Last night after I went to bed, I was thinking about the form I sent to the insurance company canceling David’s health insurance, and wondered if I should have sent a death certificate, and then started crying again. People say it’s good to cry and get it all out. Poop! All it does for me is give me a headache and clog up my contacts.

I imagine this is like having a tooth pulled. It aches and hurts, but when it’s gone, it leaves a hole and you miss it. I miss David, I lost a part of me. Like any marriage, we went through horrible times, and dealing with a handicapped child added enormous stress, but we also had good times. I’ve lost the feeling of being a couple, having a partner to deal with life.

Time heals all wounds, they say, but what they don’t say is that with wounds there are scars.

I was reading an article in the latest Watchtower magazine, ‘Maintain Joy in Times of Trouble,’ and one of the points was, “After taking reasonable measures to resolve a problem, it is best to move on and focus on more productive endeavors.“

So I went on a spending spree yesterday. I went down to pick up the tile to finish the kitchen counter (David wanted that finished and the piano moved out of the family room. He said it made it seem like a 90s bar. The counter’s going to get finished, but the piano is staying.), and while I was there I bought a new toilet, a wood lathe and a band saw. When the boys come up this weekend, I’m going to have them clean David’s bathroom and replace the toilet. I decided that earlier this week when I had to go to the bathroom, but Christian had just gotten in there. He’s like David, sit in there reading until his legs fall asleep.

I don’t know about being productive, but it’ll certainly resolve a problem. :)

Good heavens, this night is dragging! It’s only 7:45, and it feels like bedtime. I’m really struggling today.

Good days and bad days... the last couple of days were bad. David’s chair in the family room is an old, creaky, squeaky office chair I bought at a flea market 15-20 years ago for $5. When I wanted to replace it, he refused because it was comfortable, even though he had to use duct tape and towels on the armrests. I had to have Christian move it into the bedroom because the cats were up and down on it, making it creak and squeak. I was listening to a tape about losing a loved one, cautioning not to make any major changes for at least 18 months, since that’s how long the average grieving period is. 18 months?!?

As much as I hate winter, it was pretty outside today. I wish I had felt like going out and taking photos. Instead I just sat in my studio and took photos from there.

and here’s a stupid pet photo of Squeak, nice and comfy in the chair,

Well, that was a fun night. Lukas was sick last night, dry heaves sick (he blamed it on the tomatoes and green chilies I put in his omelet for supper). Then an hour later he said he was having a partial seizure. That went on for about an hour. He put it very well, “I’d rather just have one and get it over with.“ I finally got to bed at a quarter to 4 this morning.

Well, at least the sun is shining.

2 weeks since I held his hand until it started getting cold, the same hand that he stroked my hair with when we laid in bed watching TV. I miss him more than I thought I ever could.

Last night I read the comments to my blog and 2 pages of the thread on LE. It’s heartwarming to see the posts from so many people, but it was painful too, because I know some of the posters have lost loved ones too. I ended up playing solitaire for 4 hours last night. What a colossal waste of time.

I have started to read the comments and getting them posted to my blog, and I just want to thank you all for the kind words, even though they make me cry again. God bless you all and keep you safe.

Two weeks. A lifetime... A year ago last week my mother died. Another lifetime away.

I tried to find happy memories of David, but there are so many sad and angry ones buried in my mind, I decided that wasn’t the way to go. I’m just going to remember the feelings of contentment and love. In the new system, after David is resurrected, I’ll have my friend back.

I’m going to re-open my shops, and get back on LE. My mornings are pretty much the same, read the news and email, make beads and listen to Watchtower and Awake magazines, get Lukas up, get him settled for the day, and then make a snack and go lay down and read and nap. It’s the afternoons and evenings that get to me. I can’t do anything. The house sounds empty without David’s TV going, and him sitting in the family room belching. Never thought I would miss that. I get dishes washed, clean, do chores with Christian, and then vegetate at the computer. I can’t find the mental energy to do anything. There are lots of things I should do, cards to answer, emails and PMs to answer, and I’ve got several hundred beads that should be cleaned and photo’d. But instead I try to find something on the internet to divert me. That has to stop before it becomes a habit.

I’ve also decided I’m going to go out west this summer with Lukas and my nephews. I need the mountains. I started reading Zane Grey when I was a child. I fell in love with his West, from the Arizona deserts to the Montana mountains. The first time I went to Arizona, I slept outside on a cot, and I still remember the awe I felt with the stillness of the desert and the twinkling stars, and thought, ‘this is what Zane Grey wrote about.’ That man was truly a wordsmith and a poet. There is something about the West that pulls me and satisfies me, and right now I need that goal of going out there. I need something to think about and work towards.

Have you ever watched a dog go to sleep? They lay down and 5 minutes later, they’re dead to the world.

