Author: Kathie

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

One of the things that I love the most about the little house I retreat to on the Oregon coast – and that caused me to choose this place for the first time back in 2006 – is that there is dedicated space for writing, and dedicated space for doing artwork. Many of my books have had a draft pounded out in the writing nook, on an old beat-up table that butts right up to the window overlooking the ocean, which is only a few feet away. Upstairs, there is a loft, with a larger window facing the same direction. It’s perfect for artwork. The owners of the little house have another beat-up table, left in storage when I’m not there, so the table is just for me. While the view is lovely, I often paint at night, with the windows wide open, letting in the sound of the ocean.

During the day, when I’m writing, I look up to watch the passing whales or birds, and to watch the light change on the water. At night, when I’m painting, I look up at the blinking lights of a passing fishing boat, or to listen to the waves or the ecstatic sound of children with flashlights playing in the sand or basking in the light of a bonfire.

It’s just so idyllic. But especially, it’s idyllic because it’s like a home for two separate places in my brain. One that expresses itself in words; one that expresses itself in imagery and color.

I’ve craved that in my own home, which is a live-where-you-work condo. Here, my brain gets compartmentalized into my writing space on the third floor, and my teaching space on the first floor. But when I’ve wanted to work on art, I’ve either had to haul stuff down to the classroom and hope I don’t mess up the conference table, or haul stuff into the kitchen and hope I don’t mess up the island.

Since Michael died, I’ve sort of thrown myself into a massive purge and reorganization of floors two and three of the condo – where I live. About the only room that hasn’t been affected is my writing space, because that space has always been fully me – I never shared it with anyone, other than the feline and canine interlopers. I think one way I’ve been working myself through Michael’s death is by making the condo more fully mine – Michael’s presence is still here, but not as obviously as before. Interests that we shared remain. Interests that were purely his have been carefully given away to others who share those interests and will love those objects as much as he loved them.

There’s more to do, yet, but lately, my focus turned to a back room. This room has gone through more transitions than any other room in the condo. It’s sorta useless, really – there isn’t a closet, there’s no storage, it’s just this room that sits at the end of the hallway and also is outside of Olivia’s bedroom. The most important aspect of it is there is a second floor deck that is accessed through a door in this room.

First, it was a bedroom for my oldest son who was in college when we moved in here. He came home every other weekend to work, and so I put in a futon with storage underneath, and a table with cubbies and a tv on top. It worked as his room until he graduated and moved out. Then it became a tv room for a while. Next, because Michael was teaching more and more for me, we changed it to Michael’s office – but with the rule that if he began to make it into a mess, it would stop being his office.

It became a mess. Despite decorating it to his specifications, including a lovely desk with a marble top, and plenty of shelves and cubbies for storage, it wasn’t long before he was working on his laptop while sitting on his recliner in the living room, because every available surface in the office was covered – mostly with stuff that it didn’t need to be covered by.

I took the space back during the pandemic, and it became a workout room. It still held Michael’s card catalog (in college, he worked in a library and he loved card catalogs, so I got one for him from an antique store) and an antique RCA Victor radio/record player console. Incongruously, I added a treadmill and free weights, and a television to watch while I was on the treadmill.

And now…here we are, in this new chapter.

Last week, the radio/record player console left, followed by the card catalog. The console was purchased by a woman for her son, who had just won a contest where his radio play was produced. He loved all things Old Time Radio – just like Michael. I have no doubt that console will be treasured. The card catalog went to a man who contacted me immediately when I listed it, saying he’d been looking for one for years to keep his card collection in. He sent a photo of where the card catalog would be, and reassured me it would be well-loved. I believe him.

Then I looked at the room, almost bare again, except for my treadmill, and I knew what I wanted. A lovely student showed me an easel a family member of hers was giving up. It was old and beat-up and wonderful. I said I wanted it. Since I received it, it’s sitting in my garage. But now…

With the help of my son, we moved the treadmill, so that its front is up against a wall. I no longer need the television, which rested on top of the card catalog. I can watch things on my phone. The treadmill folds, which was something I never took advantage of, but I did now, and floor space suddenly became open to me.

In the living room, in a place that was always awkward, was my antique phone table, which has an old-fashioned push-button phone resting on it that has been repainted into art. I found it at an antique mall, which is where the table came from too. It moved into this new space, and has become a place where I can sit and change my shoes. Then the easel came up and tucked into a corner, in front of the door leading to the HVAC unit that heats and cools my classroom downstairs. That door is rarely opened, but just in case, the easel is easily folded. Then I took a trip to St. Vinnie’s and found what they called a TV table. It’s perfect for holding my art supplies. I added a barstool to sit on while painting. And finally, I added a small colorful rug with so many colors that, if I spill paint, no one will ever know.

I had paintings on the walls already, but I went into my garage and pulled out more that I had in storage there and added them. Everything was carefully placed – the treadmill can fold down without disrupting anything.

And then the final for me. I love painting mannequins. That’s how I got started. Back in 2018, on the day before my birthday, Michael, Olivia and I went into Boston Store, as it was going out of business. Everything was for sale. I went into the women’s department and saw a plus-sized female mannequin. I’ve always wanted to paint a plus-sized female mannequin.

“I want this,” I said. And Michael and Olivia bought it for me for my birthday.

She’s sat since 2018, waiting for me. She was in my office, then the storeroom, then came into the classroom when I closed the storeroom down. Now, she’s sitting on that repurposed TV table, and she’s at the perfect height for me to start applying paint and brush. She will be my first project.

Given to me by Michael and Oliva.

I haven’t started yet, and I haven’t unfolded and used the treadmill yet, at least since the change. But I keep walking down the hall, looking at it, and sighing in absolute pleasure.

Like I do in Oregon.

It’s all there, waiting. And that part of my brain, so unexercised, is delighted.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

 

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Going to the movies was a favorite activity for Michael and me. Even when streaming services became popular, allowing you to see movies in the comfort of your own home with your own microwave-popped popcorn, we preferred the big screen, movie popcorn, and the reactions of others all around us. When the theaters added reclining seats, including armrests that lifted to make the seats into a love seat, so much the better. I’ve yet to experience heated seats, which I’ve heard are out there, but I look forward to it.

In particular, Michael and I loved what we called writer movies. These could be movies based on books by favorite writers, or movies where the main character was a writer. Often, after seeing the movie in the theater, we’d buy it on DVD (again, before streaming) so we could enjoy it and discuss it another time. Soon after Michael and I moved in together, he introduced me to a movie called Jake’s Women, starring Alan Alda, where he played a writer whose characters came to life and talked to him. A writer movie with Alan Alda…heaven!

Since Michael died, I’ve been to several movies, usually in the company of my son Andy and my daughter Olivia. But recently, a movie came out called The Friend. I saw the preview the first time I went to a movie alone, and when I saw that it was a writer movie, I knew I had to go. When the movie showed up in our theaters, it had a shockingly low number of showtimes, so I knew it wouldn’t be staying long. This last weekend, both my son and daughter were unable to come with me, so I went alone to my first writer movie without Michael.

