young widowhood

Soundtracking My Life


There was this very nineties television show that Will absolutely  hated and made fun of all the time. I guess that nearly every woman he had ever dated loved that show, and he was quite surprised when I confessed near total ignorance of it’s content beyond what I would read about it on occasion or overhear from the show’s faithful with whom I worked. I do recall though that the main character visited a psychiatrist who believed that a woman should have a theme song and urged this character to adopt a song and play it in her head for inspiration. I was surprised by the reaction this elicited from most of the people I knew who watched the show. They thought it was a funny and bit beyond quirky thing to do. Indeed I believe the doctor was written as a bit of an oddball. I didn’t think her suggestion was weird at all. I have a virtual soundtrack for my life. Songs that can pull me out of time and right back to the circumstances that provoked my adding them to the playlist that is as much a part of me as the books I have read or the movies I have seen or the television shows I can recall in minute detail.

Music is one of the reasons I survived the past several years. My iPod literally saved my sanity during the months that Will was in hospice and the year following his death. One song is particular comes to mind too. The Middle by Jimmy Eats World. The chorus is even now a very powerful influence and it never fails to pick me up or push me onward.

It just takes some time, little girl you’re in the middle of the ride.Everything (everything) will be just fine, 

everything (everything) will be alright (alright).

It was a shared love of Grunge that bridged some of the ten years between Will and I. He introduced me to Metallica and I convinced him that rap and hip-hop were real forms of musical expression although he never learned to like it much. There was one song around the time we were first together that we heard nearly every time we were listening to the radio as we drove from here to there. So incessantly did it dog us that Will was prompted to dub it “our song” though a less likely suspect for a romantic song you couldn’t possibly find it is eerily prophetic in retrospect. The song was What It’s Like by Everlast.

God forbid you ever had to wake up to hear the news

Cause then you really might know what its like to have to lose

Before Rob and I fell in love and were still just internet friends who wrote prolific quantities of email and conducted rather lengthy IM chats, he would send me mP3’s he had essentially liberated from his public library or was introduced to by his girls. Some of the first songs were by tOOL. Jambi and Right in Two were songs he had listened to over and over in the first months after Shelley died. We’ve discovered only recently that we both have the annoying (to other people) habit of playing a track, or tracks, over and over until we have somehow satisfied our souls need of it. I don’t know what Shelley thought of that but it drove Will crazy. I was inspired by these two songs to actually track down the CD and buy it ( I wasn’t corrupted yet) partly as a way to get to know Rob better but also because I knew that Will would have loved this music. I wasn’t as fixated on the lyrics as Rob was. In fact I hardly heard them at first. It was the sound. It brought Will back and at a time when I needed that. Eventually though I came to hear the twisted humor in some of the writer’s songs, particularly those he did with Perfect Circle and I saw the music as Rob.

The first romantic song Rob sent me was Desperately Wanting by Better Than Ezra or was it Got You Where I Want You by the Flies? The first CD he sent was Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits. The first time we made love was to the oddest collection of songs that just happened to be on his laptop at the time. The first time we danced though was to a carefully crafted playlist. 

I couldn’t imagine a life without a musical background. How would you keep your memories in order? Pull them up with perfect recall? Feel the same emotions. I can’t listen to Desperately Wanting and not remember the week before Idaho Falls. Just as I can’t hear Mazzy Starr’s Fade Into You and not remember that Will chose that as our first dance song after hearing it in a movie we watched one night on television. And although it is now rare that I hear the Everlast song, whenever I do it is at a moment when I am wondering about directions or decisions and I always take it as a sign that I am on the right track.

More Packing



I am not packing as much as I am disposing of and giving things away at this point, and you would not believe how difficult it is to give things away. I am speaking of nice things too. The temptation to rent one of those giant dumpsters and toss everything into it that I don’t need grows stronger by the minute. But I just must man up and do this. No more procrastinating. No more whining. A week from today we will be hooking up the moving trailer to the truck and heading for home. It’s been four years since Katy and I have had a real home and not just somewhere we lived.

This morning before I took her to the daycare that has been her second home since she was seven weeks old, Katy made the comment that Rob was eating his breakfast alone. It occurred to me that over this last weekend she finally had a real glimpse into what a family is. From the inside. She was so calm and content. And you know what? So was I. Even moreso than when Rob has been here with us. It’s such a wonderful feeling to know where you belong. To know you are loved and wanted and needed.

I need to get back to my boxes and totes. I can hear them calling from every room in the house. I have a very tired warhorse on his way here, and I want to greet him with less work than he is expecting. 

Packing


Some people insist that the worst part of moving is the unpacking. I don’t mind unpacking at all. It is usually a quicker process because you don’t have to unpack everything all at once (or ever, as I found out when I was sorting through the totes in my basement of items yet unpacked from our last move nearly four years ago), and if you have any sense at all you are actually dealing with fewer things than you previously owned.

The worst part of moving, for me, is the sorting and pruning and unloading of stuff on friends, relatives, donation centers and total strangers as they pass by your home. Okay, the last part I made up. I haven’t, yet, tried to force any of my stuff onto innocent pedestrians. It is tempting though.

There is this old George Carlin routine about people’s stuff. How it proliferates and at what point does it go from being “stuff” to simply being “crap”. I know I pondered that question many a time last week when I was emptying previously unopened containers from the old house and our last move.

Will was very ill by this point and, to their credit, a dozen or so friends descended on our home on moving day to help me pack and move. As considerate as they were, I am still puzzled by the method behind the madness that day as I open boxes and totes to find the oddest things packed together.

There was one tote that contained nothing but two pair of work boots, a box of roofing nails, a Dr. Scholl’s insert – just one, an unused paint brush and a tape measure.

And there was more stuff of Will’s that I really want to label crap. The Carlin routine asks the question, “Have you ever noticed that their stuff is shit, and your shit is stuff?”

I never said a word about Will’s collections when he was alive. There is nothing inherently wrong with collecting things. I even continued collecting the quarters with the states on the back after he was too far gone to remember why he had started (to give to our child someday) or to even know what a quarter, or a state, was for that matter.

But, as I stood there confronted with the Budweiser Christmas mugs and an unopened box of wine glasses, I was just so angry with him. Not as much for dying as for dying and leaving all this shit for me to sort and give away. The sifting and repackaging can seem so overwhelming from time to time anyway without the memories and the responsibility of deciding what is important to keep for our daughter and what is not.

All this paring down has driven home to me the need to keep “stuff” to essentials and things that add joy or aid personal growth. There is no need to live in a big house and stuff every room with furniture and decor. A half empty closet is a good thing. Books, music and movies that fill the mind and soul are the best way to add that lived in homey look to a room. Gadgets should be useful and used often to merit the space they occupy. Furniture comfy. And things you no longer use or wear should be collected every so often and given to organizations that will see to it they end up with people who need them.

It’s funny, really, because I used to want that suburban lifestyle. Now I find that I am happier giving my things away than garage sale-ing them, and the more open space and empty drawers there are the better. Perhaps it is symbolic of new beginnings. The space and drawers are empty in anticipation of new memories.