100 Happy Days

Oh how I love the man in that picture above!

This picture was taken in September 2015 after I'd completed an Instagram project where I had to post a picture of something happy every day for 100 days.

I started the project that May. I had quit my beloved Tor House job and moved to Florida where Mr. T had been living since January while working at a new job at a startup company. One day after starting #100happydays, Mr. T came home and told me the company had run out of money and could no longer pay anybody.

That wasn't a happy day. I had only been living in Florida for 6 weeks,

For some unknown reason I decided to continue the project through all the tumultuous days that followed - from moving back to California, to finding Charlie (now that really was a happy day!) to Mr. T looking for a new job and me looking for a new job, to thinking we were probably going to lose our house in Florida, to finding out that the family members who owned the house we were living in in California decided to sell it and put us out on the streets. They changed their minds eventually but it was a horrific time that I haven't really gotten over to this day.

During all of that I kept posting one thing each day that made me happy. Sometimes it was really hard to find that one thing. The day I got rejected from 3 potential jobs in one afternoon was difficult to find something, but I did.

But somehow, having to look for the happy really affected my outlook and when I was happy, Mr. T was happy so we kept going, putting one foot in front of the other and we ended up having a pretty nice summer. Mr. T found a job which required a 5 hour commute each day so he was pretty exhausted but he didn't let that stop him from going around with me looking for fun each weekend.

 
We took Charlie on trips to the beach

We visited San Francisco


We had picnics and discovered new places





We got a little goofy at the Santa Cruz boardwalk

I think we made the most of those 100 days, we didn't let the sucky circumstances defeat us.

I will forever be grateful for #100happydays.

I have participated in the 100 happy days project a couple more times since then and I think I'm going to start doing it again. I already post one picture each day on Instagram but I'm going to focus on the happy moment in each day. They are out there, sometimes they are hidden, sometimes we forget to look for them but they are always there.

If nothing else, I can post 100 pictures of Charlie because she makes me happy each and every day! 

check in sometimes

"If I'd known you were going to be alone on Christmas, I would have come to see you."

Those were the words recently spoken to me by a much loved relative. Because I love her so much and I knew she meant well, I refrained from screaming "if you had checked in on me any time during the month of December you would have KNOWN I was going to be alone and I REALLY needed you."

Instead I just smiled and changed the subject.

Let me tell you about my December.

Initially, right after Mr. T died in November I did tell my family I wasn't up for a BIG family Christmas and I had a friend who was making plans to fly down from North Carolina and spend the holiday with me.

Then 2 weeks after Mr. T died I got a call from my 96 year old mother's assisted living facility that she seemed to be suffering from hallucinations.

What The actual F?

I didn't have the physical or emotional capacity to deal with this. My mother is fairly manipulative and she hadn't been getting her way with me lately (because I didn't have the physical or emotional capacity to deal with her) so I suspected this was another one of her plots to get me to do what she wanted.

She was admitted to the hospital and I spent most of the first 2 weeks of December visiting her where I quickly figured out that she wasn't faking but there was still a manipulative aspect to it. It's hard to explain but she was suffering from paranoid delusions and hallucinations although they never really figured out why.

Eventually she was admitted to a locked down unit and that's where I ended up spending Christmas. It was the shittiest Christmas ever, I have no words to explain how hard it was and how very all alone I felt. I actually don't know how I got through it.

Not once in all that time did my family call to check on me or to find out how their grandmother was doing - I was on my own. 

In addition, the friend who was going to spend the holiday with me started ghosting me which, based on past experiences with her, made me realize she wasn't going to be there for me on Christmas after all. I didn't hear from her again until several days AFTER Christmas.

I will add that one friend did indeed invite me up for Christmas but she lives 3 hours away and I needed to be here for my mother, dang it.

Look, no one did any of this on purpose to hurt me. Everybody had their own lives and their own problems and it's a very busy time of year. I totally get that but I guess what I want to let people know is that your grieving friend or family member is going through the worst time of their lives and they are blinded by grief and pain and fear...big time fear.

Please don't make them reach out to you if they need something. They already feel more needy than they've ever felt in their lives and if they're anything like me, they don't want to bother you so they will keep stumbling through the chaos of their lives until they decide they just can't do it anymore.

They are so vulnerable, they might make stupid decisions.

Please reach out and check in. PLEASE! You will never know how much that would mean to them. And don't take no for an answer. 

Don't ask them what you can do. Make suggestions and keep making suggestions. Or just tell them you're coming over. Or bundle them up and bring them to your house. Or take them out for a meal. 

