Change…!
The Little Red Schoolhouse… my Home… is filled with my life and over the last 5 years and 4 months it has provided me with a space that I could use to feel grounded in a world that was completely new to me… a world without Kateri. Although Kateri was no longer by my side, I needed to hold onto some of those things that provided me with a certain level of closeness to her. Even as mine and Amanda’s relationship grew, The Schoolhouse was still my space and I set it up in a way that I felt was best for me to deal with this stoopid life of Widowhood. In some ways… I was nesting.
As Amanda and I slowly got to the decision of her moving in, I thought about her and how to initially make The Schoolhouse a little less like a shrine to my memories and more of a starting point to setting up our Home… which basically came down to moving some “Kateri Centric” items that had helped me cope in the past and which I felt I could live without seeing everyday if it meant it made the space more comfortable for Amanda. For this post, I decided to simply upload some pics and give a little blurb about each of them. There are about 1,372 other pics I could’ve used to illustrate the experiences this widower went through while preparing for a significant change in life… but you’ll get the idea.
Good Morning
I am sorry I am not here, but I love you more than anything… and I’ve got my rock. Enjoy the morning with some coffee…. I miss you already.
Love
Darren
Kateri and I got this box while living in Colorado. We used it for a variety of things, but since we bought The Schoolhouse, it has lived in the mudroom where we would stage recycling before it made its way to the garage. I never understood why we didn’t just take recycling to the garage so after Kateri died it became basically just a flat surface for me to put things on… and for a memory. Some might simply see an old yellow box, but for me it reminds me of when I got so frustrated with the situation that I put my boot through the front/right side of it… and I have had to live with the fact that I did that as Maria and I were trying to get Kateri to the Cute Little Jeep so that we could take her to the ER… and that this was the last time Kateri was… home. Yup, that’s been a hard one to live with.
Iris’s and Poppies. Kateri was a flower farmer and I love that she made beds and planted plants at our home that come to life year after year. Sometimes when I go out in the evening and the sun is setting, I’m taken aback by the beauty that the natural world provides us in our lives and the ability Kateri had to capture it.
The Last Night…!
Once Amanda and I made the decision to live together, the countdown started. For five plus years I learned to become comfortable with being alone and actually cherished certain aspects of it. One of those things is that ever since Xander came into our life just under two years ago, it was me and him at The Schoolhouse. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of an impact he has had on my life. We both lost Our People to the “unfairness” in the world, but somehow came into each other’s life. I like to call him “The Roommate”… but he’s so much more that. He’s my companion… my buddy. He came into my life at the perfect time… even though it meant that Amanda and I lost a friend. I’m honored that Judy entrusted us to take care of the love of her life. Although she was looking for someone to take care of Xander, I think she was also thinking of who he could help take care of, as well.
As the days went by… as they do… it finally came to The Last Night…! The last night where Xander and I live alone. The last night of this being My Space. The last night of texting Amanda “Goodnight”… which we have done almost every night since we’ve met. The last night of going upstairs, crawling into bed, and Xander jumping over me as he assumes his position at the foot of the bed… then pushing his paws against my legs as if I’m the one taking up all the space! I miss that. Of course, now it means that I get to lean over and kiss Amanda goodnight… instead of texting her… which is much better!
For my Last Night, I ate Flatbread, smoked some pot to honor mine and Kateri’s past (and because I like pot), and put together a Lego… because I have found putting together Legos is fun and helps me relax… and I might be addicted. The pic of Xander is the last night he had free range to half the bed.
The Move In…!
I’m finding it kinda funny that I don’t really have much to say about the actual moving in! Luckily, Amanda didn’t have a bunch of furniture or a large Beanie Baby collection that she felt the need to have on display. Nope, it was pretty much smooth sailing!
Amanda and I have always communicated well, and I think that it worked in our favor as we maneuvered through this new endeavor. Once the time came, we really just tried to enjoy it!… and not freak out. For both of us, the excitement far overshadowed any trepidation we had with the decision. For me… it was a welcomed change and seems to be the right time. Although there are still some things in boxes, we’ve settled in nicely…!
I absolutely LOVE how we decided to store our cookbooks! Old boxes… Good Housekeeping would be proud.
The Second Annual Sister Visit…!
I have another post started about this new little annual event the four of us seem to have started so I’m not gonna get into it here, but it was wonderful time filled with BBQ, Duck Races in downpours, cooking hot dogs at the fire-pit, and nightly friendly games of Uno with family. (Sorry, that’s a lie… there’s no friends in Uno!)
The Wood Pile…!
Another part of the Annual Sister Visit I’ve come to love is the stacking of the wood pile! It’s been fun coming up with different configurations the last few years and it tickles me pink that my Sis and Bro-in-Law truly enjoy doing it!
After seeing how his wood was stacked, I was all ready to claim victory over my neighbor who isn’t aware of the competition we are in together, but then I saw that he’s chopping more wood… I’m gonna have to check the rule book.
Amanda’s nephew came to Vermont to visit us at The Schoolhouse before he starts his first year of college at Alabama… the Roll Tide one… pretty sure. It was fun hanging with him talking about life while hiking up Bald Top or chillin’ by the fire or playing Bananagrams as a Don Toliver playlist makes its way through the speakers. He’s a good kid… young adult… and I look forward to hearing about and seeing where his choices take him. (I’m refraining from making any cracks about Alabama… it’s a beautiful state… with lots of billboards… which seem to be for local lawyers, politicians, mattress stores… or telling you to Go to Church or The Devil Will Get You!!..!)
The Wood-Fired Hot Tub…!
I’ve been talking about making a wood-fired hot tub for years now. Whenever we could, depending on where we were living, Kateri and I always tried to make an outdoor shower. Once in a while we were even able to have a HOT outdoor shower!… but we never had a tub. We talked a lot about making one, especially after we sat in the wood-fired clawfoot tub in the bath house Chichi and John built in the woods of Vermont during the early 2000’s. There was a parlor stove, window, tile and everything!… it was magical.
One of the things I love about Amanda is that she is supportive and can be motivating! She’s been listening to me talk about this wood-fired water trough thing for a while now and one day she was like, “Ok, let’s go get what we need!”… so, we did! We’re actually still in the building stage. I mean, we tested it out in the back yard just to see if it would work… and because we could fill it from the garden hose, but the plan is to have it up at the fire-pit… which we’ve already started to piece together.
The building of the Water Trough Hot Tub has been a wonderful experience for me on both the Widower Side of things (…those things I still do that remind me of Kateri, our life, what she taught me about myself, about what’s important, and how to live without her…) and my present life. On the Present Side, I’ve loved everything about doing this project with Amanda. We’ve definitely had a few hiccups and head scratches followed by a few laughs, but we’ve certainly had fun throughout all of it…! On the Widower Side, it’s just one of those activities that I know Kateri would’ve really enjoyed doing and it simply reminds me of her and how wonderful she was.
There’s an old well at the edge of the woods in my back yard which I figured we could use to fill the tub up with water. The water in the well is crystal clear, but we tested it anyways… it’s an old frickin’ well for goodness sakes!… who knows what type of bacteria, microbes, or other tiny ass little buggers are living in there?! Would I drink it?… No. Would I fill up a water trough with it and sit in it?… yes. Will I buy some sort of chlorine tablet/liquid/goop and learn the appropriate ratio/amount to kill everything that may pose a threat to my future bowel movements if they happen to get in my mouth or enter my body through some other opening?… (like my ears or my nose!)… Definitely. Now we just need to figure out how to pump the water out of the well, up a hill, and into the trough!
A Widower’s Thought On: Opening an old ass well for the first time in “Who Knows How Long?” without having any knowledge, information, or idea of what to expect…
Xander Turned 9…!!
He was super excited to get to wear his little glittery gold top hat again this year and eat the Peanut Butter-Pumpkin with Peanut Butter and Greek Yogurt Frosting Birthday Cake that Amanda made him. Fun times!
Down to the Last Smartie…
Well, here we are… down to the last Smartie.
I had bought a bag of them in June when a couple of my Sister-in-Laws came over to go through Kateri’s clothes before Amanda moved in. I figured the timing would create a more comfortable environment for everyone involved for an event such as that. I used a wooden bowl to hold them for easy access, but we didn’t eat the entire package. So, over the next couple of evenings I made my way through them until I got to the last one… just sitting there… all alone… in an almost empty bowl. I decided to save it for my last evening alone in The Schoolhouse… but it’s currently still sitting on the stool I use as a nightstand next to the bed. I’m sure I’ll be trying to unwrap them with the stealthiness of a Candy Ninja, so as not to wake up Amanda, in the middle of the night at some point… it just hasn’t happened yet.
Kateri would call Smarties her “Pills”. For her Celebration of Life, we had bought a ton of them and there were quite a few left over, which I was able to finish off over the course of a few months… and then my buddy started sending me a bag of them every time I ran out!
Smarties remind me not just of Kateri, but also of my life in the months/year just after she died and what that time was like for me. It was confusing, scary, sad, traumatic, relentless, fucked up and kinda just generally sucked. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom every second of the day. Some days it took something smaller than a dime to remind me of that. When I had Smarties… life got better! I mean, life didn’t get better since the passing of Kateri solely because of those little stacks of fruity sugar heaven wrapped in cellophane memories, it’s because Time has a way of healing the wounds life offers us as payment for the experience of giving, receiving, and feeling… Love.
Yesterday, it caught me by surprise… the feelings that come along when you live with loss in your life. I do what I call “Huddles” with the crew at work every morning to check in, relay information, and give the team a platform to share things they may have questions about… or simply want to share. For a long time it was mostly just me talking to blank stares, which is why I started asking the question, “What is one good thing that has happened to you today?”. For a long time I would get the ol’, “It’s eight o’clock in the morning… I’ve got nothing.” type of responses… so I started forcing them to give me something… anything. It doesn’t need to be earth shattering or life changing, but I think we can all recognize something … at any point in our day… that we can view as good, positive, and sometimes even… beautiful. Well, yesterday, as we were getting ready for a busy Saturday and finishing up our Huddle I got to witness a quick interaction that pulled at the ol’ heartstrings…!
We were going around the kitchen sharing our “good things” when one person said how they were able to have a cup of coffee and give their mom a hug before she went to work. What hit me was when another crew member basically told them to cherish those moments with their mom. I think the reason it hit me was because I know the person who gave that little piece of adivce has experienced loss… and specifically in this case, the loss of his mom. When he gave that advice, he didn’t go into any big story or expand on his thoughts, it was simply “Cherish those moments.”. Right at that moment, the love I have for my mom and the pain that her loss created in my life came rushing back… when I wasn’t expecting it. I literally felt my throat get choked up and my eyes widen as I kept the tears from forming in the corners before they could slide down my cheeks and nestle into my beard. The intensity at which the loss of my mom came rushing back was staggering to me, as well as my ability to stop it and push it to the side so that I could get on with the day… and then deal with it later.
My widowed life seems to have hit a point where it’s just kinda humming along. The peaks and valleys have flattened out a bit to rolling hills… and smaller valleys. Although I am happy and there are things/people I’m excited about, for the most part it’s just one foot in front of the other. So when moments like these pop up… I actually kinda love them. They remind me of what’s important in life. They remind me of my priorities. They remind me of the love I have in my heart for the people who are no longer by my side or in my physical world. This specific experience, a quick little Huddle with no real discernable difference from any other Huddle, reminded me that loss is something I simply live with… and that the love I have for my Mom, for Kateri, for Mary Ann, and for friends who are no longer here is just as strong and powerful as the day they died.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I live a life enveloped in loss. After four years, two months, and 18 days I feel like Life is using bubble wrap to soften the loss as I ping pong against the walls of my day to day… I’m just surprised on how much packing tape Life used to keep my loss safe and secure!
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
April 1st, 2022… Mary Ann Damato… a beautifully loving woman with moments of Double Pump Flip Offs… Kateri’s Mom (Mom to 7 others… Grandmother or Abuela to 8ish more)… my Mother-in-Law… passed away on Friday morning. Stoopid cancer.
Mary Ann was a wonderful person in my life. I loved watching… and experiencing… Kateri’s relationship with her mom over the years. I loved getting to know Mary Ann… and her getting to know me. I love that we became family through the moments and time we spent together. I love that she considered me a son long before Kateri became my wife. When it comes right down to it… Mary Ann was part of “The Good” in the world. From here in the Northeast and across this country, to the villages of South and Central America, to the streets of Mexico where she would teach art to the kids on the sidewalk… she has friends and family from all walks of life who will feel the loss of this loving and compassionate woman. Take care, Missy… I love you… tons.
My mom died… and for the second time in my life… I feel like I woke up to a different world.
Now, I don’t really have much experience with death. I don’t come from a large family. I wasn’t close to grandparents, cousins, or anything. I’ve been fortunate that a vast majority of my friends are still around. And I live in a country where we don’t talk about death in a positive manner much… which may sound weird… but it’s something that we all experience, from one point of view or another, at some point in the timeline of life. Although I don’t have much experience with it, I kinda feel like the lessons I’ve learned on the topic were taught (and being taught) in an expediated night class that I’m court ordered to go to!
Being here with my Mom for the last three weeks is a completely different experience than being there with Kateri as I watched cancer destroy her body and take away her breath. I’m in a different role here in Idaho. I’m playing a different part… in a different scene… of a different movie. The subject may be the same, but it’s a version that I don’t quite have a handle on. Even though I already know how the movie is gonna end… it’s the final scene that’s still being written… and I’m having a pretty hard time with the writer. In all honesty, I kinda wish I could fire the writer… but I think they unionized a long time ago and have obtained… what’s that called?… tenure.
I am currently in the process of losing the most important person in my life. When Kateri died, that distinction shifted to my Mom. (Sorry… there’s a hierarchy and we’ve all got favorites.) In the last three weeks, I’ve learned a few things. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that losing Kateri sorta prepared me for the time when I will lose my mom. It kinda sucks to draw upon the memories of that time in my life, but it showed me just how rough life could get… and subsequently, that I would make it through. I mean, at the least… I’ve made it until today!… which is good enough.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
It took me a second to process what he said, but then my brain figured out that the meth addict looking Idaho asshole driving his shitbox ’92 maroon Toyota Corolla was leaning out his window yelling, “GO HOME!” as he passed me going the opposite direction when I pulled onto my parent’s street. It caught me by surprise as I was simply driving home after grabbing a mocha for me and a latte for my mom… which I know she won’t drink. It pissed me off. It upset me to the point where I flipped a bitch with the intention of catching up to the self-absorbed and small minded dickhead at the traffic light to inquire about his thoughts on hometowns, state pride, and what the words “One Nation” in our country’s Pledge of Allegiance means to him. Well, that and if he knew I was raised here in the city of Boise which fostered a deep love for the mountains, wildlife, and wilderness in me from the vast amount of time I’ve spent in them… and that I’m only here visiting because my mom is currently laying in a hospital bed in her bedroom dying from cancer. Fuck you… you fucking fuck… who can’t even grow a proper beard…!
Luckily, he wasn’t at the light when I got to it, which meant I didn’t have to figure out what it was I was actually gonna do when I got there! To be clear… I wasn’t looking for a fight… I’m not a fighter… I’m like three feet tall! I mean, I have no problem with scrappin’ if circumstances lead to it and it’s justified, but I generally don’t like the feeling of getting punched in the face and I don’t believe there are really that many circumstances that justify escalating to the point of violence. I may have been 100% comfortable with the possibility of confrontation at the time, but I’m glad it didn’t happen. No… instead I used this individual’s last three brain cell’s reaction to the color of my license plate (on my cute little Jeep) as an exercise in prioritizing what is important in my life, what is the immediate need, and who are the people… and types of people… I wanna surround myself with as I keep marching on day after day.
Yup, this douchebag might’ve put me in a foul mood and made me lose a tiny bit of faith in humanity (and reinforced why I live in the woods of Vermont!), but he’s just one person… whom I will most likely never see again… and I’m ok with that.
With that being said… below was gonna be my post yesterday morning. It was kinda nice for me to see that I could come up with a whole bunch of people who I care about a million times more than the inbred who screamed out his window at a license plate.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Dear Mom, Kateri, Dad, Dina, Tommy, Josh, Jacob, Addison Rose, Sadie, Amanda, Matty, Les, Keith & Michelle, Maria, Pookie, Pocker, Cassie, Trilla, Moose, Jeanette, Amelia, Cisco, Chichi, Mary Ann, Todd, Tony, Scotty (The Hottie), MPH, Jake, Kristen, Sarah, Eric, Teri, Diane, Jay, Jason, Greg, Luna, Amanda, Casey, Raph, Mike, Michael, Justin, Juice (sorry I haven’t called!), Lea Jae, Becky, Cindy, Cristina, Jeff, Jeff, Jessica, Kate, Phil, Phillip, Philip, Mark, Sue, Other Mark, Other Sue, Sandra, Bill, Shannon, Tamzen, Hannah, Gen & Jake, Luke & Brady, Michelle, Tim, Carrie, Jeremy, John, Nick, John… and another John with an “H”, Ruslan, Margot (I’m so happy for you guys!), Will, Will (More Black Sabbath…!), Sarah, Jeanie, Keri, Mike, Franny, Gardner, Abby, Michelle, Cindy, Rosie (you can take the rest of the day off!), Davin, Lil’ Eric, Corey, Orrin, Ann, Cindy, Frank, Jaime, Jamie, Tara, Tara (pronounced Tara), Lucy (Little Lion Dog), Bridget, Maggie, Lauren, Nancy… and Nancy, Paul, Rob, Wilson, Tracy, Paulie, Charles, Kate, Will, Holly, Jenny, Wendy, Brad, Maura, Luanne, Carol, Dennis, Tom, Mike, Bob, Jim, John, Susan, Lucas, Greg, Didi, Sean, Angela, Angela & Sean (even though I haven’t met Sean!), Lisa, Uncle Ron (you’re an impressively strong man… fuck cancer), Kris, Rhonda, Sarah, Ian, Martha, Matt, Chad, Julie, Laurie, Laura, Chris, Gil, Leslie, Luke, MaryJane, Vickie (not Michelle’s alter-ego), Frank & Marnie (congrats on the new place!), Dan, Marc, Nadia, Andy, Brian, Nate, aaaaaaand Xander (even though you’re a dog and won’t be reading this),
Thank you.
Love,
Darren
ps… And to those who aren’t listed… I thank and send ya some love, too.
I went for a drive on Friday. I’ve been in Idaho for two weeks and a day now to be with my mom and on Friday I just needed to get out of Dodge. Well, it’s not so much that I needed to get out of Dodge… I just needed to cover some ground, get into the mountains and away from the lights and sounds of suburbia and the city, so that I could feel a bit more comfortable and be in a space that would allow me to… think. Of course, I’m pretty sure it also started the process of me having a mid-life crisis… sorta. I just happen to need more money so that I can have a mid-life crisis in style. You know, like the ones you used to be able to have in the 80’s with sports cars and cocaine! (ummm… FYI… neither of which I’m actually interested in) I guess it’s not so much that I’m having a mid-life crisis… it’s more me trying to make sense of living a life without being able to give my mom a hug, being able to tell her about my day, being able to share my life with her, being able to lean on her for support and guidance, being able to tell her… I love her. After losing Kateri to Metastatic Malignant Melanoma… with mutations… my mom was there for me. She even made the trip to Kateri’s Kick-Ass Party… oxygen tank in tow, needed because of the cancer… saying she was gonna make it there one way or another and wouldn’t have missed it for anything. My mom is a strong woman. My mom is an independent woman. My mom is a caring and compassionate woman who loved me no matter what bad decisions I made throughout my life… while also celebrating the good ones. And my mom is currently in her bedroom, laying in a hospital bed resting as Joan Baez radio fills the air… dying from cancer. No, I guess it’s not so much that I’m having a mid-life crisis… I’m just really sad… I’m just feeling kinda lost… and being here watching my mom live with cancer for the last little bit of her life is just… hard.
When Kateri died, everything I thought I knew about who I was and what I wanted my life to look like simply vanished. It was cloaked with some sort of haze… a fog… this lack of direction in the world and my place in it. Being a widower… to put it bluntly… sucks balls. To be a widower in my mid-forties, to lose Kateri at a time when we were at the best spot in our lives and we were so excited about the future, our home, our history, and growing old together… honestly, threw me for a loop. But in the last almost four years, it also taught me that as long as I’m upright and on this side of the earth… I’ve gotta keep putting pants on and taking those steps to try and figure out how to keep living in a world without something that I thought I was gonna live with forever. It taught me that sometimes in life we have to adapt to scenarios that we never could’ve imagined… that never crossed our minds. It taught me that life could be hard… and living could be even harder.
Kateri’s death showed me that I could endure quite a bit while also clarifying… and simplifying… a couple of my priorities in life. My priority right now is to be with my mom because this is one of those things that’s only gonna happen once in my life. When I leave Idaho, my life and priorities will be different than when I arrived. I’ve accepted that and I know I will be ok… and I’ll continue to search for ways to make life better. Unfortunately, part of being here with my mom is seeing her frustration… seeing her discomfort… seeing her lose her mobility… her independence… seeing her in and out of lucidity… seeing her so… tired. Losing ones we love is hard, but sometimes I think seeing them having to endure the process as cancer attacks their bodies and we witness strength turn into frailty… well… sometimes I feel like that part of life is the hardest.
First off, I’m just gonna say that I’m not really worried about my new roommate shitting on the floor. I mean, I’m pretty sure he just won’t, but if he does..?… I guess it would be my own damn fault… because he’s a dog… whom I never want to put in the position of needing to make a decision such as, “Should I just shit on the floor?!”. He’s a very well behaved four legged animal whose actually been staying with me for the last seven and a half weeks. The first half of his stay was more of a temporary thing with us spending the second half really gettin’ to know each other to see if a more permanent stay was the best decision for everyone involved. The quick is, a few Mondays ago, after he had been up here a week or so, my girlfriend Amanda and I were asked by our friend to adopt her dog Xander when she dies… because her love for Amanda is simply immense, she thought the world of her, and knew that Amanda would love him and take care of him. Basically, we said yes and thought Xander could/would stay up here with me… since I live in the woods and he would have space to run around… because he’s a dog. Yesterday morning, in her sleep, our friend Judy peacefully passed away. At that moment, the moment in which death drew that definitive line in our life, The Little Red Schoolhouse became Xander’s… home.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Being a cook in the time of a Global Pandemic doesn’t really afford me the opportunity to take much time off of work. Heck, in June I took two days off to go see my mom… and still got overtime! Luckily, I work with some amazing people who picked up my slack so that I could celebrate my Wedding Anniversary the way I wanted to… by taking four days off (six in total!)… and going through mine and Kateri’s shit! The one thing I absolutely knew that I wanted to do was to go through all the bins of Kateri’s clothes on the day of our Anniversary… September 28th. I know… such the romantic!
It was a productive time off. I had a plan. There was an order in which I was gonna do things to hopefully get to a place of feeling accomplished in reaching my goal of sorta getting my house and garage to a starting point… a point where I could feel a little more rooted in “My Life” while still holding onto the things that I loved about Kateri and “Our Life”… which I guess is still “My Life”… ugh… you know what I’m talkin’ about. I simply came to a place in time where my life felt cluttered with these two different chapters of existence and I’m simply learning how to combine the two in a way that is… healthy… for me. Today is day six of my time off and once I’m done with this little blog thing… it’ll be Mission Accomplished!… for at least another month or two.
Saturday was all about the garage and going to the dump. I had originally thought about getting a dumpster, but after realizing I didn’t actually have that much stuff to throw away… and finding out it would’ve cost me $650!… I decided against it. Since the town dump (not my town’s dump… shhh) is only open on Saturdays and Wednesdays, it provided me with a little guidance in the order to do things. So I woke up, walked around with coffee looking at things in bathrooms, mudrooms (I’ve only got one), kitchens (still only one of those, too), the garage, and potting shed to assess the situation. I’m sure there was a bit of procrastination there, as well, but I finally just started pulling things down and out and began creating piles. Two runs to the dump later and my home and garage no longer had old humidifiers and air purifiers hanging out, or broken DVD players, little TVs we had in lofts 17 years ago, fans, toaster ovens, huge metal lazy Susan discs from cabinets we tore down 6 years ago, lotion bottles, bottles with stuff in them for hair… or the adult diapers from when Kateri was sick. It was a purge… and it felt great!
Sunday and Monday was time for going through boxes that were hidden in closets and to go through our art. Kateri and I loved picking up little pieces from our travels to remember them by. We loved it even more when they were given to us by friends and family and I just wanted to have them out to remember the people… the stories… and the memories. So after rummaging through a few boxes, going out and buying frames… and then figuring out how to fit paintings and pics in frames!… I hung our art on Monday night. On a side note, Amanda (my Lady Friend…!) went with me on Monday to donate a few things and to get the frames, but wasn’t there to help with the hanging of art that night. Although it would’ve been helpful to have someone else there, she is an amazingly wonderful and supportive person who understood that I kinda wanted to wake up alone on Tuesday… my anniversary… so she went home after dinner… and I kept sending her pics of how I hung shit.
Tuesday, September 28… it would’ve been our 10th Wedding Anniversary… 20th year together… 23rd year with Kateri in my life… 3 years 5 months without her by my side… and I woke up crying. I haven’t been very emotional about my widowhood as of late… we widowers kinda learn to live with the loss… but the emotions had been building up as Tuesday approached and they simply needed out. It felt good to release a little. I mean, the crushing sense of loss and the thought of Kateri being dealt the cancer card… with mutations… didn’t feel good, but it felt nice to have the time and space to let them flow out of me. In a strange way, it felt good to feel that pain once again. It reminds me of how wonderful of a person she was. It reminds me of how much I love her. (Now I’m crying again… that wasn’t part of the plan!)
I didn’t know what I would feel, how I would react once I started opening all of those green bins (I thought Kateri would enjoy the bins being a bright green!), especially after the first hour and a half of my morning, but I needed… and wanted… to get the ball rolling. So, I went into the spare bedroom, stood there for a few moments, pulled a bin down… and opened it. The process was actually a lot less emotional than I expected. I think it’s because I was a bit more mission/task driven and I was ready… READY… to do it. I was tired of living in this state of, “I’ll get to it… one day.”. Well, today was the day! (two days ago). As I got further into it, I just kept looking at shirts, t-shirts (which I kept all of them), sweaters, pants, comfy clothes, swimsuits, the blouses still in bags from when Kateri practiced a little “Retail Therapy”, scarves, hats, and thin hoodies (I kept all of the hoodie hoodies) thinking to myself, “They’re just clothes.”. But I also realized that they’re not “just clothes”… they are how I picture Kateri. I mean, we don’t just remember our significant others naked all the time! We remember them wearing this t-shirt or that dress or those overalls. Our clothes are an extension of our personality. They tell stories of our life… which I think is why I kept all of her t-shirts with shit on them advertising friends’ businesses, trips to NY, or to the Shakespeare Festival in Boise where we ran into one of Kateri’s childhood friend… from Vermont!
It was a process… and took longer than I expected, but it felt good once it was all said and done. It was fun looking at the little pile of things I placed on her grandma’s dresser of things I found in pockets. She would carry a little blue flashlight around that was smaller than a book of matches she had gotten in Wyoming… I think… which had come in useful when looking for particular keys that fit particular doorknobs… in the dark. There were only two articles of clothing that sorta hit me. One was a pajama top that has been in my entire life with Kateri. And the other one was a short sleeved V-neck shirt with no real particular story behind it. I just thought about how nice she looked in it. It was soooo her… and it simply made me miss her.
Love Strings…. ya. I guess that was one other moment where I had to pause… when I noticed a strand of Kateri’s hair… which she called her Love Strings. Damn Love Strings! They get you every time!
When all said and done, on Wednesday I had one more trip to Listen with eight bags of clothes to donate and one more trip to the dump with two bags of ratty and worn clothing… along with two bags of concrete mix that had turned into 160 pounds of… concrete. Wednesday evening I finished tidying the garage, brought up art that is gonna hang in the spare bedroom, and… well… cleaned the house. I was exhausted. It was five days of being fully immersed in my personal life. Past, Present, and Future. It was definitely daunting at first, but being on the other side of it feels pretty darn good. It was a task, a process, an experience that has been taking up mental… and physical… space for years now. This was the time… these six days were the time… to remember Kateri, to remember my wedding and my wife, and to take new steps towards the rest of my life.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
One thing always leads to another. Years and years ago, my parents were going through their stuff and were looking to get rid of the piano that they had been carting around… for at least all of my life… and wondered if I was interested in having it. I had told them that I would love to have the piano that I remember taking Yamaha Piano Lessons on when I was just knee high to a grasshopper (I’m not much taller now!), so my mom said that whenever Kateri and I buy our first home they would drive it out to us… and they did… five years ago… with my sister and her family (which I guess is also my family!). It was a wonderful visit filled with sitting on the porch, swimming holes, BBQ’s, fire pit building, going to the beach, eating seafood… and then one of those family members puking up that seafood into a brand new hat while sitting in the back seat of our Volvo on the drive home… it was a pretty special time. But that’s not the point. The point is… my family lugged this piano (that none of us know how to play) from Idaho to Vermont, unloaded it into the garage, and then there it sat… for five years… getting more and more swollen as the layer of sawdust (from cutting two inches of wood off of each log I burnt for two years after I got my new wood stove) got thicker and thicker. From the day Kateri and I acquired the piano we talked about how to get it into the house!… and we never did.
In the three years since Kateri died, I kept telling myself that I need to get the piano into the house, but it seemed like such a big endeavor for one person and there have just been a million other things I’ve been needing to deal with, learning to deal with, and simply… dealing with… so it hasn’t happened. That was until a couple of weeks ago when my brother in-law informed me that they were moving from one corner of Vermont to the other and asked if I was still interested in the stove (and a couple of other things) that my Father In-law had given to Kateri and myself. Like the piano, we didn’t have a home to store it at… or to install it in! So Moose said he could hold onto it for us in his garage!… where it sat for years and years!… until last Sunday.
Although I was super excited to be in possession of the stove for the first time… (it’s pretty frickin’ awesome)… I realized I didn’t have anywhere to really store it in the garage… unless I moved the piano! You know, swap one big ass heavy object that’s been sitting stationary for years… for another! As I was hemming and hawing on what to do about the situation, my Lady Friend suggested that we… WE!… simply move the piano into the house! Yup, so after buying a furniture dolly from The Home Depot we removed a door, built some ramps, disconnected and moved a washer so that we could shimmy the dryer… and the two of us got the piano into the dining room!… which coincidently made the dining room a whole bunch smaller. (funny how that works!) It was an awesome feeling!… and one of those times where you’re standing there with a piano in the middle of your dining room thinking to yourself, “Well, that went much smoother than I expected!”.
I can’t tell you the sense of accomplishment it provided me… and us. I have some pretty strong attachments and memories of Kateri with that piano. I learned the one song I sorta know how to play on that piano. The song that I got to play for Kateri at the hospital when we went for her first immunotherapy treatment. It felt good to finally get it into the house so that it could start it’s own healing process after being neglected for years as it weathered the summer heat and humidity, the winter’s brutal cold, and the continual mist of… sawdust. For now… it’s resting. It’s slowly acclimating to it’s new environment. I’ve given it a once over, did an initial cleaning, but there’s still some sawdust in the cracks and crannies that I’ll get to in time. For now… I’ll just keep hitting a key or two every time I walk past it (because you can’t help yourself!) to see if they are still sticky or not… and wait for the time I can play the one song I learned… again.
Once the piano was in the house, the next step was getting the stove! I rented a U-Haul because Kateri’s truck is no longer running and kinda just rotting away in my driveway. I figured I could use the U-Haul to move the stove, along with a chest and sink that was at Moose’s, and then use it to move my firewood from across the driveway to the garage! Unfortunately it was getting late and raining like the dickens when I finally got back to The Schoolhouse, so this year’s wood is still sitting where next year’s wood is supposed go, but I’ve decided not to worry too much about that… yet. For the time being, I’m just gonna enjoy the fact that whenever I get the money and time to sorta remodel the kitchen… I’ve got a 1940’s (?) stove to make meals on and to remember all those Hopes n Dreams Kateri and I had… when we bought our first home. (Man… she was soooo excited about that stove! We… were so excited about our future.)
