i'm no inspiration

"Part of the challenge of living according to other people’s expectations is that they are subject to change without notice. I was too sad for some people; I was not sad enough for other people. Somebody could catch you on a day when you are truly struggling, and they really don’t want to see that. They want to be able to give the world the report that, “She’s doing great. Wow. What an inspiration.”

Today is a bad day. I guess I'm too sad for at least one person. My mother, who has never been a very supportive person in my whole life, told me that it was time for me to move on with my life and to stop being sad. This was right after I told her that, because of Charlie's presence with me at work all week, I had been able to drive to work without crying for the first time in 5 months.

 It made me mad when she said it but after getting home and thinking about it, I can't stop crying. I guess all that crying I didn't do this past week has built up and has to come out somehow.

I don't want to be an inspiration to anyone either. I think I put on a good front when I'm in public but I know how well, or not well, I'm handling all this. I've noticed I'm taking more naps. I get home from work or from going out with friends and it's like I've used up all the energy that I have.

Of course the nap thing could also be because I have to keep the temperature in my house so high because I can't afford air conditioning. LOL It's been really hot here in Florida. I hate to think of the summer weather coming back so soon.

I miss the way I used to feel. I don't know how to get back to that girl and I know that I just have to walk my way through this, that there are no shortcuts but, oh how I wish there were.

And just because I hate ending things on a down note, here is a picture of how I looked taking Charlie out at 6 this morning. I put my shoes on in the dark because I didn't want to wake up too much so that I could go back to sleep. I laughed when I looked down at my feet under the streetlight. Luckily nobody else was stupid enough to be out at that hour.

 

erasing a life

I think one of the hardest parts about all this widowhood stuff is doing things I never would have to do if Mr. T were still alive.

Like, one of the first things I had to do was take care of his LinkedIn account. Normally I wouldn't have to do anything with that but he had a premium account which meant we were paying $69 a month for it. His company was reimbursing him for that but once he was gone, the reimbursements stopped and I certainly could no longer afford it so I had to contact LinkedIn. They ended up fixing the problem by deleting his entire LinkedIn account which wasn't what I wanted (I kind of liked looking at it) and something inside me screamed when I realized what they'd done but, I had to tell myself it wasn't hurting him, he really no longer needed it. But I HATE the fact that it (and he) no longer exists on LinkedIn.

And that realization just about tore me up inside.

There's all the big things you have to do - remove his name from financial accounts, from joint property in case you need to sell, even something as silly as Disney passes so you don't have to keep paying for the pass that will never be used again.

Then there are the silly, little things that no one ever thinks about. Somehow I think these are the worst.

Such as, I've promised myself that this is the weekend I'll clean out the refrigerator and freezer of all the foods that haven't been touched since November since they were ones that only he liked. But I hate even the idea of that because it means he's really never coming back. Of course my head knows this but my heart is being quite stubborn.

Or here is a silly one. See that broken bread tie up there? Mr. T put that on the cord of our toaster because the toaster and toaster oven sit next to each other and we were forever plugging in the wrong one. So he put a bread tie on the toaster cord so that we could easily identify it. It broke a few weeks ago and I actually cried . 

I put another bread tie on the cord so his idea lives on but the one he actually put on himself is gone...well, not completely gone, I can't bring myself to throw it out and hellfire will rain down on the head of anybody who accidentally does it while they are visiting me. 

I know there are much bigger "erasings" coming up. I haven't moved his shoes from the front hall and all of his clothes are still in the closet (and scattered on his side of the bedroom as he left them) and eventually I will need to go through all of them and give some away and box the rest up. I won't be able to bring myself to throw any of them away. But I just can't face that right now because that would be the ultimate erasure. To face that empty closet every day would just kill me. It would mean that he's really gone, that he doesn't need any of those clothes any more because he's not coming back.

I know he's not coming back but I don't *know* it, know what I mean? I don't want to know it.

How can someone be here every day for 55 years and then - poof - it's like they never existed? It just isn't fair.

I hate all of this but I hate creating a life without him in it the most.

weird

I am a bit weird.

