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.
There have been more than a few moments in the past couple of weeks that have made me want to write stuff down… to document things I don’t want to forget about as I go through this process, but it took four inches of wet, heavy snow to keep me in my bed… drinking coffee from the I Heart NY mug… to get me to open up the computer… and procrastinate shoveling the more than a few inches of wet/heavy white stuff from the first significant snowfall. Yup, it’s beautiful… but I’m really not ready to start pushing it off of the driveway or to chisel out a hole at the end of it where the plows keep stacking it up into a nice wall of ice chunks as if a glacier just went rolling past. So, I’m just gonna jot down a few notes, drink my coffee, and rethink my decision to not get a snowblower (I don’t like the idea of having a 100 pound paper weight taking up space in the garage 352 days of the year… but they’re less expensive than four wheelers… and plow trucks).
I shaved my head the other night (that’s just my hairdo… I haven’t paid for a haircut in seventeen years), looked in the mirror… and didn’t recognize myself. You wanna talk about a fucked up thing to go through… well… it was fucked up. It could have been the fact that my beard is the longest it has ever been coupled with the newly trimmed noggin. It could have been the fact that it was the first time I shaved my head in the bathroom after working on it for over a year… a bathroom in which Kateri put the first hole in the wall and I was now cleaning up 
little pieces of hair from a sink and tiled floor in a whole new life. A floor I tiled in the early morning hours over the course of three nights while Kateri was in the hospital… Maria being there by her side for her… while I did whatever I needed to do before Kateri was discharged with gastrointestinal issues from the immunotherapy. A floor I needed to learn how to tile for the simple fact that my wife needed a toilet upstairs so that she could sleep in her own bed. Staring at myself in the mirror… looking into my own eyes for the first time in a while… it was hard to deal with all the emotions that came flooding in as I recognized that specific point in the timeline… that life is different… but I couldn’t recognize myself. To my core… I am different… I have
changed, because my life has changed. I cried… a lot…. as I leaned on the sink and didn’t move as I searched in those eyes for understanding to what was going on, but never really got an answer. So what do you do? Well, I took a shower to remove those little bits of hair from my shoulders, beard, and body… put on some comfy clothes… texted with a friend… and waited for the “next day” to come.
Bloggery Post Addition…
Note to self… it takes about an hour and a half to upload a three minute and fifty-eight second video to this little blog when at home. I have no idea why it takes so long. This isn’t even the first time I’ve tried to post one. This is just my first moment of success in getting moving pictures from one box to another and onto my blog! (I’m blaming it on the old, slow, and outdated internet wires n stuff attaching my house to other wires that go other places)
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 