Widower Notes n Thought:
I’m just gonna say it… I’m tired. Rather exhausted, really. Physically… psychologically… and emotionally……. tired. For weeks now, all I’ve really wanted to do was lay in bed on a Sunday morning with my coffee and some weed and write a little blog post since I haven’t for a bit, but I’m in foodservice during a time when it’s difficult to find help and the entire country has decided that the Pandemic is over…. and they want to come… here… yay. It’s actually not that bad… it’s just a lot when you feel like you’re behind before you punch the clock in the morning… or after working 11 eleven hours running your ass off while peeling beets, pickling red onions, panning up and cooking 40#’s of bacon, or trying to find product because the big food purveyors cut our order due to their staffing levels…. more “yay!”. (Although I do not work for a little independent restaurant, I do feel the Pandemic is showing the public some of the cracks in our food system, how fragile and challenging our industry is, and how the little guys are strugglin’… if still around… while the big players will do just fine. It doesn’t help that customers have no problem telling the high school kid working behind the counter that they are worthless and bitch at them about the fact that they had to wait longer than expected for their muffin! Yup…. my wife died and turned my life into a game of Pick-Up Sticks. Sorry you had to wait… for a muffin… grow up… and fuck off.) Ok, that’s all I’ll say about that for now because I’d rather relax as I lay in bed and write this… and I can already feel myself getting worked up!
More than a few things have happened since my last post that I wanted to write down… that I wanted to sorta process and share. There was working Memorial Day Weekend and then Fourth of July shenanigans… which I prefer to call Independence Day. There was learning from a good friend that an old friend had decided to jump off of the Golden Gate Bridge. My lady friend and I went to Mystic for a weekend… and yes, had the pizza. I flew for the first time in a while to spend a couple of days with my mom… which was wonderful. (Seeing my mom was wonderful… the whole flying experience was mostly just an entertaining necessity. Luckily no one got into fisticuffs and the only plane I saw on fire was for training purposes as we were landing in Texas. Yup… Texas.) But for today, I’m going to write about yesterday… when I went to go see my Mother In-Law, Mary Ann… at the hospital.
Considering the fact that Mary Ann has been a part of my life for decades… I don’t really know where to start or what to write so I’m just gonna start with the immediate and set the scene. The Friday after I got back from Idaho to see my mom, I got a text from my sister in-law telling me she resigned from her teaching gig and was flying to Mexico (where my mother in-law has been living for the last couple of years) because she was having health issues and couldn’t take care of herself. After rain storms, rental cars, Mexican hospitals that only took cash due to said rain storms, four airplanes… morphine… and a wheelchair later… Mary Ann was back in the states where we learned she has cancer in her bones, liver, and lungs with a blood clot in her pulmonary artery for the cherry on top. Once again… fuck.
On the widower side of things, it’s a strange experience to go through. It brings up all sorts of things. It brings my life with Kateri right back to the forefront of my thoughts, memories, and emotions. Kateri’s family was mostly here in the East while mine are on the left side of the country, so I’ve spent more time with them than I have my own family over the last 20 years. Since Kateri died, I haven’t spent much time with any of them but I think we all still consider each other family. (Now we’re all considered Out-laws!) When I heard Mary Ann was sick and coming home, I didn’t think of her in terms of someone from a previous life whom I didn’t have any attachments to anymore… I simply thought of her as my Mother In-Law… as Mary Ann… as Mom… as someone I love very much because of the time and space we shared over the years coupled with the stories Kateri shared with me about her life with her mom. I love her… and it sucks to see people you love get hit with a big pile of poop.
Loss… it doesn’t help that I’ve been thinking a lot about loss lately and how we are forced to live with it. It’s a balancing act. This year I’ve already had two friends die and both my Mom and Mother In-Law are now living with cancer. When Kateri was in Palliative Care/Hospice, it was made apparent to me that the world doesn’t stop just because your life is complicated or even falling apart. It’s a challenge to find time to deal with everything. Sometimes, it’s a challenge to be there for someone. Sometimes…. it’s a challenge to be there for yourself. When Kateri was dying, I took the approach of, “How can I make this/these memories something I can look back on and be proud of as a person, as a friend, as a man, and as a husband… even if those memories are gonna suck to remember?”. I’ve tried to keep that approach to life since. Because of that approach… and after I was told of something that Mary Ann had said… I knew I was gonna miss another Sunday morning of drinking coffee in bed, smoking weed, and blabbing on about my little world because my priorities for the weekend had… changed.
“I want to be with Kateri.” Without knowing the context in which they were said, those are the words that made my plans for Sunday clear. I knew exactly what it was I needed to do. Sunday was the first chance I had to drive the three to four hours down to Connecticut to see Mary Ann in person… so I did… and then drove back. A couple of years ago, a friend of Kateri’s and mine who is a glass blower brought me down to the floor of the shop he works at and started the process of putting Kateri in glass so that I could give her to her family. For about a year and a half, Mary Ann’s piece has been sitting on my kitchen counter in a little purple velvet bag because I wanted to give it to her in person since she was living in Mexico. Basically, I didn’t want to risk mailing it to her and then Kateri getting lost in Mexico. Even though… to be clear… Kateri would’ve been 100% fine being lost in Mexico!… but the priority was to give her to her mom. When I heard her mom had said those words… it crushed me… and my priorities became clear. I thought, “Mary Ann is not with Kateri (thankfully)… but I can bring Kateri to her.” Looking at the situation, I would’ve had a hard time if something had happened to Mary Ann in the last few days and I had decided to simply lay in bed on a Sunday morning, smoke weed, write a blog, and live my little life instead of doing what I thought was the right thing to do for me… and her… at the time. I needed to have an experience I could look back on without regret. I’m glad I took the time. I’m glad I got to see Mary Ann’s face as I handed her her daughter. I’m glad we were able to hug each other, cry, and feel the love and energy that Kateri still brings to this world. I’m glad I was able to say, “I love you”… while holding her hand… and hear her say, “I love you more!”.
Priorities… we’ve all got our own. Decisions… we’ve all got to make them… and live with the consequences. Make the ones that are the best for you at the time.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
So, today is the third anniversary of Kateri’s last breath. I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do today to remember her, but when this morning came around… I was kind of at a loss. Yesterday, I knew I wanted to make a conscious effort to focus on the beautiful parts of my life with Kateri so I started taking notes of some ideas for a blog post… because I knew I wanted to do one (they help me process some things). I was gonna do one yesterday so that I could just take today as it comes, but I’ve been procrastinating a lot lately and… well… I guess I’m doing one today…! For some reason, I didn’t want to just sit in bed and write, so I dictated notes into my phone throughout the day and have decided to simply copy and paste them onto here. Since I was dictating… and I apparently don’t annunciate… there are words or phrases that don’t exactly add up!… or make sense!… and at some points I don’t even know what it was I was trying to say! But anyways… this is what I did and thought about throughout the day today… the anniversary of the day my plans for my future and life… changed.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I’m not angry. I’m not disgruntled. I’m not mad. I’m not better (“bitter”-I’m definitely better than I was three years ago!)… most the time. I’m not weak. I’m not vulnerable.
I am grateful. I am thankful. I’m honored. I am strong. I’m confident. I’m capable. I’m curious. I’m determined. I am loved.
I’m also…. tired. But since I don’t drink anymore… meaning the worse I’m gonna feel in the morning is tired and not hungover… well, I can handle that…!
A friend of mine lost someone very close to them in the last couple of days and on the drive into work yesterday morning I found it ironic that I (the long winded widower) wasn’t sure what it was that I wanted to say to them… I didn’t have the words!… and I told her that. She texted me that she truly thought she was prepared for what was happening. My response was:
“I don’t think we are ever truly prepared for the loss of someone… who truly loves us.”
I mentioned to her to remember to take care of herself, too!… which I think is actually the more important message for people living through loss.
Random Widower Notes n Thoughts:
St. Patrick’s Day, the holiday, really doesn’t mean anything to me. I mean, I’m not Irish… I don’t drink… and I don’t care if I know the “true” story behind the dude! For me… it’s all about Kateri… because it’s her birthday! AND… since she was Irish/Italian, she loved that she was born on St. Patty’s Day! So for her birthday this year, I decided to move her from the box the crematorium housed her in, to her new home… the Klean Kanteen bottle. And then, I moved her from the jelly cupboard to the front room so that she could be with her plants.
My plan was to take the day off from work, to be home, and just kinda remember some of the fun times we had celebrating Kateri’s Birthdays… like going to the ocean in March while wearing little green hats for the three hour drive… just to be festive. I remember one birthday morning when we went to George’s Coffee Shop in Gloucester and I got to listen to her and the line cook persuading Dean (the owner) to put The Pogues on the radio… which he did. Sometimes, it was all about the Baily’s… being drunk from the little plastic green beer mugs… one ounce at a time.
Most of the time for her birthdays it was just the two of us. I don’t really ever recall her talking about having a “Party” until her last birthday in 2018. Ya… that was rough. I can look back on it now with a certain amount of fondness as I remember how much love was in our Little Red Schoolhouse for her on that day… and how much love she had for our friends and family who were there (and those who were not)… and for life (even in those times)… but that only goes so far. I mean, it was her last birthday… I haven’t exactly gotten over that… hence the snot and tears coating my mustache and face right now! But this is about today… and how I celebrated Kateri’s Birthday… with her… by myself.
Widower Notes n Thoughts… about moving Kateri to the Klean Kanteen on her birthday:
I took this picture at work today. For some reason I just found it sort of entertaining. But I had an experience this evening that made me think of this picture… and that word… in a different way. From a different angle. From a different perspective. From the perspective of… me… and how that word pertains to my life.
I started writing this at 10:13pm… all cozied up under the first sheets I bought as a widower… with the king size duvet that Kateri stole providing weight and warmth with a perplexing amount of… poofiness. (hey kids, it’s wrong to steal… but these people were assholes… and it fits perfectly on my full size bed!) I only mention the time tonight because since Kateri died, I’ve had this thing where I simply can’t put myself to bed… like I don’t wanna miss out on living or something. The other part of that is… there is straight up just more to do when going from a household of two… to a life of one. After doing things I need to do, I always want time to “Relax”… “Zone Out”… play guitar… eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s… watch some How it’s Made or check out what Carvana is all about… you know?,… “Chill”. (By the way… buying a car online?… weird.) I usually don’t get to bed until after the One-Two… so being in bed within the 10 o’clock hour is quite the accomplishment!
Here’s the point I’m trying to get to. Patience. When Kateri died… I knew it was gonna be a life-long thing of rememberin’, feeling, learning, balancing, and… well… “surviving”. Tonight, it was a friend’s Instagram post (a picture) of two dogs walking down a bricked path, in whichever Asian country he lives in, that made me sorta realize that I have become a much more “patient” person in my widowhood. (If you saw the IG post… this would make much more sense!) For almost three years I’ve been trying to figure out how to fit it all in… how to “live”. I’ve created little routines that have helped me on the “Adulting” side of life as well as on the personal, emotional, and psychological side. I guess, in a way, they’re also helping me… cope. At the beginning of this ordeal, I had absolutely no idea how I was gonna be able to do it. But now… NOW!… I’m still not sure… but I seem to still be able to cut enough wood for the fire, keep the plants alive, do a little snowshoeing with my girlfriend, have fires at the fire pit, pay the bills, smoke a doobie… or two, AND live with the memory of how wonderful Kateri was, what I loved about her (everything), and how much I loved my life with her. At the beginning, I knew this was gonna be a life-long gig. Today… tonight… at 11:31pm, I still know it’s gonna be a life-long gig. And even though the pain is still there… and I’m still trying to fit it all in, I need to acknowledge that parts of my life have gotten… better… since Widower Day 1. Yes, it’s taken making a few mistakes and taking a step back to reassess so that I could hopefully make a couple of good decisions to maybe have a more enjoyable experience in the future…! (sheesh… long winded sentence right there!) But it’s also taken recognizing that I have a different perspective… on life… which has taken time. Some might say that it’s taken patience… and it’s clear to me… that it’s gonna take some more.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
This “Memory” popped up on Facebook yesterday. After hearing news of my friend passing away (which brought up all sorts of shit!), and then picking up the Klean Kanteen for Kateri… when this little gem popped up (because FB remembers everything!) I just thought to myself, “Well, the emotional hits just keep on coming!”. Luckily, I’m in a pretty decent space in life, and although it’s been a pretty exhausting week… and crying takes up time… this “memory” actually provided me with more warmth and fondness than sadness and despair. And I gotta tell ya… it feels good to be able to remember the fun times when I see funny videos of our life… because they were fun. (I remember balancing my phone on the porch railing, hitting play, and scurrying up the snow pile at the top of the driveway so that I could push start the utility sled that Kateri was already sitting in. The Director’s Cut has an extended version of the video where you can watch Kateri and I walk back up the driveway… under the cover of darkness… dragging a utility sled.)
Below is what I posted on my FB page when I shared the “Memory”:
I love this memory. I love that I made a sledding run down the side of our driveway. I love that we used the black utility sled. I love that it was at night. I love that I can hear Kateri’s laugh… because I don’t hear it from across the room, in the car, around the fire, or belting out into the nothingness while she’s sandwiched between my legs where I can actually FEEL her laugh… as we hold on for the ride. I know that sounds rough… but that’s why I love this memory… because I can hear her laugh.
Two years, ten months, and three days… and I just brought home Kateri’s urn… her Klean Kanteen bottle. I’d love to get all into the nitty gritty of what this moment in my life means to me, the things it brings up, the weight of this step in my Widowhood, but it’s been a long week… and I’m tired of being all emotional and shit so I’m just gonna lay down a few of the things that this day was filled with.
I had it all planned out. I was gonna come home after work, move wood from behind Kateri’s Potting Shed over to the garage using the utility sled and my cute little Jeep, eat some pizza, write a little light hearted something and post this little video I had recorded a couple days prior. I was ready to chill for my weekend. And then… while I was sitting at my desk at the end of the day… a good friend called to let me know that another good friend of ours had died the night before… fuck. Stoopid cancer.
He was a part of my life for the last 19 years. Kateri loved him. He loved her. And the memories and emotions hit me like a ton of bricks. My mind just kept going from one memory to another. The good ones. The bad ones. And everything in between. I couldn’t believe how many memories of Kateri and cancer came back… it was an onslaught that I’m currently still trying to get some control over while also letting certain emotions and thoughts have their time and space. I feel fortunate that I’m at a point where I can remember the good times in my life with Kateri and not just the cancer, but the news of his passing and the attachments of his life to ours… to Kateri… was simply crushing. I cried… a lot. Thankfully, I have beautiful friends, an understanding, supportive, and compassionate girlfriend, I’ve got my home, and I’ve got my mom to call… when I need to talk to my mom. Luckily, I’ve also become a “Functional Crier” in my widowhood. No, I may not have moved any wood, but I was still able to feed myself and take a shower… where it’s more convenient to cry because the water just washes off the snot and tears.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The Video
I posted this on my Insta/FB accounts and someone commented “Peaceful”. I agree… I do find it kinda peaceful. Of course, it’s funny to think about how I was tromping around the outside of my hundred year old schoolhouse… in Muck Boots and comfy clothes at 11:23pm… snow (topped with 2” of ice) up to my knees… out front with the sign and flag, on the deck with the windows, in the driveway, in the breeze way, back to the driveway trying to find a “cool scene”… phone in one hand and a small flashlight in the other… stumbling around as I broke through the crust with every step while trying to keep steady until I decided to say “Screw it… I’m just gonna stand HERE!”…(I more likely said the “F” word, but I don’t know if I can say that in this description!)… and then with my little flashlight shining off into the woods to the west… and maybe freaking out the neighbors down the road on the other side of those woods, as they try to figure out why the heck there is a light coming from… THE WOODS!… (creepy) … I recorded this little video. Did I mention some say it’s “Peaceful”..? I’d agree.
It’s Valentine’s Day…. and I’m a widower.
On it’s face, that is a very sad statement filled with the memories of twenty years, but we can’t sum up the complexities of life in seven words… because sometimes nine other words show up to say, “Today, I’m gonna spend it with someone I love.”
In the winter time, when I get home from work one of the first things I generally do is get the fire going. (Kateri would’ve followed that line up with, “In my loins!”… but I’m not talkin’ about that kinda fire.) Sometimes I need to cut wood first or maybe snow blow/shovel the driveway, but invariably I end up sitting in front of the wood stove on my little stool that Kateri and I got in 2001 (maybe ’02..?), when we lived above a garage in Monkton, as I get the fire going for the evening. I enjoy this part of my day. It’s a built in time/task that sorta forces me to just sit for a few minutes. Of course, when I just sit for a few minutes… I think… about all sorts of stuff!… like how the stool I sit on was Kateri’s and my first piece of furniture!… and I hope it doesn’t spontaneously collapse on me as I’m starting the fire! But it hasn’t yet and I’m glad… because once the fire is going I absolutely love sitting on that stool and letting the wood stove heat my knees, hands, face, and top of my head that used to have beautifully thick hair keeping it warm. It provides me with space… to think… to remember… to reflect.
Sometimes I sit there and think about heavy things… when heavy things are going on. Other times I think about other things… when other things are going on. And sometimes I think about things and have no idea why I’m thinking about them! So… over a few days of sitting there on my stool as I got the fire going, I thought I would make a few notes of what it was I was thinking about as I lit old newspaper I had crumpled up and stuffed under my methodically stacked kindling.
Random Widower Notes n Thoughts… as I get the fire going:
I’m sad.
Sometimes that happens.
I don’t need anything from you. I don’t need you to do anything. The things I am sad about can not be fixed… they can not be changed… they can not be taken away and hidden from me… because they are a piece of who I am.
Sadness is a part of life… it’s a part of my life. Sometimes, I force myself to get up on the right side of the bed. Other times, I just let myself be.
Sad.
I haven’t written anything since Christmas. It’s not because I won the lottery or just inherited a crap load of money from some long lost relative who made their fortunes in the Aglet Boom of 1803 and am now sunning myself on my private beach where I’ve been disconnected for the past 35ish days… spending the hours eating take out Chinese Food flown in from NYC, laying in the grass in the middle of my 20 acre garden… after the staff goes through and removes all the bugs… with tweezers and jars so that they can be released into Walter’s bedroom (He may sound old and cute… but he’s a dick.), and… well… doing whatever it is I want to do at any given time… while smoking copious amounts of weed… that Helper Monkeys roll into joints for me using papers that have images of friends, family, and times from my life printed on them. No… it’s not because of that. I’ve just been doing other things. I guess I’ve just been… pluggin’ away.
The plan for my next blog was to share my experience burning the last bundle of sage from the jelly cupboard… from when Kateri was alive… but I don’t feel like getting that heavy right now so I thought I would just jot down some Random Widower Thoughts of things I’ve been thinking about or that have happened since we last connected. I’ve attached a video of me playing my guitar… because… well… why the hell not?! I don’t take it seriously. It’s just a hobby… something I can do to fill “X” amount of time with positive vibrations that simply make me feel good. And it’s something that I find… fun!
With that being said… some thoughts on things since Christmas.
Random Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Video description: I haven’t done a blog post for a bit, so I thought I would play a song and throw it on there..! Not because I wanna be a musician or anything… I just thought it would be an easy post. And then I found out it’s a little more nerve wracking than I expected… putting yourself out there… but oh well! Hobbies help pass the time… and some hobbies help ease the heaviness of adversity that touches us throughout our lives.
It’s Christmas….!! Things I’m gonna do on my third Widowed Christmas.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Sometimes… things just happen to show up at opportune moments. I knew I was gonna write a little blurb ahead of the video, but the only note I had made for this post was:
Yup… it WAS a frustrating kind of day! I didn’t sleep much. A change at work made me want to bash my head against a brick wall… covered in down pillows… while wearing a full-face helmet. It took forever… I mean, for..ev..ER! to upload the video I made last night for this little blog post thingamajig. AND… today is the anniversary of Kateri finding out the news that there was a mass in her brain. Yup… frustrating. Plus, I’m still trying to get shit together to send in the mail to family for Christmas!… aahhh! But don’t worry… it’ll all be ok.
As the video was creeping it’s way from my phone to YouTube, I decided to throw on some Seinfeld for something mindless. Kateri and I watched a crap load of Seinfeld over the years, but I haven’t opened the DVD’s in quite some time and just thought it sounded… comforting. I decided to start at the beginning and as I was going through the cases, sandwiched between Season 3 and Season 1 was… low and behold… THE DALAI LAMA! In 2007, Kateri and I were introduced to this chant by our friend David as we would hang at his little cabin up Four Mile Canyon. Now, I don’t know anything about chanting n shtuff, but I DO know that it’s pretty darn relaxing to listen to while the fire dimly lights the room as it keeps the cold at bay and I jot this down. In full disclosure, I’m pretty sure I’ve smoked weed every time this hour and a half long “om-ing” action has taken place… so there’s that, too. Either way… I’m diggin’ it… and kinda needed it.
All of that to say… here’s a video of me walking around my house talking about my third Holiday Season as a widower… my third Christmas without Kateri. I made it because as I was decorating the Schoolhouse, feeling all sorts of emotions, and thinking about all sorts of shit… I thought about other people going through the same type of experience… I thought about my fellow widowed folk. So I made a video of some of the things I’m doing, decorating, and thinking about! (And yes… it’s so exciting that it warranted an exclamation mark..! (sorry, “exciting” might be the wrong word. Maybe “rambley” would be better…? or “awkward”..?))
I’ll admit… leaving Vermont to drive across our country to go see my mom took up quite a bit of mental space before I even hit the road! Some of it was emotional considering I haven’t seen her in almost a year… and she has cancer… which was the reason for the trip in the first place. But this post isn’t about the time I spent on the couch with her talking, sharing pics, watching the election, eating meals from my childhood, playing guitar for her and my dad, laughing, crying, or uncomfortably watching the new Borat movie together. Nope!… this is about the drive. This is me leaving my home for the longest period of time since Kateri has passed. This is about being in my cute little Jeep Renegade for 130ish hours with nothing but what I brought (which was a lot!)… during the election… in a Pandemic… to visit my mom… and my thoughts.
The Preparation
When the pandemic hit, it never really affected my life too much. I live in the middle of nowhere, I don’t live with anyone, no one comes over except my girlfriend… who works from home. I’m a homebody to begin with… and don’t really care to socialize! For me, in this new widowed life, the pandemic has actually offered a little reprieve from the onslaught of the world. That was until I realized I hadn’t seen my mom in almost a year… and she lives on the other side of the country! What would’ve normally been a quick little drive to Burlington or Boston to catch a flight, hang out in Idaho for a few days, and then fly back had turned into something a little more complicated, with heavier consequences attached to it. But we do the things we gotta do for the things we feel are important, which is why I decided to drive instead of fly, to eat/sleep in my car, and to only stop at rest areas and gas stations… as well as packing a bag filled with hand sanitizer/wipes, masks, and gloves!… so as to eliminate any of those nasty little Rona germs. So far so good!
Although I like to think that I have become much better at just rolling with stuff since I have become a widower, I’m still very much a “Planner” and “Worry Wart”. I was excited to have the chance to drive cross country again (Kateri and I did many a times, whether we were moving to and from Colorado or Wyoming… or just for a road trip!), but it had a different feeling for me in this new life. I was basically doing it alone for the first time since I did it in 2001 to come back to Vermont… to be with Kateri. That was a long time ago. A lot has happened in those 19 years. Times have changed. I have changed. Life has changed. This was gonna be a “New” experience in this “New Life”… and I approached it as just that… something “New”.
For the weeks leading up to my departure I wanted to get to a point where I felt comfortable leaving my Little Red Schoolhouse in Vermont for an extended period of time, and also tried to make it as comfortable as I could for when I got back. So I stacked my wood, mowed the yard one last time, cleaned the house from top to bottom, cleaned my car, borrowed a phone holder thing for the drive, did my laundry, pulled out coolers and camp stoves… and propane, paid bills, got simple little home security cameras so that I could see when someone was breaking into my house from 2,ooo miles away, cleaned the garage, cut wood… enough for when I got back as well, got an oil change (need another one!), packed clothes, packed old phones/iPad for pics to share, packed sanitizer, packed the Jeep… and then headed out at 5:30am on Sunday morning… with cake pops.
As a widower, much of my current life is still attached to my life with Kateri. Some of that is just natural (memories, emotions, my home and everything in it, for example), but some of that is also how we… as the widowed folk… hold on to and remember our loved ones as we slowly find ourselves in this new environment. I could’ve made this experience driving cross country as one big trip down I-80 memory lane… but that’s not where I wanted to be. I wanted to make this an experience for me… for Darren… recognizing that I would probably be hit with a few emotions as I pass the town Kateri grew up in, or remembering eating bologna sandwiches in the back of the Cherokee in Iowa during a rain storm, or passing under the Archway to the West for the umpteenth time, or when waking up in Wyoming… my second favorite state… and where I first met Kateri. That’s all just part of being a widower… you have memories of the times you spent with the one you love… and you’ve just gotta figure out how to have new experiences for your own personal growth, for your own well-being, and to hopefully make new memories that you can look back upon with appreciation, satisfaction, and fondness.
The Trip Out
I loved the fact that I was gonna take off for this trip across our country two days before the election with the goal of arriving at my folks at some point on Election Day. I love this country. I love how big it is. I love the diversity of the landscape and the people… the metro areas… the ruralness… the mountains… the flats. I loved starting off putzing through Vermont where I felt comfortable taking a piss (sorry for the crudeness… “peeing” just sounded… wrong) on the side of the road before I left my “Safe Space” and crossed the state line into New York… where I did not take a piss (no offense!) on the side of the road. I was excited to take that right turn towards the left side of the country… to be out and about in it… to have the visual reminders of the people and places that make it what it is… that make it special… and that also made me remember why I choose to live in Vermont! And yes… I missed a turn on my way to the interstate.
I made it through New York, PA, Ohio (ugh), Indiana, and into Illinois on the first leg of the trip… hitting a little rain/wind/slushstorm on the way. I thought about swinging by Niagra Falls since I’ve never seen it, but with the storm, not being allowed on the Canadian side, and the chance of other people being there… I decided against it. Again, my priority was to get to Idaho… without The Rona!
Prior to leaving, I looked up Walmarts (because I heard you can sleep in their parking lots!..?) and Rest Areas en route so that I would get an idea of potential sleeping spots. I figured I’d be able to at least get to Indiana… hoping to reach Iowa… but I made it as far Illinois. Even though it was a long day of driving (19 or so hours), I think I was still pretty energized about the trip when I pulled into the Rest Area to use the facilities and to grab a little shut eye… alongside a few of my neighbors who were on their own little adventures. I didn’t eat. I didn’t read anything. I didn’t “decompress” from the driving. I simply pushed some bags to one side of the car, laid out a yoga mat (nice try… but it didn’t do shit for padding), pulled out my sleeping bag and Squishy (Kateri’s pillow), took off my shoes…. and crawled in the back to get some shut eye. Four hours later I pulled out my camp stove, made some instant coffee from Starbucks… and kept driving.
The second leg of the trip was… well… pretty much straight and flat. I’m glad I hit the road before sunrise because I’ve always been a fan of seeing the sun come up and/or set in the Midwest. As it was creeping up the horizon behind me, I didn’t think about the politics of the people who’s state I was in. I didn’t think about how divided our nation is. I didn’t think about all the bad crap that has happened to this person, or that person, or myself. I instead thought about how the sky above seems twice as big as ours in Vermont… and it makes for one impressive dawn of a new day… in my rearview mirror.
When I hit Nebraska I thought about how many people don’t really care for driving through it… maybe because the roads don’t have many bends in them…?! But I rather enjoy it. You can just plug along at 75mph listening to music, the news, or a book on tape (which isn’t on tape anymore!) while hoping to God (if that’s what you’re into) a deer or antelope doesn’t run out in front of you! Yeah… it may not be exciting… but at least the roads are straight. (That may even be their state motto..?!)
The second night, I was able to make it to the Wagonhound Rest Area in Wyoming. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what emotional state I would be in when I arrived in Wyoming considering the reason for the trip, my lack of sleep, and my attachments to the state with Kateri, but I held my shit together. I’m sure the fact that I wasn’t anywhere near where we used to live helped with the dampening of emotions that could potentially pop up. It was nice being back, driving past the the windmills, the gas and oil fields… and the oasis of lights from them at night. It was nice seeing signs for Cheyenne, Laramie… and Rock Springs. It was nice being back out in The West. Back in the land of The Rockies (…the mountains… not baseball). Back where horses have the right of way and I have memories of sitting around camp fires with cowboys… and Kateri. It was nice to be back… if only for a day.
When I woke up at the Ol’ Wagonhound, it felt good knowing I would be able to make it to Idaho at a reasonable hour that day so I didn’t put too much pressure on myself to wrack up miles in “x” amount of time. When I got to Idaho, I decided to stop at the first rest area… it was crappy… so I went on to the second one. As I was sitting in my driver’s seat with the door open after taking care of some business, a trucker asked if I was “Having car troubles?” or “Just taking a rest?” as he was on his way to the facilities. I mentioned I was just resting and we shot the shit for a minute… which then turned into an hour and a half conversation about life… and him giving me a tour (socially distanced) of his truck and trailer! Even popped the hood! He provided me with so much information about engines, brakes, axles, trailers, stopping distances, other truckers, cops, his wife, his dog (Midas), and trucking in general that if I had retained more of it… I would sound like I knew what I was talking about! But I didn’t. My favorite part of that experience was that I asked if he had voted since it was Election Day. He said his wife was taking him once he got home… and then we never spoke about it again. It wasn’t important for us to know who each of us was voting for… or why… and I’m pretty sure we weren’t voting for the same guy! The important part was we were just two guys having an impromptu conversation about life. It was civil. It was respectful. It was nice.
I stopped at the last Rest Area before Boise to gather my thoughts, to get in touch with some people, and to take a breath before seeing my mom and dad. After three days in the car without showering… or changing my clothes… the thought of a shower and comfy clothes was beginning to sound better and better. I could feel myself getting legitimately excited about it. And then…. my father called. I asked how things were and he replied, “Good…. except we’re having some plumbing issues. Like… no water.”. Yup! Just gotta say, I was not expecting that one! Hopes and Dreams of sliding fresh, soft, and cozy Darn Tough socks onto my freshly cleaned and slightly less stinky feet were put on hold! Luckily, my folks live in the city… where there’s all sorts of plumbers who are available all hours of the day (pricing varies), so I knew the chances of it getting fixed was pretty good and didn’t think too much about it after that. Heck, I already felt gross… I was fine feeling gross a little bit longer… and at least I could feel gross while being in the same space as my mom! It was just hard not giving her a hug until after the plumbing was fixed, I was clean, and out of contaminated clothes!
Idaho
There will be another post about my time spent in Idaho, but what I’ll say is that it was absolutely wonderful walking into my folk’s home and seeing my mom sitting on the couch. I love her… and thoughts of Covid, cancer, work, Kateri, loss, elections, widowhood, my schoolhouse, my home, my friends, my challenges, and my problems simply went away for the first few moments I was there. I could see her… I was seeing her…. and that’s what the driving, the precautions, the lack of sleep was all about. It was to spend time with her. One of the great things about moms… they don’t care if you’re stinky.
The Drive Home
Now, the drive east was a much different trip than the drive out. I’d like to say I was calmer… more relaxed… and in some ways I was. For the most part though, I think I was exhausted… and ready to be back in my drafty little hundred year old schoolhouse in Vermont… where trees make better neighbors. I was ready to be home.
My plan was to leave Sunday, but at the time there weren’t as strict of Covid restrictions going on so I decided to spend another day with her and my dad and leave on Monday. Of course, all hell broke loose with Covid and things changed, but I’m still happy I stayed another day. Usually, I would’ve left before the ass crack of dawn for a road trip, but when you have over 2,600 miles ahead of you… an hour or two here and there isn’t gonna change much… so I took off around 7:30am. Basically because I wanted to say “I love you” and “goodbye” over a cup of coffee and with a hug… and not by waking them up in the middle of the night by nudging a shoulder to faintly tell them I’m leaving. I don’t think I could’ve done that… and I’m glad I didn’t.
