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:
- In 2019 I got a snow blower! (my back thanks me… and yes, I’m excited about it enough that I had to mention it! People talk about how their cats or dogs or lizards are their “children”… which is kinda stupid… so I’m gonna start referring to my snow blower as part of the family. I think our relationship has grown enough over the last 12 months to make that leap!)
- I pissed some people off in 2019… some of those people I love… which sucks, but it’s gonna happen. Luckily, we all survived.
- I’m also not everyone’s cup of tea… I’m cool with that… I’m not a huge fan of tea, either! Of course, I still enjoy it once in a while… it just needs honey… lot’s and lot’s of honey.
- I don’t really look at time in the yearly chunks anymore. In my brain, it’s still based off of the day Kateri died.
- I haven’t changed anything in the house yet, but I’ve gotten used to everything I see being a reminder of Kateri and my “Old Life”.
- I have decided to start that process in 2020, though! You know, redecorating and going through some stuff! I’m ready to start putting together my home… my life…. and figuring out how to keep Kateri a part of it.
- 2019… I went from YachtRocks/Hits 1/Pop2K to Lithium and SoulCycle… with a bit of Caliente.
- (I just got off the phone with my sis… love ya sis.)
- In 2019 I learned that I’m gonna need to do more… which means I’m gonna need help… because I wanna do more… because I need to.
- I need to be healthier… not much more to say about that!
- I took my wedding ring off for more than 24 hours over the New Year’s holiday… for the first time… it’s currently back on.
- It was odd… both the fact that I couldn’t feel it on my finger (it’s heavy and I use my thumb to adjust it a lot throughout the day!) and… well… it just wasn’t on my hand! It provides me with a huge connection to Kateri and I simply don’t wanna lose that. It made me soooooo happy that we got married… that we made that commitment… that I had a wife… and that it was Kateri. In this new life…. I had a wife… and that’s not what my life is now. (Although… Kateri will always be my wife… she just won’t be out front digging in the gardens or blaring the B-52’s while tidying the house or laying next to me when I begrudgingly would come upstairs because she said it was time for bed. Damn… I wish she was here to tell me it was time for bed!)
- It’s easier to remember the cloth KAF shopping bag when going to the store. When shopping for one… I generally don’t need more than a bag and it has become routine to grab it from the pocket behind my driver’s seat. Look at me saving the planet!
- If I was someone who bought six packs… I would still be cutting the plastic rings so that the penguins and baby seals don’t get their heads stuck in them. My mom taught me that… in the 80’s… so some of you may not have any idea of what I’m talking about!
- In 2020, I would like to be a little more focused… in everything… this blog included.
- Since Kateri died, I’ve been on a quest to simply make things better or easier… hence snow blowers, woodstoves, and chop saws… proper tools for the job and better efficiencies. The quest also includes working on me… becoming better myself. Better at this new life, better at my relationships with friends, family, coworkers, and strangers, better at getting things done, better at taking care of myself. Basically… be a better person than I was yesterday… just so as to live a better life while I’m chugging along in this current one… and to stay on the rails most of the time!
- Straight up… Happy New Year… on the 5th!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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’ve been kinda freaking out about losing pictures and videos… memories… as the time keeps piling up so I started going through them in an attempt to organize them… it’s a slow process. I realized we all get a YouTube account with our google account so I figured I would at least throw the videos I have hanging out on my phone on there so that they are consolidated, I could expand the sharing of this experience, and I could learn a bit more about this technology stuff. Again… slow process.
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.
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.
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.
First, I just need to say that this post is pretty much a “Widower” post… not sad or anything… it’s not reminiscing about how great and wonderful and beautiful and honest and perfect Kateri was (is)… it’s about after that. For the last two days I have been copying, pasting, increasing indents… still gotta add some pics, and trying to finalize the little “My Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning” site page on this here bloggy website thing a ma jig. Which meant… I read my notes. And we all know what that means! Actually, there weren’t any waterworks the last two days… or maybe just not the last day… but, it was really kinda nice going through the notes and being able to just… remember… ponder… compare times… to simply think about them… without any convulsing, sniffing, or snorting of snot. (Kateri would always say, “Out is better than in!” if I decided to suck the snot in… instead of destroying a kleenex)
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.
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.
It’s Sunday morning. I’m drinking coffee in bed from my “I Love NY” cup for the first time in a while. I loved our Sunday mornings. I would get up, make coffee, bring up two cups… one with just the right amount of half & half to make it the appropriate color. Kateri would look at bathroom designs, gardening shit, far away places that have beaches and blue water, pictures of friends and family, calendars of events happening in the area, or cool shit going on just far enough away to warrant a road trip. I would look at Craigslist, check my email… the weather… and the headlines. I’m sure we weren’t the only couple with that sorta routine. It wasn’t anything unique or exciting, but for me it was perfect… and I miss it.
out of Dodge and was hoping to skip out of work a little early and hit the ocean, but sometimes things don’t work out as planned or anticipated and you have to adapt. Luckily, I enjoy my job and am surrounded by some pretty cool and supportive people. When you start your day not knowing if it is gonna be business as usual or some memory or emotion is gonna pop into your head and put you in the corner for fifteen minutes until the tears dry up and you can focus on not cutting the tip of your finger off with the ten inch chef knife you’re still holding… it makes for an interesting day. (I feel the need to point out that I’m never really worried about cutting myself… I’m a cook… it happens… sometimes badly… and we still don’t get stitches… smart, I know. Plus, when you use a tool for 24 years… muscle memory and skill can play a big role when needed. It’s like when you have to dice 25#’s of onions. By onion fifteen, when you can’t see shit through the water pouring out of your eye sockets and everyone in the kitchen is trying to be witty asking why you are so emotional… training and skills take over… and you finish task. Hopefully, with all your fingers.)
I was never really worried about losing my shit because it was the five month point or anything. I’ve been pretty even keel with the emotions and life lately. I mean, I’ve got my moments but I’m doing okay. I think it comes down to just being another phase of this process. I feel as though at the beginning of this phase in my life (Kateri’s passing), it was such a traumatic, emotional, and confusing event that my body and mind did everything it could just to keep me going… and I can’t tell you how much time and energy that takes. It’s relentless. That’s why I felt the need to keep telling myself to “roll with it”, to just get to the next point, whatever that next point may be. At some point, the body and mind says, “OK… I’m tired… you need to stop and sit for a bit”… and everything kinda goes numb. Which is sorta helpful when your philosophy has been to “just roll with it”. It’s like a forced, continual, fucked up meditative state with moments of feeling like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man talking about KMart.
So… I didn’t go to the ocean… but I went for a little drive.
The great thing about going for a drive is that the scenery is always changing… you are always somewhere different… and you just need to figure out where you’re going and what the theme song is gonna be. I left not knowing where I was gonna end up, but if I hadn’t given into the need to cover some ground I could have missed a spectacular sunset. Sometimes… sunsets provide the perfect light to end the day.
Thirty Days of Mo(u)rning 