I go to bed and my mind races from one thing to another, things I should have said or done, things I need to do tomorrow, or should do... with a dog on each side of me in the bed, snoring blissfully.

I miss David. As bad as things have gotten over the past few years, I always knew that if something happened, he would be there for support. All marriages have ups and downs. Anyone going into one thinking it’s going to be ‘happily ever after’ is extremely naive. No matter how much you love each other, life intrudes and throws obstacles in your way. But there is a bond, you’re a pair supporting each other. That support is gone now. I have my boys, family, friends, and most of all, I have my God for support. But it’s not the same. There’s a hole in my life, one that I haven’t had for 30 years.

OK, I give up on doing beads today. The first one had scum and bubbles from CIM clear. I don’t know why I even try using that stuff. Then social security called while I was making the next one (you don’t exactly tell the government to hang on while you finish torching), so that one is ruined. So I’m throwing my hands up in the air, and I’m going to go get Lukas up and give him a shower. While I was cleaning last night I came across a book, Jo-Ann’s Your Guide to Creativity. Maybe I’ll browse through that and get some inspiration.

It’s strange how we all cope with death, even animals. K.C. (Kitty Cat. What can I say? We were running low on imagination when we named her.) has been a family room cat. That was where she spent all of her time, along with David. Not that he ever petted or talked to her (other than swearing at her when she threw up on his DVD player). That’s just where she spent her days.

The day after David died, some friends from the Kingdom Hall came over, and I was surprised to see her walk through the living room with them there. K.C. has always been a very shy cat. Later in the evening, some more friends from the Hall were over, and she walked through the living room again, and Patti actually petted her. I was surprised! Since then she’s been showing up all over the place. Now she sleeps in the living room, and this morning she came to visit me in the bathroom and we discussed the state of affairs in the world today. She was quite vocal about the weather being so dreary.

I just would never have thought of her bonding to David. He was not an animal person, although he would talk to them occasionally and enjoyed teasing Pip with a stuffed snake (she hates it and when anyone shows it to her, she attacks it).

As I mentioned, it’s quite dreary and dark here today. I’m struggling to get the energy to do something besides sit and stare at the computer. I’ve been making beads this past week, but just simple earring pairs that are just mindless to-do work. I need to find something that will pull me out of this. Hopefully the boys will make it up this weekend. I miss them.

Official cause of death, multisystem organ failure caused by sepsis syndrome.

After the resurrection, I’m going to box his ears for not saying anything about not feeling good.

One week. 7 days. So much change in so few days. It hits me most at night when I’m trying to get to sleep. Good memories, bad ones, what-if’s, maybe’s, what I need to do.

Christian picked up David’s ashes from the funeral home yesterday. In case I haven’t mentioned it, David had a very quirky sense of humor. He told his sister, Kelly, that when he died, he wanted his ashes spread on Medicine Lake down in the cities. That’s where they grew up, and he would go fishing there. He told her that it was so toxic that he would probably come back. So part of his ashes are going to Kelly, who has said she’s going to put some of them in the back yard with Connie, their sister who died a couple of years ago. The other part of his ashes are going into a container, and this summer, money permitting, I’m going to go out west with Lukas and my nephews. David was afraid of heights, which I didn’t know when we went on our honeymoon. We went out to Yellowstone on motorcycles, and I took him over Beartooth Pass. I love the mountains, but it was the worst place I could have taken him. It took 15 years to get him to go back out west again, and then we went through the Big Horns in Wyoming, and the brakes overheated on the way down. He absolutely refused to go after that. So when I drive through the mountains in my RV, his ashes are going to be on the dash, and I can say he went to the mountains with me and wasn’t afraid of my driving.

My sister told me that even though there wouldn’t be a viewing, to take some of his favorite clothes along with to the funeral home when we went there to make arrangements last week. I was going through the closet to find a T-shirt, and came across one, and thought he would have loved to give someone one last laugh. The T-shirt read, ‘I’m really excited to be here.’

See, his sense of humor rubbed off on me. That’s the part I missed so much of these last few years.

But life goes on. I’m finding little freedoms. Living with an alcoholic is being in a prison, no matter how nice the person seems to be to others. Enough said.

Lukas is doing OK. He misses David, but he has so many friends at the Kingdom Hall who care for him. I do too. Christian is the one I worry about. He’s too much like me, at heart a hermit. Once spring gets closer, I’ll be able to start getting back to meetings, and I’ll be able to get him to go to the Thursday night meetings. He needs people, no matter how much he thinks he doesn’t.

It’s snowing here. But I’ve got amaryllis bulbs flowering, paperwhites, hyacinths, and my orchid is still blooming. And my birds are busy on the feeders.

