Monthly Archives: October 2009

Anniversaries, Firsts and The Privileged Few


Yesterday was the first anniversary of my dad’s death. I knew Mom had taken the day off, but between appointments and whatnot, I didn’t get an opportunity to call her until the late afternoon after Dee got home from school. She sounded shaky but assured me she was okay.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I did okay today. Went out to the cemetery in the morning and had lunch with Auntie before her physio. People have been calling on and off, and I saw neighbors. It wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be. Now I have all my firsts done.”

Getting through “the firsts” is a big deal. I actually didn’t know that the assorted holidays and anniversaries of this and that had a designation until Will had been dead for a half a year or more. I am not sure I really needed to know it either. I have learned a lot of terminology that is death or widow specific that probably hasn’t aided me as much as it was intended to, but that is another story. People are always proud of themselves for having crossed the mile marker which is year one. Year two is a whole other matter, but I didn’t mention that. Another thing I don’t think is helpful is telling survivors about the pitfalls to come because, in my opinion, it can lead to self-fulfilling prophecy situations. Best to let others go through their own ebb and flow without planting any seeds.

Rob inquired after Mom as we sat having tea after dinner and dishes were done. Tuesday is late dinner because of Dee’s dance, and we got home to find that Rob had supper waiting. He even did the dishes after – that’s a digression, isn’t it? I related Mom’s pleasure at having jumped the year mark and the fact that no one had forgotten her on this anniversary.*

“No one called me,” he said.

“Me neither,” I replied, “and I even managed to not remind Mom that she not only didn’t call me on the one year but she forgot the date and mentioned it a week or more after the fact.”

“Well,” Rob mused, “I’d kind of alienated all my in-laws at that point by marrying you.”

Before the first year was up. A point of fact that is less relevant as time goes on. Though it doesn’t completely go away, the fact that Rob and I continue on in spite of the hand-wringing makes the objections irrelevant in the face of reality.

“Well, they were all gracious about it none the less and seem okay now except for Indy. But she has issues of her own that are probably more at the root of things.”

One of Shelley’s sisters is a cross between CB and BabySis. She has never been anything but kind to me and Dee but when we have been out of sight and earshot, she has wailed and railed a bit. She is one of those people who no matter how removed she is from the epicenter of tragedy, will try to make it all about her anyway. It’s hard wiring but a hard childhood and substance abuse don’t enhance the trait  – in a desirable manner anyway.

This got us to talking about last days. The whole death-bed scene. And Rob brought up my personal fingernail on blackboard issue – the people who don’t show up because they want to remember the dying person “as they were”.

“Who the fuck do they think they are that they get dibs on the pristine memories?” I asked. It was a rhetorical because Rob just smiled and shrugged. We’ve had this particular conversation before and with no satisfactory conclusions drawn by the end.

At one point the memories drifted past the popular idea that the dying should be treated to a running monologue of non-stop chatter from the bedside babysitters. I understand the rationale. We live people harbor the belief that the dying person is alone, frightened and finds comfort in being connected to the land of the living even if they can’t interact or acknowledge. I wonder about that myself. We are told that people are waiting for guides to come and lead them away, but what if those last hours are filled with important instructions or lessons and all we are doing is making it harder for the person to pay attention? And what if dying is as much work as every other aspect of life?

Rob assigned shifts to Shelley. Her nephew played the guitar for instance. Her mom read to her from a book on proper nutrition for cancer patients.

“I wonder what Shelley must have been thinking then,” Rob said.

I actually just finished writing about this in the last chapter of the memoir I was working on. Will’s brain damage was so extensive that he simply couldn’t receive or make sense of information in any form. I didn’t know this for a fact until the autopsy report months later, but I suspected it, so I just didn’t bother to speak. I carried on long conversations with him in my head. If you’d have walked in on just he and I, you would have wondered at the utter silence and the fact that all I ever did was rub his chest or hold his hand. But my reasoning was that he was just as likely to read my mind as he was to hear and understand what I was saying.

Dee brings home a reading book every night that she must read and discuss with one of us. Her current discussion obsession is making what the teacher told them was “self-connections”.

“It’s important to make self-connections,  Mom,” she reminded me tonight when I tried to ask her about something else in the story.

But she’s right. Self-connections are where we learn and grow.

*Not sadiversary or deathversary or any other of the Hallmarkish terms.

Blogging from the Charmin Washroom


This is something The Bloggess would get picked to do because she is weberatti and because she believes public washrooms are zen zones, but apparently Charmin is looking for unknowns to spend the weeks leading up to Christmas manning their Grand Central Station washrooms* and then blogging, tweeting and otherwise letting the known universe in on the wonderliciousness of it all.

This is how toilet tissue is sold in my native land and one more reason to not admit I am from there when we move overseas. That and the whole terrorists might kill me thing.

“It’s pays money,” I told Rob.

“But you have to live in the bathroom, right? It’s a 24/7 thing.”