I knew that the movie was about a writer whose best friend had died and left her his gigantic dog, a Great Dane. I didn’t know that the best friend was a writer too, and both of these writers were also teachers, which of course, parallels my life with Michael. The dog, Apollo, was up to his haunches in grief, along with the writer who was left behind.

At one point, the dead writer’s wife says, “How do you explain death to a dog? He sits by the door every day, waiting for Papa to come home.”

Our dog, Ursula, knew Michael as Daddy. Ten months after Michael’s death, Ursula comes downstairs every morning and sits in front of Michael’s recliner, facing it, staring at it. In the evening, she stands by our front windows, watching for Michael to come out of the bus station.

Ten months.

I went to a relatively late movie, 9:40. This theater allows you to choose your seats when you buy your tickets, and I bought mine before anyone else had. I chose my favorite seat. When I arrived at the theater, there were only two other people there, and they were in my same row. There was only one seat between us. When I sat down, they got up and moved to a new area. I wondered if they’d snuck in from another movie.

I think I was only about ten minutes into the movie when the tears started. I sat with the armrest down; there was no need to raise it. But Michael was so missing. The grieving dog, the grieving writer, the dead writer, ohmygod, I was suddenly immersed in it.

At some point, the other two people left. They were not in the theater when the movie ended. I never saw them go. At first, I couldn’t get up and leave. I just sat there, staring at the empty screen. One of the ushers came in and asked me if I was all right.

“No,” I said. “But it’s okay. I will be.”

I will be.

I explained to the usher that the movie hit me more than I thought it would, that my husband and I are/were writers, and that Michael passed away last June. He sat down next to me. Not in the seat Michel would have been in, I noticed, but to my left. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “What was your husband like?”

What a nice young man. We talked for a while, and when I left, walking out into the chilly almost-midnight air, my tears were gone. The young man waved at me, and he was whistling as he began to sweep.

But here’s the thing.

That movie was the best damn movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. Even if my situation wasn’t what it is, this movie would have entered my bloodstream and just left me fully involved and invested in what was going on on the screen. I felt for the writer. I felt for the dog. I felt for the dead writer.

And because of my situation, I then felt for Michael and for Ursula. And for me.

I will watch the movie again when it’s out on streaming. When I got home that night, I ordered the book, which is by Sigrid Nunez. It arrived on Monday, and I am now deep in it, and I am just as wowed by the book as I was by the movie. This is a movie that Michael and I would have talked about for days. But even without him here, I know what he would have said. I know what I would have said.

The conversation is happening anyway. Despite the empty seat.

Some people would wonder why I let myself be “triggered”. First off, I didn’t know fully what the movie was about. But if I had, I would have gone anyway – it was a writer movie. I also didn’t leave when I realized the storyline. I deliberately do not avoid “triggers”, because the more I learn, the more I experience, the more I am exposed to people who have experienced the same thing – and survived! – the more I see that I’m going to be okay too. The more I witness other people’s strength, the more I realize my own.

I’ll be okay, I said to that nice usher. And – spoiler alert – the writer and the dog in the movie end up okay too. I am following in their footsteps.

And I think I want to adopt a Great Dane.

(By the way – that usher? I feel like I am reminded over and over again about the goodness of the majority of people on this planet, even in the midst of all the chaos we’re witnessing. As long as there are people like that young usher, asking me if I’m okay, and then sitting down beside me to talk, the world is going to be fine.)

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Four words (well, technically, three words because one word was used twice) were presented to me this week which provided a huge moment of, if not happiness, then great relief. My feeling is that most people will see these words and wonder why they brought happiness or relief. They were:

Traumatic grief. Complex grief.

Why the relief? Because suddenly, what I’ve been feeling has been identified, defined…and I’m not the only one. Which means I’m not going crazy.

Having raised an autistic daughter, I’ve been exposed over and over again to the word “spectrum”. No matter what my daughter did or didn’t do, no matter if what she was doing or not doing was done or not done by tons of other children identified with autism, she was on the spectrum. Olivia is twenty-four now, and as I watched her grow, I also watched the word “spectrum” grow. It seemed to be applied to just about everything as the years went by.

And now…grief is also on a spectrum. I am on a spectrum.

From the time of Michael’s accident (January 17, 2024) to now, I have had so many wide-eyed realizations in the middle of feeling like maybe I finally had a handle on things. I don’t think I’ll ever forget sitting at my writing table in the little house on the Oregon coast last summer, watching out the window as a couple I’d just spoken to as I took my morning walk moved down the beach. They’d told me they were there, celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. Me, with my lack-of-filter mouth, blurted out that I would have been celebrating my twenty-fifth anniversary, but my husband just died, which, of course, put a pall on the conversation. They couldn’t get away fast enough.

Tucked back in the house, watching them walk away, I suddenly felt that the word “died” wasn’t right. And that’s when I got hit upside the head with the realization that my husband didn’t die. He was killed.

And from there, it was like all the kinds of death just unfolded themselves in a list behind my eyelids. Old age. Natural causes. Illness. An accident caused by the person who died. Murder.

And then Michael. Dead because he was killed by a negligent driver who not only struck him with his passenger van, but then ran over him with all four tires.

Killed.

Out loud in that little house, with only the ocean to talk to, I said, “No wonder I’m so angry.”

I am someone who is, unfortunately, a perfectionist, and who always wants to do things right. Since Michael’s death in June, I have struggled hard with trying to figure out what is the right way to grieve. From people around me, lovely people, I’ve heard all sorts of things. I’ve been told I’m strong, when I don’t feel strong. I’ve been told I’m amazing, when I feel anything but. I was asked how I could stand up in front of a huge crowd, celebrating my studio’s 20^th birthday, and read both a section from Michael’s forever unfinished novel and poetry that I’ve written about this experience without breaking down. Which made me wonder if I was expected to burst into tears. Or maybe I was supposed to stop and apologize and say I was unable to go on. I’ve also been told I seem removed, which made me further wonder just how I was supposed to appear.

And then, of course, a few weeks ago, I was told I was in “pity city”, a phrase which pretty much tipped me over the edge.

To the people closest to me, I’ve asked, “What am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be?”

And the answer is usually the same: “Just keep on being yourself.”

But when “pity city” hit, I felt like I was failing grief. How in the world do you fail grief? But I somehow was. At that point, I didn’t see myself as on a “spectrum”. I saw myself as alone. And abnormal.

I am definitely experiencing lighter days. Which is wonderful. But then I still had a day last week where I realized, as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning, that I was not going to be able to get out of bed. And, if I did get out of bed, I was going to be worthless. There would be no talking to me on that day. Luckily, it was a day off for me (and one thing I’ve noticed is that these bad days do seem to appear mostly on my days off…maybe because that’s when I can allow the bad days in?). However, I did have an event scheduled that day, where I was to be speaking before an audience. There was just no way. When I talked to my dog that morning, it was in a whisper. That was the most I could do. And so I canceled.

Which I never do.

