3001 weeks

December 19, 2023 - 1 min read

Today Katy and I are the same age, for one day. 57 years, 6 months and 5 days. She was 59 days older than me, and she died 59 days ago. We used to joke that she was a cougar, going after the younger man. I guess as of tomorrow she’ll be jailbait and I’ll be the one in trouble. Today’s Healing after Loss entry was more shit about god’s plan and all that.

dysphoric

December 18, 2023 - 2 mins read

Today I learned, prompted by my medical report, that dysphoric is the opposite of euphoric. That’s me, apparently, clinically speaking. Today, I also found the two pairs of pants and shirts that she bought me last January when I started my new job. We were afraid they had gotten lost in the move; I couldn’t believe that I would’ve been so careless as to lose them, but we didn’t know where they were.

day fifty-five

December 14, 2023 - 1 min read

grief, do you think you could let me get downstairs and get the coffee going before you take me down for the first time today? no? ok down we go then

Advice for the Bereaved, #117

December 11, 2023 - 1 min read

Don’t buy the cheap tissues at the store. Spend the money, buy the most expensive ones they have. The kind with lotion. The kind that won’t shred when, in one nothingth of a second and with absolutely no warning, you go from being somehow relatively OK at a random point in time to doubled over on the floor, screaming white-hot sheets of tears and snot into them in volumes you never imagined your body could produce, snatching them one after another after another from a box you can only blindly grope for with wet, shaking hands.

Things I could do tonight

December 8, 2023 - 1 min read

Spend time with my wife Look for my passport Read my Python and R books Figure out if my PC’s power supply is dead Watch a movie or something I guess Keep the woodstove burning Finish cleaning out the old hard drives and get the NAS organized Redo the wifi so everything’s on the same subnet Put things in folders Sit in front of my wife’s picture and cry

Day forty-seven

December 6, 2023 - 1 min read

wrapped around your ashes and crying like it was yesterday

Thomas Mann sure missed on this one

December 6, 2023 - 2 mins read

Today’s entry in “Healing After Loss” reads: What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so. Thomas Mann Yeah. No. OK, I understand that some grief is complicated. Some people have, had, terrible misfortune in their relationships and marriages, abuse and neglect and other awful things that complicate their losses, and the feelings that remain afterward.

Terror

December 5, 2023 - 2 mins read

My love, my love, my love, Not just disintegrative grief, without you. Paralyzing, bone-freezing terror as well. You knew me when we were children. You knew the scared, sad little boy that I was, the one who would finally find the courage to ask you to marry him almost 50 years later. You loved me then the way children love each other. We listened to “Free To Be You And Me” together a few months ago and you cried, remembering how you listened to it when you loved me as a child, all the way back.

Dear Katy

November 25, 2023 - 1 min read

Dear Katy, Hello from the fake world, the one you left and are no longer in. I went for my walk in the fake world this morning and cried over you for some small reason I don’t remember We’re running low on toothpaste here in the fake world and that’s odd because you always kept track of the toothpaste and it’s odd that you haven’t put it on the list or picked up more at the pharmacy.