Transitions

I don't need no stinkin' methods -- I've got an owl in my backyard. This is a photo of him from last year. He's been around all month. Right now, he's peering intently at the ten new goldfish in the pond.

I'm still working on this whole widower thing. The first couple of weeks, I was thinking I might get off pretty easily. With a couple week's hindsight, my current theory jibes with something Dede said a couple weeks ago.

Here's my reference story: Thirty-some years ago, I built apartments for a construction/rental property firm in Ames. We were building walls, which entails laying out two long boards (a top plate and a bottom plate) and then nailing 92 5/8-inch studs between them, sixteen inches apart. We used air-powered nailguns, which could shoot a 14-penny nail with the muzzle velocity of a .38 revolver (at least that's what somebody told me). One guy holds the stud's end up to the plate, and another pops two nails through the plate into the stud, and we move on down to the next stud. I was the senior guy, and I should have been running the nailgun, but other guy was notoriously slow, and I was trying to get the rest of the first floor walls up that Friday, so I was holding the studs and trying to set the pace. Somehow, Slowguy managed to shoot a nail under the plate, so that it skipped off the floor and buried itself into my knee. Time slowed down, as time does in situations like that, and I realized that I was on a raised platform with my kneecap nailed into place. I gave it a some thought, pulled out my trusty claw hammer, and proceeded to pull the nail out of my kneecap, using my thigh for leverage.

If I told that story right, you just cringed. I do, every time I think of it, even to this day, but at the time it didn't seem that bad at all -- it was just what had to be done. Looking back on the month of April, particularly the last week or so, the stuff I described at the time as "not that bad" seems pretty darned traumatic in retrospect -- I think I'd rather pull nails. I think a lot of the immediate loss of Diana was offset quite a bit by the relief of the end of that whole surreal experience.

Currently, my mood oscillates between sad, okay, and weird. I'm about half way through The Year of Magical Thinking (the book, not the year) -- it's given me some stuff to think about, but so far I'm noticing the differences in our stories more than the similarities.

So far, she hasn't talked about identity. I find myself thinking about that. dp and I used to joke that we could have our last names changed to Andkevin and Anddiana. 'Husband' has been pretty high on my list of hats, and that hat got even bigger through the whole cancer thang. Right now, I've flipped it inside out so I can call it a widower hat, but I'm sure that will get old.

I had the same rearrangement when we closed Unbound. 'Counselor' and 'cult expert' had become part of my identity, I remember feeling gaps that needed to be filled out. Looking back, I think 'filled out' is more accurate than 'plugged,' but I'm already mashing metaphors. Let's not go stuffing hats into holes.

That was eighteen years ago, and my sense of identity has a lot more experiences to it these days. It didn't seem that undeveloped at the time, but it feels much more solid now. It can take a few holes. The reframe is interesting, though. I still tend to say 'we' a lot, and cook for two, and I realized that I was apparently waiting for Diana to get the trashcan liner put in. (What will I do without Diffusion of Responsibility?)

Emotionally, I think I'm being pretty careful. I feel like grief is this big old mud puddle that I could just go wallow around in if I wanted to, but I don't see much advantage to doing that. I've never been much of a believer in the ventilation school of emotional baggage. Yelling about something that makes me mad only makes me more angry, so I'm sticking my toe the mud, but I'm not jumping in. Still, I get bushwhacked. I was having lunch with Bob this week, and the restaraunt's music starting playing Etta James' 'At Last.' I instinctively picked up my cell phone, because that's the song I used for the appointment alarm for dp's doctor's visits. It took me a moment to put it all together, and then I just lost it for a minute. I'm not wallowing, but I suppose I am grimy.

That's more than enough self-disclosure for today. It's the Memorial day weekend, so I've got three days to try and get some more stuff done. I'm making progress -- I've finally got a good handle on the bills and the paperwork, and I have a reasonably-clean kitchen. Trooley and I have been walking every other day or so, and I got a full, reasonably-productive week in at work. I'm still behind on my web design work, and I'm doing my best to ignore the piles of dp's stuff that still have to be dealt with, but all in all, things move forward.