Not only am I on the spectrum of grief, but I am on a spectrum of emotion. They change, minute by minute. And they are all, apparently, okay.

So this week, I spoke with someone who specializes in grief recovery, and not only that, she lost her partner years ago in a similar fashion to Michael. When she explained traumatic grief and complex grief to me, I recognized myself and what I’ve been feeling so clearly, I might as well have been looking in a mirror.

The definition of traumatic grief: Traumatic grief, also known as traumatic bereavement, occurs when a death or loss is experienced in a highly distressing or shocking way, leading to symptoms beyond typical grief. In addition to typical grief symptoms like sadness and longing, individuals with traumatic grief may experience intrusive thoughts and memories about the loss and the circumstances surrounding it; hypervigilance or heightened awareness of potential threats; difficulty processing the loss and accepting the reality of the death; emotional dysregulation, such as intense anger, anxiety, or detachment; and physical symptoms, like shakiness, nausea, or trouble breathing.

And this gave me my Moment how? Because it means I’m not going crazy. It means I can do things, like get up in front of a large audience and read Michael’s work, and then have a day where I can’t get out of bed. It means I can seem removed to one person, but then have my eyes fill with tears at an offhand comment by someone else.

It means I’m okay, even when I’m not. And it means I’m going to be okay too.

There is so much to learn.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Well, there’s no doubt which moment is the Moment this week. It sent me right over the moon, or more accurately, overwhelmed me over the moon.

I didn’t find my missing jewelry box. But I found my missing jewelry. The song goes, “Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places…” I was lookin’ for the wrong thing in all the wrong places. The box was gone. The jewelry…still here.

Continuing with a quest to get my house organized, to have everything in places where I know I’ll find it, and understanding all along that this was a thinly veiled way of trying to feel like my life was under control again, I turned to a problem area of my own. Mostly, my focus has been on Michael’s parts of the house, which ended up being in much worse shape than I suspected. Hidden behind closed doors, closed cupboards, closed drawers, was a mountain of stuff that should have been thrown away or given away years ago. And lots and lots of secrets.

For the most part, I was always the one that wanted to keep things minimal. Neat. Organized. Tidy. But there are two places where my own collecting has gone overboard. Clocks and jewelry. The next step in my organizing quest will be to start going through my clocks and slimming my collection. But first…I stood in front of my jewelry cabinet.

Years ago, I found on Craig’s List a listing for something called an antique chimney cabinet. It’s tall, about 7 feet, but slender, filled with five shelves. I saw the photo and recognized a fantastic place to keep jewelry. I had a jewelry armoire at the time, but it didn’t hold enough. This, I thought, would hold a lot. And it did.

Most of my necklaces and earrings, I keep in ice cube trays. These can be stacked. I had a lot of ice cube trays.

I brought the chimney cabinet home, and, appealing to my minimal nature, it didn’t take up much room, but kept its promise of holding a lot. I don’t shop for jewelry at jewelry stores. I look in art galleries, but also in flea markets and thrift stores. My taste is eclectic, and I also very much enjoy knowing that when I walk into a room, whatever jewelry I’m wearing will not be worn by anyone else. It’s not mass-produced by commercial stores, but by lovely individual people.

But…I no longer even knew what I had in there. Some jewelry likely hadn’t been out of the cabinet in over ten years.

A couple people suggested that I might find the missing jewelry box in there. I pushed that possibility away. The jewelry box would not have fit through the cabinet door onto the shelves. I didn’t consider at all that I might find the jewelry.

The first day of cleaning it out, I got through two shelves, stacked with ice cube trays. In one of the trays, I found a small pocket watch, which looked amazingly like my grandmother’s, passed down to my mother, passed down to me. It was one of the missing pieces. I held it for a long time and thought, No. It can’t be. Why would I put the little pocket watch in here, but not the rest of the jewelry? That doesn’t make any sense. But this little pocket watch was so familiar, and it wound – it was not battery-powered. I carefully put it in my “keep” pile. Then I worried over it the rest of the night as I tried to sleep.

The next day, I settled down to go through the final three shelves. My donate pile filled a large box, not just with jewelry, but with some little plastic cubes I’d bought years ago to keep individual pieces in that were too large to fit in a space fit for an ice cube. Scattered in different places throughout the jewelry cabinet, I found all of the missing pieces:

*my grandfather’s pocket watch, identified by his picture inside the back lid,

*my wedding ring from my first marriage, which also had an anniversary band soldered to it,

*a small ceramic pin of a dog holding a daisy, a gift to me when I was eight years old and in the hospital, for the third of five eye surgeries I would receive between the ages of 16 months and 15 years,

*my engagement ring from Michael, bought the weekend we rented our townhouse in Menomonee Falls, the first place where we would live together. We’d gone into an antique store called Needful Things. This was perfect, as Michael’s favorite author was Stephen King, and in one of King’s books, there was a store called Needful Things. Without my seeing, Michael found the engagement ring and bought it, presenting it to me later that night. It didn’t even need to be sized. It was perfect.

*a miniature gold hourglass pendant, filled with diamond dust for sand. A gift from Michael on our first Christmas.

*the diamond and ruby heart pendant that caused this whole search to happen, when I realized I couldn’t find it for Valentine’s Day, the day I always wore it. Michael gave it to me on a Valentine’s Day before we were married.

All there. All intact. All so very precious.

The hourglass and heart pendant did indeed come from jewelry stores, but because they were from Michael and from his heart, I didn’t care.

Tears have been common since Michael’s accident, then over the five months where he tried to recover, and since his death. The tears on this night were a mix of joy and sadness.

But how did they get into the jewelry cabinet? They were kept in a special little jewelry box, specially purchased for the pieces that meant the world to me, but that I didn’t wear often. I have absolutely no memory of removing them from that box and putting them away in different parts of the jewelry cabinet. They weren’t even together. They were scattered.

The closest I can figure is that I did it in April. Michael was home from the hospital, and I was trying so hard to make our condo comfortable for him, and to give him as much independence as possible. He was sleeping in Olivia’s room because he couldn’t climb the stairs to our bedroom on the third floor. Olivia moved all of her clothes to her apartment, and I then moved all of Michael’s clothes from his closet down to the closet in Olivia’s room. This would allow him to pick out his own clothes each day and not have to wait for me to run them down from our room. I took advantage of all the stair running to bring up a corner desk that used to be in our room, on my side of the bed, where it fit perfectly in a corner. Months before, Michael decided he wanted one of his old time floor-standing radios up there, and so it took the place of my desk. It also stubbornly always managed to find my toe if I got up in the middle of the night. So I brought the desk back up, and quickly hid the radio in my car, where it was then moved to the storeroom. The little jewelry box sat on top of that radio, and it wouldn’t fit on the desk.

I must have decided then to take the jewelry out, put it in my cabinet, and give away the jewelry box. But you couldn’t prove it by me. I have no memory of doing so.

But there they were.

All of the pieces are now safely back in the chimney cabinet, newly cleaned out and the collection slimmed down to the point that I know exactly what I have and where it is.