For the five and a half days I was in Idaho we watched a lot… A LOT!… of election stuff… and I rather enjoyed it. I also kinda liked that it eliminated all of that, “what do you wanna watch?” type stuff. We couldn’t go out because of the Pandemic/cancer/etc., so might as well belly up to the boob tube! Again, I love this country (yes, we’ve got some serious issues) and to have the unique opportunity to be out and about in it while “We the People” were casting our votes… I just kinda dug it. However, after watching and hearing about how a bunch of our country viewed the process, viewed the election, viewed the other side, got their information, how they share their information, how easily so many people are willing to disregard tradition, respect, the process, facts… their fellow Americans… it took me until Wyoming before I could switch the radio station away from music… and back to the news… which didn’t last long. For the rest of the trip east, I would periodically flip through the news channels, get a couple of different updates and angles, and then right back to some much more enjoyable sounds while on the road!
The drive back wasn’t without it’s challenges… I did have to drive through a snow/ice storm which started in Wyoming and I dealt with through Nebraska. Luckily, I don’t care if people get upset with me for driving slow. The goal was to get home… safe and sound… and that’s what I was gonna do. Again… 2,600 miles… as long as I was moving forward, it was good enough for me! Was it nerve wracking?… yes. Did I spend a ton of time thinking about how “All Season” tires do on ice with 50mph winds?… yes. Did I just want to stop, get out of the car, and wait it out?… well… no… because it was cold, snowy, and windy with big trucks careening off the interstate… and that wouldn’t have gotten me any closer to home! So I just kept driving… between 7 and 43mph… until I came upon my home for the next few hours… the Pine Bluffs Rest Area. FYI, when you sleep in your car and it’s 17 degrees outside… inside your car ain’t much warmer!
On a side note, I posted the storm experience on social media and a friend of mine from Vermont commented how he was driving through the same storm!… on the same road!… in the same area!… and I guess he’s now a truck driver instead of a cook! I just thought it was kinda cool… in a “Small World” sorta way.
I really didn’t have any problem with driving through the weather, but I’ll tell ya, it felt a million times better when the road looked dry and my little thermometer thingy was telling me it was 35 degrees outside! Luckily, it just got warmer and warmer the further I drove east. I mean… until the sun went down. Then it got colder… cuz that’s what happens when the big ball of heat goes away.
Once I made it back to the Chicago area… it felt like I was getting closer… it felt more “familiar”. I don’t know why… maybe it’s the congestion of people, maybe it’s being on a “Turnpike” or “Thruway”… but whenever I hit the Chicago/Gary/Cleveland part of the trip, it just seems to feel like Vermont is a hop, skip, and a jump away! And then you remember there’s still New York to get through… Upstate. Which from my understanding is all of NY… except the city..? I actually thought about taking I-86 across southern New York so that I could get some pizza from Nirchi’s. Kateri and I would get two sheets to snack on whenever we headed out west. It’s fantastic. But instead, I was all responsible n shit and decided to stay safe and stick to the plan… and not have Nirchi’s pizza.
Home
From the moment I walked out my parent’s door and got back into my cute little Jeep Renegade, I had my bed, my woodstove, my little red schoolhouse in the back of my mind. I just wanted to be there. The thing I found odd was that it was only in the back of my mind. Yes, I wished I could teleport myself and in the blink of an eye… be home! But in reality, I knew I had a lot of ground to cover before I would be there, so I guess I simply went through the motions until I reached my destination… and didn’t think too much about it.
When I crossed into Vermont under the cover of darkness, I didn’t get that “I’M HOME!” feeling… although, I did feel a huge sense of relief. My mind was still in Idaho with my mom, on the road thinking about life, in the past with my memories, and concentrating on the present with every turn through The Green Mountains as I made my way to 91. For a week and a half I didn’t think about all the things I think about on a daily basis. For a week and a half I didn’t worry about the things happening in my life. For a week and a half I didn’t think about cutting wood, paying bills, work, if I did this right… or if I did that wrong. For a week and a half I drove across this country to be with my mom… to take a moment to sit, to talk, and to spend time with her… and then to drive home. That was the purpose of my trip. I guess I road it till the end because it didn’t really hit me until I was making my way up Wild Hill and had passed John and Mary’s… then Heman’s… and then the Hooligan’s… I went past my wood pile and up my driveway until I reached that oh so familiar view out the driver’s side of those big, beautiful schoolhouse windows… that I realized I had reached my destination. I sat there thinking about the fact that when I turn the car off… and open my door… the trip is over. It was emotional. It was overwhelming. It took me some time… but after a lot of deep breaths, and a few more moments of thinking, I opened the door… stepped out into the cool Vermont night… and found solace in the fact that I had made it…… home.
Random Widower Notes n Thoughts:
For some reason I decided to search The Oracle for widowed celebrities… and I’m not exactly sure why besides simple ol’ curiostity. I mean, I’m not exactly up on celebrities and I kinda don’t care for reading or watching stuff about widowhood, but I searched it anyways. If you became famous in the last decade… 15 years or so… I probably can’t pick you out of a line up!.. or really care to! But, if you’re a widow(er)… I feel for you. It don’t matter how many people know ya or how much money you got from that horrible 90’s sitcom… or one hit wonder!… if the person you loved more than any of that type of shit… the person you loved more than anything else… up and died… life sucked.
So… that first part was really just notes I made the day before the 2 and a half year mark. The video below I made the day after the 2 and a half year mark. And now I’m posting this blog three days later. Yup… I’m slackin’! But what it comes down to is, I had a moment where I decided to simply look at the last two and a half years of my life… and tried to not let the emotional attachment to last 20 years with Kateri be the focus of my thoughts. And I’ve gotta say… it felt good to look back at my accomplishments over those two and a half years and be comfortable with how I have handled them! Sure, I’ve taken some wrong steps, but just took a step back when I realized it. Sure, I’ve said some things that I probably shouldn’t have said in certain moments or environments or to certain people, but I’m learning to think before I speak… a majority of the time… sometimes… here and there……… I’m working on it! Sure, I’ve made some mistakes, but as of right now… I’m ok with all of that.
We all make mistakes. Luckily, for two and a half years I have been surrounded by people who are understanding, caring, and supportive… and realize we are all just fallible animals trying to get through the day. It’s because of those people and the lessons Kateri taught me in life that I was able to have a positive moment on this new timeline where I could feel accomplished, comfortable, and proud of how I have dealt with my “Widowhood”… even if that “moment” came to me while in the shower! (I’m pretty sure we all do a lot of thinkin’ in the shower!.. when we’re not singing.)
ps… if you take a gander at the video… I know I say, “ya know?” a lot. This is why I prefer to write things down… I ain’t no orator!
We can’t look at our lives as being in the early stages, or in the middle, or coming to the end of it. It’s all just life… and we simply need to live it.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Just over ten years ago… in the spring of 2010… it hit me like a ton of feathers that I needed to ask Kateri for her hand in marriage… after being together for nine years before that… and friends (sometimes with benefits) for two/three years before that! I used to say that I wish I had asked earlier. I mean… our first anniversary was our tenth year together!… but those are just numbers. Nowadays, I simply view her as my wife and like to remember the twenty years I was fortunate enough to spend with my best friend… my Dearest Kateri… and not just the time we were married.
I’ll be honest… I don’t really know what to say. My Anniversary makes me think about those twenty years together, filled with the good and not so good times taking place in Wyoming, Colorado… and Vermont… our home… Kateri’s home. There were plenty of other places with good and not so good times all over this country… and in the Dominican… and that other tropical paradise… Canada, but that’s a lot of shit to write down! So, I decided to focus on our wedding, think about why I loved it so much (It was pretty awesome… you should’ve been there!), and simply make a list throughout the morning… and maybe into afternoon… of things that I kinda hold on to about that day.
Kateri and Darren’s Wednesday Wedding
September 28th, 2011
Yup, my third Wedding Anniversary without Kateri is an emotional roller coaster type of day. Today is the anniversary of the best day of my life, but it’s also a pretty big reminder of the worst day of my life… and that’s one of the challenges I face as a widower. When you live a life where you can pin point, right down to the date and time, the best day of your life and the worst… your world gets a little muddled and muted. For example, I know the colors of Autumn surrounding the Schoolhouse and blanketing the hills of Vermont are currently absolutely stunning, vibrant, and beautiful… but it’s just not the same. Although… this year they seem to be a bit more… colorful.
So… the world is going to shit… I guess. That’s what I see on my little phone when I check the news. (CNN/Fox… I like to see propaganda from both sides. Of course, I feel like Fox News is the annoying richy rich frat boy who’s drunk and yelling at all the other party goers to do keg stands and chug vodka so that he and his cronies have easier prey in the hours ahead to make fun of, influence, or take advantage of for their own pleasure or benefit…. just sayin’.) Yup, the west (where I’m from) is on fire, The Rona hasn’t gone away no matter how much disinfectant we drink or how much we stare at the sun, we’ve lost some really good people (John Lewis, Notorious RBG, Chadwick Boseman, Jerry Stiller… Regis), there have been so many storms that we’ve gone into the Greek alphabet to name them, schools are now the petri dishes of some strange social experiment where no one knows how the heck to do it while parents are just happy to get their offspring out of the house for a few hours, and in some parts of the world they are canceling Halloween… that’s just fucked up. But you know what..?… there’s toilet paper on the shelves and they’re coming out with another season of Cobra Kai! It’s not all Doom and Gloom!… which I guess is what I’m trying to get to.
I’m just gonna say it. For me… life is good! Really… it is! Not like “I just won the lottery and am gonna party like it’s 1999 Good!”… but it’s still good. Yes, there have been some heavy moments and a few bumps in the road in the last little bit, but nothing really compares to the loss of Kateri in my life so I feel I’ve been able to somewhat deal with… life. Nope, some things haven’t gone as planned, but one of the things that being a widow has taught me is that the unexpected is to be expected and I just need to plow on through… or stroll… or crawl. OK… sometimes I just need to lay in bed and let time pass to get through certain moments, but I tell myself at some point I’ve gotta just get up, get out, and get going!… because otherwise I’ll get bed sores… and that’ll just create more problems!
I think the loss of my chickens has made me think about the timeline of my life. Specifically, my path since Kateri passed just under 2 years, and five months ago. I feel now that I’m here alone, it’s another step into “My New Life”… and oddly, it sorta feels good to get to this point… the point without chickens. I knew the time would come… it did… and now I’m here. It’s like I’m now living a more accurate picture of what my life will be like post Kateri & Darren’s Time as I’m more firmly rooted in… Darren’s Time. I guess in some way those stoopid raccoons provided me with a little bit of “closure” with the massacre of the chickens… and then I gently pushed the door shut with the subsequent Viking Funeral of Lil’ Bitch up at the fire pit with a couple friends last weekend.
Yup, the Pandemic hasn’t really changed my life much. I’ve got firewood for this year… and next!… and a new stove and chimney to keep the schoolhouse warm as winter is steadily approaching (there have already been a couple of fires… and a Nub Night! I’m still cutting 2-4 inches off of two cord of wood so they fit in the new stove.). The bulk head stairs are built, the deck is painted, the garage is in order… somewhat, rooms are painted, and toilets aren’t leaking anymore… after 17 trips to the hardware store. On top of that… I’ve got friends… good friends… who help. I know we all get caught up in our own worlds and we’re all different types of peeps, but the cool thing about friendships is that just because there may be more miles between us or more time between visits… those aren’t the defining factors of what makes two, three, twenty seven, or a couple hundred people friends. It’s the bond created through shared good experiences… and how we treat each other through the not so good experiences. (Actually, I feel there’s a boatload that goes into what makes people like and not like other people… and the relationships they have, but sometimes I like to not overthink it and hold onto the perspective that there are some friendships/relationships where it simply boils down to the fact that they just… click.)
For twenty years, Kateri was my best friend… and I wish she didn’t die. But I’m thankful for the life I had with her, for the friends we made, and for the lessons she taught me… which I try to use as I figure out how to live my life without her. Yup, there’s all sorts of shit going on in the world… and in our little lives… but there are things in our control and there are things that are not. For today, I’m not gonna focus on the piles of poop being plopped all around us and take some time to focus on the good things, get in touch with some good peeps… and simply have a good day. I hope you do the same!
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
As of 7:44 last Saturday night… I no longer have chickens. It was kind of a horrible experience that I knew was a very real possibility, considering the fact that I live in the woods. It was jarring. It threw me off. Since Kateri died, people have asked if I’m gonna get a pet, a dog, a kitten, fish… whatever… and I would always reply that once the chickens die I don’t wanna be responsible for another living animal for a while. I just didn’t expect that to happen on Saturday! Stoopid nature.
I’ve attached all sorts of things to those chickens. They were Kateri’s Hopes n Dreams. But they also helped me ease into this new solo life by simply being around. I loved that they would be at the door to their little yard when they heard my car pull into the driveway or when I would open the screen door. I loved that they would follow me around the yard as I watered this or worked on that. I loved that they would come when I called out, “Here chick, chick, chick!”. I loved watching them run… and I love that I have the memory of Kateri impersonating a chicken… running! I guess I loved those little ladies for all sorts of reasons, but the fact of the matter is I don’t have them anymore and I need to adapt… to settle into… this new reality. After waking up alone the day after Kateri died…. well… nothing compares. So, I could add more sadness to this experience… or I can accept it for what it is… give it it’s time and space… and keep moving forward. My last week has been filled with some wonderfully supportive and beautiful moments, and some coincidences that I have just kinda dug. I guess that’s what this is about. Here are a few things that have helped me look on the brighter side of life as I adapt to being the only living thing in my household for the first time in twenty years after the death of Kateri… and then her chickens.
Ya, the Schoolhouse feels different… it has changed… it’s not the same as when Kateri and I bought it… it’s quiet. I’m trying to train myself not to look towards the coop every time I walk out of the house. I’m trying to get used to not having the ladies as a source of entertainment… because FYI, they were very entertaining! I’m getting used to not worrying about them. I’m getting used to living alone… on the hill… without Lil’ Bitch. I’m adapting to change. I’m adapting to life. Fortunately, I’ve got a lot of good things going on in my world… a lot of good people. Sometimes those people… sometimes, they just pop up out of nowhere… as they’re riding down the road… at just the right time.
I took a couple of days off so that I could meet a friend in PA this weekend. And yes, I literally mean “meet” them. It’s kind of amazing how much someone can impact your life without ever standing in the same room as them! Unfortunately, the stoopid Rona put the kibosh on that so I decided to still take the time off, stick around the house, and get to things that have been nagging at the brain for a while now… like the leaky toilet… and mess of a garage. After painting the porch, I’ve been sorta motivated to keep on the train of seeing how I would like to set up and/or maintain my new life and home. Getting a few things checked off of the list of things to do does wonders for the psyche!
So, I’ll just say… I had my extended weekend kinda planned out. Start with the toilet (flush valve) and then move on to the garage, chicken coop, truck, and wood. Well, of course things don’t always go as planned. I was able to replace the flush valve OK… for being a cook… but after I attached the tank to the bowl, I noticed one little drip of water… on each of the three anchor bolts! (I don’t even know if that’s what they’re called…?!) Now, originally the flush valve was leaking, but just into the bowl on its way to the septic tank. It was one of those every once in a while things where I would hear the tank replenish the top inch of water, but at least it wasn’t leaking onto the wood floor! Luckily, two mason jars were enough to hold the bolt problem at bay (wherever bay is…?!) until I was able to hit The Home Depot for some new hardware after a few hours of work on Friday.
It was during my learning experience with the toilet, running in and out of the garage to be exact, that I decided it was about time for me to buy one of those stand up tool boxes on wheels to help me organize all the crap I have accumulated over the years while fixing this or building that. So, on Friday I bought the bolts/washers/nuts I needed to finish the toilet… and also bought a tool box to put my crap in! (…after watching the dude struggle to get the box off the top shelf with one of those lift things while I stood guard at the bright orange gate. I tried not to stare… but it was an entertaining struggle!)
I finally finished the turd herding (plumbing) on Friday afternoon around four and then it was on to the garage and tool box…es! (I got two of them…!) Friday night was basically me dorking out in my garage with my stuff, listening to music, and enjoying the process of putting friends with friends. I didn’t finish tidying the garage until Monday morning… there’s a lot going on in there… but it was well worth the effort. It feels good. I feel accomplished. I feel… better.
Yup, those are a few of thing that I did. But now, for the widower shit… the roller coaster… the “rolling with it” type stuff. At the beginning of the week, my intentions were to fly solo, listen to some tunes, smoke some pot, and just be productive at the schoolhouse while I worked on my “New Life”. And then my sister-in-law reached out to say she was in Vermont and was hoping to come up! So, I amended my plan… and prepared for the tidal wave of Kateri and “Old Life” memories and emotions that were gonna come along with having a Damato in the schoolhouse.
First, I’m gonna say that it was an absolutely fantastic couple of days seeing her, talking, remeniscing, building fires, roasting hot dogs, and hanging on the porch until the heat drove us inside or to the garage… while watching a four year old take a bazillion trips up and down the driveway with his scooter.
It had been too long. She was there with us for the last three… fourish weeks of Kateri’s life. The three of us… Kateri, her, and I… had a ton of good times. We spent a lot of time together. We lived through a lot together. And I am forever grateful that the three of us were together… that she was there for Kateri… in the last weeks of her life. I simply love her.
As a widower, I’ve learn how to adapt to change a little bit better… because I was forced to. This weekend was one of those times. For two years and four months I’ve been on this journey. I’ve had to learn how to live in this world without Kateri. I’ve had to learn how to go through the days without being completely devastated by what life has shown me… by how cruel it could be to such a beautiful person… to the person I loved more than anything. That takes work… and a lot of it. Two years and four months after Kateri’s death and I feel as though I am firmly rooted in this “New Life”. I’m doing things that are for me… for my home… for my own well being. I’m able to look a little further into the future… a little… further. I’m at that point where I am living my life… and am doing OK. I’ve adapted. Even though I’m surrounded by the 20 years of life with Kateri and the memories of how it used to be… I’ve learned how to live without her. (basically, you just keep waking up and dealing) So when a family member/friend comes to the schoolhouse to feel close to Kateri, to be in this space, to be close to her things, to find comfort… emotions and memories come with them.
I welcomed those emotions and memories this weekend because most of the time I need to kinda push them to the side just to get through the day. I actually enjoy it when moments like these come around because it provides me with the time and space to simply remember Kateri with someone who also loves and misses her. These days, it’s less devastating when someone comes to visit (which has been no one in this time of Covid!) and more comforting… which feels good. Ya, the plan was to be “productive” this weekend and to spend time with myself in this new life, but I’m soooo happy that plans changed and I got to spend a few days of my new life remembering some of the wonderful parts of… my life.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ps…. I started this post last week, but WordPress updated me to the new Block Editor… and I don’t really know how to use it!… so it’s taken me a bit. Since then, on Saturday at 7:30ish in the evening as I was trying to figure it out… a raccoon (I’m pretty sure) killed the last three of my chickens… of Kateri’s chickens. Yup… also pretty sure there is gonna be a post about that experience!… which I’m still dealing with… considering the fact that dreams of Lil’ Bitch and me on the hill are over. For the first time in twenty years… I’m the only living thing (besides plants) in my household… weird.
I love the instant gratification you get from painting something. It gives the room, the cabinet, the cart, the box, the house, the dresser, the whatever that clean and new…ish feeling. Today, I’m sitting on my newly painted front porch/deck… and enjoying it. I’m actually on my deck writing this as we speak! I know… it sounds exciting!… but it’s really just relaxing and satisfying more than anything else.
I’ve thought about all the things I could attach to me painting the front porch. There were a ton of memories and emotions that popped into the mind and body as I rolled and brushed away (the Karate Kid also came to mind! (the original!))… but this was simply something I wanted to do for myself… and my home. I guess I wanted to feel like I accomplished something that would give me the sense as though I was making an improvement, cleaning something up, preserving something for a bit longer… taking steps forward. So I grabbed a mask, ventured out among the infected, bought some white paint… and started with the railings.
I thought I would get the porch and railings done in a couple days… it took a week… which I was fine with. I knew it would probably take longer than expected so I simply planned on moving shit, cleaning shit, painting shit, and moving shit again being my evenings for a few days. The weather was gonna lack precipitation so I thought it would be kinda nice to get some sun while getting some work done, as well! Heck, when “Today’s Hits” is blaring out of your garage… you can paint until the sun goes down! A word of caution—when you can paint until the sun goes down… maybe put on some sunscreen while it’s up. Yup… itchy.
It’s amazing how time weathers the things in our everyday lives. I jumped on painting the deck because I saw a picture of our house when we were first looking to buy it. I remember when our offer was accepted, we drove up Wild Hill where I stood on the front porch, looked at those large windows, red siding, and white trim and said to Kateri, “Well, we just bought a really old schoolhouse… with a really new paint job!”.
As I sit here today, there is still paint peeling on the garage and on the north side of the house. (ummm, it’s peeling on the east, west, and south sides, as well!) My downstairs toilet’s tank is still slowly leaking into the bowl on it’s way to my septic tank. My wood is still tucked away in the lean-to on the other side of my yard… and I don’t have next year’s wood yet. I still want to go through some stuff… and organize the garage. There’s all sorts of things that we each need to “get to” in our lives as we go through… our lives. I’ve been overwhelmed quite a bit as I’ve gone through the past 2 years, 3 months, and a few weeks more, but as of right now… I’m not. Right now, I’m enjoying that sense of accomplishment… while sitting on my newly painted deck… as I wave to the people as they drive on by.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Yay!… the lazy blog post! I was gonna do one yesterday because I had a pretty wonderful Holiday Weekend and have been feeling pretty good lately… but didn’t. Oh… I tried. Spent hours trying to figure out what I wanted to share… how I wanted to share it… and realized… there was just too much. There were simply too many fun experiences, interesting situations, positive steps in this new life, good memories, and some sad ones over the last little bit for me to consolidate them into something that would capture the… je ne sais quoi (that’s French!)… warm n fuzzy feeling…?.. with a sense of security….?.. and easiness…? (A feeling of refreshing tranquility and an absence of tension or worry… yup. Thanks google!) So, I watched Unsolved Mysteries instead… and today you get a “Widower” post.
First… some pics from my third 4th of July… in this new life.
And now… a video… about a memory… that keeps coming back.
I actually started on the spare bedroom the day before the 2 Year/2 Month mark. It’s been a week long process… which still isn’t finished… but, it’s definitely a lot further along than it was a week ago!… and going through stuff is just gonna take me a bit. Although I have hit that point where I kinda just wanna start going through stuff and setting up “my” house… I also understand that it’s gonna take a while… but I can start! There’s a lot… A LOT… that comes along with the loss of a spouse. Sometimes, I feel like there’s even more that came along with the loss of Kateri. I mean… it’s Kateri!… she was pretty awesome. Of course, I think anyone who has loved someone else might feel the same way… but I’m talking about me right now.
So, this is what showed up this week in my life after I jumped on the opportunity of having another set of hands to help me move a dresser out of the spare bedroom… some pics and notes. (FYI… life is good… just a big balancing act!)
This is my final pic… and then a video… as if there wasn’t enough already! I really haven’t done anything with my little shrine to Kateri and as I was going through boxes I figured I could add a few things from the top of the jelly cupboard… so I did. I wasn’t sure about how to dispose of the sage bundles used for smudging, so I asked sis-in-law. Well, I found out that neither one of us really knows what to do with used sage bundles, but we figured as long as the intentions were good… it’s all cool and groovy. So… that’s what the video is about. Just a heads up, I mention it’s January 28th… it’s not… it’s June. There would be a heck of a lot more snow on the ground if it were January!… but there might still be a fire.
ps… you can hit the “like” button if appropriate… and you still have time to follow the blog for the chance to randomly see it pop up in your email inbox! (it’s kinda sporadic… and not very focused… or professional.)
Well… I’ve known that I wanted to write a blog today because I like setting time aside and 
taking advantage of dates such as “The Second Anniversary of Kateri’s Kick-Ass Party” to remember her and our life, but now that I’m here… I’m not sure what to say! Not that I’m all verklempt or anything (although, I’m sure there’ll be some emotional moments), two years just happens to get filled with all sorts of things… experiences, emotions, fun times, not fun times, learnin’ times, pandemics, protests, and simply life. So… we’ll see where this goes.
One of the things I just realized is that I have sort of a catalog to look back on with this here blog thingy, so I decided to see what I wrote last year! And… well… last year I said I had no words!… but I did have three Widower Notes n Thoughts and the above bullet point was one of them.. and I still agree with how the celebration of Kateri’s life felt to me. It was absolutely wild the similarities of our wedding and the celebration… and I’m glad it was truly a celebration of the life that Kateri brought to all of us.. the life that she shared with the lucky few of us on this planet. Just like our wedding, I don’t remember all of the particulars of that evening, but I’ve got the gist of it… and it’s mainly a memory of love.
Up until Thursday, I planned on spending this weekend alone doing some things that I thought would be nice little attachments to Kateri. I thought about taking the Klean Kanteen bottle that she used when she was sick up to a friend in B-Town to see if he could get it engraved (that’s what I’m gonna use as her urn). I thought about hitting Flatbread just to be in the space again… which also affords me the opportunity to grab a couple of breads! I thought about swinging by and seeing a couple of wonderful people. But then I thought about all the other people (you know… the rest of the world simply living their lives) and the whole Covid-19 thing going on up there and wasn’t sure how that would impact my job. We’re pretty strict on our travel guidelines!… which is understandable to me… so I started thinking about sticking around the Schoolhouse… and then David called.
I had called my wood guy when I got home from work on Thursday and left him a message. It was the second message I had left for him (which isn’t annoying at all!… but the routine I’ve come to accept) so when the phone rang twenty minutes later I totally thought it was him… it wasn’t. The moment I heard, “Hello my friend.”… I knew it was David… and not my wood guy… whom I still haven’t heard from. This is a nice example of where sometimes I just feel the need to roll with things as they change or materialize. David was calling to see if this Saturday would be a good time to come visit..?! Now, I’m not one who believes the stars aligned with the second moon phase as Jupiter rose in the east… on a Tuesday… to make it so that David reached out two days before this anniversary after not seeing each other for almost a year… but it was a pretty cool coincidence!
As I thought about David’s inquiry, it seemed somewhat perfect to me. David has been in our life since 2004. He came into our life during our time at American Flatbread in Vermont. We stayed with him at his little cabin by the river up Four Mile Canyon in Colorado… until we found our place in Ned. We all came back to Vermont at relatively the same time. The three of us spent a lot… A LOT… of time together. He knows me. He knows Kateri. He loves her. So, when I thought about the possibility of maybe having company this weekend… the thought of it being David sorta fit perfectly! He’s someone I feel 100% comfortable having around if I decide to go through shit, am dealing with shit, or simply taking a shit! (that’s how you know your relationship is tight… when you can poop in front of… or in the vicinity of someone… or if there is the possibility of them hearing you on those special mornings after unhealthy nights!… and it doesn’t phase you. Sorry, kind of a gross analogy… and please, try to poop privately)
So today, on the second anniversary of Kateri’s Kick-Ass Party, I’ve decided to see how it plays out. I’ve decided to take this weekend and remember Kateri for all the wonderful things she brought into my life… which I’m sure I won’t remember all of them because there are simply too many amazing experiences, people, and memories that she gave me since 1998, but the good is going to be the focus. I figure, this isn’t a “Woe is me” type weekend… this is more of a “Remember how Kick-Ass Kateri was” type weekend that I luckily get to spend with someone who personally knows just how Kick-Ass Kateri was, too. Yup, I’m sure there will be some emotional moments (just had one!), but that’s only because the love I (we) have for Kateri is just as strong as it was when she took her last breath. Life just happens to be different now.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
When I got to my room over looking Lake Champlain (I splurged… I figured my wife just died and we were celebrating her… I wanted to be able to see something nice when I woke up the next morning), the staff had left me a couple of cupcakes and condolences. Such a simple gesture… that I will always be grateful for.We bought our Five Different Shades of Orange 1973 Super Beetle at a garage sale in Bristol back in ’02 or 3. That kinda makes it sound like we were rolling in cash and just picking up cars as we were out and about enjoying a Saturday, but it actually took a few weeks to make sure we had the money… and Bob (the seller) was having a fair amount of separation anxiety… so it was a process. He would come into the restaurant Kateri and I were managing to grab a bite and we would chat to get acquainted with each other a bit more so that he could feel comfortable knowing his little bug was going to a good home. We feel it did.
It was one of those days where we were simply out and about driving around Vermont, watching shit go by, and hitting some yard sales…Kateri loved “Yardsaling”. The Super Beetle was parked on the road with a for sale sign in the window, so we started the whole kicking the tires, inspecting underneath, checking out the rusty spots, and dreaming of what it would be like to use for one of our favorite pass times… smoking weed (with a couple of Road Sodas back in the day) and driving the back roads of the Green Mountains… together.
The inspection and dreaming was all going along fine until I had decided to roll a window down… and it didn’t go back up… and we hadn’t met the owner yet! Yup, Kateri was pretty proud of me at that point! Well, really all it did was force us (me) to find the owner and have a conversation about the vehicle… because I might’ve broken it. When we found Bob we told him we were checking out the car and his first response was, “You didn’t roll down the window, did you?”. Yup…. proud.
We had a nice conversation, checked out some of the other stuff he was selling, purchased an iron gate that we carted around with us for years (not sure where that ended up!), and set up a time to take the bug for a test drive. Of all of our experiences with that little beetle, the test drive was my favorite. Kateri had never been in… or at least driven…(?) a Volkswagen Bug before and we figured that even if we didn’t buy the car, she at least got to have that experience! I’ll tell you… from the moment she saw that little, Five Different Shades of Orange Super Beetle… with a sunroof!… it always put a smile on her face. To be able to clearly remember her enthusiasm when she got into that car, fired it up and heard that distinct Bug sound as she cautiously took off down the road with the windshield six inches from her face, it makes me happy to this day… even as I can feel the tears on my cheeks. (I guess that’s how you know it was a good thing)
I love all the memories I have of Kateri and I with that little buggy. It was an adventure every time we pulled away from our little house in the hills… to drive around other hills… never knowing if it was gonna start up again once you stopped for gas, a bite to eat, or to just take in a view. There was one time we decided to putz down south a tiny ways to where Kateri’s little sister was working for the summer at a kid’s camp. Luckily it was a beautiful day because at every stop we had to wait, let the engine cool down (I think. Again, I’m a cook and not a mechanic!… but believe those engines were air cooled.), and hope that it would start so that we could get to the next point on the trip… and eventually home! It was a great lesson in patience.
The license plate! Oh my gosh… I loved our license plate. It was the first time we got vanity plates. (Are they still called that? Personalized?… whatever) At first, Kateri wanted to have some sort of variation of Pickin’ Apples… her code phrase for sex when she was younger. But we weren’t able to get one of those. We live in Vermont… there are a lot of “Apple” people here… so we started brainstorming other ideas. As much as I like to think it was “our“ Five Different Shades of Orange ’73 Super Beetle… it was really Kateri’s. Once we realized her nickname would fit on the plate, we just thought it would be appropriate! And then we found out THAT was taken. So what do you do?… You add a number to the end! Yup… people would see us puttering around The Green Mountains, smiles ear to ear, in a bright orange bubble with green rectangles on either end that said… SQUIRT1..!
Although “Squirt” is what a lot of people call Kateri, we got a kick out of thinking about how drivers who were following us would interpret it!
When we moved to Colorado in 2007 we had to get rid of it. A friend said he could hold onto it for us and used his ex-girlfriend’s AAA membership to pull it out of it’s winter storage space… tarped in the woods… and transport it north to his place. It wasn’t in too great of shape at that point, the rust was kinda running rampant. As the tow truck guy was slowly using the winch to pull it up the angled flatbed… the battery fell through the floor! It’s sorta sad thinking about how she never hit the road again, but it’s kinda fun thinking about how our friends would sometimes pack into that broken down and stationary Bug after they had a few drinks, pass around a joint, talk, and reminisce about the good times. Kateri got to have that experience once when she came back to help a friend out. I love that image… Kateri smiling and happy in her ’73 Super Beetle… with people she loves.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
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I didn’t go to bed last night until the wee hours of this morning. I knew I was probably gonna be up late since I wasn’t gonna be working today. I decided early on in this “New Life” that I wasn’t gonna work on the anniversary of Kateri’s death… ever… and I’ve made it two years in a row! As a widower, I’ve had to deal with the loss of Kateri every single day I wake up, but as time goes by, day to day life kinda turns into this new normal and I’ve gotten used to balancing the weight of not having Kateri next to me and all of the things that come along with that… and figuring out how to “live” and function in this new world without being an emotional and psychological plane wreck! I feel as though there have been a couple areas of turbulence and maybe a bit of engine trouble over the last two years, but I’m still in the air!… even if I fly pretty low sometimes. One day… I hope to be in a space where I am soooo excited about life that I simply NEED to buzz the tower!… even if Goose is pleading with me not to. One day Goose… one day.