  That's not quite accurate, I'm a lot weird. I prefer the word eccentric but most people would say weird. I'm ok with that.

I'm not really interested in the things that most normal people are interested in.

I tend to get obsessions about odd things and then I research them and dwell on them, immerse and surround myself with them. Such as, at any given time when I lived in Virginia I was obsessed with either the Victorian era or the American Colonial period. Poor Mr. T. I completely decorated our living room in the Victorian style even though I know he really didn't like it. Of course we never really used our living room so that might have been why he put up with it. He was a smart one.

And I can't even count how many times I dragged him down to Colonial Williamsburg and insisted that we stay in the restored section even though those rooms weren't up to the luxurious standards that he usually enjoyed when traveling.

But, bless his heart, he not only tolerated my quirks (now that's a much nicer word than weird) but he celebrated them. I think he thought all my little passions and collections were adorable even though he could rarely keep up with them because I tend to switch from obsession to obsession with the speed of a cheetah. Ah yes, I used to have a thing for cheetahs.

Then there was the time I loved seals and sea lions, and the time I thought I wanted to learn the autoharp, or how about when I wanted to collect all things Little House on the Prairie and dragged him all around the Midwest visiting museums. Of course we did get to see Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands of South Dakota so I know he enjoyed that part. Or the time when I was obsessed with the American Southwest and decorated the whole house in that style...that came before the Victorian redecoration. Or the time when I fell in love with anything vintage - clothing, makeup, music and we had to go to all sorts of vintage festivals and antique malls. Mr. T wasn't fond of antiques, he liked new, modern stuff but he learned to appreciate my aesthetic. 

There was also my complete obsession with a house builder from the 1920s in Carmel so we went all around the town having him take pictures of all the houses and I spent hours in the library reading microfilms of 1920s newspaper or the lengths I went to to learn everything I could about the WASPs from WWII. Mr. T was supposed to take me to Texas this summer so that I could do more research about them. Anybody out there fancy a road trip to the middle of nowhere Texas?


And the poor guy never knew what color or length my hair would be when he came home. I experimented with my hair for years before finally settling on a style that suited me. In the beginning he might have had a confused look on his face when suddenly my long hair was short or my blonde hair was red but eventually he got used to it and nothing could phase him.

   My longest lasting obsession has been with hats. I love hats and wear them often. Mr. T loved this obsession, he often said I had a "hat head" which meant he thought I looked good in most any hat.

He loved for me to get new hats. On our last trip to California he insisted that I buy 2 new hats at my favorite hat shop in Carmel. It would make him happy to know that I wear one of them often and the other, bought for a vow renewal we never got to have, will make its first appearance at Disney Dapper Days later this month.

I'm also weird because, unlike most girls, I don't give a crap about wearing the latest styles or buying expensive purses and shoes. Actually, Mr. T loved me to have designer purses and the only ones I have are ones he insisted on buying for me. But nobody can make me spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on shoes.

Instead, and this is what makes me definitely weird, I have fallen in love with a style called Boho which is part vintage, part hippie with a dash of cowgirl thrown in for spice. I started dressing this way in 2012 and it was like a light bulb went off in my head. This is me, this is who I am. Mr. T used to call it my hobo style just to tease me but I think he really respected that I marched to my own drum when it came to style even though it wasn't his favorite style. Although I'm not interested in current designer fashion, I am very interested in fashion and style and I spend an inordinate amount of time putting together just the right looks. Mr. T appreciated that I cared about how I looked and the style I presented to the world. He loved to pick things out for me that contributed to that style. He had great taste in clothes and jewelry.

I so appreciate that he loved my weirdness and never judged. I was lucky and blessed to have someone by my side that allowed me to blossom into the real me. Before him, I had never met anyone that made me feel so comfortable to just be myself and let my freak flag fly. He encouraged every research subject, complimented every new hairstyle or outfit, made me feel like I was the cutest, most adorable girl on the planet and he listened to my endless chatter on subjects he probably couldn't have cared less about. For a mostly quiet girl, I can get on quite a roll if I'm talking about something I love. Being a passionate person himself, he understood and encouraged passion in others.