In total, I used to have 28 ice cube trays of jewelry, each holding 14 pieces. I gave away 17 ice cube trays worth of jewelry. The little plastic cubes I had, that held jewelry too big to fit in the ice cube trays, I didn’t make a final count of, but there were about fifty. They’re all gone. Besides the remaining ice cube trays, I have a few original boxes holding jewelry, especially from my favorite gallery in Newport, Oregon. I easily cut my collection by more than half.

Among the remaining, those special missing pieces. All of them. Eventually, they will be passed down to family members. But not yet. They are something treasured that I thought I lost, but I didn’t.

I can’t say that about my greatest loss of all. But I will make do with what he gave me.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

 

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

This morning, I woke up laughing. I was immersed in a dream. Olivia and I were in a restaurant and Michael showed up. He sat down, ordered a meal, and then told us that his whole death had been a mistake. The explanation in the dream, while convoluted, made sense, though I can’t remember the details now. I do remember getting up and being enveloped in his hug while I told him how happy I was to see him. Then I pulled back and said, “But just so you know, there’s no way in hell you’re getting your clothes closet back. I’m using it now.”

Which pretty much sounds like me. In my massive house reorganization, which will continue this weekend, my spring and summer clothes took over Michael’s closet. This means I no longer have to deal with the dreaded twice-a-year switch-out of seasonal clothes, something which always caused Michael to put on his headphones so he couldn’t hear me swearing and moaning away as I worked my way through it.

I smiled over the memory of the dream as I worked my way through morning clients. I think the dream reflected what I’ve been feeling this week, and what I talked about to a couple people. I feel like I’ve turned a corner, in a way. Things have started to feel…normal. Though I hate to use that word. They aren’t normal; Michael isn’t here. And I hate to use the phrase “a new normal”, because new implies something bright and shiny and exciting, and this new chapter of my life has definitely not been that.

But whatever this is, this week, I started moving through my day much as I did before the world blew apart. I went from task to task. I smiled, interacted, laughed, got things done. I was not distracted. My thoughts still drifted to Michael, but I didn’t burst out into tears. There were challenges, and I frowned at them, but faced them, fixed them, and moved on. It was like a fog lifted. A fog, but also a sense of something that had been grabbing and pulling at my feet as I tried to move forward going away, leaving me free to move. I walked easily; I worked easily; I smiled easily.

And as I talked to clients, I glanced up now and then at the photo of Michael I have sitting on my credenza, across the room, and directly in my line of vision. He smiled back at me.

One of the biggest physical effects of grief has been an overwhelming fatigue. I have been craving sleep, sleep, and more sleep. I’m a lifelong insomniac, but since Michael’s accident, and then his death, I have been asleep within a few minutes of going to bed. I’ve found myself typing critiques with my eyes closed because I couldn’t keep them open. I got into the very bad habit of meeting with morning clients, and then crawling back in bed at noon and sleeping for a couple hours, which badly ate into my writing time. By the time I got up, got showered and re-dressed, answered phone calls, had lunch, took the dog out, it was almost time for late afternoon clients to start. The fatigue causing me to return to bed every day essentially took away my number 1 method of battling negative things: writing.

But then there was this week. Fog lifted, feet free, eyes open. I did not return to bed after morning clients. At least…until this morning. I did today.

And then I was gifted with the dream, which caused me to wake up laughing.

My Moment this week is very subtle. There is no one frozen-in-time moment that I am conscious of. There is no solution; Michael did not come back, and he never will. But there is this very mild, very quiet feeling of the path opening up before me again. That feeling of “Life goes on.”

I’ve always hated that phrase too.

But I think I know now, I feel now, that “Life goes on”, doesn’t mean “Life goes on and you totally forget that the one you lost ever existed.” Life goes on does not mean that you skip and twirl. You just move. But you move with purpose, and for me anyway, with a sense that I am doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

And as I said before, with the impact of the video I watched last week, “Life goes on” also does not mean you move on. You move forward. Michael is still very much on my mind and in my heart. But you know, when he was alive, I wasn’t thinking about him constantly. I didn’t stand at the window, watching for him to come home at night. I didn’t wake up with him and watch him go to work, counting the hours until he came back. In fact, I asked him to quit kissing me goodbye in the mornings because he woke me up a couple hours before I had to be awake, and I wanted to be left alone. He and I moved often in different directions, but always knew the other was within reach.

It’s not all that different now, except he’s not within reach the way he used to be.

I had a call from my tax guy a little bit ago, saying my taxes are ready to go. I had to teach myself how to get everything prepared for the tax guy this year – Michael always did that. But I did it, and apparently, successfully.

I had to buy a new laptop last weekend, because my current laptop decided that the left side of the keyboard was no longer going to work. I’ve been working with an external keyboard, which I hate. It’s bulky and it makes travel difficult. But in the past, whenever a new laptop was necessary, it was Michael that put everything from the old one to the new one. I don’t know how to do that. So I found someone who does, and it’s being done for me. I did it.

There are going to continue to be things that I find that Michael used to do, that now I have to learn to do. And…while at first, everything seemed insurmountable, they’re not. I’m doing them. I think of Michael, smile, and then get things done. I think of him, dream of him, and then bring him along with me as I move forward. For this week, anyway, the fog is lifted, my feet are free, my eyes are open.

And no matter what, he’s not getting his clothes closet back.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Just a few minutes ago, I was eating lunch (late) and reading a book, when I came across this sentence:

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable.

• Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

And just like that, my head was hanging and I was crying onto my ham and cheese sandwich.

My life has been like that lately. Plugging along just fine, feeling, well, reasonable, and then something happens to make me cry, or the alternative, make me laugh. I’ve always been a rollercoaster, but lately, I am the rollercoaster from hell.

I watched a video sent by a student earlier this week. It was of a Ted Talk on grief, and the speaker, Nora McInerny, said, “Grief isn’t fatal, but it can often feel like it is.”

I didn’t have a ham sandwich at that moment. So I cried over my keyboard. Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khkJkR-ipfw

Two weeks ago, I wrote this blog and told how I’d been staring at the blank screen for ten minutes, trying to come up with something that counted as one of my Moments. Then, last week, the day after writing my Moment, I had such an avalanche of small good things that all I wanted to do was come home and write a second This Week’s Moment for the same week, to talk about the miracle of small surprises. There were no rainbows, no unicorns. No sudden opening of my door and Michael walking in, saying, “Surprise! It was all a big mix-up involving my doppelganger!” No gift of a clock that turns back time so I could call Michael and divert him long enough to keep him from stepping into that intersection until that blue passenger van drove by, leaving him unharmed. No. It was just one small good thing after another.