Initially I planned on taking three days off for Kateri’s anniversary so that I could do something out in the world like go to the ocean and stay at the dumpy little hotel, which we loved, and was right on the water. We got a kick out of the place when we found the shape of an iron burned into the carpet in the entry way of room 318 (I don’t actually know the room number… it’s the one on the top floor on the end… in case you were wondering). But The Rona has kinda put the kibosh on any plans like that so I was kinda forced to decide to stick around the schoolhouse… which I’m also completely okay with. I mean, this really is the place where I feel the closest to Kateri because it’s filled with all sorts of her Hopes n Dreams. I just wish there was more time for her to experience more of them.
Two years. Jesus… what the fuck…?! (sorry Jesus, just using you as an exclamation… I don’t blame you. We’ve been warned you work in mysterious ways! At least, that’s what I hear… I don’t actually go to church or follow you on any of your social media platforms… but I dig the message you were delivering. It’s just a fair amount of your followers that I have an issue with… they can get a little freaky!) Although at points it feels like Kateri died yesterday, the fact of the matter is that for 730 days (31?… was there a Leap Year or some shit?) I’ve had to learn how to live life without her. I’ve had to learn how to live My Life using the lessons that she taught me instead of witnessing her actions. She cut the path through the woods… I just need to maintain it and see where I can create new ones. (some bushwhacking required)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ps… it feels odd not really ever writing specifically about Kateri and all the beautiful things that made her such a unique and loving person. Maybe my next post will be about her… and not me and my shit.
My Dearest Kateri,
First… Happy Birthday! You’ve always loved your birthday being on St. Patrick’s Day… it might’ve been the Irish in you. I love how you would make sure to have a bottle of Bailey’s around for today… usually starting the morning off with a “little” in your coffee… until the time came to start drinking it out of one of the two tiny plastic beer steins. I especially loved it when you would fill up both of the miniature mugs, hand one to someone you loved, clink them together as well as two small plastic mugs could clink, and celebrate simply being there together on your birthday.
Well babe, I’ll be honest… I had a little emotional breakdown just a second ago, decided to run to the store for some papers and on the way back I realized what it was I needed to say to you. I wanted to write to you about all the fun St. Patty’s Day/Birthday adventures we had at the ocean, in pubs, with friend’s and family… or just the two of us, but I’m not going to. Those are all simply wonderful memories… which I have. What I don’t have… is you. And today…. I’m having a hard time with that.
Since just under two years ago, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this alone. To fill you in, we currently have something happening in our world that will ultimately touch every living person on this planet… in one way or another. It’s called COVID-19 now, but get this… at first it was called Coronavirus! I know!… CORONA-VIRUS! I thought you would get a kick outta that. Although there were a plethora of beer jokes when it first came to light just a couple of months ago… and I may have made some remarks about licking door knobs to get out of work… aaaand I know you would still be making inappropriate jokes (at times) about it to ease the anxiety… it’s actually a very unsettling time and serious thing.
This is where you come into play. When I drove home from getting my papers, I looked around at the open fields, the sparsely filled Park n Ride, a family in a four door pick-up truck at the stop sign waiting to turn, everything felt… different. I’ve gotta tell you Kateri, when I heard your last breath… I heard my world change. Now, as I face a changing world, I simply wish I never heard that silence and that you were with me now. I wish I had our life again. I wish you were here to stay in comfy clothes, drink Bailey’s, and watch horrible movies on your birthday because everything is shut down. Hell, maybe we would be at an empty hotel on the ocean making cappuccinos in our room because we got it for dirt cheap! Once again, your cappuccino would probably have Bailey’s, but it doesn’t really matter what we would be doing… I just wish you were here with me because you always made uncomfortable times better… or uncomfortable in a different way… a better way!
I hope you are having a wonderful time however you are spending your birthday. I have all sorts of scenarios playing in my head, but my minds eye can only focus on your smile… that big, innocent, genuine smile. I want you to know that our friends have been reaching out today showing us they love us. It’s been nice, but I haven’t really responded to anyone yet… I’ve kinda just been thinking about you. Well, and dealing with work… and a chimney guy!… but mostly you.
You were my partner in everything… in life. When life got crazy… as it is right now… I looked to you… and I still do, Kateri. I want you to know that. You taught me so much. You provided me with direction… with purpose… with guidance. You may not be standing next to me or sleeping upstairs or at the farm or in the garden, but you are always with me.
I’ve been much more emotional today than I expected to be… you would have a blast yelling, “CRYYY!” at me… but I just wanted to send you a note… which made me more emotional… so I’m gonna stop now and say, “I love you, Kateri. Happy St. Patty’s Day and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!… you would be 46.” (because I know you still aren’t paying attention to your age)
Love,
Lippy
ps… Coronavirus: Reason #317 that trees make better neighbors.
Today I’m writing what I was gonna write tomorrow about yesterday, but I realized the date and the whole “Widower Day” was kind of a funny run of two’s so I thought why not tonight?! (I don’t know why… I just happen to like numbers. Yup, as Kateri would say… I suffer from O.D.D…. it spells odd.)
At work yesterday, I made the comment that if I didn’t love my house as much as I do, if Kateri and I had just bought some random home in the burbs instead of our cute ass and drafty little red schoolhouse… well, I probably would’ve sold it and hit the open road! But that’s not the case, so I’m still here at my little red schoolhouse home and on the drive home yesterday I had an experience that simply made me happy about my current living condition.
It was getting dark when I turned at the lake. Not like dark dark… just kinda dark. About three minutes in, I saw two dimly lit red lights moving at a slower rate than I was moving.
I couldn’t really make out the shape of the car, but I could tell the lights were the taillights of on old Volvo station wagon… and then made the assumption that it was John plugging along in front of me. This is where I felt a little bit of the warmth that “community” and “neighbors” provide once in a while. I loved the fact that before I could actually see any of the particulars, I could tell who it was. It made me feel like I was driving “Home”. After literally saying how I would’ve “Hit the open road” just a couple of hours earlier, it made me realize that I do still really love where I live… and the fact that I know my neighbors. I don’t know most of them very well, but each of them have come into my (or our) life at one point or the other. Some I wish we (I) got to spend more time with… I guess I still can. Some, I’m fine with just a wave here and there. Either way, it’s comforting knowing the people on my Home Road. It eases the loneliness… and that little experience helped fill a tiny bit of the emptiness I feel every time I head back north. It was a little thing. It was random. It was moment specific. But it was significant to me on an insignificant drive back to the schoolhouse.
When I pulled into the driveway, pulled up to the garage, put the car in park and set the parking break.. I just sat there for a moment. I have this thing where sometimes I can’t get out of the car right away… usually because I see those big ass schoolhouse windows to my left and it just reminds me of all of the “Hopes and Dreams” Kateri and I had with our lives and our home… this was one of those times. I was starting to get a little emotional when the song Dance Monkey by Tones and I came on. I had heard this song quite a few times and have just always really enjoyed it. I’d like to think that I’m sorta up on current music, but I don’t have TV and am not on the internet too much so I don’t really know about any of the artists… or what they even look like! This song, however, has just been growing on me so I decided to sit and listen… in my driveway.
It made me really think about Kateri for a couple of reasons. I thought of her dancing in the passenger seat as we would drive down the highway… or be sitting in our driveway. I thought about how she would’ve really enjoyed movin’ to this particular song. It made me think about how Kateri faced the news and fucked up reality that she had cancer… in her brain… and her plan was to dance the cancer away. She always described it as her “Dance” with cancer… and she danced beautifully with the asshole partner who unexpectedly cut in.
As I thought about these things and others, I wondered if I could maybe play this song on the guitar…? So, as I sat there in the driveway… in my “cute” little Jeep… I pulled out my phone and searched guitar chords for the song that was currently vibrating loose change in the cup holder. I saw that it was basically four chords and when the song ended, I went inside, rolled a joint, turned on Youtube to check out the official video, lit a fire, lit the joint… and just enjoyed the song for the second time in 15 minutes.
I couldn’t really tell anything about the artist from the official video, so I started searching live performances. This is where I need to insert the “Oh my God!”… because what I saw was simply amazing. The first video I found was her U.S. debut when she played on Jimmy Fallon… and I couldn’t get enough of it… of her! I’m not gonna get too much into it except to say that I found her to be absolutely inspiring… which then turned into another two hours filled with nothing but Tones and I… and Dance Monkey being played over and over again as I searched for more and more live performances. It was such a “not what I thought” experience that I couldn’t get over it! As I watched her perform… it made me wanna root for her! Of course, seeing her perform gave me the feeling that she is gonna have a shit ton of people who are gonna wanna listen to her music, learn about her story, and support her! It was just one of those pleasant surprises that come along once in a while. Check her out!
Yup, it was just one of those days. And, in all honesty… I finished writing this today… because I didn’t finish it yesterday. Instead, I fell asleep on the couch.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
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I think… like everyone else… I wish I could just drop everything, pack a bag, load the car, and experience wanderlust again for a while instead of plugging away at the grind. Not that things have been absolutely horrible… I haven’t been getting punched in the nuts when I wake up every morning or anything like that… but it DOES get a little tiring when you constantly feel overwhelmed, are constantly trying to “figure things out”, and life keeps showing you that there are things you have control over… and there are things that you don’t. So…. I’m just gonna keep plugging away at routines for right now… keep an eye on what I have control over… and maybe try to create some new routines! (Like ones where I have to brush my teeth at a rest stop, in a hotel, or next to my tent would be fun! Or in my schoolhouse… I have no plans of letting go of my schoolhouse! Gotta have home to come back to!)
The past couple of weeks have been good, filled with some good things. My lady friend and I went to Salem, Mass last week to get out of Dodge, see the ocean, and check out some witches! (the witches weren’t actually a main focal point) One thing I love about the East Coast is it’s history. Yes, we have some pretty horrendous history in this country, but everywhere does.
It’s fun to walk around a town made up of old brick buildings and wooden houses where you can read about what took place on that spot hundreds of years ago!… even though they weren’t good times. (I guess that’s how we learn not to do those things again… or not let them happen again.)
For me, it’s weird doing things with someone who isn’t Kateri… but that’s the whole balancing “New Life” and “Old Life”. I mean, I still wanna experience life… sometimes with someone else… sometimes by myself… but mainly I don’t wanna keep trying to recreate the experiences I had with Kateri because those times are simply memories of a different life now… even if they are really, really good memories. I want new experiences… for my new life. Experiences like going to the Peabody Essex Museum or the Salem Witch Museum. I still wanna walk around towns and look at the architecture or old ass homes where the doors don’t have any right angles anymore. I wanna go into magic shops and get in trouble for taking pictures because they sell REALLY important and magical things. I wanna have fun and say things like, “These are the trees where they hung all the witches!” when walking through a town green… not knowing if there was any truth in the statement! I still wanna live… life… and focus on “The Good” things once in a while… and push “The Bad” to the side for a bit… here and there.
I was gonna go into some other things I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks like the fact that I’ve started going through the house… slowly… or the fact that I’ve started my book! (an even slower start… but I’ve got a file folder with words in it!) But, it’s my Sunday on a Monday and I’ve got things to do. All in all, I feel I’ve been doing okay. Going through the cabinet in the living room was rewarding. It’s interesting what you find in boxes. This one had old computers (no, I didn’t turn them on to look at pics or anything… although I wanted to), CD’s from decades ago, cords cords cords, an old picture of me from 2007, a ticket from our NY City Christmas in 2012, toys my mom gave Kateri over the years,…. and underwear. Yup, you just never know what you’ll find!… but you’ve gotta open the box first to see what’s in it! Otherwise, it’s just a box taking up space.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
It’s up to us to decide on which to focus on and when. We aren’t helpless. Sometimes, we can do things that are actually helpful to ourselves… and others… without much effort.ps… You can follow the blog if you want! I promise! Unless you’re a dick… then you can follow some other blog.
Well… it has started. I have begun the process of going through shit to see what I want to keep around, what I want to save, what I want to throw away, and what I feel other people may want… of course, people definitely tell you what they want when your wife dies! More importantly though, I would want something to go to someone I love… who loved Kateri… if there is significant weight put on whatever object by whatever person… and if it’s in the “Give Away” pile! In this case, I’m going the kitchen… so there isn’t a ton of those types of things.
I mean, I don’t know if anyone is gonna be fighting over the 2 year old Cheerios in the glass jar on the counter!.. but maybe?!
I planned on going through the kitchen on Sunday since my original plan to go see a buddy in AZ fell through and I was still gonna take the time off… because I need it. When I knew I wasn’t going to some strange land filled with sand… and where the sun seems to be a heck of a lot closer… I wanted to take advantage of the time to get to some things that I just simply haven’t been able to get to yet. The kitchen seemed like a good place to start because it is also a space that is functional… I use it everyday.
Now I’ve just gotta say it went a WHOLE lot slower than I expected… and I’m actually not even done!… but the kitchen is clean (top of the fridge and all!) and I was able to go through a few cabinets and cupboards. The fridge… and everything on it… was the big one. It’s amazing what we put on refrigerators… the memories we magnet to the thin metal keeping all our shit cold. Mine kinda covered the gambit. It was dotted with pictures of family from years ago, recipes in Kateri’s handwriting, little notes, menus from local sandwich shops, magnets from our travels, wedding invitations and snapshots of good times! It also had Kateri’s pill regiment schedule on it that our nurse friend had made her when Kateri got discharged from the hospital… when her colon gave out halfway through “Cancer Time” because of the immunotherapy or some shit. Ya… I think I’m at the point where I don’t need to see that every time I go in the fridge to grab a Stewart’s Orange n Cream soda! I also stumbled upon a fortune, hidden beneath other papers, that word used to “Learn Chinese” was…….. disease. Yay!
Although I didn’t actually finish what I planned to finish in the kitchen… it is further along than it was on Satruday! I’ve learned that I can’t put unreasonable pressure on myself to bang some of these things out. Some things will just take time due to those constraints in time, emotional attachment, and… well… life. For me, I’m happy that I started the process and sorta have a game plan going forward. I made a big dent in something that has been nagging at my brain for a bit… and that feels good. Now I’m off to round up all “Important Papers” scattered around the house in various bags, boxes, cabinets, and closets… and I’m gonna show them their permanent home in the filing cabinet! (the one Kateri found on the side of the road!)
Widower Notes n Thought:
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Well… I officially have a Therapist for the first time in my adult life. It’s funny, as I sat here after writing that sentence, I didn’t know what I really wanted to say!… and then a friend texted and my thoughts shifted to jogging in the rain… which sounds kinda sloshy… fun, but I will probably never do… and doesn’t have anything to do with my Therapist. This is sorta what happens for me every time I stop and take the time to think about what it is I’m going through… where I’m at… what brought me here over the last 44 years and how it all works together to push me in a certain direction as I try my best to steer the wheel of life… which happens to have a significant amount of “play” in it! I keep seeing sayings like “YOU control your life” and “It’s how you show up” type stuff… and it’s true… but there’s a shitload out there that we have absolutely no control over which affects our life in one way or the other and to whatever varying degree! Hence… “play in the wheel”! (My father had an old Wagoneer. One of those classy ones with the mountain scene on the back widow. You could give the wheel a quarter turn before you headed in whichever direction!… Man, I would love to have that Jeep now.)
Back to the Therapist. I’m not gonna get into the whole road that led up to me seeing a Therapist because that could take a while! (I mean, I know I got up early… but no.) And… it’s not really important. I mean (again), it is… but it isn’t. For me, the important part is that I am taking the steps necessary to keep my life moving in a direction I can live with. After six hundred and whatever goddamn days I’m also just simply…. tired… and taking advantage of every opportunity to push me in a positive direction in hopes of getting to a better space. I mean (third time), all in all… on average… in the grand scheme of things… I’m hanging in there… fair to midland, I would say… but I’m tired of that feeling of “sustaining” or “keeping my head above water”. I want growth in all aspects of my life and in who I am. I want to be able to see the beauty that surrounds me… or that is on the other side of the windshield… and not just recognize it for being beautiful. This is one of those opportunities.
So… my approach to finding a Therapist…? As with every experience in this new life, I wanted this one to be as close to how I envision it to go as possible. I already had an idea in my head of what I felt I would be comfortable with. I thought about what type of environment would be calming and warm, the location, the type of person I wanted to have this experience with and all that jive. Fortunately, so far it has worked out!
I went through EAP at work and got two referrals. Yes.. I googled each of them. The first one was closer to my home, but there were other areas they specialized in like “Yoga”… and all I want to do is talk to someone… who focuses on talking. I can get 100% behind all the “Namaste” stuff… positive energy/vibrations/loop o’ bliss/etc., but I didn’t feel I wanted it as part of this experience, so I moved on to the other one.
I couldn’t find much info on… we’ll say “Betty”… so I gave her a call. The moment I heard her voice I knew I had found my person! (I’m calling her “Betty” for a reason… she sounded consoling and supportive… and… well… “seasoned”.) I instantly felt like I could talk with her. She had this welcoming sound to her that put any of my concerns about the process at ease. It felt… good. Aaaaaand….. when we actually met at her house for the first session…. it turned out to be exactly the experience I was looking for! Betty’s stature, demeanor, her home, her history, her voice and words, even the road to her house were all fantastic parts of this new experience… making a new memory… in this “New Life”.
There isn’t much more to really say about that first session… it was mainly a get to know ya/why we’re here type thing. I was gonna do just three sessions to start, but as we were talking I realized what this session basically was and thought a couple more would probably be beneficial. So, I’ve decided to commit to five sessions and then take stock. The first three are gonna be kinda rapid fire (once a week) and then I wanna space out the next couple. What it comes down to is… for me to get to a point where I am happy with where I am, who I am, and how I’m doing it… I’m gonna need to be open to trying new things! Fortunately, this “new thing” has so far been nothing but… encouraging!
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
So…. wow. That kinda snuck up on me! I’ve had quite a few things on my mind as of late and have been kinda trying to deal with some “New Life” shit… “Old Life” shit… “Emotional” shit…… and snow. I guess I’ve simply been thinking a lot about life in general and wasn’t really doing the whole “2019 in Review” thing… until last night… at around 6:30/7ish… when it dawned on me that there were quite a few things that happened in 2019!
I was gonna throw out the ol’ “There were some good things, there were some blah blah blah things…”, but that was basically everyone’s year! I kinda figure that that’s just how it goes..?! And then I thought about how our lives’ aren’t just generalizations. They aren’t that simple. In the 365 days that I woke up in 2019 there were definitely ups and downs, but there were things… specific things… that stand out. So yup… here’s a New Year’s Random Widower Notes n Thoughts list for 2020. (yay!… and an almost ten minute video about a whole lot of not much at the end…!):
Random Widower Notes n Thoughts… June 2, 2020:
ps… I started this post on New Year’s Day 2020. Since then… I have had to use the term, “One appointment at a time.” again… but for the first time with a particular person… someone I love very much… more than most. Luckily, she’s one of the strongest, determined, and fearless in the face of adversity type of people I know… and she’ll (we’ll) get through this. Life doesn’t give us the option of when we need to deal with some stuff… it’s not in our control. What is in our control is how we approach it… how we face it… how we are going to let it exist in our life. It can beat us down… or we can accept the situation and try to take the best steps forward. I’m a “fixer”… I want to fix things as quickly as possible so that I can move on to the next thing. Sometimes… I simply can’t fix it. But I’ll do whatever I can to make it… a little bit better.
On the way to work yesterday, Christmas Eve, the realization hit me that I think this is the first Christmas in my life that I will be waking up in an empty house… alone. No one already drinking coffee downstairs. No one sneaking little wrapped packages into old socks hanging by the wood stove. No one making phone calls seeing when other people will be swinging by. I can’t smell the oil being heated up for the round upon round of fried dough. Nope… it’s pretty much just silence here at the schoolhouse. I did manage to fill the air with the smell of coffee… because this day needs to start one way or the other… and I really, really need it!
Although I talk about how I’m alone this morning… I sorta planned it that way. Two Christmases ago I was in Idaho spending it with my family because we had found out my mother has cancer and Kateri and I were going to spend it with them… then we got the diagnosis of melanoma in the brain on December 19th, 2017… and Kateri stayed home… alone. Which sounds like a sad situation with this limited information (and it was), but it was exactly how it should’ve gone.
Last Christmas, my sister-in-law was here… and it was good… but she’s not here this year and once I knew she wasn’t gonna be coming (I knew pretty early on) I made the plan to just have a Christmas morning to myself and to see how it goes… alone. 
I’ve also come to the conclusion that as for now, that whole “alone” feeling isn’t gonna go away for a while. Yes, there are people in life… people that I care deeply about… friends and family that care deeply about me, but when I lost Kateri… even though I may not have lost everything… I did lose that comfort you have in life knowing that there is that one person… that one special person who will always be there for you… who will guide you, love you, support you, laugh with you… and hold you when you just need to be held. For almost twenty years, I never really felt alone… but I do now. Not because I’m sitting in bed on my computer instead of taking bong hits for baby Jesus. Not because there isn’t the smell of oil heating. Not because sister-in-laws went to Jamaica or because friend’s and family are miles and miles away. It’s not even because it’s Christmas Morning. It’s simply because Kateri is not here… and I wish she was.
This is my second Christmas as a widower and I just gotta say… it’s weird. I wouldn’t say harder or more emotional or anything… just different. Unfortunately, life has been challenging as of late and I just haven’t really gotten into the Holiday Spirit as much as I was hoping for… but I’m trying to force myself into it this morning… and the coffee helps!
Yes, I may feel alone and sorta lost… but it’s still Christmas Morning and I want to make the most of it. I want to connect with friends and family. I want to open packages and cards from people I love. I want to share gifts with special people in my life. I want to laugh, share stories, and reminisce. I want to push all the ugly, unfortunate, and complicated challenges out for a day and just relax with my coffee by the fire, some Christmas tunes, and most likely a movie along the lines of National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. Life will be there tomorrow when I wake up for work, but today… it’s Christmas… and I’m gonna try to focus on the things that I have come to love about the Holiday Season… even though they have become harder to see.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Well… I guess it’s not a tradition this year! And I’m okay with that. Yes, I will have fried dough on Christmas again in the future… (I wish I had some now!)… but I’m also learning about how my Christmases (holidays/anniversaries/weekends) are gonna go… and how I would like to spend them in this new life.
It’s a big, complicated planet filled with a whole bunch of humans… who are complicated. It doesn’t matter spiritual beliefs or traditions or backgrounds or placement on the globe… it’s basically try to be a part of “The Good” in the world. We can always start small and just try to be a part of “The Good” in other people’s lives… as we go through our’s.
Awe… Monday morning. One good thing about being a cook… Monday mornings usually don’t mean shit when it comes to the work week! And when your work week starts on a Tuesday or Thursday… well, it just doesn’t seem quite as bad. I… for one… have always enjoyed what I do for a living so My Mondays never really fazed me. I liked going to work… I loved being in a kitchen. It makes your job… and life… a bit more enjoyable when you don’t look at the start of the work week as the bottom of a hill you need to climb for the next 5 days! Of course, since Kateri died… I now have that Monday Morning feeling almost every day I wake up. I just want more time to put towards myself, my home, and the new future that life decided to wait until I was 43 to show me… when I thought I had a good handle on what the future held. Luckily, I still enjoy what I do… where I do it… and who I do it with… so that helps. Either way… it’s 9:20 on a Monday morning… and I’m still in bed. So….. ha ha.
The long and short of Thanksgiving… A lazy morning with the Macy’s Day Parade, the day spent with friends that I love, entertaining situations, fun conversations, good food, the meeting of new people, and lasagna. I also brought a “date” to Thanksgiving Dinner… did I mention dinner was held at our friend’s house where Kateri and I first lived when we moved down here? Or that our friend is also the mother of our other friend… a dear friend… the friend who married Kateri and I? (he’s one of Kateri’s pocket people) Did I mention how I sometimes can’t stop my brain from swirling as I try to figure out how to balance old life/new life collisions? Yup… I put a lot of weight on the situation. And in hindsight… too much. I feel that seems to be the case with a fair amount of things.
Now, I feel the need to mention that my “date” happened to be a friend of mine who I’ve spent quite a bit of time with over the last year and she probably knows more about what I’m personally going through than anyone else. Basically… for me… I’m glad my first holiday with someone other than Kateri was with someone I felt comfortable going through that situation with! For all the anxiety I put on myself thinking about this or that… it turns out that when you are surrounded by people you love… good people who love you back… you can take quite a bit of worry off the table. Well that… and being somewhat “grown up” and having the ability to have “adult” conversations helps everyone involved!
Yup, Thanksgiving came and went… and now it’s Monday. I’m getting my chimney swept today and it’s still trying to snow, so I’m gonna get dressed, go and shovel some of the white stuff away from where I think these guys are gonna put their ladders, do some chores, play a little guitar, be responsible and take care of some Grown-Up stuff, and get ready for Tuesday… which is really My Monday.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
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I wanted to do a bloggery at some point this weekend because Friday the 22nd was Kateri’s monthly death date anniversary… and today is my birthday… yay! I took yesterday off and it’s been a good couple of days so far… a lot of thinking, relaxing, and remembering. But I don’t feel like throwing myself into an emotional three hours of writing about crap, so this morning… I made a video on the way back to bed from getting my Birthday Morning Coffee… and never got back into bed.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Generally, once I start a blog or video I just go ahead and either post it or trash it. Well, there’s actually a fair amount of videos on my phone of me playing guitar or rambling on about whatever that I had full intentions of posting to YouTube and just haven’t because I either lose motivation, run out of time, or simply second guess myself about throwing things out into the world… which is why I like to just write/record and then post… no time to second guess! After 97 blog posts and something like 9ish videos saved to YouTube… nothing horrible has happened to me yet, so I’m kinda keeping on that train of thought with the option of posting something after the fact… like I’m doing right now… from my bed… on a Sunday morning… with coffee.
So here I am on Tuesday evening, rambling on about something I did… which made me feel somewhat silly… so why not share it with the world…?! (or with whoever can find it in the sea of digital memories.)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Kateri and I weren’t exactly “texters”… or really even cell phone users, but for some reason I had started texting her when the time was 1:23 or 12:34 or 3:45 or 2:34… you get the idea. I’ve always enjoyed numbers. At the ranch where Kateri and I met, there really wasn’t much to do in the winter if you weren’t working, or snowmobiling, or snowshoeing… or any of the other things you do when there’s 5 feet of snow out the window… with another 4 feet on top of that. So I watched movies here and there, put together puzzles, hung out with the other seasonal riff raff, and read a few books. Some of those books were filled with stories, some were filled with history, and some were filled with exciting tid bits of information like how the Fibonacci Sequence shows up in the arrangement of the seeds of a sunflower. Over the years I have read less and less about “math” as my interests turned towards other things… like cooking, guitar, and hanging out with Kateri… and now I think I’ve dumbed myself down to where I simply get excited when I look at the clock and it reads 4:56! Which I guess has nothing to do with equations or mathematics… but it’s a fun little observance that has absolutely no real significance in my day to day life… and I guess I thought Kateri needed to know when the numbers lined up!
There are so many little things that pop into my head throughout the day that remind me of life with Kateri. Lately, for one reason or another, the memories have been coming in a bit more frequently. They aren’t all big memories of exciting times, or holidays, or those special moments that are only shared between the two people experiencing them… some are little tiny random blips that show up and turn into bigger blips… like texting Kateri 12:34. I don’t know how many times I texted her when the numbers were all lined up on the clock… but I do remember that once in a great while I would receive a text from her and all it would say is 1:23… and it put a smile on my face. I knew the only reason she was doing it was because she knew I got a strange little kick out of it and looking back on it, it’s just one of those little things in my past life that now has a whole bunch more attached to it. It’s kinda like these memories are little tug boats pulling twenty years of experiences behind them with all the emotions piled up high on the barge. Once that tug boat gets to it’s destination… it’s just a matter of time until those emotions need to be unloaded from the barge… and I never know if it’s gonna get unloaded quickly… or take longer than expected!… and there’s always another tug boat coming up the river with an emotional barge in tow.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
It provides me relief. When she first died and I realized I was playing almost every day… I bought myself a new guitar… a new sound. It provided me change, but with the comfort of familiarity. This year, I thought I would take advantage of my solitude and buy myself an amplifier because of the whole “I’m not gonna bother anyone”… and plus I needed a little personal growth with my hobby. I wanted a few more options with how my “Escape Time” sounded as I searched for relief from the swirling thoughts… and it has been working. Like everything else in this new life, I try to fill time and space with people and experiences that make me feel good… with the hope of dampening down all the crap. Unfortunately… the crap is always there. But fortunately… I can sometimes swap it out for a few moments of “The Good” in the world through walks in the woods with neighbors, conversations on the couch, Stewart’s Orange Soda, Ben and Jerry’s… or simply the strumming of strings.
It’s a hard memory for me because I remember not being very sympathetic to her headache. It was before we knew what was going on and I thought it was just a headache that would go away in time… but it never did… and I’m reminded of that morning by stupid studded snow tires… two years later. (I’ve written this down before and I just find it interesting how it’s one of those recurring memories that is time specific. I wonder if this memory is gonna visit me every year when the weather changes and the people start freaking out with the first forecast snow. I swear… people lose their minds!)ps… I thought it would be cool to post this blog at 12:34… but then I had to tend to the fire and missed it!
Yup… just the vid. (I’m trying to be hip and cool by shortening the word video… but I don’t think it works. Saying “vid” just doesn’t sound right!… and it looks funny.)
I established a draft! Yup… it’s pretty exciting! Not like a draft in the writing sense of the word… with my new woodstove and chimney. If you don’t know what I’m talking about… you’re missing out on one of the best things about cold weather… a hot spot to stand next to! It’s been kind of a fun challenge dialing in the new stove, but also kinda frustrating when I can’t get it to burn as efficiently as it should. Plus, when it’s 26 degrees out, like this morning… I wanna be all toasty and warm!
This morning, after I woke up on the couch at 4:37am (next to a pile of empty KitKat and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup wrappers)… and then woke up in bed at 7:42am… I went down to get the fire going for the day. I had planned on spending today doing home chores and getting to know the knew stove since we are in a “cooling trend” right now.
You know, do some shit outside… clean and organize the garage, take down window boxes, try to leaf blow the leaves from my yard to the empty land across the road without “Sunday Traffic” seeing me!… while periodically coming in to stoke the fire to keep The Schoolhouse nice and warm. It’s the first day in a bit that I would have this opportunity so I thought I would just go with it, go slow, relax, and enjoy the Sunday Morning doing a few things that would make me happy… like drinking coffee in bed as I hear the tick of cast iron warming my home.
I’m excited to spend some time outside, too. It’ll feel good to get the yard buttoned up for winter. By next Friday, the temps are gonna start dipping into the teens, so I also feel like time is running out to take care of some of these things before the snow flies! It doesn’t hurt that it feels good to look at it once it’s all cleaned up… instant gratification! Accomplishment… I guess. And it’s always refreshing to be out in the fresh, cool air… with chickens.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Sometimes… I feel like I’m chasing a sun that has already set. Sometimes… I just wanna stop, sit, and wait for it to come back around… but I’m forced to keep moving through the darkness. (Don’t worry, I’ve got a headlamp… the batteries just might happen to be a bit weak right now!)
It was the Halloween of… ummm… 2003 maybe..? Could’ve been 2004 or 5. Well, up to 2007… but one of those years. I know we were living in South Starksboro in our cute little cottage with a loft and a woodstove… it was pretty cool. (Our first stand alone home together… rented from a couple who became very special to both Kateri and I… and who still are. It’s weird to think back at those memories right now. I wish I could get everything that is bombarding my brain right now down on paper… but I can’t… and I’m trying to get to what it is that I wanted to write about! But now… I’m thinking about how Kateri called our back yard the Dagobah System. You know?!… Yoda n shit… and it kinda was.) Anyways, I know it was within that range because on one Halloween we used the tiny bedroom downstairs and the loft you couldn’t stand up in… where we slept… up the ladder… as the places to “design” and make our costumes for the evening. We weren’t going out. We weren’t having a party. Well, I guess we never really had parties… but the point is, we were just gonna be hanging out at home that night and Kateri had a knack for coming up with some fun things to do.