When I get to see him in heaven, the first thing I will do is thank him for giving me the space and confidence and support to become my true self, for loving whatever version of me that I came up with each day. It was the best gift a slightly (very) awkward, shy girl could have ever been given.

And so, for him, I'm going to keep on being adorable and cute and quirky and just plain weird.

thinking about it

First of all - Charlie update!

She's doing really well. Her energy is up, she's not hyper/anxious anymore, she's my feisty girl again. Her back legs are much better, not completely strong but so much better than it was over the weekend.

 

 For the last 2 days I've taken Charlie to work with me to keep an eye on her in case the seizures come back. Well, at least that's the excuse I use. Truthfully I have her with me because I can't stand to have her out of my sight and I'm getting more out of it than she is. I love having her there, it makes me calm. And, I've now driven to work 2 days in a row without crying - that's a record! It's a long drive which leaves a lot of time to think.

Which brings me to what I've been thinking about lately - 

sex

Bet that got your attention. ;-)

Did it make you uncomfortable? It sure makes me uncomfortable and yet it's something I need to talk about. It's a big topic in my widow groups. I think a lot of people think grief is so big that it crowds out normal human emotions. Just the opposite, I think, it intensifies all emotions - the good, bad and the lustful. You miss everything about your old life especially the physical intimacy. 

I think, going through all of the trauma of Charlie's health crisis has brought some of that up for me. It felt awful to be alone during all that, which made me miss the emotional intimacy of sharing the good and the bad with someone and then that leads to thinking about physical intimacy. Don't moments of crisis make you long to really connect with someone? It's like, if everything else is going wrong at least that one thing is going right.

Not that anything is going to change in that department for me. I certainly don't have the emotional strength for a relationship at this point. I can't even imagine having the strength for a new friendship, I'm not able to give even that to anyone right now. As one of the widows I read about said "I want someone to kill spiders in my house and I want intimacy but I want you to want nothing of me. I want you to love me while I give you nothing."

I suppose for some people the alternative would be a one night stand. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not for me, I'm blushing even as I write this. Let's face it, I was a good girl before I met Mr. T. I mean, I was a VERY good girl. As much as I sometimes, over the years, regretted that I wasn't more experimental before I got married, I very much suspect that deep down I'm still a VERY good girl and nothing is going to change that. In this brave new world of sexting and booty calls, I'm a dinosaur...a VERY good dinosaur.

So all of that leaves me pretty much screwed (or actually not screwed LOL) so I guess I'm doomed to just be "thinking about it" for the rest of my life.

 


 

broken

Charlie is home!

And I'm so grateful that she is...BUT

I feel totally broken.

I'm angry that it even happened. I know that's the wrong attitude and I am working on it but WTF?

How could the one thing that is keeping me grounded be almost taken away from me? What sense does that make in the universe? What have I done in my life that was so wrong that I'm being punished like this?

Something inside of me has broken. It's brought back all the FEAR and vulnerability that I had back in December.

I only have 2 things left of my life with Mr. T - my house and my Charlie and both of them are being threatened and I just can't get past this right now. Maybe with time I will put this in perspective but not right now. It's smashed any confidence I had in the future into a million pieces.

So Charlie has epilepsy (most likely) and she's on daily anti-seizure medicine for the rest of her life. That part I can live with, I grew up with an epileptic dog, but Charlie's seizures have left her with some damage - she has weak back legs and falls down while walking sometimes. She also has tremors as if she had Parkinsons but I'm hoping they are more a side effect of the medicine that will go away with time. They are already lessened from when I brought her home on Thursday night.

What makes me the most sad is that Charlie's spirits are down and that's not like her at all. Again, I hope this is a side effect of the medicine that will change in time but her depression is not helping with mine.

They had to shave Charlie's legs to put in the IV. They also shaved her butt because all the treatments messed with her system and gave her diarrhea. Earlier today I was telling her that she got a FREE grooming but then I remembered the vet bill that was as large as my mortgage payment so I realized that grooming was nowhere near free. That was a grooming that came with a big, horrible price.