First was the arrival of new dishes. When Michael and I moved into this condo 19 years ago, Michael was surprised when I told the kitchen designer that I wanted a plate rack. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted one. I’ve always been the type that likes things neatly stacked and tucked away. But being able to have the plates easily within reach, and also treated as art, just appealed to me. When I went on a search for plates, I couldn’t find any that I liked. Finally at Goodwill, I mix and matched a set of solid burgundy plates with solid hunter green plates – the two colors used the most in our very bright condo. For 19 years, they’ve lived in the plate rack, but as time went by and some broke, they did not break evenly. I now had more burgundy than hunter green, and the lack of a cohesive rhythmic pattern was making me crazy in my newly reorganized kitchen. I even used a wooden silverware organizer to organize my BATTERIES by size. The plates that just weren’t even just screamed at me.

When I went for a plate search last weekend, it was like when we moved in all over again. It seemed like all the plates were white or beige. Some had pretty prints on their surface, but their edges were still white or beige. It took a lot of searching, but then I found them. And they arrived on my doorstep on Friday, the day after I posted my blog.

The outer edge of the surface is every color imaginable. The surface you eat on varies by the plate, from orange to green to yellow to blue. The rim that faces into the room when they’re in the rack match the surface. It was like my kitchen suddenly lit up and sang with brightness. With joy.

Well, with rainbows. I guess rainbows were involved.

I packed up my old dishes and brought them to Goodwill, back from whence they came, hopefully to give someone else some of the happiness they’d given me. As I drove home, down Main Street, of all streets, how down home can you get, I looked ahead and saw a man walking behind a young girl on the brightest yellow bike. Daffodil yellow. My favorite flower. As I got closer, I thought, that looks like my son. That looks like my granddaughter.

It was! They were!

I drove around the block so I could come up beside them. Hearing my son’s, “Hi!” and my granddaughter’s even brighter “Hi!” just melted me. And I have to say, there is no more beautiful sight in this world than my long-haired, long-legged granddaughter on a daffodil yellow bike. She was a poem. I wish I’d thought to take a photo, but I was too busy admiring her.

Back at home, I tackled the last of my second floor decluttering/organization goals. Michael always wanted a card catalog, like we used to use in the library. I found one for him at an antique mall soon after we moved in to the condo. It’s in my back room, where my treadmill is now, and we used it as a medicine cabinet. Bandages under B, Sudafed under S, we argued over if Tylenol should be under T for Tylenol or A for Acetaminophen. The T won. However, as I discovered when I started to clean out the multitude of drawers, it was another victim of Michael’s hidden hoarding. Every drawer was stuffed to the brim – and there was no sense to the alphabetization. I threw out over 200 pens – all of them dead. Receipts. A set of magnets. A set of fake bloody fingers, bought to scare us at Halloween. A Lone Ranger badge. Old autograph books. A working Viewmaster and reels.

I threw out three bags of garbage. I did, however, sell the autograph books and Viewmaster and reels within 24 hours of listing them.

But it was done. Every bit of the second floor of this condo is now organized according to my very strict rules. Even the batteries. I feel like I am calming chaos.

Then, in the mail, there was a package with a book I’d ordered. It contained a poem I hadn’t thought of in years, but that came to me suddenly one night, and so I looked it up, found it, and ordered the book.

Years ago, when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, six lines of this poem were published, I believe in an article in the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper. I loved the six lines so much, I cut them out and thumbtacked them to a bulletin board I kept for years, filled with lines I loved from all the things I read. At the time, the name of the poet wasn’t included, nor the title, and I thought this was the whole poem:

The night I lost you

someone pointed me towards

the Five Stages of Grief.

Go that way, they said,

it’s easy, like learning to climb

stairs after the amputation.

The day these words came back to me last week was a few days after I was told by someone important to me that I needed to move on, let it go. I was, he said, in “pity city.” And now this poem came back, glowing like a moonlit path in the darkness.

I Googled the words and found that this is a much longer poem, called “The Five Stages of Grief”, by Linda Pastan. It was in a book with the same title. I searched further online, found a copy, and bought it.

Now it was in my hands. As I slid it out of the envelope, I found it was originally a library book. Inside was stamped “No longer the property of Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania.”

I clutched the book and wondered if it felt as abandoned as I’ve been feeling. And now, well, I’d saved it.

That night, in bed, I read the entire poem. And again, I cried, this time over the final stanza:

Acceptance. I finally

reach it.

But something is wrong.

Grief is a circular staircase.

I have lost you.

Grief is a circular staircase. The perfect definition. Crying over a ham sandwich. Elating over the poem that is my granddaughter. Feeling accomplished over thoroughly organizing a floor of my home. Crying over a poem that resonated decades before it would resonate with me in an even deeper way. I saved the poem. Now it saved me.

That’s who I am right now, and it’s okay. I am not living in pity city.  I am on a circular staircase. I am living my life. And when rainbow dishes and daffodil bikes and things being where I know I will find them lift my spirits like the sunshine of spring, I know I’m doing fine.

On Monday, a coaching client returned to me after a break. She’d sold her first book, and now was ready to start on the second. She brought me a vase filled with the most gorgeous daffodils.

My favorite flower.

On the tag wrapped with ribbon around the vase, it said, “The daffodil announces the end of the cold dark days – symbolizing rebirth and new beginnings.”

Daffodils and a bicycle. Rebirth and new beginnings. Finding an old friend in a discarded library book. Tears over a single sentence in a novel.

A circular staircase.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

I unexpectedly ended up with a week off from work and found myself with some extra time. An emergency that surfaced ended up not being an emergency at all, and as I’d already called off my classes and clients for the week, I decided to look at it as a surprise gift and settled in to have what was essentially a stay-cation.

Well, if you can consider a stay-cation to be when you do some more purging in your home. I cleaned out the coffee table in my living room. The table is actually a bench from the 1950’s, complete with the figure of a nude woman on the front, made out of decorative tacks. Over the years, it became our storage for DVDs and VHS tapes…most of which have not seen the light of day for a long, long time. Many were Michael’s. I took five garbage-bags full of these to Goodwill. What remains – my Columbia House DVD collection of the entire Waltons series, the entire series of Dr. Katz, a VHS collection of the children’s show Today’s Special, which I fell in love with when my kids from my first marriage were little, our Christmas DVDs, and my favorite ever movie, Mr. Holland’s Opus, now fit in a clock in my back room, which has shelves in its belly. The coffee table is essentially empty, with just a couple of my big books on clocks and my Nintendo Switch supplies. I also cleaned out the cedar chest at the foot of my bed, in yet another attempt to find my missing jewelry box (nope). And then I tackled the kitchen drawers. I discovered that all those times Olivia and I complained that we couldn’t find any scissors and Michael came home with two or three more, they were all actually there, hiding in an ever increasing number of “junk drawers”. I had two and a half dozen scissors in my drawers. I kept eight (I don’t know why) and piled the rest and all of the other junk into two more big bags of garbage.

I actually have a tool drawer now. And you can SEE the tools.

But in between that and sleeping, I did something else that I haven’t been doing. WRITING. I’ve written every single day this week. Every. Single. Day. I’ve almost hit page 200 of my new novel. And here’s the thing…I returned to my roots as a night-writer.

And oh, it felt soooo good.