Don't sit around thinking "no news is good news" and just assume that if you don't hear from them that everything is fine. I know it's a lot of work and it takes you out of your comfort zone. I know it's so much to ask but if you don't...

You may never hear from them again.

please listen to me

I've noticed that people tend to fall into one of two categories around me.

Either they avoid any mention of Mr. T altogether or they do ask me questions about him or how I'm doing but the minute I start to cry or show emotion they kind of freak out. They apologize all over themselves for "having made you sad" and then they quickly change the subject and never mention him again. It is clear that my emotion has made them extremely uncomfortable.

So listen up because I've got some stuff to say about that. And it's stuff I wouldn't have necessarily known before all this happened so it's normal to make this mistake but if I don't tell you, who will?

My husband died just 3 months ago. He was my best friend and the person I talked to about everything for over 3 decades. Of course your question didn't make me sad - I'm already sad. It's not like I was going along not thinking about him and you reminded me. I think about him from the time I get up until I finally force myself to sleep.

But nobody will let me talk about him so of course I'm going to become emotional and cry. I haven't been allowed to have any experience talking about him, learning to keep the emotion at bay. I really think with time and practice I would be able to talk about him or my situation without tears. Maybe I'm wrong about that but how am I ever going to find out?

And maybe I just NEED to cry. Sure, I cry at home when I'm by myself but I imagine there's something healing about being able to cry with a friend. Or maybe there's a situation that I really need help with but nobody will ever know if they don't let me talk about it. Or I won't even know I need help if I don't have the opportunity to pour out my heart to someone. Sometimes the more you talk about something, the more you understand and maybe a solution can present itself.

There are definitely situations where I just want to have fun and not talking about Mr. T is just fine but it gets uncomfortable when I know that the person I'm with will never be ok with going beyond just the moment we are in.

Luckily every once in a while someone comes along that seems to understand. Usually it's someone that has experienced great loss themselves. Recently I was able to spend time with someone like this. A friend I don't see very often was in town and we went out to eat. First of all, I really miss going out to eat and I was thrilled that she invited me especially since it was someplace I'd never been before.

We've known each other for a few years and spent time together as two couples both in California and Florida but we've never been extremely close friends only because we're both busy people and our time together has been limited. And yet, she made sure to let me know that she really wanted to talk about things that were important to me and she sat there and listened even when the tears started falling. She didn't apologize and change the subject, she listened, asked insightful questions and even came up with a suggestion of how she might help me with a practical problem. I'm probably going to take here up on that one. She thought of it because some caring people did the same thing for her when she suffered a big loss earlier in her life.

After talking about me for a little while, I was more than happy to ask her questions and hear about what's going on in her life. 

Now you may be wondering why I put a picture of a cake on the top of this blog post. My wonderful friend designed this cake to be a tribute to our shared love of California and had it brought to our table for us to enjoy as dessert. I took half of it home and I'm still enjoying it! What a sweet and thoughtful gesture; I'm truly blessed in the friend department.

So bottom line is - if you really want to help your grieving friend, don't shy away from the tears. If they don't want to talk or don't want to cry, they'll change the subject but maybe, just maybe, the best thing you can do for them is stay by their side and listen as they talk and cry and start to heal.

change

I just needed one ingredient for a recipe so I turned into the parking lot of my neighborhood store and then I saw the sign.

STORE CLOSING

It was literally like a punch to the stomach.

My first thought was "oh I have to tell Mr. T about this"

and that was the second gut punch.

Because, of course, I can't tell Mr. T anything anymore.

This store holds a lot of memories for the two of us. It's not a brand name store like Publix or Target or Walmart. It's marketed directly at tourists and the prices are more expensive so we never did our normal grocery shopping there but it was so convenient so it was often my go-to store when I just needed one or two things or I didn't feel up to dealing with driving on the highway or the crowded parking lots or a store full of tourists.

For 5 or 6 years this was the only store that carried a particular flavor of hot chocolate that I loved so Mr. T would go there whenever we were in town and buy their entire stock. And he absolutely loved their clearance table over by the frozen foods.

Once, when we were particularly broke, I went to the clearance table to shop for his birthday and ended up buying a reel of something called "magic twist ties" for him. He loved that present and used it for years. I think I saw tears in his eyes when he used the last one.

But my strongest memory of this store is that we often went there on Friday and Saturday nights because Mr. T loved to hear the "happy sounds" of the tourists in town for the start of their vacations, buying all their groceries for the week. That was seriously one of his favorite things to do, he was always up for it when I suggested it.

It hurts me to see things change, to see the world grow different from the one he knew. I wish everything could stay exactly the same as he saw it. I hate the idea of a world that he wouldn't recognize.

