what is a wife with a dead husband

I read about a man whose son is killed in a car crash. a drunk driver runs a red light and slams into the boy and he's dead at the scene. and now it's 4 years later and the dad can't get over it. here's the problem, he's a dad, but his child is dead. so what does that make him? how can he be a dad without a child? he's like a living dead dad. he identified as a parent, and now that identity is dead.

the day before gordi died he and i had a spat. and we never fought. we were amazingly compatible. but of course we were in a horrible situation. he was at home but very sick and he said his sister was coming over. (and i was fine with that. i love his family, and they have been so good to me. they continue to include me in family events even though gordi's dead. they continue to treat me like family. they invite me for christmas and took me out on my birthday. my family would not have done the same thing. if i had died they would have never thought about gordi again.) then he said his sister wanted to help. she wanted to clean up the kitchen. and i threw a fit. i said, just let her come and sit and talk to you. don't let her clean. what she's saying is that i'm not a good wife. i can't clean, i can't take care of you. i can't heal you. your family thinks i'm a bad wife and has to come and take care of you because i'm no good.

and of course i was a terrible wife. i'm sure you can imagine what a terrible wife i would be. i can't cook. i can't clean. i can't do anything. and in our relationship, gordi cooked and cleaned and took care of the house. i made the bed in the morning (because i was the last one out) i could put my dishes in the dishwasher, but i was not allowed to unload the dishwasher because i didn't know where gordi kept his cooking utensils. i could not fold laundry because i couldn't do it right. (oh, and watching him fold a fitted sheet was a sight to behold. it was like magic.) on garbage night i took the garbage down to the garage and he took the cans out in the morning when he left for work. i was supposed to corral my clutter so the public areas of the house were acceptable for company, but i could have my office as messy as i wanted.

when i said, your sister is saying i'm a bad wife,  he said, my sister just wants to do something. she wants to feel helpful and this makes her feel like she's helping. he said, my family loves you. (and they've proven that). he said, your family hates me. and i tried to deny it, but i couldn't really. and everytime i've told this story, and i have told this story, i've thought that was the point. but the real point is how am i a wife if my husband is dead. i'm a living dead wife. and i never aspired to be a wife. i always thought i would never marry. who would want to marry me? i would so obviously not be a good wife. and i'm not really pretty. and i didn't marry until i was 44, which is statistically rare. and i never really identified as a wife (gordi was a much better wife than i was) i didn't take his name. i was not a good wife. we were only married 3 1/2 years when he died. but it was the only happy time in my whole life. it was the only time i felt connected and complete. it was the only time that felt real and right. and what am i now with him gone?

I had a houseguest coming for Easter so I had my house cleaned, and that whole process upset me more than I thought it would. I probably used to be a hoarder. I would have called myself a packrat, and I’m better now, but still the place had gotten quite cluttered. My husband used to do the cleaning and I’m really not very good at it.  But having the house cleaned was really awful. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before how much I love my house. It’s practically in Fontenelle Forest and the whole back is windows to a view of my wooded back yard. But now it just doesn’t feel like mine. It doesn’t feel like home. All the surfaces are cleared, and there’s nothing of me here. I feel erased. I can’t find anything I want or need. Every place feels too bright and too big. All the coziness is gone. All the personality is gone. It feels alien. And I don’t feel like I belong here. I didn’t clean my home office, so I’ve been spending a lot of time here at the computer. It’s the only place that feels like home. When my guest leaves I can ‘cozy’ the place up again, but right now it just all feels so wrong. I guess I didn’t handle Spring cleaning very well. I’ll probably try to keep the dining room clean for when the CultureQuest team meets here. And even before the clean up it wasn’t hoarders bad, but it was comfortable, and now it’s not.

Tattoo two

i got another tattoo. it's not quite as meaningful as my first, but i like it. it's on the inside of my left forearm. it's a quote from vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five. in the book, it's said every time anyone or anything dies. After the bombing of Dresden, nearly everyone was dead. so it goes. on the night Billy is abducted by the space aliens he is holding a flat bottle of champagne. all the bubbles were dead. so it goes. it's what the Tralfamadorians say when they see a corpse. they see in four dimensions and do not understand our limited view of time. when they see someone dead, they acknowledge that this minute isn't his best, but there are many other better moments when he is just fine. we should focus on those. it's also possibly the best translation of "amen." it's synonymous to the phrase "so mote it be." Stuff happens. So it goes.

locks of love

I cut my hair and donated 14 inches of hair to locks of love! I had it in my will that i wanted my hair donated, but i was a little afraid my wishes wouldn't be carried out. and my hair was getting unmanageable, but i was afraid to cut it or shape it for fear that then i couldn't donated to locks of love when i died. plus, i sort of wanted to keep using my hair while i was still here. then i came up with the idea to cut part of it and keep part of it. i usually pull part of my hair into a half-ponytail sort of high up. i think it's technically called a half-up. so i had them cut off that top-layer half-ponytail, and then sort of blend it in. my hair is way too thick anyway. so my hair is still half way down my back, but some poor bald cancer child gets the benefit of my extra hair! it's win-win. i got to donate a lot of hair, but i still have some left too. this pic is after the hair cut.