My natural body clock has me set as a night owl. When I’m not battling insomnia, and that insomnia has been gone since Michael died and I instead began to battle exhaustion, I am still up until the middle of the night. If I went only by what makes me comfortable, I would be up at night until about three in the morning, and then I would sleep until noon. All of which I did this week.

Night-writing started out of necessity. My three kids from my first marriage were all born within four years. Child 1 and 2, Christopher and Andy, were born 26 months apart. Child 2 and 3, Andy and Katie, were born 13 months apart. So when Katie was born, I had a 3-year old who was just barely potty-trained, a 13-month old who wasn’t walking yet, and a really, really colicky newborn. That first year was…well, let’s put it this way. I’ve pretty much pushed it out of my memory.

But I am phenomenally organized, and so I began to organize my children too. By the time that first year was done, they all willingly went to bed at the same time. 8:00. As soon as I kissed them all goodnight and shut their bedroom doors, I shot down the basement stairs to my little office. I wrote until at least midnight, often later, and then came upstairs, too jazzed to fall asleep. So I’d watch an hour of the Waltons (at that point, on the Family Channel), get my daily cry in, and then pour myself into bed between two and three in the morning. While I couldn’t sleep until noon with three little kids at home, they were really good about playing quietly in their rooms until about 8:00, when I would get them breakfast and take whoever was going to preschool that day to school.

Eventually, though, my life changed. I worked various jobs outside of the house, usually in the evenings so that my then-husband would be home with the kids. When I began to teach, I very quickly got into the groove of teaching in the morning until lunch, and then teaching again from about 4:00 on. That left the afternoon, and I became an afternoon writer.

This has worked for me, though often, when I sit down to write, my head is so full of the manuscripts I just discussed, and the manuscripts I will be discussing later, that it’s hard to stuff myself into my own work. I’ve developed a few tricks to deal with that, the best one to assign a song to whatever book I’m working on. I play the song every day before I write, associating it with the book, and like Pavlov’s dog and the ringing bell, I begin to drool. I also start each writing time by reading out loud what I wrote the day before. This gives me a running start and reminds me of what I intended to do next.

But this week? This week, I cleaned and organized during the day, which helped my mind be at peace. I sat down to write about 4:00…and I kept going as it became dark, then darker, then darkest outside. And I wrote. And wrote. I wrung myself out. And then I wandered downstairs to the television, usually with two cats on my lap and a dog at my feet, and I watched, not the Waltons, but I finished the whole series of Everybody Loves Raymond, and I started watching (again) Night Court. Where I used to cry every night after writing and before bed, now I laughed.

I felt fully back in my skin. I was doing what I love the most – writing – at the time I loved the most – middle of the night, no one awake but me. No distractions. Quiet. My whole focus, my whole mind, lost in the story I was writing. For those that don’t write, this is the time that you stop seeing your own world around you, and you see the world you’ve created.

It’s magical.

When I’m asked into a classroom of kids, anywhere from elementary through high school, I borrow a lesson I learned from John Boy himself on the Waltons. He was encouraging his little sister Elizabeth to write, because she was having trouble with her schoolwork. I took his lesson and expanded it. I had a bag of slips of paper with what appeared to be random words written on them. I’d have kids volunteer to come up, pick a slip out of the bag, and then write their word absolutely anywhere on the board. Words were everywhere!

I’d point them out and say, “Just words, right? Well, look.” Then I took each word and put them in order, forming an intriguing and exciting opening sentence. And the eyes would widen.

“Magic!” I would crow.

“Magic!” the kids would shout back, even the high schoolers.

And then we’d begin to work on their own stories.

Oh, I felt the magic this week. The words which have been scattered throughout my whole being came together and formed sentence after sentence, and I just RIPPED.

And another thing – in my fiction, I do not write about myself. Part of the magic is being able to slip into other lives, other souls, other feelings. But what I will do, from time to time when I find myself personally disturbed, facing something I don’t know how to deal with, is put a character in a similar, but not exactly the same, situation. And then I let my ability to tell stories unwind and watch how my brain gets that character out of the mess.

Then I know I can get out of the mess too.

So it’s probably not surprising for me to say that this book started out as a reaction to Roe vs. Wade being over-ruled. It continued that way for a while.

And then Michael died.

Dealing with grief has entered this novel. Roe Vs. Wade is still there. But Audrey, my main character, has lost her husband of only six years to Covid. And I’m watching as she twists and turns through grief. And I’m throwing out words at random on the page. Then they all come together in sentences. And paragraphs. And pages. And she is finding her way.

I will too.

And when I return to being an afternoon writer next week? I’ll be just fine. The midnight oil is burning bright within me now. I will tap into it at noon instead of midnight.

Magic.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

So I’ve just spent the last ten minutes, scrolling through Facebook to avoid starting to write this blog. Because I have absolutely no idea what I want to write about.

It’s been a week where nothing much happened, really. Which at times can be a great relief. I did nearly slice the top of my left thumb off as I attempted to actually cook a real dinner in the crockpot. It was an easy recipe. Cube some sirloin steak, cut up chunks of russet potatoes, Throw it all in the crock pot, add onion flakes, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, mix together some beef broth and Worcestershire sauce, put on the lid, cook for 8 hours. Top with cheddar cheese fifteen minutes before serving. I thought, I can do that! So when I finished with my morning clients, I ran downstairs to my kitchen, got the steak in the crockpot, peeled the potatoes and began to chunk them. And that’s when one wet potato shot out of my hand and left my thumb exposed on the cutting board like a tied-up woman on the train tracks. Or a more appropriate comparison, a woman tied up with a sawmill blade rolling toward her, because my knife sunk into my thumb like it was what was for dinner.

One trip to the ER later, where they GLUED my thumb back together, I came home, cleaned the blood off of everything in my kitchen, realized my shoelaces, blood-soaked from tying my shoes before driving myself to the ER, were a loss, found a whole unpeeled potato stuffed into my garbage disposal, thanks to my cat Cleo, and eventually finished the recipe. Which turned out very well, by the way.

That was really the most noticeable thing to happen this week, and it hardly counts as a moment of happiness.

It was one of those weeks of looking around and thinking, and sometimes saying out loud, “What the hell?”

This is one of the really odd things about grief, I think. Mostly, I’ve seen it portrayed as dark and depressed, an inability to get out of bed, tears that are so constant, they’re not even noticed anymore, long sighs, gazing out of windows.

And I do have those days, trust me. Right now, given a choice of innumerable activities, I would always choose sleep. I’m asleep as soon as I close my eyes. I sleep as late as absolutely possible. While sleeping, I have weird dreams, and while waking, I have weird almost-awake hallucinations. The weirdest one was lifting my head toward Michael’s side of the bed, seeing a hole in the wall just beyond it, and inside that hole was a man sitting in a chair, reading a magazine. He waved at me, I waved back, and went back to sleep for another half hour. When I woke again, he was gone, and so was the hole in the wall. I did not recognize him, but he was comforting. I haven’t seen him since.

What the hell?

I took up sleepwalking for a while too. I live in a three-story condo, with my bedroom on the third floor, and one early  morning at four, I woke as I opened the outside door on the first floor, preparing to step outside into the snow.