I wish I didn't have to worry about money but the fact is I didn't have that much in savings so this trip to the emergency vet has put me one month closer to homelessness and I don't understand why that had to happen either.

One thing I do know, I'm done going to those Meetup things, trying to meet new people. I'm done trying new things, done going on solo adventures. What was the point of all that? I think I was trying too hard to prove to myself that "I've got this" and I don't "got this" so I'm done. 

And, of course, the biggest thing was having to go through this alone, without Mr. T by my side as he's always been. The horrible drive to the vet clinic with Charlie having a seizure the whole 40 minute drive, having to go back all alone the next night and see her looking so sad, watching her every minute of every day afraid she'll have another seizure and knowing that I'll have to deal with that without Mr. T.  It's hard enough to be alone through the good times, it's devastating to do it through the bad times.

I know I'll bounce back eventually, I always do, but I'm going to stop pushing myself to be "all right" and just let myself feel whatever I'm feeling even if it means doing nothing but sitting on the couch for the next year.

Of course I'm grateful for my friends. I texted 2 friends while I was waiting at the emergency vet clinic and they were right there texting me and keeping me calm while I was waiting to hear if Charlie was going to be ok and that made the situation slightly less terrible. I know they wish they could do something to help but there's nothing anybody can do to change any of this.

It's just something I've got to get through on my own.

And I will...just not today.

 

prayers for Charlie

If anybody is out there reading this blog, please say a prayer for my Charlie girl. She is in the hospital tonight.

She had a seizure around 7:30 pm. That's not completely unusual, she has seizures every 4-6 months but this one was different. Usually she snaps out of it within 5 minutes and is back to normal. 

This time she didn't snap out of it, she continued to shake and her back legs were weak so she couldn't walk normally. After a bit of this I called the emergency vet clinic and was told to bring her in.

Then her tail started wagging so I thought she was getting better but then she started shaking and I knew it couldn't wait until morning to see our regular vet.

The emergency clinic is 40 minutes away from our house and I'd never been there before. I loaded her up and started down the road. Then she started having another seizure so I drove the entire way one-handed because I needed my other hand to keep petting her, telling her she was a good girl and that she was going to make it the whole way to the clinic.

She was still in a seizure when we got there so they took her back immediately and started working on her.

Eventually the doctor came to talk to me to tell me that she probably had epilepsy, which didn't surprise me. But then he came back and said she was still having muscle tremors (although she wasn't in a seizure anymore) and that surprised him because he'd given her a lot of medicine. He started asking questions about things she might have gotten into, thinking that we were dealing with a toxin rather than epilepsy. But I didn't have any good answers for him because she hadn't gotten into anything that I knew of.

Hours went by and all I did was worry. Then the door opened and they brought her to me. She had stopped trembling, no tremors and apparently she was barking a lot back in the ER so they decided it might do her good to spend time with me. They left me with a "doorbell" to push in case she seemed to be in distress.

She was hyper, walking around a lot. Her back legs were still a little weak but other than that, she seemed her normal self. Once she barked because she heard a dog and when a cat meowed loudly she had a puzzled look on her face. She really wanted out of the examining room so I picked her up and we went for a walk around the waiting room. It was 11:30 by this point and we'd been there for over 3 hours.

Finally she got sleepy so I scrunched myself onto the little bench and let her fall asleep in my lap. And that's how the doctor found us. He said that her tests had come back normal so he was now inclined to believe that it wasn't a toxin and that she had just been so hyped up and anxious, it took a long time for the epilepsy meds to kick in. 

So it was back to the original plan, Charlie was going to stay overnight at the hospital and be pumped full of epilepsy medications. Because she had several seizures, he didn't want to take 2 weeks of pills to get her to the level of medication she needed to stop seizures. So she's loading 24 hours of meds to get to that level. He said she'll sleep through it all. 

Of course I won't relax until she's back home and normal and I won't relax even then. My childhood dog had epilepsy and had to take 2 pills a day throughout her life. She lived to be almost 15 so the idea of epilepsy doesn't scare me, I just want to get to the point where the meds are doing their job.