My dad died last week. He’d been sort of sick for a few months, but only really sick the week before, so it was pretty unexpected. He was 71: his birthday was the day before he died. Father’s day was three days later. He’d had a heart condition and heart problems all his life. He had his first heart attack when he was in his twenties, so I guess that forty-some years or so we got after that was bonus. But it wasn’t his heart that killed him. It was blood cancer and the ensuing anemia and pulmonary distress. But his life is way more interesting than his death. He was a jack of all trades. It seemed he could do anything. He could fix cars, and fix things around the house, he could paint and make picture frames and carve wood. If he wanted something or wanted to do something, he figured out how. He had to drop out of college when he ran out of money, but he made sure I made it through (and then some). Academically, he was my biggest taskmaster and cheerleader. He worked as a private investigator on the side, so he had cool surveillance equipment. He used it to help me cut my first record. And we had the most popular slumber parties around, because when we had a séance, we always got a real ghost. It made it hard, however, for me to sneak out to meet a boy or sneak in after curfew.

My folks welcomed our friends and the neighbor kids and any kid who needed some love. All they wanted from life was to be parents and they were great parents, to us, and to our friends and to my sister’s kids, and to their friends.

He could sell anything, but that also made him a very savvy purchaser. He knew all the sales tricks and demanded the actual best price for anything. And he usually got it.

He was personality plus. He had a huge collections of jokes and would come up with a joke (or two or three) appropriate for any situation. When things seemed too serious at his funeral, I knew the perfect joke from his repertoire, appropriate for the situation: There was a man, a dying man. He was weak, on his death bed, when with nearly his last breath he smelled something wonderful: his wife’s famous chocolate chip cookies. His favorite! He got out of bed with his last bit of energy and crawled to the kitchen, ready for a bite of delicious warm cookie. He gathered all his energy and reached for a cookie, when his wife slapped his hand and said, “They’re for the funeral.”

Bodies

I just went to see the Bodies exhibit downtown and i thought it was fascinating and interesting. i bought the audio tour as well and listened to the adult and children's commentary (i always want to get my money's worth). there are several whole bodies and lots of parts all dissected in someway to show muscles, tendons, internal organs, veins etc. i especially liked the circulatory system. they have a special procedure where they fill the veins with a colored polymer then chemically dissolve the rest of the body around it so all you see is where the blood was. it was fascinating and very pretty. the other sliced up stuff was interesting but not always pretty. but it is intriguing to see how we're all put together and what all it takes to get and stay alive. i suppose it's not for the more squeamish, but it's pretty cool stuff. and it's all very scientific. the parts are labeled. the placards and the audio commentary talk about the anatomy and the physiological connections. it's interesting to see how it all fits, and how it all fits together.

hospital

I was in the hospital recently for a blood clot in my arm. and it was a horrific experience! i was sort of familiar with the hospital experience from when Gordi was sick last year, but this time it was for me! i was appalled at the level of incompetence and neglect. i was at a prominent teaching hospital for 2 days (1 night) with a blood clot in my right arm. every time someone came in the room, i had to keep them from doing something detrimental to my situation. every aide tried to take my blood pressure in the right arm. i kept offering them the left arm. they kept wanting to use the right arm. i reminded them there was a blood clot in the right arm. the response was usually, oh, that would be bad. thanks for telling me. my thought was, this is why i am here. you should know this. after the first time, a sign was placed over the bed saying not to draw blood or take blood pressure on the right arm. no one looked at it. every 6 hours they drew blood. every 6 hours i had to keep the lab tech from taking blood from the right arm. i know the iv was in the left arm (because there was a clot in the right arm) i know there were no more veins in the left arm from which to draw blood -- believe me, i know that. but that doesn't change the fact that the right arm had a blood clot, and so they couldn't draw blood from it. i had to keep a lab tech from drawing blood at the wrong time. i had to stop a doctor from giving me blood pressure medicine. i had to stop a nurse from giving me a wrong iv. i totally had to be my own advocat, and i knew from Gordi's experience about that too. but i worried about people who were incapacitated (and there are people like that in hospitals) and couldn't speak up when someone was trying to do something wrong. but also, lots of people expect that the people in hospitals actually know what they're doing and don't argue with them. what if i had thought, well, the nurse (or aide or tech) is the professional and knows what to do. if i'd let them do what they wanted, i'd be in worse shape right now. i have to go back for blood work like constantly now to check the blood thinners etc., and today at the clinic that works only with people on this blood thinner for clots, the lab tech tried to take blood from the right arm even after i told her there was a clot there. she said, that won't make a difference will it? i made her get the more experienced person, who agreed with me that it would be a very bad idea to draw from the arm with the clot. i knew the hospital experience would be annoying and frustrating ( and they would not let me sleep -- they were in at 11 and midnight and 1:15 and 4:30 and 5:00 and 5:30 and 6:00 and it never stopped after that.) but i had sort of thought that it wouldn't be as dangerous as it could have been. i shouldn't have had to stop EVERYONE from doing things that were directly detrimental to my condition. it worries me.