“They’re paying $10,000,” I repeated the money thing because I didn’t think he’d heard.

“To live in a bathroom that thousands of who knows where they’ve been people are walking in and out of to take care of any private function you can imagine every day for five weeks!”

“For $10,000,” I said – again – “And you get to blog about it and tweet and make YouTube videos.”

“In a bathroom where people piss and shit,” he was really stuck on the negatives. “Do you have to eat in there too?”

“Well, I would imagine they give you breaks,” I said, not really knowing and not really sure. It’s in America after all where “reality” is carried to extremes.

“You want to do this, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, no.” Okay the money, the blogging and the attention would be interesting but there is the whole toilet aspect to consider. He had a good point there. If I were 22, homeless already with no immediate job prospects, this might sound like a better opportunity.

“I’m not going to live in a bathroom in Grand Central Station for 5 weeks,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a family thing,” I said.

“So you want to go to New York for five weeks by yourself?”

Already I can’t picture Rob and Dee for five weeks on their own with me checking in via an iPhone. I think this kind of technological upgrade would be necessary in order to pull this off when you are not a homeless 22-year-old college drop-out without prospects but the Charmin people would have to foot the tech bill or that $10,000 would be eaten by the expense. Which I guess is why they are looking for bloggers as we tend to work for free when we aren’t paying people for the privilege of providing Google with content they can turn around and sell.

“No, I can’t be gone for 5 weeks,” I said, although in the corner of my mind where all outlandish ideas are given more than a cursory once over, wheels are spinning. The three of us in a washroom? Living in Grand Central Station? Better than Balloon Boy Family tv. And it reminds me of one of my favorite childhood novels, The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where two kids run away to the Metropolitan Museum and live there for a while. I wonder why Grand Central Station? Why not the Met or MOMA. I could live for 5 weeks in a Museum.

In the end, I decided that even with my allergy reduced sense of smell, I couldn’t live in a public washroom for any length of time. Not even the luxury Charmin potties.

*Updated-Times Square. Luxury porta-potties in Times Square. My bad. Check the link though because they look pretty up-scale. Still, outdoors? They must be looking for people willing to camp. Can you camp in Times Square?

Sure Is Monday


Been stressing all weekend about the new blogging gig at Care2.

“You should never stress about work,” Rob said when I finally voiced my concern that I wouldn’t be able to find a topic for my first post.

“But I can’t work and not be perfect,” I said.

Herein lies my problem, I was raised with a work ethic and the expectation that if I am being paid to work, I need to be damn perfect in the execution of my job – whatever that might be. I have carried this load of crap since the first paying job I had when I was 12 and I was forced to mow our anal retentive neighbor’s lawn two summers in a row. My father, who couldn’t have loathed his job more, believed that there was no half-assing in employment.

I think this must be specific to my particular generation because I haven’t encountered it in those who aren’t technically considered my peer group to the same extent that we seem to be afflicted with it. Maybe it was our parents or something in the food chain or a freakish configuration of planetary bodies, I don’t know, but we are miserable perfectionists. Miserable because we can’t seem to help ourselves despite knowing what a waste of our time it is.

“The hardest thing I ever did was giving up perfectionism,” Rob assured me, but he is the same “reformed” perfectionist who is busily working himself into a knot renovating our home into someone’s dream home because we have no plans to return here after the overseas assignment he is maneuvering towards comes to its ultimate fruition.

Of course I worried to no end. I stumbled across the perfect article in my old home town newspaper this morning which provided the inspiration and link I needed to write my first post – currently awaiting approval. Working for money again has also supplied me with fodder for 50 Something Moms, so blogging is good all around. It was a silly thing to knot up about as it is about as easy for me to not find ideas for writing as it would be to blank my mind and not think. Writing ideas nearly assault me in their quest to be word on screen. Trying to keep pace is more of an issue than anything else.

Oh really, you say. Then why the blog black out over the last week here?

I’ve been writing. That’s why. Blogging is awesome and I don’t think I could ever give it up, but it is a time suck and the sucking usually comes from my off-line writing. I can’t spare it if I want to meet my deadline for rewriting the beginning chapters of the memoir. And while I am on the topic, writing about the dead husband and other related stuff is rather involving. A time suck on the magnitude of black hole.

Things will get back to daily here once NaNoWriMo begins because I am committed to daily doses of fiction, but after that I can’t say. I am literally a hand’s worth of fingers away from post #1000. That’s a lot of blog. Rob thinks I should do something to commemorate the post. I did make note of #500 when it happened, but I haven’t been much for blogversaries and such. You see 1000 posts and I see all the days I could’ve written something in the past 3 and 1/2 years and didn’t. Damned work ethic again.

Today I am exhausted and still have writing and housewifely stuff to do before putting in time on the Dance Mom beat this evening. I haven’t felt this since I stopped teaching – this Monday thing – this weekend lag. Interesting.