MAKING NUMBER 8 CHOCOLATES

It was eight years ago that I began to think the very dark thought that Ted might die, and soon. 

We knew he had pancreatic cancer for more than a year when that thought crept into my head for the first time.  Up until that thought, I believed he would somehow learn to live with it, and our life together would go on as before.  

The date of his death is March 29, 2009 -- two days shy of his sixty-first birthday.  I am about to turn sixty-two in April.  It feels very strange to live longer than Ted lived.  This idea is out of reach for me.  I live with something right next to my body that isn't there.  I feel it.  I have started to privately think of it as The Big Empty.

Death is not the only killer around.  I remember reading about a traumatized and amnesiac woman arriving by bus to NYC in the seventies, with no idea how to live or who she was.  She knew one thing for certain -- she loved chocolate and she deep-wired knew how to make it.  She found work with a chocolatier and eventually ran her own operation. 

She didn't die -- just most of her life and previous identity did.


As my own March 29 anniversary date approaches, I view my days at a distance, as if through the lens of a drone above myself. 

I see myself writing, housekeeping, caring for my dogs.  There are always library hauls and reading -- with background familiar noise of John Wayne/John Ford Westerns or such, playing on Amazon Prime.  Sometimes I tune to Pandora stations like Johnny Cash and sometimes Pavarotti. 

I think I am lucky that I'm not a sit-still person, and yet I am miserable at intentional exercise. 

I take continuing education classes.  My most recent class was on strength training exercises using a big red rubber band.  I think I misplaced the band down my shirt three times during class and recognized myself for who I continuously turn out to be.  When the class was over, I knew I was lucky no one had been injured.

My working motto at the moment:  "Thank Goodness I'll Never Have to See Those People Again".

Everything changed when Ted died, except for some essentials about myself, such as:

• Still attempt to accomplish feats I have attempted many times, and failed. 
• Still in love with the public library, still a reading addict. 
• Write multiple times a day -- lists and books and notes to self and letters and emails to others. 
• Enjoy a wide range of music so long as it somehow tells a story. 
• Think of Ted and want him here with me throughout every single day. 
• Live with dogs -- now, with dogs Ted never had a chance to trip over and love.

Every day is a pieced-together textile with the main impetus of staying busy behind it. 

I am sometimes asked how to begin again, after loss and grief take your life away and you have to keep on living.  I have written a new book about that, and it will be for sale on Amazon in two weeks or so.  My book, "Baptized Every Morning", is a guidepost, journal and sketchbook about starting over after loss and grief wipe you out. 

Now that this book is almost finished, I have started working on my next book.  It will be about a prostitute and madam, living a century ago.  The research is beguiling to me.

Recently, I joined a local rock and gem club and have been rockhounding and polishing finds in my rock tumbler.  My ten-year-old grandson, Julian, is also a member of this club.  We share the unique joy of understanding rocks and how they came to be.  He got a rock tumbler for Christmas and just finished polishing his first batch.  Gorgeous -- especially the Tiger Eyes. 

Julian's Polished Tiger Eyes!

It is exciting to watch his collection grow as I grow my own, and share the thrill of the hunt.  Julian has a deep understanding of the chemical compositions, of elements and atomic weights.  I learn a lot from him in that regard.  I've been a rock collector most of my adult life, but being around a young rockhound has reignited my enthusiasm -- especially for finding and polishing agates and jaspers. 

I like to hunt rocks on the beach.

Yep.  I stay busy.  A new book, nearing publication.  Another book underway.  A beloved grandson with me in rockhounding and rock polishing.  A big family near, including six grandchildren, three adult kids and their spouses.  Elements of myself that go way back, like music, reading and the dread of deliberate exercise.  These old friends have been true. 

My pieced together, new way of living is busy.  It is even what you might call full. 

I wish there was a way for me to say otherwise, but there is an emptiness to my life that never goes away.  Not ever. 

This is my brand of widow, today.

My gratitude list is long. 


Love.
Family.
Rocks. 
Music. 
Dogs.
Writing.
Books. 

Gratitude, even, for continuous companionship of The Big Empty. 

HELLO GOODBYE TO CHEESED-OFF FOSSILS

{Fossils (from Classical Latin fossilis; literally, "obtained by digging") are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past.} 

If it is December, I am culling.

Drawers, closets, walls, garage, shed.

Every December, I find myself relearning why it is painful to discard certain objects.

Letting go of objects I once dearly longed for is a form of self-burial.   It can be tear-jerking to see clearly that one's old self is constantly withering.  Withered.  Blown. 

I used to sell objects in an antique booth and sometimes on-line, so culling was made into a business function and not as emotional. 

Once upon a time I had the energy to host a two-day garage sale every year.  Bury that me. 

If my grown kids don't want something discarded, it is thrift store bound.  When I see my goodbye-thing on the thrift store shelf with a price tag affixed, I am viewing a fossil.  It is clear evidence of something that was once alive.

Xiphanctinus Molossus once swam in the sea

that covered present day Kansas

Without fossils, the state we know as Kansas might be less of a wonder.  Millions of years ago it was underwater, with fishes and air dwellers thinking everything was going along rather swimmingly.  Presto! Chango! and today I can visit a gnarly-toothed extinction of a fish any time I like in a fossil museum.  Everything is under glass.  People like to hover and watch over fossils the way a miser watches over a scarecrow in order to inherit his clothes.   There is something about a fossil that has to be had.  Every fossil knows a secret.    Tell me.

What a glory it must be to be admired and respected for the imprint one has left behind.  

When I look at the exalted state that is any fossil, I feel a particular longing for a mission in my own life that will leave an admirable imprint a million or so years along.   Now that I am retired from working, I feel torn. 

Real and lasting meaning and value to the world

VS

Having unplanned fun full-time   

I am feeling CHEESED OFF, a British phrase meaning waiting too long for an important mission -- or, in my case, wanting to find a way to leave a lasting imprint.

Perhaps living alone spares me from the daily mission of living peacefully with another individual, and robs me of a bigger sense of purpose on a daily basis.   Now that I've written the previous twenty-eight words, I feel a cynical laugh building inside of lonesome me. 

I have fossil envy.  It's not the first time, and it probably won't be the last. 

Dearest You:

Once you had died and your body taken away from this place, I did a few things that are now extinct, so far as I know.  One is that I took clear packing tape in a red plastic dispenser and went around the house, lifting your fingerprints.  Fingerprints on counters, on glassware, appliances and doors.  I hung them on a kite-string line and memorized the swirls and the dips.  At last I knew that I could not differentiate your prints from mine and that of visitors near the end.  For the life of me now I cannot recall where these packing tape artifacts are.  I don't even live in the same house as these made up, strung up, taped up, transparent banners of unidentifiable fingerprints.  They are fossils for a distant epoch to dig up and re-string, possibly for all to admire. 

*************

TIME has turned the corner again and it is now an impossible accumulation of years:  2017.
 Eight years since there was dearest you whose fingerprints co-mingled with my own. 

I am still thinning out the fossilized possessions of that forever lifetime together, a ways ago and a ways ahead.