I don’t quite remember much of the evening or exactly what time it was or anything… it was dark… and I was probably drunk, but we gave ourselves “x” amount of time to get into costume and to see what each other came up with! It was fun!… and funny!… and somewhat disturbing! I had made a pillow case into a huge face, tucked it into jeans that were halfway down my thighs…ish, and might’ve made arms… but I’m not sure about that! I do know that my own arms were crossed above my head with my elbows pressed into the corners of the pillow case to keep the face… well… a face. I had seen it in elementary school at an assembly or something and figured… we’ve got pillow cases!… pants!… and markers! I could pull it off pretty easily and it would be kinda silly! Kateri almost died laughing as I… or Big Head Person… ran around 450 square feet while throwing in some dancing and jumping. Yup… it was fun.
But it was Kateri’s costume that got me thinking about that particular Halloween this evening. I don’t even really remember her whole outfit… there was a lot of black. What I remember is her face. It… was… FREAKY! Definitely creepy! A little shocking… and somewhat… interesting. She had done the Scotch Tape thing all over her face making her skin look almost sorta burnt… old and wrinklyish… just simply all fucked up! We couldn’t get over how weird it looked! It almost freaked us out!… but mostly we couldn’t stop laughing and talking about how gross it was! And her nose! Oh my gosh… I almost forgot about the pig nose! Wow… I’m glad I haven’t forgotten about that! Actually, I’m glad I remembered that Halloween… this Halloween. I wasn’t expecting that!
For me, it was fun being surprised. Kateri showed and taught me sooooo many things in my life. Some of those things were personally life changing… they played their part in making me into who I am today. But it’s the normal everyday experiences that carry the most weight. I was always amazed by how seemingly easy she could provide joy to someone else. It wasn’t effortless… but it was simply who she was.
The memory that began this whole thought train was Kateri making Halloween decorations with nieces and nephews… and then me wondering if I wanted to pull out those decorations tonight because we still have them… but I’m not gonna. I just like that I have these memories… my memories… of Kateri being Kateri… and her saying, “Bloody Bloody Fangs!” on Halloween.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ps… you can hit the like button if ya want!
It’s been a year and a half since Kateri passed away… that just seems all sorts of fucked up to me. It’s weird because at some points it seems like it has been that long (whatever that means)… and at other times it seems like yesterday. Actually, anytime I think about Kateri it seems like yesterday… which is hard… and the main reason why I have to try and manage my emotions much of the time. I can function in society without breaking down in the grocery store or coffee shop… but I still don’t care if I do. Although I haven’t become comfortable living my life without Kateri (I just want her back)… I have become more comfortable with my situation… and all the bullshit that comes along with it. Mourning the loss of a spouse is one of those “Big Life” experiences that happens to be somewhat complicated and I realize I am just settling into this whole grieving process… because it’s gonna be around for a while! Oh, it’s gonna change here and there… maybe it’ll even take a break once in a while… but it’s not going anywhere. I’m just learning to live with it.
Eighteen months. I don’t even really know what to say… which may come as a surprise to some people who know me!… but there is just so much involved it’s hard for me to corral all my thoughts on the subject! Soooooo, I decided to revert back to a list of thoughts that have popped in the noggin of this widower as I remember the last year and a half without the person who I expected to live the rest of my life with… my wife… my Kateri.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The End
ps… it wasn’t the end because I wanted to say that I hope you all have a nice evening. Maybe get a fire going, eat a chicken pot pie, throw in a movie, relax a bit in comfy clothes and realize that there are quite a few pretty darn good things in this world. Ummm… unless you don’t have any of those options… then, I guess you’re on your own… but I hope you still have a nice evening with the pretty darn good things in your world!
So yeah, I’m just gonna say it… my body hurts!… but all my winter wood is neatly stacked and tucked away in the lean-to keeping it safe from the rain… and snow… and out of site! I’ve been looking at the piles on the other side of the driveway for about two months now. I was just never motivated enough or had the time to stack it, so I made it The Agenda for this weekend. My plan was to get out there just after the sun came up and have it done by early afternoon, but sometimes things don’t go as planned. However, I’m happy with how the day went… besides being reminded that I’m getting older and that I haven’t taken care of my body in the last year and a half or so! Oh well, that’s why I did it yesterday… so that I could recover today.
Generally, I love stacking wood. It feels good being outside and doing something that helps prepare for the quickly approaching winter. I love that it warms you twice!… or three times… or four… depending on how many times you need to move it. I love that it is such an ingrained part of life here in rural Vermont. I love that people have their Wood Guys and that there is always someone looking for a Wood Guy 3 months too late! I love shooting the shit with my guy in my driveway while we sum up a year’s worth of experience in half an hour. I love that I simply tape an envelope with cash in it to the top of the chest freezer in the garage and when I notice it’s gone… my wood is paid for. Yup… the Vermont invoice! I love the memories of friends and family helping with the stacking over the years, in all the different places Kateri and I had lived… and I’ve gotten satisfaction when I’ve done it by myself. This year was a little different, though.
My idea was to stack this year’s delivery by myself since I never really asked for help or got my shit together enough to plan it out. Last year I stacked it all by myself… on one of the hottest days of the summer… because I felt I needed to prove something to myself… that I could be self sufficient. I had just learned that life can take things away pretty quickly and I was freaking out about not knowing if I would be able to stay on top of everything, so I just tried to do everything on my own. Not to mention, it always feels like you are working harder when you sweat and when you stack two cord of wood on a 97 degree Vermont summer day… well… you sweat! This year, although the wood was dropped in August, I’m glad I waited till October when it’s a tad bit cooler!
My approach to the stacking of the wood was a little different this year, as well. Almost 18 months into this new life puts me in a different space than I was last year. There has been a shift in some of the things in my life… how I view things. Although I love stacking wood and everything that I attach to it, this year it just felt more like a chore… something else that I simply have to do. It felt good to be outside and doing something that will prepare me for the future, but there wasn’t really any excitement behind it except to get the job done so that I could move on to the next project on the list. You would think after almost 18 months that I would be more on top of everything, but the onslaught of widowerhood wears you down over time and quite frankly, going from a household of two to a household of one is a lot to take on! Attach the emotional/psychological reminders you are surrounded by everyday… even more fun! But, everything still needs to get done… so I keep doing it.
Yesterday, even though I felt like the stacking of the wood was more of a chore… it turned out to be a much better day than expected. This is where I feel the need to fill you in that I did not stack ALL the wood by myself. About two thirds of the way through my neighbor Bobbi pulled up to the mailboxes to see if her tax bill had come yet and after sitting on a rock… her still in her car… and shooting the shit for a few minutes I asked if she wanted to some up to the porch and catch up. So we did! It was nice. We hadn’t seen each other in months… and she’s always entertaining! After about an hour she said she needed to go because of a FaceTime date with her kid or something, but said she would be back to help! I told her she didn’t need to, but I would take the help if I was still stacking when she was done. It wasn’t a half an hour until she came back… ready to stack some wood… thin black leather driving gloves in hand (I mentioned she’s entertaining)! It was wonderful.
For me, it was a nice surprise to end the day hanging with someone… a neighbor… when I thought I would be spending the day alone. Yes, I took more breaks as we stacked the last quarter of the pile (Bobbi happens to be in her sixties… I think), but the conversations, laughing, and reminiscing was worth the slower pace. I guess that’s one of those “sometimes it’s good to smell the roses” type things. It simply felt nice to sit on the plastic Adirondack chairs that my father had bought when they came for Kateri’s Kick-Ass Party last year, waving to cars and trucks as they drove by, and to thank a friend for taking the time to lend a hand. It was a perfect end to the day. Plus, the sun was going down at that point so I’m glad we finished it by the time the day ended! And although it felt sorta like a chore… it definitely feels good to know that my wood is stacked and I’ll be warm this winter.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ps… to let you know… it makes me feel good when people follow the blog… just sayin’.
(Just to put it out there… I still haven’t experienced that “Anger” at the situation feeling, yet… I just REALLY like to swear.)
Ok. So all I really wanted to say is that… for me… 536 days into this experience is about the time that I needed to make the decision to start looking at the future a tiny bit more. I’m tired of the “routine”. Yes, there are things I have been doing that provide me joy (guitar, sitting by the fire or on the porch, eating cake pops, etc.), but those things are literally to get through the day. Losing a spouse is crushing… in every aspect of your life… at least it has been for me. We do things… anything… to just… not… hurt. (To give you a glimpse into the emotional state of this widower… I saw Kateri’s name in a sentence I wrote… and now I’m a wreck. I love her name… how it looks… everything that fills those letters and the spaces in between. That it was who she was.) But getting back to the point… I’m ready for change. I feel the need to make some small changes… and I’m ready for some big ones, as well. (ummm, FYI… not toooo big of changes… or too many!… or ones on a whim! Even though whims make for good adventures). I just feel the need to take a step back, take a moment, and move forward with a bit more focus on having my happiness and well being in mind going into the future.
Basically, I’ve had a few challenges pop up on a few different fronts and I’m just gonna make the effort to control the things I can control, not worry about the things I can’t, and start asking myself… me… what it is I want my life to look like. I may have said all this before (sorry, I still haven’t re-read most of my posts), but I don’t think I can tell myself too many times to focus on being happy!… so that’s what I’m gonna do. Yup. The End.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The friend I was with was female… (ummm, and she still is)… so when R. asked if we were The Schoolhouse people it made for an interesting introduction when I had to explain that the schoolhouse was mine and my wife’s first home… that my friend is not my wife and that I live alone… because my wife died from cancer. Fun!
I’m just gonna preface this with my Wedding Anniversary was actually yesterday, I’ve been horrible at planning things lately, and at 10:08 in the morning… I’m still in the same comfy clothes as last night because I fell asleep on the couch! (I like to think of it as me being efficient… this way I don’t have to get undressed just to put them back on for a Sunday morning!) Long story short… well, abbreviated… this is what I did.
When I woke up, I really had no plan. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to spend the day. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to honor the date. I didn’t know how I wanted to remember the happiest day of my life in a time where the crap in life seems to overshadow and push down those good memories. I was hoping to wake up and be flooded with all the wonderful images of friends, family, and Kateri on our wedding day… but for now I guess these types of dates are just gonna remind me of how wonderful things were… of the unexplainable joy that filled my life. They remind me of what we had… what I had in my life… and what life did to my sweet sweet Kateri.
I had thought about hitting George’s in Gloucester and maybe spreading some of Kateri’s ashes in the ocean. Or maybe spending a night in Lake Placid where Kateri and I would spend a weekend if we needed outta Dodge. Once, we kinda just wanted to get out for a weekend… but also needed to do laundry! Kateri simply found a hotel with laundry services… we loaded up our dirty clothes… and spent the evening getting room service while waltzing down the hall every so often to switch it over, throw in another load, and spend another small fortune because we were doing laundry in a hotel! Oh well… it was fun… and that’s not what I did yesterday.
We got married at a place called Camp Common Ground in Vermont. It’s not toooo far away from where I live and for some reason I thought it would be nice just to go back, walk around, and remember what it was like on September 28, 2011. It was early enough that I also thought I could cruise up there and be back in time to chill at home for a bit, too! So I headed out.
It was a beautiful drive… cloudy… cool. I took the dirt roads for the first bit and just got in the right frame of mind. When I hit Montpelier I thought, “I should probably eat breakfast…?!” and then Penny Cluse in Burlington instantly came to mind… because I love it there. As I got a little further down the road, another thought popped into my head that put a smile on my face… we cooked a majority of the food for our wedding in the Penny Cluse kitchen!… how fitting that I would be eating there!… today! It’s that whole attachment to experiences thing that I seem to keep trying to do, but it worked for this! So I got to Burlington, ate my Mama Cruz’s Huevos Rancheros, caught up with a couple of people, gave and got a hug from Charles, and moved on to the next phase of the journey.
It was nice driving south from B-Town. I hadn’t driven that route for quite a while and it was interesting to see the changes… the growth. It was while I was taking in all this change that another thought popped into my head. I realized that I was going to Camp Common Ground because of the memories and experience of getting married there. 
Well, yesterday was a Saturday… and even though we got married on a Wednesday, most people get married on Saturdays… so the thought was, “I wonder if there is gonna be a wedding going on when I pull up?!”… there was. At least, that’s what I’m assuming… because there were people milling about as if they were getting ready for a wedding!
I had prepared myself for that possibility and thought about what my reaction would be. I even thought about just sliding in and start milling about myself!… Who would know I’m not with the wedding?! But instead, I just flipped a bitch before anyone could ask me how I knew the bride and groom… or bride and bride… or groom and groom… and started the journey back home. I would have loved to have stood in the spot where Kateri and I committed our lives to each other in front of our loved ones… beneath those two majestic trees holding court over the open field we had made into our church… but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I knew I had inserted any of my experience into “The Happiest Day of my Life!” experience for these strangers… for these two people who were about to embark on their own journey filled with their own ups and downs. A wedding should be pure joy. Yes, “Till Death” is sometimes inserted into the ceremony, but on your wedding day… at least on mine… it is nothing but love. It’s a celebration. It’s a time to focus on all the reasons we want to spend the rest of our lives with someone. It’s about “The Good” in life. It’s one of those days in life that you just push all the crap aside and fill the time with music, laughter, conversation, life, and love. And I don’t think there are many days like that in our lives (except for maybe the birth of a child) so I wasn’t about to be “The Ruiner” for these people!… who didn’t happen to think about my needs when they were planning their wedding!
Since plans were sorta foiled, I started the journey home with stopping by a friend’s house in the area. They weren’t home so I decided to take the scenic route home (it’s Vermont… it’s all scenic) and go over the Appalachian Gap. Luke and I would drive it every day when we worked in the Mad River Valley and the view from the top is wonderfully convenient.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
We were talking in the kitchen the other day how we couldn’t believe September is more than halfway over! Seeing the trees already trading in their bright green leaves for the vibrant reds, yellows, and oranges of Autumn Time in New England (well, Vermont) came up a bit quicker than expected… but then again… I don’t know where the summer went… or the last 17 months.
I kinda get annoyed with how we all talk about not knowing where the time went… like we were caught off guard that time didn’t stop for us… that nature didn’t take a break. But I also think we focus on the time because we live good lives, with good people, with good experiences… and we hate that that time is limited. We find ourselves in disbelief that we didn’t take advantage of seeing this person or talking to that person… or going ziplining, parachuting, to the beach, out to a nice dinner, or to the Snoop Dogg and Friends Tour featuring Warren G as they celebrate 25 years of Doggystyle (a classic album). The missed opportunities are amplified as we attach the passage of time to them as a gauge to the success of us “taking advantage of life” or not. Ya, there are all sorts of things I wish I had done in the last 17 months… but I can’t dwell on those things too much… and I am trying to not be too hard on myself as I wrestle with figuring out this new life… in a new time.
Seventeen months. In some regards, it simply doesn’t feel like Kateri has been gone for a year and 5 months… in most regards, actually. Although I have woken up every single day without her, it feels like just yesterday I was able to feel her skin, her hair, her love… without having to remember it.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I’ll make this short n sweet since I had no plans on opening up the computer in bed when I woke up this morning! It was a Facebook post that sorta hit me… and I subsequently sorta lost it. It was from my sister and she was talking about how you don’t just marry your spouse… you become part of a family. She posted this because my brother-in-law’s mother passed away… her mother-in-law… and it just made me think about how death touches us all the time… from all sorts of different angles.
I know my sister is hurting from the loss, but she wasn’t who I focused on at first. My heart sank for my brother-in-law… because he just lost his mom. There was a flood of emotions as I read her post, but it was the thought (and my own made up image) of my sister holding her husband… consoling him… loving him… and showing him that she loves him that hit me. Her being there for him. Her being his wife. And him being a husband who is needing to look to his wife for strength, love, and support.
I love my brother-in-law. He is a good man. A strong man. A good father. A good husband. A good person… a friend. He is family… and he just lost his mom. I’m glad he has my sister to be there for him… she’s one tough cookie. Oh, I’m sure she’ll have her moments of weakness and he’ll need to be there for her, as well, but she’ll be ok. They are both pretty amazing people, a pretty amazing team… with an impressively resilient family.
One part of relationships is being there for each other in all sorts of situations. It can get messy and confusing like having to be there for your wife even though it’s your mother that passed away… but death affects everyone involved… and we all deal with it differently.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
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pps… and I hope you have a good day.
I took three days off of work last week… I felt that I needed to. I’ve been trying to take some time off during the summer, but it just didn’t really happen until this week. I’ve been feeling like I need a bit of time to address some of the obstacles this new life has put in front of me. It’s strange for me to think that it has 497 days… because I face it every single day. So at points it still feels like it literally just happened… and other times I can feel the space growing between points in the timeline. Either way, at the beginning of my Mini Vacation I had no plans on painting my bedroom… but I’m glad I did.
Kateri and I have rented a room in a house with meat heads in Burlington, slept in a studio above a garage attached to a large empty house… on an air mattress in Monkton, slept in a loft in Starksboro (our first stand alone house… we felt so grown up), had a king size bed in our “Secluded Apartment” at the ranch in CO… the squirrels in our room weren’t the worst part… it was the racist and untrustworthy managers. We stayed on our friend’s futon up Four Mile Canyon until we found our little cabin in Ned… where we signed our lease in green colored pencil… and had no jobs at the time. Loved that place… and the people. We stayed in our friend’s basement apartment in Huntington (well, Hanksville… but only people in Hanksville care about those specifics) when we came back to Vermont… where we could hear the kiddos riding their three wheeled machines in a circle through the kitchen, back hallway, living room, front hallway… and kitchen again…. as we laid in bed with smiles on our faces at 6:32am. Our next bedroom was just an open second floor loft with a staircase in the middle. Actually, it was more of a glorified ladder, but it had a railing to hold on to! Side story… I heard Kateri fall down those “stairs” one night when I had forgotten my keys and had to wake her up by calling to her loudly from outside and knocking on the door as I stood in the darkness. When you can hear something like that, your fiancé (at the time) hitting the floor, but aren’t able to see what’s going on… well, I just about broke down the door. Our next place was The Condo… where, from our bed, we could hear the horses run back and forth in the arena on certain mornings. On other mornings… you simply smelled the shit.
The next place we would lay our heads… our next bedroom…. would be in our little red schoolhouse. It’s funny to think about all the places we’ve lived, all the places we’ve slept… and then to think about where I am stretched out right now. I just can’t believe how much is packed into this little corner of the house. Our first night sleeping on the mattress on the floor… of our first home. Moving the bed around every couple of months to find the best light. Figuring out who’s clothes will go where. Those Sunday mornings of laying in bed with coffee as we planned out our day… and dreamed about our future… between runs to fetch a fresh Cup of Joe for one another……………………. And then Cancer.
Three days after Kateri died Maria helped me go through all of (well, most of) Kateri’s clothes. It had always worked out that Kateri would keep her clothes in our bedroom and I would keep mine usually in the spare room… if we had one. It’s not like she had a ton of clothes, it was more that we lived in small spaces! When she first died, I didn’t see the point of waking up every morning being surrounded by her clothes as I would go to another room to grab mine for the day. The thought had hit me that there was absolutely no reason for her clothes to be hanging in the closest… or to fill the two dressers in the room. She wasn’t coming back…. but I had to keep waking up there. I wanted to start my day in my space… with my clothes… because this was now my life. I have a house and twenty years of memories that are constantly reminding me of Kateri and what we had. I needed to chisel out a little space that was just mine as I tried to figure out this new life… so I figured I would start in the place I wake up every morning… and where I end my day every night… when I don’t fall asleep on the couch!
For me, going through Kateri’s clothes wasn’t as hard as I expected. Maria would ask if she could take this or that for herself or a family member and I would say “Sure” or “No”. I had seen Kateri in these clothes throughout my entire life with her and we generally remember people dressed… so there is a huge attachment for me between Kateri and what she wore… her “Style”. In the moment, it was simple… I couldn’t get rid of much… but I didn’t have to either. So, Maria and I went from drawer to drawer and into the closet. We talked, we laughed, we remembered, we cried… and then we put her clothes into green bins which sat in the corner of my bedroom for 16 and a half months… until I painted.
Kateri and I hadn’t gotten to painting the bedrooms of our first home. We started with the downstairs, the laundry area, second bathroom, upstairs hallways, and kitchen. There were other things we wanted/needed to do with the house and at the time and some of those projects took priority over painting like building chicken coops, fire pits, small stone patios, and paths through the woods. There was also the bathroom remodel that started with Kateri putting the first hole in the wall before Cancer… and me finishing five months after her death. Life was just sorta happening I guess… and we never really thought about there being a timeline. So this last Monday morning, as I was talking to a friend and trying to come up with a game plan for my Mini Staycation, the painting of the bedroom project came up and I decided to go ahead and try to get it done at some point before I went back to work on Friday.
I was actually really excited about it! It was fun trying to figure out what colors I wanted to surround myself with as I stared at a wall filled with little pieces of paper at Home Depot. Another side note… this was a time I REALLY wished Kateri was with me!… she had an eye for that type of shit, but it was still fun doing it on my own for the first time.
I wanted to wake up in a warm space. I wanted it to be bright. I figured it would help put my brain in a positive space the moment I woke up!… or when I called it a day. I was gonna go with a yellowish color, but the hallway is “Mustard” and that would’ve been just too much so I went with green. Well, actually, “Granny Smith Apple” and “Spring Leaf”. Let me tell you… there must be some very green apples out there! Yup, it’s definitely bright!… it’s growing on me.
I like doing projects because of the instant gratification when you finish. After I had decided on paint color, got together all my brushes and other painting tools, I had remembered about taping! Jesus… I forgot about how much time that takes! I also wanted to do the job right so at some point during the evening I bit the bullet and started to meticulously cover trim, doors, and floors with masking tape. Although the thought of just “being careful” had crossed my mind… I didn’t wanna risk it. I knew I would hear Kateri’s voice every time I saw a little bit of green paint creeping into the wood trim.
I ended up painting until 2:34am… with the assistance of Lizzo and various 90’s Alternative Rock artists providing me with a beat to keep moving to coming from the little JBL speaker I had gotten for Kateri when she was in the hospital… but finally… it was done. It sorta reminded me of when I laid the tile in the bathroom throughout the night when Kateri was in the hospital. I kinda like plugging away… getting stuff done… when the schoolhouse lights are surrounded by darkness and the rest of the world is sleeping. I like being in my own little world once in a while. Sometimes… I need it.
I feel good about the job and again… the color is growing on me. I guess it doesn’t actually matter if the color is growing on me or not… I’m not gonna paint it again for quite a while… but luckily I kinda like it. Kateri’s clothes are now in the spare bedroom across the hall… still in the green bins. Although it feels good that they are out of the bedroom because it allows more light in and I like not seeing them stacked in the corner every morning… I still can’t move them to the garage or anywhere else outside of the house for storage. I like having them close to me… even though I don’t look at them or anything. They provide me with a bit of comfort. And no… I don’t wear them or hold them or rub them up against my face… yet.
It was hard taking another step into this new life… changing something in my home… for me. It’s weird. It’s strange. It’s odd thinking about how I want to set up the schoolhouse in a way that would provide me with a space to remember Kateri… my wife… as well as keeping my own needs and wants in mind. Yes, there were definitely some struggles and emotional moments as I was transforming my bedroom into Fern Gully, but it also felt good to take that little step… to provide myself with a new space… to create a space… in my new life.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I left work an hour early on Thursday to unexpectedly drive up to B-Town for something. Work was fine, kind of a normal Thursday for me… did some ordering, sent off invoices, had a talk or two… but it wasn’t until I got up north and was sitting at my friend’s that it hit me… 16 months… since the death of Kateri.
It was kinda strange. I’m always aware when the day comes around… the 22nd of each month… but for some reason my brain was occupied with other things all morning long. I also figure that as the months start to build up… they hit me less and less. I’m learning to live this new life and as time goes by these dates are more just reminders of what it is I’m going through, what it is that I used to have… than the stinging slap in the face or punch in the gut that would debilitate me for “X” amount of time every month.
I’m not putting much weight on the whole “I wasn’t thinking about Kateri” the entire day… I think that is probably a natural progression in this process. Of course I miss and love Kateri, but I realized I’m not gonna be a wreck every single month the 22nd comes around. Sometimes I will be a wreck… sometimes I won’t be. Life kinda happens… and keeps going… and sometimes it takes priority over the past. For me, 16 months was just another perfect moment in this pile of poop.
My friend and I were sitting on his back deck catching up and trying to figure something out, his daughter was playing with a neighbor friend inside, when I checked the time on my phone. That’s when I saw the date and it sorta hit me… 16 months. Yes, when I saw the date and realized the significance… I had to take a moment. I could feel the lump in the throat. I could feel the eyeballs get a little more moist… like when you can feel the tears holding onto the bottom of your eyelid… but they haven’t jumped off yet. A million memories flooded my mind for less than a minute… I took a breath… and we kept talking.
I loved the fact that I was going through this little unexpected episode and the person I was talking to, the person who’s home I was at… was the person who married Kateri and I. We hadn’t seen each other for more than a few months and I just thought it was kinda 
cool that he was the one I was with when I realized the date. It’s stoopid little things like that that I have come to absolutely love… the cool little memories some situations have given me since the passing of Kateri. They provide me comfort… when those things happen. It makes me feel good. Whether it’s accurate or not… it gives me another reason to think, “It’ll all be ok.”. Sometimes life takes away the things we think we can’t live without. When it does, sometimes it gives us back tiny little things that help us keep going… we just need to make sure we are paying attention.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
It was a Monday morning and we were laying in bed doing what we did on Monday mornings… Kateri was looking at bathrooms to come up with ideas for ours and I was probably looking at Craigslist for jobs, canoes, motorcycles, boats, or the random things that people sell. We were sorta coming up with a game plan for the day. It was our one day off together and we always spent them with each other doing mostly nothing… it was perfect.
Kateri wanted to build a cold frame for herbs… or lettuce… or something else we could eat… so we started to make a list of things we would need to go and get at the store to put together something that would hold dirt. Now, did I mention it was our one day off together…? because we also usually just laid in bed for a bit, drank coffee (each of us taking turns running for refills), and pretty much got into a laid back frame of mind… which also made us not want to leave the Schoolhouse. So… I started listing off things in the garage or over at the potting shed which could be used to make a box… with a lid… with the hope of not having to go out amongst “the people”!
We were actually quite proud of ourselves for using what we had! I had leftover lumber probably from the chicken coop. In one of the little plastic bins/cups that Kateri had gotten for me when we bought our house… with the hope of providing me with an organizational tool for the garage I was so excited to finally have… we had found a couple of hinges. For the top…?… it only seemed appropriate to use one of the many old windows we had laying around. (We had windows because in 2011 we had gone around picking them up from various strangers so that we could build our “church” for our wedding. No… neither one of us is religious. Kateri always said she was a “recovering catholic”). And Kateri had some garden mesh/fabric stuff… because she gardened… to line the box with. We had all the fixin’s to build our cold frame! And there was no need to leave the hill!
It was a good day. Nothing special. Nothing really out of the ordinary. Just a Monday. We were so proud of ourselves for just making do. Kateri was so happy to have a cold frame where she could grow things next to the front deck… and beside her gardens. She was putting down roots… at our first home. It made her happy. It made me happy to see her and to help make her happy. Life was good… and we were happy together just doing what we did… on a Monday.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Well, currently sitting in my garage because it’s cooler than the front porch right now and I don’t wanna be inside. I just let the chickens out so that they could feel the grass between their toes… and eat all the ticks. Today is one of those days that I’m willing to risk having to deal with death so that the chickens can enjoy being chickens. (when you live in the woods… there are creatures that rather enjoy eating chicken for dinner… hopefully not tonight, though!) Yup, today I’m just going with the flow. It’s kind of what I’ve been doing for the last week or two… which has been both good and… well… aggravating on some fronts.
Independence Day was fantastic. A friend and I had a wonderfully Vermonty 4th of July with parades (well… a parade), swimming holes, creamies, grilled burgers, macaroni salad, homemade key lime pie (not my home), fireworks and all! It kinda sucked getting a flat tire on the way down to the fireworks… and having the wheel decide it didn’t wanna come off for a bit even though the lug nuts were on the asphalt… but the spare made it on and we made it in time to watch shit explode! Personally, I love the fact that we both sorta rolled with it. We tried something with the tire… didn’t work… I tried it again! Oh hey, my AAA is non-existent…?… let’s try yours! Once we actually got to the point that a tow truck was coming, I just started to kick one side of the tire and it popped off! So we canceled the wrecker, threw on the full size spare (thank God… or something… that it was full size), drove to the town just south of the parking lot we were in, and enjoyed the rest of the evening! Rolling with it!… until it cost me $303 to throw 4 old tires on the Jeep and to replace the sensor that the flat tire destroyed. (Actually still rolling with it at that point… just reluctantly)
A couple of days later, Saturday, I woke up with tears puddled up on my eyeballs and lids. Now… I just need to say… this was one of the stranger “Widower” experiences I have had. I guess it isn’t really all that strange, but it hasn’t happened to me much… if at all… until Saturday. Oh, I’ve woken up and then started crying… but this was different. There was accumulation of salty water on my closed eye lids! When I moved my head I could feel the streams roll over my cheeks into my beard and ears.
I don’t really remember what the dream was about, it wasn’t anything serious or big, but Kateri was in it… both of us were… together. The odd part for me was that I was sorta watching this dream as a third person. There wasn’t a big event happening or anything… it wasn’t like it was our wedding… Darren2 and Kateri were for the most part just going about their lives. It was the fact that I was witnessing these two people just plugging away… and it crushed me. Neither one of them had any idea of what direction their life was gonna take… they had no idea of the pain that they both would face. The physical, psychological, and emotional pain that cancer was gonna cause Kateri… and the pain of having to live a life I (he… Darren2) didn’t plan on… nor care as much for. Seeing Darren2 and Kateri happy without the big pile of poop… before the big pile of poop plopped down… just sorta crushed me in my dream… which is something I guess can make you cry while your asleep.
And now!… I’m gonna go do something else… where there’s less mosquitos! (I feel like mosquitos should stay out of garages! Little bastards.)
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
The other evening I was going through videos on my phone that I had made last summer… when I was trying to figure out what the effe just happened to my world… and I came across this picture that I had taken on July 1st, 2018. Sooooo, that would’ve been Widower Day 70… and it’s weird to think I’m at 436 now partly because much of the last 14 and whatever months are in some ways a blur… and foggy. But I remember taking this picture because of the significance of what the date on the newspaper reminded me of… April 22nd… the day Kateri died… 70 days earlier.
It was hot that week… a year ago. Come to think of it… it’s hot right now a year later! Hmmm, maybe we should track these trends…? Anyways, it was hot… like real hot. I lost 
a chicken that week… Taco. Although she wasn’t my favorite, I thought she was the most beautiful. She just looked like a picture perfect Silver Laced Wyandotte. Bright white and black with the really red comb thing… like the ones you see in the movies! (really… I have no idea what a good looking Silver Laced Wyandotte looks like… but she sure was a purdy chicken. And… the chicken in the picture is Lil’ Bitch… she’s my favorite) Yup, poor Taco. I opened up the door to the coop… and BLAM!… dead chicken… mostly in the nesting box… little head hanging over the edge……….. it was hot. I felt pretty bad there for a bit, and then just thought… it’s a chicken… and had to move on.
Anways, while it was sweltering outside, I remember it felt somewhat nice in the garage standing on the cool concrete. I had built shelves on the east side with the hope of getting organized. My “nesting for one”. I was going through boxes that Kateri and I hadn’t yet unpacked from the move back from Ned. We always had an idea of what was in certain boxes and I when I came to the large rectangular one housing the King and Queen I decided I’d like to see them out again. These were from Kateri’s life prior to meeting me, so they had always been a part of OUR life… hanging or leaning here or there… and I just kinda thought they would be fun to have out in the schoolhouse (currently… they are in my front little plant room).
They were wrapped in newspaper… the one with the date… which is the fun part of moving from place to place… sometimes you get to be reminded of specific times in your life as the memories attached to those times get pulled from the vaults with the unwrapping of that protective layer. Sometimes you get to open up a box from multiple moves ago… like this one… which was four ago.