I don’t wear pajamas.

But the sleepwalking seems to have gone away.

Facebook Memories hits me across the face sometimes, which probably wasn’t the original intent of this social media site. This week, on the preview it gave on my news feed, I suddenly saw Michael looking out at me. It was a photo from rehab, where he’d just been moved. He was out of a hospital gown and in one of his favorite shirts. He was holding a stuffed Ursula, a special pillow I had made for him, because he missed our dog so much. At that time, he’d been in the hospital for six weeks, and he was in week one of what would be three weeks in rehab. His right eye is closed in the photo, not in a wink, but because the eye simply did not want to open.

But it was a moment of hope for us. He was out of the hospital. His memory seemed to be coming back. On his first day in physical therapy, he walked several steps. It was easy to push aside the troublesome signs that all was not well…the way he would repeat things a million times. The pain he was in. The complaining about the constant roaring in his right ear. That winking eye.

And then, of course, despite the hope we felt, he died.

Looking back now, I can see all of the signs I ignored and covered over with hope. I didn’t cry over them then, but I do now. I wish I would have let myself be more prepared. I wish I’d prepared him more. I wonder how much he knew, but he tried to cover up, so that I wouldn’t worry.

Writing all this is not making me feel any better. I had a client say this week, “I can tell you’re feeling sad today.” Well, I feel sad every day, actually, though I thought I was doing a good job of hiding it away. Maybe I’m letting hope push aside signs that all is not well.

But that’s the thing, really. I do still have hope.

I have moments where I lose myself in laughter. There are times now when I can think of a memory of Michael, even speak of that memory, and not collapse into tears. While our dog Ursula still comes downstairs every morning and looks for Michael in his recliner, I don’t. Though I do reach over every now and then and pat the arm that separates his recliner from mine. For a while there, I was only looking at my feet, trying to focus on taking the next step. Now, I’m looking all the way down the block, even though I’m walking down this street by myself.

This past Sunday, my daughter Olivia came home from work, and walked in just as I was reading a column from the Sunday paper out loud. I explained to her that, while her father was alive, I read him this column, an advice column we both liked, every Sunday. Now, his recliner was empty, but his urn sits on the piano, and so I still read to him.

“Oh,” Olivia said. She nodded, told me about her day, and went off to her bedroom, like it was a perfectly normal thing for me to be doing, and for her to see, walking in.

And that’s the thing too. It is the norm now. A norm that I can’t change, no matter how much I hope. But also a norm that is allowing me to laugh again, and resume moving forward.

I think that’s about as good as I can do today. And you know what? That’s all right too.

Even though hope let me down, there is still hope to feel, and I feel it thoroughly and always. Even through the sadness.

Hope always rises, donchaknow.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

There are still nice people in this world.

I just felt that needed to be said up front. There’s a lot of craziness happening now, and I think it’s easy to lose sight of that. But over the weekend, I was just awash in nice people, people who were face to face with me, people who were surrounding me online, people in my memories. I was doing a very hard thing, all alone, but I wasn’t alone at all.

I’ve read, and now I’ve found, that one of the hardest things after a loved one dies is going through their belongings and clearing it all out. Now of course, this doesn’t have to be done – the things have a place in the house already, but it turns out there’s this feeling that just comes over you, of having to take care of it all, get it somewhere…and for me, I think it was all about trying so hard to feel like I was in control of my life again.

Since Michael died, I’ve gone through a lot…the clothes closet, the dresser drawers, his counter, his hoarder’s closet, the bag he carried back and forth to work. All of it was hard. But then there was the off-site storeroom.

This was really a lesson in practicality. The storeroom costs $150 a month, and most of it was taken up with Michael’s overflow, things that didn’t fit in the hoarder’s closet, but that needed space, that he wouldn’t let go of, and that I didn’t have the patience to deal with. There was no need to spend that kind of money anymore. And so, last weekend, a weekend where my schedule allowed me a Friday and Monday off, so I had four days, I plucked up my courage and went in.

Now granted, some of the things were mine, and some were jointly owned, like our Christmas stuff. But so much there was Michael’s. Three floor model old time radios. A desk that he loved to write on, but in the room deemed his office, he just couldn’t stop himself from loading it with so many things, he couldn’t even reach the desk, and I ended up removing it all and claiming the space as something else. But we kept the desk anyway, because he couldn’t stand to see it go. Boxes and boxes of stuff, a lot of which contained things from his desks at work, and that he brought home when he lost yet another job.

I dug into it all. And in all of it, I kept finding memories of nice people. As I dug through the box he brought home from his dream job at a local theater, I remembered how the theater decided his position was unnecessary, especially at his pay rate…but they didn’t let him go until I was through with my radiation treatments, so that we would have the health insurance to pay our medical bills.

Nice people.

The latest box, brought to me from the job he was coming home from – not walking away from – on the day he was hit by the passenger van. He only had that job for a year, but we both felt he’d found a home away from home. His boss and coworkers came to the hospital to see him, and visited him once he was at home. The phone calls they made to me, to make sure I was doing okay. Keeping his desk for him, ready for his return, until we all knew he wasn’t coming back. Coming to the Celebration of Life and crying with me as if they’d known him for years and years, and not 12 months.

Nice people.

The boxes from work were what affected me the most. There were so many things he kept at work, to remind him of home. There was a photo of me, professionally taken soon after we were married. I surprised him with it at Christmas. I dressed in a men’s business shirt, wrapped Michael’s tie that boasted old time radios around my neck, posed with his model of an old time radio microphone, and held a sheet of paper, as if I was on an old time radio show. I showed up at the photographer’s with a box full of antique radios and this get-up, told him what I wanted to do, and he even helped me to tie the tie.

Nice person.

In one frame, there were many, many photos tucked, many of our daughter Olivia. Pictures of him with our baby daughter. And more pictures with each of my kids from my first marriage. The role Michael loved the most was father, even when that role had “step” in front of it.

And then I found the journal Michael started writing to Olivia before she was even born, but after an ultrasound determined who it was we’d created together.  I’d forgotten about it, Olivia never knew about it.

She has it now.

You know, it’s very hard to sort through things when you have to keep clearing your eyes of tears, and then having to sit down for a while because the tears become a storm and you just can’t breathe.

But I did it. Around me, people on social media, some whom I’ve never met in “real life”, encouraged and cheered.

Nice people.

Then came the finding new homes for Michael’s radios and his desk. First, someone I only knew from Facebook came out with her husband, to claim the smallest of the floor model old time radios, and also two of my mannequins. I paint mannequins, but I’d had these for years, and knew I’d never have the time to paint them. This friend and her husband arrived at the storeroom and greeted me with hugs and gifts. The wife gave me an envelope full of cards made from her photography. The husband carried a hibiscus he grew for me from a cutting, after he learned of my losing my very much loved hibiscus, Carla. He also brought me a pot of growing daffodils – he handed me spring. And my favorite flower.