Please pray for Charlie and for me.  It's 2 in the morning right now and I doubt I'll get much sleep before it's time to get up and go to work and worry until they call and tell me I can come pick her up.

let's meetup

One of the pieces of advice everyone gives a grieving widow is that you need to get out and meet people.

I'm not really a "meet new people" kind of person. I'm pretty shy and a complete introvert so the idea of making small talk with strangers is probably right up there with jumping into a volcano on my list of things I really never want to do.

For as long as I was married I really didn't have to meet new people. I had a best friend right there with me. We did everything together. We traveled, we went out to eat, we went to movies, we went shopping, we were always doing something and it was always together.

Fast forward to now and everything has changed. If I want to do something I either have to ask my friends if they want to join or I have to do it by myself. 

I can do things by myself, I have done things by myself but I don't want to live my life that way, doing everything by myself.

So I guess I have to do the thing I dread - I have to meet new people.

My sister in law told me about this thing called Meetup. Not that she's ever done it, the big chicken. But it's a free thing where people start groups for different interests and they schedule events and you can sign up and meet a bunch of people.

Sounds fun, right?

Well no, to me it sounds like torture. But I didn't really have a choice.

So last night I went to my first Meetup event. It's a group that meets at various Disney parks and hotels to walk around. It's actually a walking group in most cases but last night the event was centered around a concert at Epcot. That seemed like a safe first event to attend.

I got there a little early so I decided to find the Leave a Legacy picture that Mr. T and I had taken back in 2000. It was a promotion Epcot was having back then, they etched your picture on this metal tile and then all the pictures were permanently displayed on marble stones at the entrance to the park. I hadn't seen the tile in years (Mr. T and I only looked for it once) and I had no idea where it was - there are thousands of these little tiles. Luckily Epcot has a computer to help you find your tile. I knew we'd done it in 2000 but had no idea of the date but the helpful cast member eventually found it for me.

That's the original picture that we had taken when we purchased our tile. I had never seen it in color before. It was thrilling to see this picture (taken on May 26, 2000) but it was also hard.

The nice cast member gave me directions to find the tile and with just a couple of stumbles I eventually found it.

There we are for all time and eternity. I want to try tracing it one day.

Eventually they are going to move all the marble bases to another location in the park but they will be at the entrance for a few more years. Now that I know where we are, I'll go visit every time I'm at the park.

So, once that was done it was time to meet up with the group. Of course, me being me, I considered just walking on and seeing the concert solo but I ruled that out, knew that I needed to take this first step so I walked up to the 2 ladies that were waiting and introduced myself. They were very nice, as were the other 5 people that eventually joined us. We walked to the concert venue, waited in a very long line and finally found really good seats.

Now I'm not a huge Rick Springfield fan, in fact I only know a couple of his songs, but I enjoyed the concert a great deal. He sang a song he'd written after his mother passed away. It clearly made him emotional and boy, it made me emotional too but I kept it together, didn't want to cry in front of my new stranger/friends.

I especially enjoyed when he came down from the stage and sang all around the audience. We had great seats for that moment.

It was a short concert so after 30 minutes he finished up and we were free to go. We took a group photo and then some decided to stay for a second show and others broke off to do other things or go home. I was one of the going home types. One other woman was walking my way so we went together. She kept me entertained the whole way by telling me about how she lost her husband 9 years ago and how hard it's been and how difficult it is out in the dating world. Apparently, much like teenage boys, men are only after one thing and, unlike the teenage boys of my past, they are pretty aggressive about getting it. Oh so much to look forward to.

I got home and although I did enjoy the concert, the whole experience made me sad. I posted about it on Facebook and everybody was posting words of encouragement, saying it looked like fun, etc. and that made me even sadder because nobody seems to get that it was hard to make myself go and even harder to know that I HAD to go. None of them have to find groups of strangers to hang out with. None of them need to "make new friends." None of them need to survive or move on with their lives. 

Well I'd better stop with that line of thought because it's just making me angry and bitter and that's not me. That's not who I have always been. Of course who I've always been always had a partner right beside her for all the fun adventures.

And so, even though I kind of hate it, I'll be back out at another concert tomorrow, meeting new people. Because that's who I am now.