We had packed that box eight years ago and July 1st, 2018 was the day it was gonna get unpacked! When I noticed the date… it was just… kind of a flood of emotions and memories. Honestly, I don’t remember exactly how I reacted… I don’t think I lost it or anything… but I probably did. The one thing I know for sure is… I wasn’t gonna hold onto that crumpled up piece of eight year old newspaper for the rest of my life because it had the date Kateri died on it!… so I took a picture of it… that I’m now afraid of losing.
I’ve come to expect these little unexpected things that pop up. I’m glad that I took a picture of that newspaper and came across it a year later. I’m also glad I came across that picture… a year later… and could recognize a few of the changes I have gone through in this experience. Yes, the picture definitely made me emotional, but it was nice to think about my life with Kateri in a different time… in a different place. It made me happy. Those were happy times in 2010. Hell, I had just asked her to marry me when we were packing those boxes… we were moving back to Vermont to set roots! It was exciting! It was fun! And ya… this aint what we planned… and not what I expected… but I’m grateful for the life we had because it provides me with countless memories (in vaults somewhere) that simply put a smile on my face.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I’m just gonna say it… I just lost my shit (the emotional sobbing type) after reading someone’s post on FB. Yup, lost it. Loooosssst…… It. I was just so surprised by what this person had written! It was beautiful! It was powerful! It was posted by someone who was a part of my life in a time when I wore much smaller shoes. (well, not much smaller shoes… but smaller…. I was a kid) The post was touching, I had an attachment to the person… and there was a picture! It had all the makings of a moving moment! And then… then!… I realized it was one of those “copy and paste if you stand for/care for/believe in/proud of/hashtag whatever” things!… and everything changed.
Now, I need to say thanks to whoever wrote that little note… it was fantastic… but it was kind of a weird experience. I found it amusing that I put soooo much into that post… emotionally… in the beginning. One moment I’m losing my mind thinking about how beautifully my friend had shared their feelings about this or that because it made me think about Kateri… and then the realization came and it all stopped… and I laughed at myself. (memories of the person and her age now, her family, how the words made me think of Kateri, the wonderful picture of this woman and her big ass smile… all played a part in my dramatic reaction… I think)
Part of it is my lack of social media participation in the whole “copy this” or “play that” scene. The other part is it went from all of that… everything that I had attached to the post… all the nostalgia… to simply words on a screen that someone took the time to copy and paste. Still a moving post… just not the same… for me.
Just so the record is straight… I love that this person copied/pasted/and participated with this particular post. And the reason the post meant so much to me at first is because of my love for this person and I could see them sharing the wisdom themselves. It was just funny to me how my mind went in one direction… and then abruptly stopped. It just sorta slammed on the brakes so that it could see where it was… and then it realized it was on the good ol’ trusty roller coaster again.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ummm… I’m the one who over cooked it when I was heating it back up
This simply… hit me. I miss her. And right now… it hurts.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I wish I could fill in the details of what all that evening entailed… a later date perhaps.
(Yup, when I started this post it was NOT Mother’s Day… and now it is) Simply… after the one year mark… things are different… I feel different. I was gonna go into all the ways “this” has changed… or how “that” has been replaced by “those”, but there will be other times for all that jive. I just felt the need to say that through this experience, every once in a while there is a tangible feeling when a shift takes place. Kinda of like on the first day I didn’t cry… or when six months hit and I felt like I had a little bit of control over my life… and had to make decisions for myself. Although there is no destination, there’s this tedious little march going on that keeps pushing me forward and with every step, I overanalyze it… and then adapt to make the next step.
As I have flubbed my way through this, there are times that I just feel lighter. Sometimes it’s happens when I come to a realization of something that has been weighing down my brain. Sometimes it was just getting through a holiday or birthday or our anniversary. For right now… for today… I attribute my “I simply feel a little better!” state of mind to two main things… getting past a date… and a text saying, “GOOD, GOOD NEWS!!!!”.
Now, there are actually a gazillion little things I believe that contribute to noticeably feeling a little better… i.e. getting most of the yard raked, not needing to build a fire every night, rearranging the living room, meeting new people from all walks of life… in my new life, SPRING!!, the fact that I’m still on top of sh… stuff, that I haven’t acquired some strange illness that causes a baby’s hand… and arm… to grow out of the top of my head! (although… could be useful) Yup, there are a bunch of things that come into play, but currently it’s the continuous passage of Time during my tedious little march that helps me get through certain checkpoints. For me, hitting the one year mark without Kateri felt like I was just gently pushed into a new chapter of life. Of course, it might just be a new paragraph, but might as well use the universally accepted homogenized term to reference a point in the story line. Hopefully it’s a long story… and as long as there are more pages to turn… I don’t really care what chapter or paragraph I’m on!
The text… “GOOD, GOOD NEWS!!!!”… came from my father… and he wasn’t lying. We found out that my mother had cancer (lung cancer that had also traveled to her brain) 4 or five months before we found the sh… stuff (really trying not to cuss!) in Kateri’s head. For me, it has been quite the experience having to process and accept that the two most important people in my life were handed the cancer card…. and cancer is a fucked up thing. Once you live with cancer in your world, you begin to see not only how prevelant and inconsistant the disease is, but also how many people it simply affects. It’s a strange trip. When I got the phone call that they had found something in my mom’s lung… I was devastated. When it hit Kateri… and then she died… well, I didn’t think about what was worse than “Devastated”, but I felt it. Luckily… time does help.
Sometimes, you just have to hold on for a while and let the time pass.
If you do, sometimes the big pile of shit get’s a couple of shovel loads taken out of it by three simple words… written in all caps… with exclamation marks. Sometimes… “GOOD, GOOD NEWS!!!!” pertains to the best news you’ve heard in a year and 19 days… at least for me. What’s the “GOOD, GOOD NEWS!!!!” you ask? The docs could no longer see any tumors in my mom’s brain!… yup, and we’ll take it!
Honestly, it’s been one of those roller coaster months, but for now I’m just gonna allow the “GOOD, GOOD NEWS!!!!” to stick around for a while and give me another thing to smile about. Today is Mother’s Day…. and I feel fortunate that when I’m done here I have the opportunity to pick up the phone… and talk to my mom… because I love her. (yes… I’m a momma’s boy. When I was a kid, I remember crying after a swim lesson… not because I was afraid of water or got it up my nose or anything, but since I was having so much fun in the water… I forgot about my mom… and I didn’t like that.) There’s a lot of crap out there, but the good is hangin’ around, too. Sometimes it’s so good… you have to say it twice.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I’ve been thinking a lot about other widowers and widows lately… more so than in the past. I think that the whole “Time heals” bullshit has something to do with that. Plus, I belong to two support groups (1 just widowers, 1 widowers/widows) and it’s kinda hard not to feel for people who are going through… or who have been through… what I’m experiencing when they pop up all over your Gosh Darn (trying to be respectful) Facebook feed! In all seriousness, I’m not exactly a “support group” kinda guy and I definitely don’t engage as much as other people, but the names on the screens and the words of support I see them write to strangers has provided me with an unmeasurable amount of encouragement for not only my life to keep moving forward, but for theirs as well! It has just been one of those things that has pleasantly caught me by surprise.
I’m at a point where some of the fog is starting to lift and my mind isn’t fully consumed by figuring out how to just “survive”… the shock is dissipating, I guess. A few other people who have lost their loved ones (spouses) have reached out to me… and I can’t tell you how wonderful that makes me feel… that they found some sort of connection to what I was saying or that it put them, at the least, a little bit at ease knowing they weren’t the only ones going through this horrendous experience. They could see there are other people who somewhat understood their pain… which is unrelenting at the beginning of this life changing event.
Soooo, on this beautifully overcast and chilly Vermont Sunday morning I decided to jump back on the ol’ blog and update the “My Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning” page with adding the first 6 days of notes from my experience being alone in the world again after nearly 20 years with Kateri. I’m currently in the first anniversary month of my Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning and it’s nice to use it as sort of a gauge to how I’ve changed, coped, and dealt with this slap in the face from life. I’ll admit… it’s a little strange looking back at these notes a year later, but I love the fact that I can remember most of it so clearly. Of course, revisiting pictures makes for a lovely emotional Sunday morning… but it’s nice to recognize that it’s a different time, it’s a different space, and that I’m different. I don’t know if I can say “Better”… there’s a lot that goes into that… but I can definitely say things have changed… and that I’m ok. I’m may even be good… ish… and I hope you all are, too.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Widower Day 6… (April 28, 2018). Woke up at 6:58am on the couch… in the same position.
Took truck to recycling in Thetford
a. Broke the law (not my town’s dump… shhh), saw Joan, she turned right. I figured if she was going to the orchard that it would give me an in… so I followed her, so I could meet a neighbor. Laying down foundation.
b. John and Peggy
c. Beautiful view
d. Sprayed me with tick shit. New thought… I am going to constantly be paranoid of ticks since I now don’t have that person to Tick Check me (Tick Check Yourself before You Wreck Yourself…).
Took Jeep to Kmart for more green bins. (For Kateri’s clothes)
Drove to Hannaford’s in Bradford. Figured I should have at least a little bit of food I know I would eat, but don’t have to make.
a. Interesting how I’m a cook, but I was buying things I only needed to heat up.
b. First real shopping trip shopping for just me… odd sensations, realizations.
Went to Local Buzz for a sandwich.
a. Abby made it for me. Came up from behind me.
b. Same approach as Wild Hill Orchard… I need to step out of my comfort zone if I want the keep the same types of things that Kateri provided for me. I would pretty much never go get a sandwich by myself and bring it home to eat.
c. Got a pack of smokes from The Bliss (not sure if that is the name of it).
Called Will… he and Kate came over.
a. Brought enchiladas, mole, guac, beans, chips
b. Chatted in the kitchen and then on the deck… sunny, warm
c. Will called an hour later mentioning that he can always come over and we can just smoke a joint.
Tidied the garage.
a. As I type this, I realize it is giving me “purpose”… something to do, something that keeps my mind going… even if it is about what I am going through.
b. Built a support for plywood. Moved wood to middle so that I have space to move around and to start setting up the garage for the beginning of my life.
c. Threw scrap wood in black cart, baby rocker to shed, wheelbarrow.
Flipping through pictures, I came across the 3 I had taken of Kateri (the morning she died)… didn’t shock me as much as I expected it to. I was conflicted about taking the pictures, but I felt I need to have the option of being able to see her… I find the picture beautiful with the army blanket… I just love her and found it to be somewhat peaceful.
a. Deleted one photo
b. Didn’t take any other photos at Palliative.
Had a Fire.
a. Figured… why not? I’ve got a fire pit. Burnt all scrap wood from garage except planter box and piece of house (would be good to start the next fire).
b. Light out for the whole thing. Sun just starting to go down. Chickens just roosting up… I watched them march to the coop.
c. Used old gasoline to start… ya, stoopid… but kinda fun (kept thinking “WFC Style”). It got a little big at one point… need to expand the ring.
d. Looked around—this is all mine… just an odd feeling and made me think about the fact that I wouldn’t have this without Kateri… no bank would give me a loan off of what I make. Lucky that I have all of this in a time I am dealing with such sorrow and loss. I’ll figure the money shit out… hopefully.
Took a shower. Facetimed my P’s. Planned on watching Justice League (Kateri loved superhero movies… those where really the only types of movies we would go out and see… “big screen movies”), facetimed with Keith.
a. I haven’t really been able to cry when I’m alone. Talking with my P’s and Keith I got a little weepy… I was able to release a little. It’s strange all the different types of emotions and angles and just “things” the brain does as it tries to cope. I feel mellower emotionally, but I can’t tell if it’s any easier.
b. Fell asleep on the couch again (I’m writing this from bed on Sunday… at 12:30pm. Came up at 6:30 for a “Sunday morning” and haven’t really left except for 2 smokes… and had to wash my hand after each one).
Some thoughts during the day/night:
a. Willing to invest my personal time in KAF if they are willing to invest in my future… hell, I can work at home on shit and it won’t take time away from Kateri these days.
b. I still get a kick out of numbers (1234) and remember how we would text the time back and forth.
c. Realized I haven’t looked at myself in the mirror for a while… don’t even know the last time. I looked hairier to myself.
d. People are telling me “You did good”… no regrets type shit, but I don’t really care that they feel I have been a good husband/partner/”soulmate” through this and through our life. I only care about what Kateri would think… and I will never be able to ask her about that, if I gave her enough love/support… if she was proud of my actions through life and through this big pile of shit. (I am now crying). Just one of those mindfuck type things. The tears feel good.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I’m not gonna do this for the next fifteen days or anything, but I figured it was kinda cool to revisit a year ago… that whole, “look at how much has happened since then” type thing. This has been an emotional three days, but they’ve been good. Emotional… but not exactly too much more than any other day or what was to be expected. The flood of love and support is somewhat overwhelming… in the best possible way!… but definitely adds to the waterworks.
Really, I just wanted to start year two by remembering Day 1 of this new life. Day 1 was… strange. I was exhausted. I was in shock… and in a fog. You would think it is the hardest day… the day after losing a spouse, but for me… I was numb. I just floated through it. It’s when you come out of that fog and have to live life again is when it gets tough… stoopid reality sets in.
I read through these note… thought about that day… looked back at the last three days… and I’ve gotta say that I feel good! I’m proud of myself for getting through this first year, by doing it however I thought I needed to do it. People say there isn’t a road map for this type of shit… and from what I can tell, they’re correct! I’m glad I was able to bushwhack for a bit… find my way… and I feel like there are gonna be some open spots up ahead so I’ll stay on the “as positive as possible” train for now. There are no more first anniversaries… there will no longer be days that I can say, “On this day last year, Kateri was… yada, yada, yada… alive.”. Time is a funny thing… and I’m starting to think it likes to fuck with you.
My favorite part about Widower Day 1 was Heman. Kateri and I had never met Heman… I guess Kateri just hasn’t… but we spoke about him often as we made up stories from the limited information we had acquired through the two and a half years since buying the schoolhouse. He’s a neighbor just a few houses down the road, has the bushy… somewhat frizzy big white beard, is a machinist who loves old cars (he has a beautiful old Studebaker… it’s gorgeous!), and there are stories that he has lists… that you don’t wanna be on. Kateri’s high school (?… I think) French teacher used to live down the road and he told us that once he saw his name in the ol’ 18 spot. Some time had gone by, him and Heman caught up… AND HE SAW HE WAS NUMBER 4! Didn’t know what it meant… but didn’t think it was good!
Heman is just one of those characters in life that everyone has a story about. Honestly, a vast majority of the stories I have heard from various friends and neighbors put him on a pretty high pedestal. He’s a good, honest man that will help you out if you need it… and yes, I kinda wanna be him when I grow up! (I mean, I wanna be Braedy’s dad, as well… but that’s a whole nother story that involves tractors and tighty whiteys)
I remember it was brilliantly sunny that morning… it felt nice… after, well… losing Kateri the night before. When I’m outside, especially when I’m on the porch, I wave to everyone who drives past the schoolhouse… and this loud ass purple Chevy was no exception. I watched it go by and when I heard that it stopped out front and was backing up it was kinda like… ok? this may be interesting?!… not knowing who it was at first, but when I saw that big ol’ beard… I knew exactly who it was. I can’t tell you the impact this encounter has had on my life. Although I was in a daze from just losing Kateri… I felt a smidgen of comfort. I’ve gotta tell you, Heman was nowhere near the bubble of people I thought I was gonna encounter that day, but he probably had the most profound affect on me. Day one of my new life… just happened to be the day I got to meet Heman.
Heman: Hallo… My name’s Heman… I live just down the road. Figured enough time has gone by that introductions were in order.
Me: Heman… I can’t tell you how fantastic I think it is that you stopped by today, but I’ve just gotta let you know that my wife passed away last night… and things are a little strange.
Heman: Oh, oh my gosh… I’m so sorry for stopping. I’m so sorry for your loss.
Me: That’s ok Heman. This is why Kateri and I bought this house… our first home… to set roots. I think it’s absolutely perfect that on the first day of my new life… on day one… I got to meet a neighbor… and it was you. I just wish Kateri could have been here to meet you, too.
Heman: I’m just so sorry for your loss man. If I still drank I’d invite you down to the porch for a beer, but I gave that up blah, blah, blah 2012.
Me: That’s ok Heman… I haven’t had a drink since September 9, 2006… but I smoke pot?!
Heman: SO DO I!!
Yup… and Heman basically got back into his loud ass purple Chevy, cigarillo coming dangerously close to his perfectly unkept beard, and went off to do whatever it is that Heman does.
It’s been a long strange year… and now, I’m ready to see what the next year has to offer, but this is what I did the day after Kateri died. I remember it being strange in itself to open up a computer in bed to make these notes… we never had “screens” in bed!
ps-I have yet to hang out on Heman’s porch… maybe in Year 2!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 1… Woke up at 10:00am-to alarm-Dr. Phil moment
Just Scottie, Maria, and myself
a. Heman drove past, stopped, backed up, and pulled into our driveway.
b. Figured it had been long enough and introductions should happen
c. Told him my wife passed away.
d. We bought this home to set roots and it meant the world to me that a neighbor… Heman… would stop by the DAY AFTER Kateri died meant so much to me as I am in the first day of my new life
e. Scottie left around 12:45PM
Bobbi stopped by after checking her mail. Sat on the deck
Keith and Michelle came by. They brought me a BLT hoagie
Moose and Fam came by.
a. Went over cremation papers… decided on Wednesday.
b. Made list of who would be invited to cremation
c. Tony’s first time to the house.
d. This is what a “home” is… a place for friends and family to gather… I’m glad I had that realization.
Chichi and Benjamin came by with 6 pizzas
a. Gave me a… card.
Never really left the front deck
Got sun burnt on my face
Facetimed with my family… they were at Dina’s house.
Went to bed at 5:00am
Widower Notes n Thought:
It’s 7:35 in the morning… I’ve been up for about 47 minutes… and I don’t know what the fuck to say. I do know that the first text of the day came in a bit ago… and I’ve been crying those good ol’ crocodile tears ever since. Although I don’t really care if people see or hear me being emotional, I am sorta glad that I don’t have people walking past my house on their way to work or school hearing me as I sob uncontrollably while making odd noises through my mouth because my nose is so plugged up with snot! Kateri always said, “Trees make better neighbors!”… and right now I’m glad they are the ones right outside my window listening to me cope and come to terms with the fact that I haven’t been able to hear her laugh, hold her hand while walking down the dirt road, or kiss her goodnight… like I did every… single… night. It has been a year since Kateri has not been on this earth. For 365 days I have come home to an empty house filled with memories of a life that life decided to take away from me… from all of us. It hurts. It’s painful. It’s something I don’t want… but it’s what I’ve got… and I’m glad life didn’t take away the memories.
In the winter of 1998/99… December… Wyoming… I watched Kateri walk from The Chalet (female employee housing) down to the lodge, from the window of The Stables (male employee housing). She had on her blue snow pants, her white winter coat with the god awful neon patch work, and her funky hat from Nepal or some place (I should remember where she got it… she told me… it’s just not coming to me!) keeping her head warm. Kateri would sometimes tilt her head as she walked. I found the image to be calming. We didn’t really know each other at the time… we had just met. At the time, there weren’t any romantic inclining’s yet… she was just someone I found to be interesting. She was unique. There was something different about her. Thankfully, we got along and became friends!
Twenty years later, I love the fact that the image of Kateri strolling through the snow is still clear as day in my mind… and that it was just the beginning of her filling my life with friendship, purpose, guidance, and love. It has been the surprise of my life watching this young twenty something woman from the east coast walking through the snow turn into the most important thing that ever came into my world. I am grateful and lucky that I am the one who got to spend the rest of Kateri’s life with her… I am fortunate in that way… I just wish she didn’t have to leave.
For the last 365 days… and for the four months and three days before that… I have been consumed with either the experience of watching and being a part of cancer ravish Kateri’s body and brain, the loss of Kateri, or trying to figure out how to survive without her. It’s been a struggle. I don’t eat, I find it a challenge to put myself to bed, I’m stressed out worrying about my future, my job, my home. I’m sad, I’m confused, and I hurt… this process physically hurts… but I’m here. I’m here surrounded by the memories that Kateri and I made with each other as we built our life together. She gave me twenty years of memories to draw upon when I feel the need to be close to her. She filled our home with relics which are attached to experiences over those twenty years which I can hold in my hand, I can feel, I can smell… I can touch. Kateri will always be with me… a part of me. That’s just what happens. This last year has sucked balls, but the great things that Kateri brought into this world… into my world… are still here… even if she isn’t. That is how we hold on… to the people we love more than ourselves. That is how I hold on to Kateri… because I miss her… I love her… and I always will.
ps… the video is kinda dark, but it did happen to be night time… and we were just sitting in our driveway. This is simply a minute and 18 seconds of Kateri being Kateri. Yup, sometimes she just had to finish out a song! (love ya Nina)
Although Kateri called herself a “Recovering Catholic”… she still loved the holidays and Easter was no exception. It didn’t matter if we were home or happened to be away in some dumpyish hotel near the ocean, visiting friends back in The Rockies, or with family anywhere… there was always an Easter Basket in the morning. I’ve got to mention that Kateri loved baskets, and if there was a holiday where she could make someone happy by putting little gifts and candy in a basket… she was all over it! The gravy being she got to keep the baskets afterwards!
Sorry, just gotta detour for a sec because one of Kateri’s favorite Easter events IN THE WORLD! just popped into my head. We have a couple of friends who throw an Adult Easter Egg Hunt! Now, first of all, Kateri loved these two people. (The husband was actually the nurse who was there when they had to tip her upside down to put an IV in her neck when her kidneys failed in 2004… after our trip to the Dominican. It was a scary time and she was so thankful that someone she knew was taking care of her… and that it was him. He had ever since held a special place in her heart). Anyways, these guys have some land in the hills and invite friends over for an evening/night of festivities. You see… the Easter Egg hunt happens once it get’s dark!… At night!… with flashlights n shit!… on a few acres in rural Vermont consisting of yard, woods, creek, pond, fields, barns, and culverts! It was probably one of our favorite experiences ever… I mean, at least in the top 250… there are a lot to choose from, but it’s up there!
It was hilarious. I think about 50 of us… ish… packed into the kitchen and living room of their little old farmhouse and waited for two things. 1. For it to get dark and 2. For John to come back from hiding the prize which would provide us with a “winner” of the hunt… The Black Egg. Actually it was shaped liked a kidney, but it did the job. It was obviously the best color for an Adult Easter Egg Hunt at night… and it was able to hold the prize of a couple hundred bucks for the winner!
It was nice for everyone to catch up in that time, to meet new people, to share stories… but once John came back!… it was on!… in the most polite, friendly, and supportive way an Adult Easter Egg Hunt could go! The fact that it was in the dark just killed Kateri and I! They would literally walk into the yard… drop eggs… and not find them till the next morning. You could see headlamps pointed straight down scouring fence lines, woods, around out buildings… and in them. You could hear the giggles of grown ups as they found and opened eggs filled with candy, lottery tickets, and booze. There was outright laughter echoing in the darkness as people tromped through the creek and slipped on the slick rocks. The year we participated, The Black Egg was inside… INSIDE… the 6 foot culvert running beneath the dirt road! It was simply one of those fun things in life that take you by surprise when you realize just how good of an idea it is… that everything about it is fun! Basically, it’s a night filled with good people who are simply trying to find money in a black kidney… in the dark… while drunk and stoned. (yes, it’s also fun sober… just not as fun… or challenging)
Last year, Easter fell on the 1st. It was actually three weeks before Kateri passed. It’s weird to think about… she wasn’t in Palliative Care yet. Heck, we hadn’t even received the bad news of no more options yet. Maria had just gotten to our house the day or two before… I think. She came to help… and to be with her sister. It was the three of us for the last three weeks of Kateri’s life… going through it… together. I am forever grateful to Maria for being here for many reasons, but it really comes down to the fact that I think Kateri needed her to be here. Kateri needed Maria to be with her as she was preparing to leave this earth… she needed her help… her support… her love. And Maria… needed to be with Kateri.
It’s because of Maria that I have this video taken last Easter after we had spent the morning drinking coffee and going through our Easter Baskets (Kateri got me a tent… that’s a whole nother story).
I didn’t remember the video when I stumbled upon it trying to clear space on my phone, so it sorta caught me by surprise. It’s hard for me to see Kateri in the “Cancer Time” and it’s quick, but it’s Kateri… through and through… in a space she loved… with people she loved.
If you are into Easter, Jesus, and all that jive… I hope you have a good one! If not… well… Happy Sunday!
Yo… and if ya want… hit the follow button!
This is kinda one of those “spur of the moment” posts. It’s cloudy and a bit chilly…. with large patches of snow adding to the coolness of the image out the ol’ schoolhouse windows. I’m still in comfy clothes… from last night… because I fell asleep on the couch after watching the first scary movie… alone… in said schoolhouse… since Kateri passed away (“The Silence”. At least it wasn’t a ghost/paranormal/psychological sorta movie. And… I survived!). I actually woke up at 6 something, but was comfortable enough and warm enough, so I just decided to stay horizontal… till 9:13!… (a.m.)… and not trudge upstairs. It’s been one of those slow moving/Tupelo Honey on the radio types of mornings… and it feels good. The coffee tastes nice, dark, and strong… and I’ve already gotten to have a nice visit with a friend from down the road. I even got to pull out power tools!… and use them in my front yard while still in those comfy clothes… with the addition of rubber boots! It was literally just replacing a couple of straps… but some people… well I… will take any opportunity to fix something using tools.
Basically, I’ve enjoyed the morning. I’ve actually enjoyed the last couple of days. Last night, when I got home, I let the chickens out so that they could stretch their legs and remember what scratching in the grass and leaves from last fall feels like. I also learned that we all have a little slow motion option on our phones!… yup. As I’m going through life learning about what makes me happy, what doesn’t, and everything in between… I thought, “A slow motion video of Lil’ Bitch, Chicken, Chicken, and Chicken running to me might make me happy?!… and it did. Soooo…..
I had told myself… and I guess the digital world… that I wanted to take these next two weeks (the last two of the first year without Kateri) to mourn the loss of my wife. The other day, at the end of a conversation with a friend, he asked me, “What does that mean to you?”…. and I realized… I have no fucking idea! But I figure rememberin’ has somethin’ to do with it so that’s what I’m gonna do a little of and see how it goes. I mean… we’ll see… it took me three days, 2 baths, a pint of Ben n Jerry’s, two hours and 23 minutes of Aquaman, and 13 packages of pills (Smarties) to get through 8 photos! (yup, the kind you can hold in your hand)
Yesterday… a year ago… Kateri went into Palliative care after we spent all night in the ER (except for an early morning run home with Maria so we could grab… something?… don’t really remember). I’m not gonna talk about seeing her doc in the morning, before the hospital was humming… when I could see the sorrow in his eyes as he went over options of drilling holes in Kateri’s head to relieve some pressure. I’m not gonna get into how I kicked the wooden box out of frustration because Kateri said, “We… can’t do this anymore.”… a box I walk by every morning and every night… splintered wood that reminds me of the time I wasn’t willing to give up hope… I wasn’t willing to accept it… but my wife… Kateri, couldn’t take the pain any longer. I’m not gonna talk about that because… as awful as those sound… I thought I still had time.
A year ago yesterday, I sat on a couch. Across the room from me was my wife, my best friend, the love of my life… Kateri. It was quiet… calm. Kateri was asleep… well, drugged… but finally some relief for her. Keith was on one side of me… Michelle on the other.
Each with an arm wrapped around my shoulders… a hand on my leg… one on across my chest. I remember them just holding me as I was processing what was going on… while they were processing what was going on… and I just remember saying to Keith… “This is it. We’re here for a reason…. right?… this is it?”… and all he had to say was, “Yes.”
What does “mourning” mean to me? I guess it’s remembering picnics with bologna sandwiches (bologna was not a part of our normal diet) in the back of Cherokees… in the middle of Iowa while a thunderstorm is wreaking havoc across an empty campground. It’s remembering Kateri saying, “Fear the poke!” as she would flex her index finger to show off her second digit muscle. It’s remembering that Kateri was the most loving, thoughtful, honest… sometimes brutally honest, and simply the most beautiful person I have ever been fortunate enough to meet, to be friends with, and to share my life with (of course, she’s basically the only one I’ve shared my life with!). It’s remembering sitting on that couch being comforted by friends I love. It’s remembering walking over to my wife to hold her… crying… knowing she was going to die… knowing… Kateri was going to die… soon. It’s remembering a time… when she was alive.
(before anyone says anything about her always being around, will never truly be gone, she’s in the wind and yada, yada, yada type stuff… I get it… I’m not talking about that stuff)
It’s been nice going through some old pics, but really it’s not the time. It’s hard, but the memories of Palliative Care are really what are consuming my thoughts right now… and I’m OK with that. That’s what was going on a year ago. I feel it’s only natural that they would still be ever present in the ol’ noggin around the first anniversary. And quite frankly, I believe it was probably the most intimate experience Kateri and I had together so I’ll just roll with it. Being with the person you love more than yourself when they are in pain, when they are sick, when they are told there is nothing that can be done to save their life… and them looking to you for comfort… them looking to their husband… looking to the love of their life… well, that’s when life shows you a bit more of what love is.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
There’s a strip between the coop and the house… which I was excited about… and then the chickens crapped all over it! (At least they looked happy!)
It hit me last night… I’m trying to jam “healing” into a time frame and attaching it to all sorts of things. This is one reason I’m thankful I decided to use writing, to start a blog, as a tool for myself as I go through this process. Recently, my plan was to just get all those things that I associate with “widower” stuff on the blog by the one year anniversary of Kateri’s passing. I wanted it all there… consolidated… organized… so that I could start year 2 with a fresh and brighter outlook, but I can’t do it. Tomorrow is the anniversary of one of the roughest days of my life… the day we found out there were no other options (two immunotherapy treatments which had two drugs at each treatment… along with one radiation session… did absolutely nothing). The day after that is the ER. The day after that… Palliative Care.
I need to remember those times without trying to pile on what I was going through after she had passed. I mentioned that I need to take the next couple of weeks and mourn the loss of Kateri, to remember her, and this experience. I just can’t do that while posting and thinking about the time right after she passed. It’s just too much… and it takes away from the uniqueness of each experience. I feel it would diminish them… to just notes about an experience. Writing and this blog has shown me that.
Soooo, after reading my notes from Day 15, I thought it was fitting to pause the “Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning” notes here (I’ll still be posting other things) until after the 22nd, and to remember not only the last two weeks of Kateri’s life… but the 44 other years we were all so lucky and thankful to have her in our lives. For me, I just want to remember the last 20 years… my life with Kateri… and not the life without her.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 15… woke up at 8:00am… got out of bed at 8:45… just needed to be horizontal a little longer.
As I get ready to go back to work, I decided to shoot the entire company (for some reason) an email to show my gratitude. This is what I sent out.
Good Morning Everyone,
As I try to reintegrate back into life I was going to write to my crew, to my peeps, to our department, to say “Thanks!” for supporting me and for picking up my slack over the last however long when I realized that I needed to thank everyone who makes up this company. What I just went through (and am still going through) requires support from all sorts of different angles, from all sorts of people who are in my life in varying degrees. I don’t know most of you and I’m sure most of you don’t know me, but we have KA that connects us and right now those connections are helping me as I try to navigate, cope with, and live with this new life that was thrust upon me. My wife, Kateri Marie Damato, died 2 weeks ago after a four month and three-day dance (she considered it a dance… not a battle, not a fight… although she fought hard) with Metastatic Malignant Melanoma in the brain at the age of 44. She had a rare mutation in the disease that was just absolutely brutal to her body. She faced it head on and with that “Kateri” approach to life. She never asked for a prognosis, never took narcotics for the pain because they disgusted her, she never said the “woe is me” type stuff, she never stopped living her life or being who she is when faced with an obstacle that would have left most of us destroyed on the floor and unable to function because of the weight of it. This has been the absolute worst thing that has happened to me in my life so far. I have never felt so saddened, so scared, so sorry for someone else. I have never felt so many different emotions, so much pain while… numb at the same time. It is a strange thing to go through losing a spouse, a partner. Two weeks ago, I went from traveling through this life and all that it brings (a home, experiences, travel, friends, moments, chickens) with someone who I planned on being old and wrinkly with… to instant independence and all the challenges that that brings emotionally, physically, and financially. To say the least, it has been a bit much.