And I know that's stupid and an impossible wish. Change is inevitable and I can't hold on to things whose time has come and gone. 

I know there's a bigger lesson in all this...just not quite ready for it yet.

 

normal

I have had a good weekend. It feels nice to say that.

I know a lot of the reason for that is that I got to do something very normal this weekend; I got to swim and spend lots of time on our back patio.

We bought this house in 2000 right after Mr. T got a very good job, the best he'd ever had. We had sold our house in Virginia and didn't want (couldn't afford) to buy something in California where we were renting so, on a whim, we bought this house in Florida and rented it out for several years as a vacation property. All the houses in this area were marketed for vacation rental so they all have small pools in the back.

We could only spend 2 weeks a year here but when we were here, I swam every moment I could, even if the weather was not really warm enough to swim.

For the last 2 1/2 years we've been living here full-time and every weekend where the temperatures have been over 80, I have been in the pool. It's where I'm happiest. Mr. T wasn't as big a fan of the pool as I am, although he liked it, so he enjoyed my swimming weekends because it gave him a chance to putter around the house, fixing things and working on little projects. And from time to time he'd come into the kitchen where I could see him from my lounge chair. He'd come to the window and make goofy faces at me or walk outside and ask me if I needed anything. Sometimes he'd stand at the stove and cook something for us for lunch and bring it out to me as a surprise..

In early November the temperatures outside finally started coming below 90 and then below 80 and it wasn't as much fun to swim or be outside. Then the world fell apart and I didn't want to swim or do anything.

This weekend we had unusually high temperatures, more like summer, and although the water temperature was still low (62!) I went in the pool anyway. At those temperatures, you stop feeling anything in your extremities pretty quickly anyway so I found I didn't mind the cold so much. LOL

I splashed away in the pool and then warmed up again under the umbrella, enjoying a good book and the feel of the warm sun on my skin.

 

Charlie loves being outside as well and had missed it. She could spend all day out there sleeping on the chair while I read.

For just a little while, life felt normal again, just like every other Saturday and Sunday.

One of Mr. T's favorite things about this house was watching me enjoy it so much. I know he was smiling down from heaven this weekend.

 

how are you?

How are you?

It's such an innocuous little question, one that's asked and answered many times each day and yet, it's such a minefield for me these days.

Do I answer honestly? Do I say "horrible" "terrible" "I'm devastated" "I want to fling myself down on my bed and never get up."

How about "I feel like my heart is being ripped out each morning that I wake up and realize, for the millionth time, that it wasn't a dream and I have to trudge through yet another day without my best friend."

Or my personal favorite "when I think about living the next 30 - 40 years all alone like this, I feel a tsunami of grief overtaking me and I don't think I'm going to make it."

You see, no one wants to hear that. Hell, I don't even want to hear it. So I just fall back on "I'm ok" and that's all the asker wanted to hear anyway so they say "great!" and I feel like a fraud but they're happy.

Maybe one day I won't be lying.

photography is my life

 

 Mr. T was a photographer. It truly was his passion. He even made a living at it for a year when we decided to take a break from Silicon Valley and try living in Florida. 

That was also where he discovered that, not being much of a people person, photographing weddings probably wasn't going to be his thing. He was MUCH better at food photography. He was also much better at technology so we went back to Silicon Valley and photography became a much loved hobby for him.

He always wanted me to get into photography with him but I never did, much to my regret now. We had all these dreams about getting an RV when we retired and roaming the country searching for interesting people and stories and food. I would write about it and he would take the pictures. When he did take pictures of people, he was very good at capturing emotions, telling their stories with just one perfect picture.

It would have been awesome.

So it hurt me to see his camera sitting on the shelf just gathering dust and I decided to do something about that.

Today I attended a "cameras for dummies" course at a local store. No, that wasn't the official title but that was certainly how I came into it. Luckily I wasn't the only one. This course promised to tell us what to do with all the buttons on our DSLR cameras which was just what I needed.

When I signed up for the course it asked us to come with the battery in our camera fully charged. It took me over 30 minutes, a lot of Googling and several You Tube videos to figure out how to get the batteries out of my camera! When I finally did it, I felt on top of the world.

The course lived up to its hype. I had been intimidated by Taz's camera before, almost afraid to touch anything. Now I can change the aperture and the ISO and I even know what those words mean! And I even know when I should change them and what I should change them to...mostly...kinda.

Not that I didn't end up with pictures like this today

But I also ended up with pictures like this

Mostly it left me with a passion to learn more so now my photography journey is just beginning.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll roam the country looking for interesting people, stories and food. In honor of Mr. T.