The next day, another husband and wife team came for the other two radios. They came, not from my own pages on social media, but from an ad I put on Facebook Marketplace, explaining the story of the radios. The wife flung herself out of their van, hugged the stuffing out of me, and then said, “I have something for you, whether you want it or not!”, which made me laugh. A calming candle, and calming lotions and sprays. The couple left with a promise to send me a photo of the radios after they had them set up in their house.

Nice people.

And then the third, also from Facebook Marketplace. I’d posted the desk, also with the story behind it. She walked into the storeroom, laid both her hands on the desk’s surface, and said she would treasure it.

Nice person.

I can’t say that this was the hardest time since Michael died, because as every new thing pops up, it seems to be the hardest. It’s easiest, and likely more truthful, to just say it’s all been hard.

But swirling through all the hard are nice people. People who know me, people who don’t, people who knew Michael, people who didn’t.

I am alone. But I’m not.

The storeroom is almost empty now. I have to find a home for the metal conference tables that used to be in my classroom at AllWriters’. But once they’ve found their way, I will be rolling down that garage-type door for good.

Do I feel a sense of control now? In a way. The things I brought home from the storeroom are beloved. Tucked in Olivia’s bedroom closet is the cradle I found at a flea market, when I was pregnant with my first child. It was homemade, artist-made. Instead of spindles, it has solid walls of wood, other than one side, which is carved with the moon and the stars. All four of my children have slept in that cradle, and my granddaughter too. Things like this don’t get sent away…they are saved for the future generations of my family.

We didn’t put up Christmas decorations this year, but next Christmas, all of the Christmas decorations, including the tree, are now safely at home. They will be brought out easily and with joy.

On the shelves of what I called Michael’s hoarder’s closet are the photo albums, neatly lined up, even the photo album from my first wedding. There are a few bins of loose photos. All are there for my kids and granddaughter to look through when they want to dig through their own memories and see their own histories.

I feel a little more in control again, even though I know we never are. But I also feel surrounded by nice people.

And yes, that helps (enormously). Despite. Anyway.

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

In general, I’m not someone who likes surprises. I’m big on organizing. I’m big on planning. I’m big on sticking with schedules and knowing what’s about to come around the corner.

One of the things 2024 taught me is you cannot always plan on what’s coming around the corner.

But planning is still within my comfort zone. I’ve had to learn, with running a small business and having a new baby at the age of 40, to never expect plans to be 100%, and to be prepared to change direction in one hot moment.

But still. I like to know what’s coming.

I’ve had some odd things happen since Michael died. I can’t explain them; I don’t really want to explain them. I want to just wonder about them and marvel.

The first one happened soon after his death, when I was cleaning out his hoarder’s closet. With a couple shelves done and more to do, I fell exhausted into bed one night and cried out loud, “Oh, Michael, where are you?”

The next morning, when I got out of bed, my feet landed on either side of something small, rectangular, and white. After bending to pick it up, I found that it was a magnetic poetry piece. “In here,” it said.

Michael, of course, or at least his remains, are in an urn. And this type of humor is all Michael.

That magnetic poetry piece now sits in front of his urn. Whenever I wonder where he is, I just have to look at it and know. “In here.”

During Christmas week, I fell very ill, as I’ve written about. Bronchitis like never experienced before. A sinus infection that felt like my entire head was going to blow up. For two weeks, I didn’t teach, and the only people to come into the AllWriters’ classroom on the first floor over a three day period was my son Christopher, my faculty member Richard (and his students), and a handyman who was installing a chair rail for me. Early Tuesday morning, Christopher came to let the dog out, so I wouldn’t have to attempt to breathe down and back up through two flights of stairs. On Wednesday, Richard came to teach. On Thursday morning, the handyman came to finish the chair rail. Those were the only people who’d been in the classroom by the time I came down late Thursday afternoon, dragged by a dog who just couldn’t wait any longer.

On the classroom table, right in front of my teaching chair, was a miniature Philadelphia Eagles football. That’s weird, I thought. The Philadelphia Eagles were Michael’s favorite football team.

I called Christopher and asked if he found a football when he took the dog out. “What football?” he said.

I texted Richard and asked if he or one of his students brought in a miniature football. “What football?” he said.

I asked Dave, the handyman, and he said, “Oh, I saw it, but I didn’t bring it.”

So somewhere between 9:00 p.m. Wednesday night when Richard’s class ended, and 8:00 Thursday morning when Dave showed up, the football arrived. There was no explanation.

But…I had just decided to read a section from Michael’s unfinished novel at the AllWriters’ 20^th Birthday Event. And the football was in the AllWriters’ classroom, at the teacher’s chair.

I think I got his approval. Or maybe he was telling me to bet on the Philadelphia Eagles at the Superbowl. I didn’t even know they were playing. But the football now sits next to the urn.

Then came Rudolph. When we first built our condo 19 years ago,  I purchased a large stuffed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with a battery-powered blinking nose for our first Christmas. He stood by one of our living room windows, looking out over the city parking lot. At the end of that first Christmas, I was preparing to pack Rudolph away with the rest of the Christmas stuff when Michael protested. “He looks cute there,” he said. “Leave him.”

So I did. For the next 19 years. His nose stopped blinking at the end of the first year, and we never bothered to change the batteries. The batteries in the battery holder inside his stomach are the same that he arrived with when I bought him.

So the Wednesday after the arrival of the football, I saw a red blinking light reflected in my living room window. I thought it might be a police car, and so I got up to look.

It was Rudolph. I took a video, to show my kids. It had been so long, I couldn’t even remember how to turn him off. He blinked and blinked, and then finally shut off on his own.

After Michael died, during my cleaning fit, I considered getting rid of Rudolph. Now, he’s not going anywhere.

And now, the latest thing.

Last week, I wrote about how hard it was to go through Valentine’s Day. The week before that, I wrote about things that I’ve been wearing to offer encouragement during moments that I’m having a hard time. A sweatshirt that says Keep Going… on the front. A ring that says, “Keep walking past the open windows,” another ring that says, “You’re enough,” and a third that says, “Your story isn’t over yet.”

So Valentine’s Day. And no, I haven’t found my jewelry box. But on Valentine’s Day, there was a package waiting for me at my front door. I puzzled over it as I carried it upstairs. I hadn’t ordered anything. There wasn’t any return address. The package was soft and squishy, so it wasn’t a book I’d pre-ordered, the most common culprit when I receive a surprise package.

I sliced the package open, and then pulled out a black and gray speckled sweater. I held it up in front of me, and across the chest, written in very subtle silver, is the word, “Beautiful.”

Whenever Michael arrived home, he had two ways of greeting me. One was, “Hey, Punkin.”

And the other… “Hi, beautiful.”

And it was Valentine’s Day.

The package was definitely addressed to me, by name. I have no idea where it came from.

But I very much like to believe that I do know. Just as I know why Rudolph blinked, and where the football came from, and I laugh whenever I read, “In here.”

(Now if he would only show me where the jewelry box is.)

The sweater fits perfectly.

I don’t like surprises. But I love these.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.