The point of this email is not to list all the horrible things that come along with a big pile of shit like this, but to shed light on the amount of beauty that I have seen while going through this experience. The amount of love and support from friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and strangers has been simply overwhelming. The conversations, the phone calls, the texts, the emails from all sorts of people in our life from all sorts of places has made some of this bearable and the rest of it not quite as daunting. Life doesn’t stop for any of us roaming this planet, but sometimes we need to stop and say “thank you”. I thank everyone for giving me time to be with my wife as she lived with cancer, to care for her when it got rough, and for the time to initially cope with my life after it had taken her’s. I thank you for providing me with the memory of being treated as a person, not an employee, in a time of adversity. I thank you for the opportunity to look back at this and say, “Ummm, that went as well as it possibly could… for a big pile of shit”.
I am just one person within this company and I know we all have a different experience with it, but I felt the need to share part of my experience with all of you because it has been a positive one… and this is what it’s all about. We are a company made up of people who are all just living life… it’s as simple as that. I look forward to using some of my new-found time to get to know some of you a little more. You can check out my FB page if you want a fuller story of our life recently and in years past (I’m cool with friend requests at this time… filling voids n such), and I’ll check out yours. If not, that’s cool and groovy… we don’t all need to be friends. More importantly, please just be kind to one another, respect each other for being here, and support the people who you are surrounded by every day because that is the way life should be lived, that is the way people should be treated, and that is the experience that you have given me.
Regards,
Darren
a. I’ve gotten some replies already and they make me feel hesitantly better.
Called Consolidated
a. Paid the bill, my name is nowhere on the account, they transferred me to CS… got sick of waiting and have to wait for death certificates anyways.
b. Haven’t gotten death certificates yet… kind of annoying, but not really. Doesn’t really matter at this point… I’ll get them at some point.
Set up the new phone.
a. Kind of a fun little new thing. I like that it is black like the router… sorta blends in, doesn’t stand our as much as the white.
Keith came over and we chatted on the front deck for a bit (left at 3:30ish).
a. The sun was nice. Had to open up the umbrella.
b. First time I hade cried in a bit. It feels good to be able to cry when he visits, I’m finding I get more emotional when other people are around
c. He’s gonna start working 5 days a week…
Drove up to Burlington for Penny Cluse’s 20th Anniversary. It was something that is uncomfortable for me… social situations… alone, but I wanted to congratulate Charles and Holly and say thank you for being a part of my life. It is still one of my favorite restaurants and I hold Charles in such high regard as a cook/restaurateur
a. Didi and Nick pulled up besides me as I was texting with my dad about places to stay when they come out.
b. I felt awkward about going in, but I felt pretty secure with my actions… I knew I needed to go in and I knew that I really did want to see people. (It didn’t feel weird)
c. People I saw: Didi, Nick/John, Charles, Holly, Tracy, Stasia, Dan Marshall, Moira/Joe, Andy, Carlton, Juan, Sabra, Betzida?, Ruslan/Emily, Dale, James, Clarence/Sandy, Jake/Kristen, Gardner, Sipha,….
d. Stayed longer than expected, but was gonna roll with it anyways. I’m glad I stayed as along as I did to see the people I did and to have the conversations I had.
Drove home, talked to my folks about some Freedom Farm house (looked it up when I got home… hopefully they can book it).
a. I had to just get off the phone with them considering my father kept running downstairs to the computer to get information on it… I was trying to get home… and it was late already, but that is what makes it interesting and entertaining.
Read cards from Leo and Heidi, and Nancy D.
Went to bed at 2:10am…. First day of work tomorrow. Another first day of my new life… more Dr. Phil moments to come.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
We were progressive n shit. (Actually, we didn’t like the idea of changing her name… Kateri Lidstrom wasn’t who she was… and it sounded stupid)
I’m a cook. It’s in my blood at this point… it’s part of “who” I am. We are not “Home Chefs” or tell people that, “I just love to cook!”… we are a different breed and unless you are one… you just don’t understand… like being a widower/widow. You may get a glimpse of what/who we are… but you never get the full story… there are too many details. Now, I do believe that that goes for any personal experience we humans go through. I may know that you are hurting, or are faced with the challenge of losing a loved one, or that you are an accountant and have to face Tax Season!… but I don’t know what that feels like for you… I don’t know what you need to do to get through your challenges. Nor, do I need to know. I just need to know that there are challenges in your world.
Work is a huge part of a cook’s life… it’s a huge part of my life. Kateri and I were a cook and a flower farmer. We were worker bees… the drones… like so many in our circle. We rely on work out of necessity for survival… it’s paycheck to paycheck. Now, I’ve made it no secret that I’m kinda over being in kitchens… 24 years is a long time to do anything and I just wanna try something new… but the comfort I found just sitting on a stainless steel table, talking with my chef… with my friend, on a day when I was seeing my co-workers… some for the first time after losing Kateri, was the perfect place for me to be. I found warmth surrounded by the hum of refrigeration, sitting on a cold metal table, and having someone listen to me as I tried to explain what I was going through.
I am forever grateful to my place of employment and co-workers for one reason (there are other accolades I can give, but this is the big one)… they gave me time to be with my wife when she got sick… they gave me time to be with her when she went into Palliative Care… they gave me time to be home in our schoolhouse after she passed. It is because of that time that I am able to look back on this horrendous experience and recognize that there are good parts imbedded in those memories. It is because of the time given, that I have the memory of holding Kateri’s hand and arm… when she took her last breath. To have the memory that I was with Kateri at the very end of her life… at the very end of our life… is something I will always cherish… no matter how hard it is to think about. That is what the gift of time can give someone… when time is running out.
For the past couple of weeks I have been humming and hawing over if I should be revisiting these notes right now, but that is one reason I think I started writing this blog. It has sorta guided me through this process. It has given me some insight to what it is I’m doing and what got me to this point. It has forced me to reassess decisions and to adapt so that I can keep moving forward… so that I can keep waking up each morning and keep putting on my big boy pants (Dr. Phil moments). In the last week and a half, it has shown me that I need to take the next two weeks… and mourn the death of Kateri. I need to put everything else aside, I need to focus on myself, I need to stop worrying about all the things that life has thrown at me, I need to stop trying to figure “everything” out, and I need to simply slow down… and mourn my wife… because I want to.
I have tried to be overly positive throughout this process because I needed to… to survive… literally. In no way have I ever had thoughts of suicide, but to this day… I still don’t want to live a day without Kateri… and that is a hard thing to come to terms with when I know I will never have another day at the beach with her. There won’t be another afternoon of working in the yard or in the gardens. She will never again be laying in bed next to me… drinking coffee… on a Sunday morning. As I’ve been faced with that reality, I had to overcompensate with “The Good” in the world… I’ve relied on it. But now… I just want to remember my wife… how much I love her… and how much I simply miss Kateri.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 16… First day of going back to work… first day of the rest of my life. Woke up @ 7:35ish
Couldn’t really jump out of bed. It was nice to have to get motivated to go to work, but I wasn’t in a hurry. It took a little longer to get out of the house as well… hesitant.
Eric texted if I wanted to go to A-Street first, so I drove there.
a. I like that I went to A-St. first… it was a nice warm up… a toe in the water.
b. He mentioned working in a day of rest in the middle of the work week for now… which I think is a great idea. It helps relieve that stress of making it through a work week. I’ll probably work Tues/Wed, off Thurs, work Fri/Sat. Who CAN’T work 16 hours without freaking out?! Of course, I may have a moment of freak out.
Went to Camelot.
a. Jason was there. We chatted both in the kitchen and up at my desk. Work shit.
b. Talked with Diane… I love my desk neighbor. She’s just a pretty cool lady.
c. Brock was working on the dodec and came over and gave his condolences. I like that dude, too. Just seems like a nice guy. Don’t know if we would have ANYTHING in common, but I would have a burger with that guy.
a. I’m trying to figure out who I want to maybe spend more time with or not while trying to figure out how to interact with people at the same time.
d. I had a bowl of chicken salad.
Went back to A-St. to chat with Eric and to see if there was anything I could do to help. Portioned chicken salad, turkey, roast beef… then pretty much left.
Chatted with Eric for a bit after everyone left.
Came home, swept the breezeway, cleaned bathroom/bedroom screens, got chicken water, cleaned the grill, replaced a burner cover (I thought there would be four in the case… nope, just one). Cleaned up the kitchen, dishes, and called Consolidated Communication and paid off bill.
Drove to Bradford to get some smokes.
a. I need to stop… still. At this point, I am also thinking of how she would deal with stuff.
Ate some spaghetti and meatballs
Watched some Kitchen Nightmares (which I don’t really care for), but it’s noise. Looked for lawnmower baffle and new cook shoes… couldn’t do either, but that’s OK.
My folks rented the Airbnb on Bloodbrook. I think that will be better for everyone.
I simply can’t do this anymore… I gotta sleep. All in all, it was a nice first “back to work” day. I’m feeling OK, but still know the challenges ahead me… there will be some new things/new emotions coming down the pike (?).
Going to sleep at 1:00am on the dot.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
ps… Go ahead, don’t be scared, you can follow the blog through email… there’s a button somewhere on here! It just feels good. I guess another reason for the blog… positive reinforcement. (You don’t even need to read them!… just delete them right away!)
I was gonna write about all sorts of stuff… but then I read how long this thing was and decided against it… because I can do that. Looking back on this day (and I remember it clearly)… is just kinda weird. I remember wanting to be strong and positive. I probably overcompensated on the positivity, but I needed to at the time…… And then I fell asleep on the couch (seems to be a theme). Yup.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 17…. Woke up at 7:25, stayed in bed until 7:37am
Day number 2 of work:
Started at Camelot.
a. Went through emails. Never suited up, stayed in 501’s/Cedar Circle Hoodie/Green John Deere hat.
b. Talked with people. Angela (might be going to Sheboygan), bakery Jim, Lindsay, Tony (from Jersey).
c. Put Trampoline in Jessica’s car and saw Karen, Suzanne, Ralph, Brock sitting on the picnic table, they came over to see how I was doing.
d. I did try to hit the major points of this experience and what my approach currently is towards the challenges that I’m about to deal with. I feel as though they were impressed with how I am dealing/coping with everything.
e. It felt nice that they took the time… the “Big Wigs”. I am/feel fortunate to work for this place. It is filled with people who are being sooo supportive of me as I go through this.
Went to A-St.
a. Eric, Gil and I went through the schedule for the summer to look at coverage.
b. Happens every year… the question of what to do with staff and how to reduce labor when Baker closes.
Went to that new building.
a. Spoke with Chantelle about insurance. She was awesome. Might leave me at Silver… why not, I’ve definitely hit the out of pocket maximum.
b. Barb came out and we chatted for a bit. It was nice to talk with her, she has been great through this… both supportive and responsible.
c. Gave Suzanne another hug and Ceal came through.
Went back to Camelot.
a. Hung out in the front for a minute.
b. Talked with Michelle… she’s just so nice
c. Had a conversation with J. He just became a US citizen (don’t know where he is from), but he said it was an amazing experience. He loved the diversity of the group that was there for the ceremony.
Called Knights’s funeral home from the park n ride in Thetford. Rich said they are gonna get some more death certificates and just mail them to me.
a. When I got home, there was a message from Stuart saying they were still waiting for the Williston PO to send them back. I felt bad calling them before I had heard that message, but it’s been over two weeks and I am ready to have the certificates in my possession so that I can take care of some stuff.
Went to the store. Was gonna pick up some hot dogs, but on the way there Michelle texted asking if I wanted to come over for dinner and have hot dogs!
a. I didn’t get much stuff, still not in a routine of meals and I don’t wanna throw shit away or spend money just to throw something away.
Came home and washed the jeep. It’s kinds fun washing your own car in your own driveway. It’s probably a strange sight in WFC, also.
a. Went to clear spam from Kateri’s email and saw the one from Kit again so I clicked on it. He had sent it (titled Thinking of you) on the morning of her passing at 10:57am. In it was a few pictures and a link to a video of me proposing to her at Mcguckin’s (Love in a hardware store).
b. I watched the video… it was rough, but I watched the whole thing. It just brought up so many memories and feelings.
c. It made me really miss her touch. I miss the feeling of her arm, her skin, her hair. I sat on the pink box (which is now purple) and cried for a bit. I went out and sat on the porch and just had that “missing her” feeling… it was overwhelming. All I wanted to do was to feel her again… and I know I never will.
When I was about to leave for Keith and Michelle’s, Michelle from Ptown messaged me thanking me for my message.
a. It felt good that she reached out. I really dug her, and it was my first experience meeting someone new… albeit, she was a bartender and working.
b. The conversation was just so easy and nice and she was so welcoming that I needed to thank her.
c. I kinda hope she stays in contact… I think it could be fun to see where that relationship goes (she is a lesbian with a girlfriend, so I don’t mean in any sexual way). I’m guessing this is what it’s like to meet friends and foster those relationships… or not.
Went to Keith and Michelle’s.
a. Hung out with just Michelle for a bit. It was nice.
b. She asked about “bartender Michelle” … that’s when I informed her that she was a lesbian, yada, yada, yada.
c. On the back deck I got emotional when talking about the challenges ahead of me. It’s nice to have them in my life. They provide me with a level of comfort that I just don’t get anywhere else.
d. Keith came home towards the end of my tear factory. He looked like he should be on a college campus with his button up short sleeve shirt, shorts, and name tag.
Came home. Closed up chickens. Heard a deer fawn in the woods somewhere to the north. They have that distinctive little whine/cry/noise. I didn’t go investigate, but it reminds me of Starksboro when we heard a mom giving birth and East Thetford when there were two in/around Sarah’s arena and by the gator.
a. Played a little guitar. It’s nice that my fingers aren’t hurting quite as much now that I’ve been playing more. It doesn’t help with the going to bed part though… It’s been nice being able to pick it up whenever… which just happens to be late night most of the time.
b. Watched a little Netflix… honestly, don’t remember what I watched (I am writing this the morning after because I fell asleep on the couch).
c. Texted with Matty for a minute. He was asking about places to stay. It wasn’t until the morning that I realized he should just stay here… or at least be given the option.
d. Smoked copious amounts of weed trying to get me to go to bed… but over did it and crashed on the couch.
e. It has been kind of nice not worrying about falling asleep on the couch when I don’t have to get up the next day. It doesn’t bother me… I’m still getting sleep… and it reminds me how I would always tell Kateri, “I don’t mind sleeping on the couch… it’s like camping!” I heard that as part of a joke from some comedian years and years ago… sorry dude, don’t remember who.
f. Ate some Cheetos and a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups because I had them. I feel guilty eating that shit, but I get enjoyment out of it also because I never really have had them in the house… at least the Cheetos… but I need to stop eating the crap.
I feel as though this was the first day that I have felt that “serious sadness” that is gonna be coming. Right now, it’s all still pretty raw, but when I had that feeling of just wanting to touch her, to hold her, to feel her hair in between my fingers I knew that a shift was starting to happen in the way I have been dealing with all of this.
And yup….. fell asleep on the couch… at some point.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Sometimes, the ol’ balance scale is off kilter and I have to focus on whatever carries more weight. Sometimes the balance scale… feels like it has 7 arms.
Some other times, I just want the night to last another twelve hours so that I don’t have to get out of my cozy bed… and start a new day. But then… then… it begins anyways.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 18… woke up at 6:12 on the couch… went up to bed until 8:00am
Had a lazy morning… didn’t do much.
At 11:00ish I got a newspaper (still haven’t read it) and went to the farm.
a. Got a Mocha and a blueberry muffin. Talked with someone who I couldn’t remember their name.
b. Talked with Anna on the picnic table about what’s going on. Maya came over on her way to lunch. She was stylin’ with a “Wolf” hat (almost airbrushie), grey long sleeve, swim trunks (palm leaves type)… Anna said she wants to do a photo shoot with her on “Farm Style”.
c. Saw Michelle. We caught up. She gave me a Rose of Sharon (Kateri wanted her to order them) and some kale for chickens. We cried next to the Jeep.
d. Went to the house to see Adie. She has to leave in a week to help with her father. Much earlier than expected which is hard for her.
e. Chatted with Dave and Luke for a bit about drinking and shit.
f. Saw Double E. We’ll get together and eat or play disc golf
Went and got Death Certificates. Rich came running down the hill with them. He is a very nice guy.
a. They looked fancy.
b. It’s kinda strange having them.
Saw Eric at the light in Norwich.
Decided to go to Best Buy and get a camera for the computer.
a. Passed Eric in W. Leb
Came home and raked the rock walls and area next to the road. It was quick and easy
Played a little guitar. Played a little Mappy/Pole Position/Galaga/Ms. Pac-man.
Dinner: Hippie cup of noodles, iceburg salad, orange, Cheetos.
Talked on the phone with Nate D. Jared/Double E/Nate were all texting me at the same time… spoke with Nate.
Fell asleep in the chair from midnight till 2:00am.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
All I wanna say is… I really enjoyed reading through these notes… looking back on this one day. At the time, the day itself was just kinda meh… and I’m sure I was just floating around in a daze. But reading what I was thinking about and recognizing the mood I was in as I wrote down ideas… as I was first trying to figure out what it was that I was gonna do in my life… to survive (because that’s what it feels like)… it felt good. Instant gratification. A talk with a friend. Looking for good in… whatever. Saying, “Fuck it”… and doing whatever it was that I felt I needed to do to feel better.
I remember this day. I like this day. It was an ok day with lasting ramifications. As a widower, I have to deal with balancing this new life with the old. It’s hard to have to sometimes push Kateri aside just so that I can get through a day. Shitty way to put it, but bill collectors don’t care that your wife died and I can’t cry all day at work… or at the store… or at the dentist… or hole up in my little schoolhouse wearing comfy clothes with a year’s supply of ice cream (in convenient pint sized servings).
I like these notes because I can see a little bit of both chapters of my life in them and it was a “typical” day for me.
Lastly, it’s just really cool to be able to look back on my own experience and see myself doing OK… that I was challenging my norms… that I was living my life… and… missing ours. Sometimes flinging shit against a wall pays off.
There… that’s all I wanna say.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 19…woke up at 7:20ish
Tried putting down as much notes as I could remember quickly about yesterday because I fell asleep in the chair. Yesterday was just one of those days. Wasn’t very motivated to write shit down.
Went to work today. Got there just before 9:00am.
a. Chatted with Eric for a bit. Did pars, plugged in Ian’s requests, told him we didn’t have coverage for one of the days… life doesn’t work out sometimes… he was cool.
b. Annie got me by the front doors and said how she just felt like… she knew Kateri and I were soul mates. (sometimes I feel like that isn’t a fair term for the living. Grim future type stuff)
c. Work…. Well, it’s work. I enjoy it and I’m excited to get back into it, but I’m just not there yet. I’m pretty much going through the motions. I may jump in the kitchen tomorrow… but I haven’t yet.
Left work around 1:00pm… I’m sticking to the four-hour day for this week. To be honest, I’m not really looking forward to full days next week, but I’ve gotta get into it.
a. Came home to get gas can. Got it and went to Farmway to see if they had any shoes for work… they didn’t. Mainly it was because I’ve got tiny feet and they didn’t have any 7.5’s in clogs or “dress shoes”. It didn’t really surprise me… that’s part of being small! (needed a little excitement).
b. Mowed the yard. It felt good. Mowing the lawn is one of those instant gratification type things. It felt good to get the leaves out of there… to see mainly green. It neatens things up. I’m gonna try a new pattern in the back yard on the hill… it’s a bitch to mow and I don’t feel like dealing with it this year.
c. Gave Rob a call… left a message. I feel weird not connecting with him yet… we’re not tight, but he means a lot to myself and he was something special to Kateri. She was just so proud of him and impressed with him. He held a special place in her heart.
d. MPH called while I was taking a dump. I rushed and wiped because, I thought it was Rob returning my call… it wasn’t. We talked for almost an hour. It was nice to catch up with him. I’m really liking keeping in touch with people. It also feels good to have friends check up on me and then tell me they think I’m handling things pretty well. It was also nice just meandering around outside while chatting on the phone with a friend.
e. Took a shower (because I was disgusting from mowing… fucking dust and leaves) and ordered a pizza and tiramisu from Colatina Exit. Ordered an All the Way (supreme, deluxe, everything… whatever you wanna call it). That’s one of those things that brings me a little joy… the fact that I can order a pizza with a whole bunch of toppings… like mushrooms and bell peppers.
f. Went and got the pizza.
When I got home I decided to play a little guitar before I ate.
a. Decided to try and record what I was playing. Figured why not, there’s the technology… it might help me improve if I could hear what I was playing.
b. Then…. THEN, I started talking to the camera and I realized that it helped me, it was some sort of release, some sort of coping mechanism since I don’t have anyone to talk to at home anymore. It felt good and exhilarating.
c. Recorded three videos. Different degrees of breaking down between the three of them. Might do a fourth and think about posting it.
d. It made me think about doing a bloggy type thing or just using Facebook about what it’s like to go through this process. I think I would have to start tomorrow, though. I would want people to see as much as possible of this figuring it our shit.
e. I’m hoping that other people dealing with/coping with shit would get some sort of strength from seeing that someone else is dealing with shit, too.
Ate pizza and watched some Altered Carbon. I don’t know what’s going on, I haven’t been paying attention, but it’s science fictiony and it’s something on while I putz.
Decided to go to bed at midnight. Then decided that I should play some Mappy… so now it’s 1:22am. That’s part of the whole Instant Independence… I can play a game of Mappy at midnight and go to bed afterwards!… and then be annoyed with myself that I played a game of Mappy and it’s 1:23am.
Goodnight.
I’ve been doing things for the past 346 days just to try and feel better… maybe to push a bit of the pile of shit off to the side for a while… to hide it. In 19 days it will be the anniversary of Kateri’s passing. It’s 8 days until she went into Palliative Care… 6 days until we found out there were no more options… or chances of her beating this thing. Her dance was gonna end… soon. I remember I even tried to prepare myself for what I knew was coming… but it was sooner than I expected. Decades sooner than I wanted. And simply… too soon.
For 346 days I have been filling time with projects, with work, tidying, cleaning, organizing, removing stuff, chickens… and chicken chores, moving wood piles, remodeling bathrooms, acquiring things to help in the future (I’m getting older… and definitely over shoveling snow off driveways!), watering plants, rearranging living rooms (just last week!… I like it, but there’s a strange feeling sitting at home in a space set up in a way that Kateri has never experienced), seeing friends once in a while, meeting new people, seeing family even more once in a while, taking baths, playing guitars, keyboards, or blaring music when it’s significantly past the one-two. I’ve tried to fill time with actions that would help me in the future and/or make me feel good… or better. Right now though, right this second… I just want to stop… and sit… and feel the sadness that the loss of Kateri has given me… because it’s the closest I’m gonna get to her. When I can feel the pressure in my temples, when I have to breath through my mouth because my nose is all snotted up, when the words are blurry after a good ol’ “moment” (like this one)… when it hurts the most… I can see her the clearest. I can almost feel her… feel her skin… her hair. Her beautiful black and silver hair. Again… almost. Now, tell me that’s not fucked up!… (it’s not)
That being said, being really sad does get really old really quickly! So I’m gonna go let the chickens out on the strip of grass exposed between the snow banks, so that I can see them run. If you haven’t seen a chicken run… it’s funny. (And now I’m thinking about Kateri’s imitation of a chicken running… which was also funny… crap)
ps… the evening got much better… in bed by ten!… and I’ve just spent 4 minutes and twenty-one seconds reading “much better” over and over again asking myself… “Does that sound weird?”.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 20… (Saturday, May 12, 2018) … alarm went off at 7:00am.
Couldn’t get out of bed until 7:37am. Doesn’t give me too much time in the morning, but there IS enough time to do what I gotta do. I also haven’t been making lunch in the morning since I’m just doing halfish days.
Got to work. Just Eric up on the dodec.
a. Caught up with him a tiny bit. Let him know I was doing OK, but there have been some rough spots in the last couple of days.
b. It’s good for me when its just us catching up with no one else around. I’m comfortable with him. I value his opinion… I guess that’s what friends do. I figure I’m also lucky that my friend is my boss.
c. Actually, touched a knife and an onion… three of them, and blanched some spinach for the Mother’s Day quiche special thingy. It felt good to do some chopping and sautéing. Didn’t talk too much…
d. I did the US Foods order… like riding a bike.
e. I have a more positive approach to how to handle things. I’m gonna try and be helpful, how do I help people move forward a bit.
Left work and just came home. I was gonna go to the store but figured we/I (I accidently wrote we out of habit and didn’t want to erase it so that’s what you get… a we/I thing) have enough food to survive a night so might as well not spend the money.
a. Stopped at the Thetford Village Store to get a couple of sodas… they didn’t have Sunkist in the bottle so I got a big can of Sunkist and a same size can of Cherry Coke… nostalgia I’m guessing. Also bought a lottery ticket… with power play… why not?
Got home and decided to suck it up and sand the bathroom. It took me a bit to get situated… putting on coveralls…. Finding hats… safety glasses… etc. Then it moves to the excitement of working on it… getting it just a little bit closer to being a full functional bathroom.
a. Had to break out the electric hand held sander… it was taking a little too long for my tastes and my shoulder was gonna feel it (in a bad way) if I did it all by hand.
b. I used the little speaker for music. I put it under the piece of plastic covering the bath… that was good… taking advantage of what we had.
c. Dust got everywhere. I mean, everywhere. I’m gonna have to get out the mop and sponge and water at some point.
d. Shop vac’d as much as I could. I’m going to have to do it again… which is fun (not really, it’s kind of a bitch).
Took a shower, Facetimed Maria, watched something, smoked some smokes, smoked some stuff, chilled most of the evening. Started watching Bojack Horseman… per MPH’s suggestion.
a. Maria got to Jamaica today. She brought a little of Kateri. She’s kinda considering the trip a pilgrimage for Kateri.
b. She smoked a joint in the kitchen by the back door. Shut the glass door to “block” smoke from going into the front room since she was waiting for dinner to be delivered
c. Maria Facetimed with Keith and Michelle and they watched the sunset together.
I left the chicken coop door open and didn’t check eggs this afternoon. I’m not too worried, if something can get them through all the mesh and wire fencing…
It’s 2:10am and I’ve gotta go to sleep. This is my problem. I am lost through out the day and find myself just standing or sitting and either staring off into something (or nothing) and by the time I need to write shit down I can barely keep my eyes open… or function.
Thought about posting videos of what I am going through on Facebook.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
I was gonna write about some of the things I was thinking about on my hour and a half drive home (over the river and through the woods) from the airport to the schoolhouse last night… as well as when I got home, but… wow… I guess I had a lot to jot down on ol’ day twenty-one!
May 11, 2018
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 21… woke up at 6:56am to no alarm. Stayed in bed until 8:00ish… got some coffee, had a smoke, washed up, brushed teeth, crawled back into bed with the computer.
This was my FB post this morning.
Widower Day 21… Some positive observations from the last 3 weeks, because when life plops a big pile of shit on you, you sometimes grasp tightly to any of the “good” that is buried in it. Here are a few that I have noticed for you to take with you as you deal with your shit.
a.It’s much easier to make the bed in the morning when only one person sleeps in it.
b. You can play music as loud as you want… whenever you want…. and you should.
c. You can eat pizza 3 times a week.
d. It’s gross… but you can sneeze without covering your face… just let it go! (this changes when you are out in public)
e. Laundry slows way down when your wife dies from cancer… and you can use whatever settings you want… and you don’t have the constant fear of accidently putting her Darn Tough socks in the dryer.
f. You can work on your bathroom project (that you started 9 months ago) anytime you feel like it… at any hour.
g. When you flip through Netflix for 83 minutes searching for something to watch… you are only annoying yourself.
h. You realize that these observations are because you just lost the most important thing in your life, your brain is going into those deep dark holes, and you are just grasping for something to feel better. So that’s when you think about the fact that the bed is easier to make when only one person sleeps in it… and you call your mom.
Decided to work on the bathroom again today. I’m so close I just want to get to a point where I can at least use it for everything besides a shower… I’ll tile the shower last.
a. I went to the Home Depot (look, they’ve got a lot of inexpensive stuff… cheap, but for what I need it doesn’t matter that much. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing anyways) and picked up more joint compound.
b. I also picked up some paint primer for the walls. I figure that once I’m done sanding and clean up I could at least put a coat of primer on. It would clean it up sooo much and make it feel like a bathroom.
Came home and wrote to Ellen.
a. Now, I had no plans to write a celebrity, but I’m pretty scared about what the future holds and figured might as well try anything I can think of.
b. I had started to just write down a couple notes… then it turned into the whole letter.
c. When I went to post the letter on her website… it was too long. Kind of bummed me out because I thought my letter had a good amount of info, let the reader know kinda who was writing, and I don’t think it was too long. Of course, when you get thousands of emails a day… it might have been too long.
d. Although it was kind of a strange thing to do, I felt good about doing it. It felt good to say fuck it… I’m writing to Ellen, let’s see what happens.
Called my mom.
a. It’s Mother’s Day… I wanted to wish her a happy day.
b. She told me that I have been on her mind which makes me feel good. Granted, I think I knew that I was on her mind… she’s my mom and I’m going through shit… that’s another reason I love her.
c. Told her I thought they will be happier in the Airbnb house. It will be a nice Vermont experience.
d. I’m worried about her in the airports when they travel. She said she may wear a mask, but the distance going from flight to flight she isn’t worried about.
e. My dad was mowing the yard… normally mom does it. Sounds like it got a little tall and dad had to empty the bag quite a few more times than expected.
f. They were going to Olive Garden for Mother’s Day dinner with Dina and the fam.
g. I love them.
I had a good cry. Not having been too emotional/crying lately it felt somewhat good to be able to let it out, but it sucks. It’s just that feeling of disbelief… of just wanting to hold her, touch her, feel her hair, her skin… and I won’t ever be able to again. I miss her.
Mudded the bathroom a second time.
a. It’s rather awkward… this whole drywall/mudding thing, but I think the final outcome will be ok.
b. It definitely took longer than I had anticipated and used more joint compound than expected. Not knowing what exactly it is I’m doing… I may have also used more than normal. Then again, maybe I used less?!
c. I didn’t do much IN the tub. I feel that since tile is going up… it isn’t as much of a big deal. I could be very wrong.
d. Finished up around 8:45pm. Cleaned up outside with the hose.
Checked Facebook… there were a lot of comments and likes n shit on my post. It felt good to read what people were saying. For not doing much on social media, I have gotten some comfort by using it.
a. I no longer have someone to talk to. I need to release some things sometimes to the ether.
b. I am kinda testing waters to see if I can expand this Widower thing. Maybe use it as a catalyst to something else that will help me keep my home and provide new experiences.
Took a shower, got into comfy clothes, and made something to eat.
a. I had planned to go to the store, but figured I had enough stuff at home to not go hungry.
b. I made 2 Grilled Cheese with bacon, had a naval orange, and a bowl of Cream of Wheat… and 8 packages of Smarties (what Kateri would call pills) … and then I find myself getting choked up when I think about “pills”… and Kateri… and now I’m crying.
c. Threw on an old HG Wells movie (well, a story of his) from 1936. I love old stories (books or movies) because they give you a little glimpse of what was going on at the time. This story was talking about war… and the state of Europe. I didn’t really pay attention to much, but I think the war was with something other than Europeans.
d. Watched some standup comedy. It has helped me lighten the mood sometimes. I watched John Mullany (I think that’s his name) … I really enjoyed watching him. He seemed smart, had an innocence to him, wasn’t crude.
Fell asleep on the couch again. Woke up around 4:00am and crawled into bed.
a. I have been fine with falling asleep on the couch, but I do need to start actually crawling into bed at a reasonable hour.
b. I need to realize that I have time to do the things I need/want to do with this new being alone thing. I don’t need to play Mappy at 12:30 at night or watch tv or surf the web or play guitar or keyboard or music on the stereo. I NEED to go to bed and get a good night’s sleep.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Well… I’m heading back home to Vermont! It was a quick trip to Boise to see my family… specifically my mother… but, I am soooo happy that I did it. The look on her face when I walked through her door I will cherish forever. The fact that I have never done something like that (surprise my family… or anyone… by just showing up) has made me think about the life I have coming up in front of me… this new life where I am solely responsible for what I want to do… and how I want to do it. My perspectives have changed on everything. What I view as important has changed. My goals in life have changed. All because my life has changed with the loss of Kateri.
