[NOTE: First Person Singular Pronouns intentional. Thank you.
This Is NOT Blogging!]
I had planned it carefully. I would be busy from four in the morning until long after dark that night.
Cooking breakfast even before the chickens got up. Then drive for an hour to the train station. Wait on Chronically Late Amtrak. Then back to town just in time to run out to church. Then out to go see a friend's new baby and discuss computers with her husband. Back home to catch up on some housework, then take the girls and a friend to a Finger Loop Braiding class with the SCA. Then pick up dinner and get home in time to crash for the night.
Scheduled and coordinated insanity.
Why?
Simple.
9 March 2003 was our Eighteenth Wedding Anniversary.
Melissa had wanted to have dinner and watch a movie with me that day. She had picked the movie as well. The original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie. I found it and bought it on DVD for her a couple of weeks ago. I even had something special in the freezer for the dinner- Butterfly cut jumbo shrimp.
The girls watched the movie the other night with grandpa, the dinner is still in the freezer.
Instead of an anniversary dinner I ate a take out burrito and dumped SPAM from my Russian mailboxes.
I still cannot believe it is over.
All of it. Her illness. Her life. Our Marriage. My life as a Husband.
All that is left of her is memories and pictures.
I found a box of her shoes in a closet and for a second headed into her bedroom to ask her if she still wanted to keep them.
One day last week at work I reached for the phone about nine O'clock, as I had been doing for the last month or so, to check on her. She always got mad at me because my call would interrupt the Regis and Kelly show. But that's when the nurse's aid was there and she'd been awake and had breakfast and a sponge bath by then. I caught myself before I dialed the number. Then I called anyway, just to check on things there. A bill collector had called, I needed to call somebody else and confirm a delivery, routine.
I force myself to remember that she had told us about the other side. She had seen it. It was better. They were waiting on her. There, she was healthy again, and happy.
She is in that better place. Of that there is no doubt.
And we go on as best we can.
And part of that going on is dealing with days like wedding anniversaries and suchlike.
Her birthday is coming up this fall. That'll be rough. As will the girls' birthdays as well. Not to mention the Family Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving and the day the Cubs finish the season above .500 for a change.
I did not realize how completely my life had become intertwined with her. Even during her illness when I was her housemate and nursemaid instead of her husband. And how much she was still involved with the girls.
Something else involved with going on is how much weight I've put on and how out of shape I have gotten in the last couple of months.
For the last two years or so I have been going to the Y with one or both girls and while they swam, I worked out on the weight machines at least once a week faithfully, more often than not though, we went twice a week. That all ended the week before Christmas 2002 when she took that final turn for the worse. Everything else ground to a halt and we took care of her. And worried. And ate junk food.
And now I am faced with a ton of extra blubber on me I neither need nor want. And even now, I cannot pull enough time out of thin air to get there to work out. Nor can I figure out a way to do it at home. We don't have room, and I really don't have time. And I don't have the temperament for it either. I just told Thrivent Financial's regional office if our local representative even pulled into my driveway I'd have him arrested for trespassing. (I was on hold with them while I was writing part of this. Multi-tasking.)
Yeah. I will have one of my insurance agents hauled off in handcuffs.
The man has flat out lied to me, then he refused to return my calls, and has not been by the house through all this even though we had called his office and asked him to come by. And so on. And when things slow down, I'm going to see if we have canceled checks from last year where we paid on a policy and the money was never credited to the account. Wouldn't be the first time an insurance man 'lost' payments and then found them later in his own checkbook. If I find them, I'll turn them over to the State's Attorney with a smile.
Sheesh.
It never slows down does it?
I took a break after dealing with the insurance people to check email. That too was a mistake.
Some other idiot is accusing me of being a Blogger again.
The Media Desk is Gonzo Journalism in the truest sense of the word. And has been up and going in one form or another since the late eighties. The Desk Website has been running since 1998.
So. Listen looser. I was the Desk before you could reach your keyboard without sitting in your mommy's lap. I've got rejected articles older than you are. How many statewide awards for features and columns have you won? Show me your White House Press Credentials. Then.... Leave me alone.
As for the rest of the email, SPAM. More Spam.
They are digging their own hole. Hard and Fast.
Forcing Congress to do something about it. Them and Telemarketers.
Did you hear the news story about the telemarketer that called some Governor's emergency hotline trying to sell something? Not once, but twice.
Something tells me that state will soon have a meaningful Do Not Call List.
In any case.
Now instead of celebrating our anniversary I tried not to think about it. And instead of going back to our hometown for our twenty-somethingth high school reunion, me and the girls are going back one week after our eighteenth anniversary for a memorial service in the church we were married in.
Damnit.
I miss her.
I can't write anymore now.....