With this trip, I feel as though I have taken another step in grabbing control of my life. After almost a year without Kateri, it was one of the few actions that has given me a sense of , “I’ve got this! I’m not helpless! I have control!”. It has also reinforced for me that there are a shit ton of people out there that are willing to help me out as I go through this process, whether they be friends, family, co-workers, or strangers.
The goal wasn’t just to surprise my mom with a happy go lucky visit… I needed to see her for myself. When you just lost your wife due to cancer and your mother is living with cancer in the lungs and brain (who was diagnosed before Kateri), but you live 2,400 miles away… things go through your head… a lot of bad things start creeping their way into the ol’ noggin. Questions come up. Images start showing up… based on nothing except for what is swirling around up there. When I got off the phone with her last Tuesday, I realized the only thing that would help me stop the swirling was to see her with my own eyes… to hold her with my own arms… to sit next to her on the couch and talk… and it could be about nothing. (Or… watch reality TV shows about malnourished lemurs and the veterinarians who take care of them!)
I’ll just say that sitting on this plane, heading back to The Green Mountain State, flying in the direction of my little red schoolhouse… going home… I feel a hundred times better than I did at 3:45am on Friday when I started my journey out west.
Those worrisome images that had found their way into my head a week ago have been replaced with relief and the expectation that there will be more than a few other trips for us to chill with each other because… well… she’s doing fantastic! I mean, she’s not running marathons and we won’t be doing any bungee jumping any time soon (I don’t think), but she’s doing much better than… you know… I expected!
I will always hold my mom up on a pedestal. Not just because she’s “Mom”, but because she is an impressive woman… an impressive person. She is strong… she is compassionate… she is selfless. Like a lot of us, she has had challenges in her life. For me, any speed bumps that I have hit at 35mph, she has been the perfect example of how to face those bumps with positivity, strength, and grace… whether she agrees with my assessment or not! I love her… and I’m glad I took my life in my own hands so that I could tell her that in person. It was a good trip.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 22… woke up at 7:40ish, laid there… alarm went off at 8:00am. I set the alarm because I need to get into a more regular routine and didn’t want to accidently sleep until 10 or something.
Finished writing notes for yesterday.
a. Cried a bit after thinking about how much I miss her… rough.
Keith came over around 10:40ish so that we could go for a drive.
a. Stopped at the gas station in Bradford for some drinks (V-water for me)
b. Went across the bridge to 25 on the way to Rumney.
a. It was strange doing something that Kateri and I did a lot except being the passenger and not with Kateri. We came to a town near Wentworth that has a Rocket in the green. Before we got there, I mentioned that I thought there was a Rocket (no idea why I capitalize it) around here… 3 seconds later we pass the Rocket.
b. It was also strange going for a drive and having the opportunity to watch shit go by, but everything is still kind of a blur… it’s that numbness.
c. Took some side roads. One just looped around. One dead ended (no pun intended) at the Glenclif Healthcare Facility. It was cool. Perched on top of a hill. Kind of creepy. Wouldn’t want to be there at night. Have no idea what type of “healthcare” they provide.
d. Was gonna eat in Woodsville but went to Tuttle’s Family Diner in Wells River. Never been there before and can’t tell you how many times Kateri and I went through there.
a. It was a good experience. It was nice to sit at a counter. The place was a little thrown together, but my Ruben (pretty sure that’s how it was spelled on the menu!) was good and the service was friendly, but not overbearing… entertaining at certain points, but good. Keith and I were even told we have beautiful eyes.
e. Came home, sat on the porch for a second, Keith took off.
Finished sanding the bathroom drywall. It went much quicker today. The frickin dust gets EVERYWHERE! Wiped down the walls with a sponge and tried to clean it up as much as possible. Left the cardboard down for when I paint… well, primer… hopefully tomorrow.
Got cleaned up. Had to get the dust out of every crick and cranny. I’m excited to add the primer, then I can pull up the cardboard, add a sink and mirror, and have a mostly functioning bathroom upstairs!
Played music pretty loud all the way to Worthy. Ended on the Caliente Station. It’s just fun to listen to once in a while… I have no idea what they are talking about, but it’s got some moves to it.
Keith and Michelle came up behind me when I was turning in South Royalton.
a. Bauman and Laura were the next to show, then Sarah L., and Jeff and Cristina. It was a nice group of people.
b. Not really being in the loop lately, it was a nice surprise that I saw Sarah… she’s just a wonderful human.
c. Got the ol’ Worthy Burger with cheddar and bacon. That’s why you go there.
d. Had nice conversations with Jeff and Sarah. Filled Bauman in on what I’ve been up to the last few weeks. Told Sarah about how I want to write a book or something… she’s gonna speak to some writer friends for me to see how stuff like that goes.
a. If I can get paid some money to write… I’ve gotta try… what have I got to lose? (I told Keith that on our little drive)
e. Ate inside in the corner. It was comfortable enough. Really, we stood a fare amount of the time.
Drove home and decided to just brush teeth, get clean, and crawl into bed. I want to wake up earlier tomorrow and I can use the computer in bed so might as well give it a try.
a. On the way home, I thought about how I am in the process of figuring out who I am… again. Almost like when you are younger and insecure, but I don’t have those insecurities. I know it will take time, but it falls in line with the, “here’s your new life… what are you going to do with it? How are you going to act? How are you going to live your life?”
Went to actual bed around the one-two.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Sunset on May 15, 2018…Widower Day 23.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 23… Woke up at 6:30ish… tried for earlier, it wasn’t happening.
Was able to get out of here quickly.
On the commute in between The S. Farm and Andy L.’s I had to come to a crawl for 2 grown geese helping their 2 geeselings cross the road. You could see the mom/dad pushing them along.
a. It was such a cool little spectacle that it made my brain start thinking in big broad thoughts about big life experience stuff and what we go through.
b. I passed a car and it was just another reminder that life just keeps on moving. The thought of, “you have no idea of what I’m going through!” popped into my head… just one of those moments. Then I realized that of course they don’t… I have no idea of what they’re going through, why should they know my life?
Work was ok. It feels a little bit more normal. I want to make sure I am being true to myself and making the most of this opportunity… who do I want to be?
a. Jeremy invited me to Ziggy’s to play pool with a group of people. 90% sure it’s work people, but not 100%. I’m sure there will be people.
b. Work made me think about jewelry… which made me think about if/when will I take off my wedding ring?
c. Cracked some eggs, did some schedule stuff, made a tomato basil tart. I don’t really care for it, tastes like pizza to me. We’ll see in the morning. It felt good to see something and then just test it out. That’s how a cook gets better.
On the drive home, I thought about how I am just coasting right now. The next step will be organizational, and then it will be survival. Went to the store and picked up pot pies and some other random stuff… fruit n shit, so there was some “good for ya” stuff.
When I got home and was putting groceries away I saw how much food we/I actually have, and I don’t know if I would ever be able to go through it all.
Decided to go ahead and start painting the bathroom.
a. I thought I could paint and then have time to call Paul, but it took much longer than I had expected.
b. Started it at 4:45 I think and ended around 8:40. It feels good to have it look more and more like a bathroom. I pulled the cardboard from the floor.
c. Mopped the house, even our bedroom. Had to start getting all that dust out of here. I also want the option of working on bathroom whenever I want and not have to take a shower afterwards.
d. The first coat of primer looks good. I’m happy with it. The next coat won’t be to much. Not much paint left either, soooo.
Put on some music afterwards… Khalid
a. It brought me back to after Kateri had passed, but before Maria took off and we were here smoking and putting on music videos and one came up of him and kind of his life. We were so impressed by the young man. We/I dug it.
Took a shower and ate a chicken pot pie and a salad.
a. Watched a little standup comedy. It’s good to watch funny shit.
b. Thought about what I would like to do for my video for Ellen… yup, still on that train. Why not?
Went to bed at 1:20 am.
It was a good day… I mean today was. Looks like Day 24 wasn’t all that horrible, but I’m talking about my day in Boise. Aaaand… I ate a banana for breakfast… I hate bananas.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 24… alarm set for 6:00am… got up at 6:45.
I’ve been trying to get on a routine, a schedule as I go back to work. It’s been hard forcing myself to actually get to bed with this new independence.
(I am writing this the next day because I keep falling asleep on the couch and Anna just sent me a message… she has reached out to me more in the last 2 weeks than ever before.)
Went to work.
a. Nothing super exciting at work. I didn’t think I would be able to hang for very long with how I was feeling during the morning. Sadness had just hit me, and I couldn’t get out of it. Before I went to lunch, I found Eric and Teri on the back porch and said I don’t know how long I will stick around for. Eric just mentioned that I have tomorrow off (Thursday) and that helped me push through the day.
b. I used that weird energy to simply make a soup. I made Chicken n Bacon Corn Chowder to use up some product. It felt good to use up some stuff and to make something just a little different. I do feel it came out a little blander than I expected, but I am also using this experience to kickstart my cooking again and to get back into it, into something. It will only help me in the future… with work and also at home to provide me with a good meal, to learn something new, and to consume time.
c. There are some members of the crew going through personal stuff as well. I am trying to provide them some guidance and to be supportive, but it’s funny going through something like this and then being in the position to hear other people’s issues… I’m like, “really?… how about you don’t take those actions anymore?”… or “Is that really affecting you this much for this long?”. But I have to remember that you can’t put a measurement on someone else’s pain… we don’t know HOW MUCH pain something causes another person. Only they know how they feel.
d. Left work around 3:30.
e. Eric told me the DailyUV is hiring bloggers… or blog writers… or something.
Ran to the Home Depot to pick up paint, a paint liner, rollers, and a brush for the bathroom. I figure, I am so close might as well bust it out. The fact that most of the dirty shit is done makes me feel good and excited to get it closer to usable.
a. Picked out a darker blue. I think the primer was a good gauge but is a little to “baby blue”. I went with a darker shade. Something like “perfect sky” or something.
Met Luke and Gardner at the house. Luke had bought a new dump truck for the Hindquarter and Gardner built the walls for the dump. Our house is kinda in the middle, so I lucked out and get to see both of them!
a. Planned on 5:00, Gardner got here at 5:30ish. Parked on the side of the road. We realized that probably wasn’t the best place for a big ass truck with people flying down the dirt road.
b. Gardner milled the wood himself and built the walls over 2 ½ days… it’s beautiful. It will be cool to see once the wood burn The Hindquarter logo into the side.
c. Luke got here soon after and we all just kinda shot the shit and played around on a brand new black dump truck… you know, lifting the tail gait up… and then lowering it.
a. I felt kinda like the cool kid as people drove past my house and three dudes are just sitting around shooting the shit with a dump truck in the driveway.
b. It did also make me think about getting older. We were at my “HOUSE!” looking at a BRAND NEW DUMP TRUCK that Luke bought for HIS business. We were talking about QuickBooks and shit. It just felt like we were grown ups.
d. We took a little walk to show Gardner the back yard. Went to the fire pit and just kinda hung out.
a. Gardner told Luke and I what the different trees were on property. He is amazing that way… wealth of knowledge.
e. Raphael and Tara came over on his motorcycle and 4 wheeler and met us at the fire pit… (we were not having a fire)
a. They are a kick. It was fun listening to them meet Gardner and listen to him share his experiences with them. They were talking about being in Hawaii and Gardner mentioned how he lived there for a bit and they probably walked on trails that he built.
b. It was pleasant. It was nice to hear people just shoot the shit. Yes, there was a little of what I/we are dealing with, but mainly just people chewing the fat.
c. When Raph had to leave, he and Gardner dorked out over the motorcycle for a bit… and then Gardner took if for a quick spin.
f. Luke took off before the sun went all the way down… and left his pencil!
g. I left a bag up at the firepit so Gardner and I went to get it and just took a mosey on the path above the house.
a. It was nice to talk to him, to talk to someone and he was perfect. I just dig him and find him very impressive because of his experiences and approach to life.
b. Have to mention that he is another one who has quit drinking and has found such strength in that decision, is experiencing that clarity that drying up provides.
c. I look forward to spending more time with him, either working with Luke, him visiting, or me swinging by his place when out for a drive.
Was gonna put a second coat of primer on, but it was 8:30 by the time everyone left and I just wanted to chill. Didn’t even cook. Threw in a frozen Chicken Pot Pie and called it good.
a. I was gonna watch a movie, Life, and started it, but fell asleep.
b. It’s a horror/sci-fi/thriller… not sure if day 24 as a widower is the right time to start watching scary movies, but I fell asleep, so it wasn’t a big deal.
a. I’ve always liked scary movies, but for the last 18 years I’ve had Kateri and knew that if I ever really got scared that she would be there. I don’t have that anymore, so I wonder if I am gonna like scary movies as much.
c. Ate a bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and fell asleep. Woke up at 4:38am… had a smoke… washed up… and crawled into bed.
I told Gardner this is how I feel… “No one is gonna make a story about this experience if I don’t tell it”.
I’m still wearing my bracelet almost every day.
It’s currently 6:53am and I’m sitting at the end of a terminal in Burlington Intl. Airport. International!… funny. The first alarm was set for 3:45am (Harp), by 4:00am the chorus of old car horns and telephone rings started… so I got out of bed… got coffee… took a shower to wake up a bit… put on my travel clothes, double checked the schoolhouse to make sure I turned off things that needed turning off, threw my backpack in the Jeep… and headed off to Burlington.
The reason I was going to the airport was so I could surprise my mom… by showing up. The short of it… because it’s 3:35am right now… is that I basically wanted to see my mom, to see how she was doing, how was she holding up with this cancer shit. I haven’t seen her in four and a half months and I just didn’t want to wait any longer to see with my own eyes. This is one of the challenges of moving away from your family… they aren’t around… and neither are you.
She had a doctor’s appointment today, and thankfully she is doing well! Things are stable! For me, I was able to see with my own eyes that she is doing much better than the images that have been racing through my brain… and it was relieving.
It’s quite the fun story… and I really enjoyed surprising not only my mom, but my entire family by just popping in! When I first went to my father’s work… where my sister works, as well… she told a co-worker, “that guy looks a lot like my brother” when I was in the parking lot getting out of the rented 2019 Nissan Altima (fancy).
When I walked past her window and she saw my Cedar Circle sweatshirt… she knew it was me! My father… well, I just walked into his office while he was on the phone with a client… and then caused him to fumble over his words for a second! I’m sure the client was like, “ummm… you ok?!”. My mother… well… the look on her face when I walked into the house… it simply filled me happiness.
But now… I gots to go to sleep! (stories for another time!)
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 25… woke up at 8:00.
Although, I am trying to go to bed earlier, for some reason I didn’t mind falling asleep on the couch and then crawling into bed at 4:45 in the morning. The bed felt REALLY comfortable.
I tried to figure out Dropbox. I figured it out a little bit. It should be fun to learn.
Drove up to Burlington to talk to Northcountry and thought I would take care of Community and try to get in touch with Paul, Rob, or Flatbread Chelsea.
a. On the way up I thought about how I think I’m still in shock. I feel numb and like I’m just floating through life. Not focusing on anything.
b. I also thought about the party. I would like there to be some sort of arts involved in the remembrance. Maybe a dance by Paul… some sort of thing going on while something else is going on?
c. Thought about how everything is just a stepping stone for something else… cliché, but that’s what I was thinking about. Since we are getting older, you can see how something just feeds something else… growth. Ice Cube and Dre had NWA, then Dre had Snoop, then Snoop had Warren G, then Nate Dog (could’ve been the same time, but this is how I am providing an example).
Northcountry
a. Launa helped me. It was straight forward and painless. Changed my password before writing this.
b. As I was leaving, I remembered Kateri in the ER (the second time, it was a Friday, Hastings helped her off the floor and back onto the toilet… I was in town talking to Kureisha and getting groceries n shit).
Community
a. Spoke with Erin. I can’t do anything about Kateri’s solo accounts without being her executor. I’ll just have to go to the court and see what they need me to do.
b. I remembered her from when I worked at Leunig’s and went there to deposit checks.
Ran by Flatbread to see if I could meet the GM… Chelsea. Spoke to a bleach blond bartender with some solid make-up on. Chelsea was in a Manager’s Meeting. Bartender took my name and said she would call me when she had a moment… she hasn’t called.
Went to Zero Gravity to see if Paul was there… he wasn’t. So, I went next door to The Great Northern to see if Jeff was around… he was.
a. He gave me another one of Rookie’s flavors. Something citrus and mapley
b. Talked with Jeff, other bartender guy, Marnie, Boo, and Frank… it was a good visit.
Drove to W. Leb and hung with some of the crew. Jeremey, Margot, Justin, Ian, Kelley, Jim, and Jim’s wife. It was a nice evening of playing pool.
Came home, watched the rest of the not so scary educated. (note-“not so scary educated”…? Yup, no idea what that means!)
a. On the drive home I thought about how a lot of people tell you, “You look good!’ after your wife dies from cancer.
b. An owl flew right in front of me as I was passing Heman’s place.
Went to bed at 1:25am.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 26… Got up at 7:37ish… I knew I needed to sleep a bit more… and it was comfy.
Ran over a squirrel with a nut in it’s mouth on the way to work today. That kinda sucked… and popped.
Work was fine, nothing to write home about. It was a desk task oriented type morning. I was pretty subdued and just wanted to get some things done. Not in a bad mood or anything.
a. Ya, work was work. It’s still a little weird seeing some people, talking to some others… it’s nice.
b. Chatted with Tami for a minute as I was leaving. It was also nice. We don’t chat that much just the two of us that often (at all really) so it felt good to fill her in a bit and to let her do what she needs to do so that she doesn’t feel weird being around me.
Came home. Planned on maybe going to the Dinner Under the Balloons, but wanted to paint the bathroom and make some phone calls.
a. Called knights funeral home about death certificates being mailed back and picking them up next week. Asked about money owed and he said no worries (not those exact words).
b. Put the second and last coat of primer on in the bathroom. I didn’t do some of the lower section… running (ran) out of paint. It’ll get covered by wainscoting. Its looking good. I feel good about where it’s at and I’m confident I’ll be able to start setting it back up a little soon.
c. Called Paul. He was fantastic. He told me that he and Rob feel as though they would like to throw the party. Their generosity is amazing and is just another part of this whole pile of shit that is good. June 20th… Flatbread.
d. Decided to have Friday night pizza so I ordered one from Colatina E. I had enough credit things that the girl asked if I wanted to use them for a free pizza?… HELLS YA! It was fantastic. Threw in an orange soda and my bill came to $1.94
e. Came home. Played a little guitar. Was about to hop in the shower and then got a little disgusted by it so I cleaned it. I threw away the whole chain thing because it disgusts me a bit, but the whole shower was pretty disgusting. It felt good to clean it.
f. Played a game of Mappy… and Pole Position. Lea Jae texted me, just checking in. She’ll be stopping by at some point. Glad I texted her back… still trying to stay on top of things, of the people.
g. Threw on a documentary on names and the effect they have on us. Names as in funny/challenging names. Like “Dick Large”. It was cool, but it also made me realize there are people out there just trying to figure out the next step in the movie process. (a note from today… I have no idea what I meant right there!)
h. Texted with Matty for a bit… because it just feels good sometimes. I wanted to talk to my parents but didn’t.
Having to call it a night at 1:35am… it’s just too much right now
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Ummm… so, I’m not reading these notes until I go to copy and paste them each day. I just scroll on down until I hit the day and hope for the best! I’ve actually been doing pretty good with it. I would even venture to say that it’s kinda nice to revisit them. It at least keeps the evening interesting!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 27… alarm went off at 6:30am… turned it off until 7:30, got out of bed around 7:45am… yup.
Worked. Wasn’t really into going to work, I’ve been pretty sad and unmotivated to get out of bed. Once on my way to work… by 244, I start to feel somewhat OK. Limiting my smoking on the way to work.
Work was fine… Saturday. We had a line to the kitchen door.
a. I was just there… somewhat helpful, but I still don’t feel like I’m being very productive.
b. I saw Karen in line so I went to say “thank you” for the card. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy… special… that she would take the time. It gives me hope that KAF will be able to help me survive in the future.
Luke swung by to chat.
a. I thought he was coming home from Boston and that his family would be with him… wrong on both. He was heading to Boston for Binks’ graduation party… solo. Before I knew he was solo, I figured KAF would be the best place for all of us to chat. It was just him, which was perfect so that we (I) could talk without interruption.
b. I hadn’t seen Luke since before Palliative. I told him how I have been coping: projects, talking/texting peeps, working, can’t look at pictures, remembering the beautiful things that happened in this experience, trying to stay positive.
c. I told him how I have been writing and how it has been a nice release of emotions and energy. It has been good for me and also provides me with some hope that it may go beyond my computer. Hopefully, it will be useful to other people. I mentioned how I am thinking about a book and a blog. He said he could help me with the blog.
d. We talked about the Scotty story, Kateri’s last day, the day after. I was a little emotional, which happens when I get around close friends. I am so thankful that we were able to catch up, even if it was just for a bit.
e. He was in our wedding… a Man of Honor… if that says anything.
f. David texted saying he was at Farmway.
Met David at the house.
a. He grabbed the key from the turtle to get in since I wasn’t here.
b. I filled him in on where I was at emotionally and how I was coping with everything. Basically, the same things as Luke and I talked about.
c. We decided we needed to eat sooner that later and I thought we could go to Samauri… it’s close and decent. Went down Blood Brook to show him Raph’s house.
a. It was ok. Food was good, service was horrendous. David went up to order our drinks because we were sitting for so long.
b. Griffin and Celeste were there. I saw them when we walked in but didn’t say anything because I figured we would see them when they left… we did.
c. I hadn’t seen Celeste since Kateri’s birthday party, so it was nice to fill her in. Mainly it was how I was doing, which is weird.
We came home and pretty much caught up.
a. I told him about the Scotty thing and the Heman story from Day 1. Those are the things that help me push the dark shit aside.
b. The sadness of missing her is starting to set in and I don’t know what to expect from that, but I like to think that it is good that I recognize it… of course, I could be way off base.
c. I told him about Kateri’s last day… that was hard for me.
a. I haven’t had to talk about it for a bit but realized there are people who haven’t heard it.
b. It was hard, but I am glad that I can recall the day so vividly.
c. It was a pretty emotional evening between Luke and David, but it was also so easy. This is what I feel I need to be doing when the opportunity arises… and our friends need to know the story… at least as much as I can share with them.
d. Crying felt… not good, but better… or relieving.
Went to bed at 2:45am
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 28… woke up early but stayed in bed until 9:40ish… in and out of sleep. It was a cloudy/drizzly morning which makes it hard to get up… bed is just so comfortable on those mornings.
Had a pretty lazy morning with David. We hung out, put music on the TV.
He gave me body work at noonish.
a. It felt really nice getting some work done from him. He is really good at that shit. I started face down and after a bit my head just filled up with snot and I could breath through my nose or swallow… takes away a bit of the relaxation.
b. When I flipped to my back, the relief on my head was fantastic… relief from snot, not my mental well-being… that was good too.
c. It was a little hard just laying there because your mind does start to wander. Although the massage is relaxing and you focus quite a bit on that, the fact that your head can think about anything meant that it was gonna go to some sad places as I laid there.
d. When I was getting off the couch and taking my clothes off to get on the table my right elbow got tweaked and still hurts… it’s called getting older.
e. He did a combination of massage and Reiki… I don’t really know when he was doing the Reiki… I’m guess at those moments when he stopped rubbing me.
f. Afterwards, we had a smoke, cooked some bacon, and made some egg tacos.
David left around 3:30.
I went to the store quickly to grab a few things: soda, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, milk, seltzer, fruit, etc.
Sean, Angela, and I were gonna go for a hike, but it was rainy all morning. We decided they were gonna come over here and make tacos around 6:00.
When I got home I thought I could bang out painting the bathroom before they got here… I was wrong. I did get quite a bit done, so when they did arrive I just covered brushes and paint and shit and left it for after they leave. (Independent… I can do it later… at night)
a. I have been finding that although I want to get projects done and shit, if I have the option of working on something by myself or hanging/talking with a friend… I’m gonna go with the contact with friends… that’s what I REALLY need right now.
b. They came up and saw the bathroom… could smell the fumes.
c. I rolled a joint and we went out to the front deck to smoke, catch up a bit, and to enjoy the evening… then the cool wind came up and we went inside to start cooking… well, Sean started getting everything ready. He has done this for us twice and I have to say… he has it down (bringing shit to someone else’s house).
d. Chorizo/chicken tacos with guac, he brought pickled cabbage, cilantro, tomatillo salsa, corn tortillas… it was fantastic.
a. I felt good about my eating the last two days. Going out and then having people bring you food is very helpful.
e. It was a very nice evening… I like hanging with them, it seems kinda easy and laid back which is what we/I like. It was nice to get to know them a bit more.
a. Angela mainly worked for/with family in Wisco until coming here, Sean grew up in Miami (gross), they worked at The B@#$%^& (which I don’t really know what that place is about), they wanted a BnB also, they want to buy a house (but don’t know where yet), Sean went to culinary school, they may need to move since housemates are having a baby… but is supposed to move out in December when their house is built (not Sean and Angela’s), Angela was sort of a wild child… said she would love to go back to high school!… said she could do whatever she wanted to!… Sean and I are not those people who would go back to HS if given the chance.
b. As Angela and I were talking, Sean went to the kitchen and made caramel popcorn… love having cook friends!
f. They took off and I finished the painting the bathroom.
It was nice having both David and Angela/Sean visit. I’m still not very emotional when I’m alone, but when I get around people I love, it lets me release a little.
Busy day, but a good one with good people. I fell asleep in the chair until 4:28am, had a smoke, washed up, and crawled into bed. I set the alarm for 7:30am because I am still trying to get back to a normal schedule.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
It’s the second day of my weekend and after staying up way too late last night… but enjoying no alarm!… I decided to try and pluck some things off of the “To Do” list today. You know, those little things that you just keep meaning to get to… or are blatantly disregarding?! So I did chicken chores, replaced the Daytime Running Light on the ol’ buggy, brought wood over from the potting shed… with help from said buggy… and a sled, changed out the drip pans on the stove because the old ones had literally disintegrated, and then… well… I rearranged the living room.
Now changing up the living room was no where near my list of things to do today, but I am actually almost giddy thinking about sitting back on the couch in comfy clothes… chicken pot pie on the lap… and getting lost in a movie in my new surroundings!… a whole new experience! It feels good to have done something today, spur of the moment, that will also provide something new… a little variety… in my day to day. It is kind of a strange feeling sitting here in a space in which Kateri has not seen set up this way before. It’s a moment where the Old Life and New Life overlap in my head… but I feel good about it. I also feel good about the fact that I still have two Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups for my movie!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 29… woke up at 7:30am to my alarm, snoozed until 8:15ish.
Made coffee and crawled back into bed to write notes for yesterday. I would really like to get to the point where I am going to bed earlier and spending time in bed writing.
Went to Randy and Vicky’s to drop off my drills. They were gonna mend their garden boxes.
a. We hung out behind their garage and smoked a joint away from O#$%^… who was in the house.
b. They had been having a rough go at it the last couple of days. Stress of everything (Kateri) kinda bearing down on them. Randy wanted to drink a bottle of whisky the other night. Thankfully he chose not to. Although, with how well he has changed his life around, I don’t think tying one on is the worst thing in the world.
c. Randy mentioned that he had been getting angry lately.
a. I don’t have any room right now for the anger. Once you get into anger… it can lead you down some deep, dark paths.
b. They asked that I check out a screen door for them at LaValley’s…. I never got one… or went back to their house.
Went to LaValley’s and Home Depot
a. They didn’t have the wainscoting I was looking for so I just went to Home Depot to see if they had anything.
b. They had sheets of bead board which is what I was looking for. I had to have them cut them in half hoping they would fit inside the Jeep… they didn’t. I had to strap them to the top… and then pull over at the Powerhouse Mall to redo it so that they wouldn’t fly off and go through someone’s windshield.
I was able to get them up on the wall. I don’t know how well they are attached… a lot of nails just went into drywall. I didn’t glue them or anything in case I needed to remove them.
I thought I was gonna write something a little more in depth of what I’m about to do for the next thirty days, but it’s 11:41pm and I got home a little later than anticipated… and I’m… well… kinda tired. A friend and I went up to BTown for a get together of absolutely wonderful people who wanted to show a friend of ours that we love him… that we support him… that we are there for him as he does his dance with cancer. This is a man who I met when I first came to Vermont… who I have cooked with and for… and who Kateri considered one of the early “Pocket People”… which should tell you something about this guy.
I wanted to explain in detail what is going through my head and my plans for this bloggery in the immediate future, but being in the same space… in a wonderful space opened up by wonderful peeps to all of us “Industry People”… is the thing that took priority this evening for multiple reasons. The main reason, I wanted to show my friend I cared for him… and to tell him I love him. Luckily… these are my peeps… and I got to tell more than a couple of them that I love them.
Sooooo… here’s the gig. March 24, 2019 starts the last thirty days before the 1st Anniversary of Kateri’s death. In thirty days will come Widower Day 365… one year without my wife. I am going to share my Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning (my notes from the first thirty days without Kateri) for the next thirty days starting with Widower Day 30 (I don’t know if that’s a little odd to start with 30… but, I’ve got my reasons. They may not be rational… but they’re reasons!). I’m gonna also put those notes in the “My Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning” site page area thing… just in case someone wants to see how this widower dealt with being sucker punched by life. FYI… I’m giving myself leniency if circumstances don’t allow me to get to posting blogs n things. The notes aren’t very exciting and there are some things I don’t feel comfortable sharing out of respect for people in my life, but I feel I sorta wanna to get this all out before the start of “Year 2”.
You are more than welcome to share any of this if you feel it may help someone out who is going through their own shit… to show them that they aren’t alone in having to cope with such a gut wrenching, confusing, scary, and lonely time. I don’t know how this will all go, or what going back to these notes will bring up, or if I should wait till after the year is up… or if I wanna even do it! But here it goes anyways!
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning
Day 30… Tuesday May 22, 2018.
Woke up around 6:30 so that I could get to work. It’s a strange day for me. I gave myself 30 days to write about this experience. Part of it was I don’t want to forget some of the things that have happened over the last month, part of it is I wanted something I could look back on as a reference (how was I feeling? Simply what did I do on ___day of this process, part of it is I want to write a book because I feel I have a story that is interesting… I have an experience which was/is horrible, but I’m living through it, I hope that my story could help someone else going through their own shit storm, I hope enough people would be interested in what I have to say that they would give me $ for it… with the hope of keeping my life as I know it together.
It was a strange day at work.
a. Although I was aware of what I was going through and that it had an affect on my attitude, I was still kinda hypercritical of a lot of things at work. Some of which I feel was justified, but for some things I definitely could have dealt with a little differently.
This is what I posted on Facebook after I made 7ish videos to share what I was going through after I had sat in the car for 25 minutes crying and not being able to get out. I wanted to share my experience and be in the moment, but I also realized I wanted to be happy with what I was going to purposefully send out there.
Widower Day 30… In the last thirty days I have felt the love and support from friends, family, and strangers. I have been trying to get to a “starting point”. I have come up with terms like “nesting for one” and used terms like “little victories”. I have tried to stay busy to keep my mind off the sad shit. I have pushed my own comfort zone out of fear for the future which I have been given. I have laughed… and I have cried. I also made a video where I say I’m a widower at 43… I’m 42. This is what happens at the end of what I’m calling my 30 days of Mourning. Yup.
a. I am happy that I posted this. It was on the liberating side of things.
Widower Notes n Thoughts:
Yup… I didn’t really realize it until I was driving home from work that today was the eleven month anniversary of Kateri’s passing. I felt a little off today, but didn’t think much about it. Plus, coming off of Kateri’s birthday and the ringer that that put me through, I was actually just looking forward to a little bit of a mellower time for the following few days… hopefully weeks… and so far it is. At this point, having gone through birthdays and holidays and anniversaries of cancer stuff… the month anniversaries are just a way to track time. Compared to Kateri’s birthday… or the date of the diagnosis of Melanoma in the brain… or the anniversary of her death coming up in a month… all the other months have just been a countdown to that 1 Full Year moment. So, for me right now… it kinda sucks to think that Kateri has been gone for eleven months, but I’m emotionally hung over… wanna take a breather… and just prepare (if you can) for 1 year. (wow… that just fucked up to think about)
So, out of laziness… this is what I did today:
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 