One week, 7 days. This time last week I was coming to the realization that I was being faced with a decision that I had always thought would be easy, pulling the plug. The doctor gave me just the faintest hope, and I couldn’t do it. Not yet.

My nephews couldn’t make it up Saturday. I miss them and the kids. Some very dear friends came over and spent the morning, though. Cindy helped clean off the kitchen table, which is where David always sat to watch TV, and Peggy cleaned out his coffee pot, and the guys visited with Lukas.

I am so proud of Christian. Yesterday he didn’t even wake me up from my nap when Lukas went to the bathroom and needed to be wiped. I am so glad I have my boys. I used to tease Christian that when he became a teenager that he was going to turn into a monster, but he never did. And Lukas... once when I had to take off from work to run him down to St. Paul for a doctor’s appointment, he thanked me for taking off from work. A 14 yr. old thanking mom for something like that. I almost cried. How can you not do anything for a son like that?

I am truly blessed.

5 days. Tonight it will be a week since we called the ambulance.

I’m starting to become un-numbed (is that a word?). Is that normal after less than a week?

One thing that surprises me is how I so fell to pieces, and how much grief I’ve felt this past week, considering how things have been between us the last couple of years. I think my sister had it right when she said it was realizing the might-be’s, the chances of changing things are gone now. That and saying goodbye to the might-have-been’s.

It’s no consolation, but I’m following family tradition. My mother was widowed in her 30s and both of my grandmothers and my sister in their 40s. At least I made it to my 50s.

I’ve mentioned David had a wicked sense of humor? When we first started dating, he loved to shock me. Once he took me to a topless bar (without telling me what kind of bar it was), and another time he took me to a bar in St. Paul where they had a dance talent contest. It wasn’t until we’d been there for a while that he told me the dancers were transvestites. I still can’t figure out how they could wear such revealing clothes (tight low-cut dresses, envision Tina Turner) and look so like women. For goodness sakes, this was before sex changes and hormones.

Yup, that was my hubby.

4 days. The anger and guilt are passing.

Elaine went home yesterday, but my nephews, her boys, are coming up today. That will liven the house up a bit. And I won’t have to shush the little ones up if they get a little noisy. I’m glad they’re coming up, I need the distraction. I am so thankful that I have Lukas and Christian at home with me. I don’t think I could take this in an empty house. OK, it’s not an empty house, I have a cat meowing to go out and a ferret scratching my leg begging for a treat.

It’s -8° here, and I have birds galore. Both feeders are covered with birds and I had 4 woodpeckers on my suet feeder. By Thursday it’s supposed to be above freezing. I want this winter gone.

3 days.

Anger and guilt and grief.

Anger at David for not being able to overcome his alcohol use, and anger at myself for at times despising him for that weakness.

Guilt at all of those wasted emotions and wasted time being angry at him, for not being able to somehow be what he needed, for walling myself off from him these last few years. Maybe if I hadn’t done that he would have said something about not feeling good, maybe I would have caught it. All I can do now is pray to Jehovah for forgiveness and try my best to live more in tune with Bible teachings.

Grief at picking up his fuzzy vest and putting it back down because I don’t know what to do with it. His billfold is still on the kitchen table, and his coffeepot on the kitchen counter, half full of coffee. I suppose I should empty it out before mold starts growing in it, but not today. I can’t. Time will ease this sorrow, but it will never go away. How can it? I’ve lost my love and my friend.

2 days. It’s incredible how much change 2 days can bring.

My first memory of David was at a card party. I had seen him before at the airport (we were both independent taxi-cab owner-operators), but had never talked to him. There was something about him, dark curly hair, mustache, low voice, that just struck me, and I thought ‘I would like to get to know him better.’ Did I pursue him? You bet I did. I was in love with him (love or lust, what’s the difference when you’re in your 20s). In the next weeks and months, we got to know each other and went on dates, and had a very brief fling, but he decided he was still in love with his former girlfriend, so he broke it off, and we moved on. I was rear-ended one day sitting in the cab line and that kind of did my full-time driving days in because of whiplash injuries. I leased a cab part-time, which made for some pretty lean days. So when David, who had quit driving to take a job as a cab-starter (when people came out of the airport looking for a cab, his job was to ask them their destination and he would direct them to the proper cab) asked if I wanted a job as an assistant starter, I jumped at the offer.

Over the next couple of years, we got to be friends, and then best friends, and then started going on dates again, and ended up living together and then getting married. I can honestly say I married my best friend. He was kind, generous and so funny then.

9 years ago, the company he worked for was bought by a big company. They installed a computer dispatching system, waited a week to make sure it was working, and laid off all of the senior dispatchers. No severance pay, no 2 week notice, nothing. David was devastated. Personal demons (he is the 3rd sibling out of 7 to die of alcohol abuse) and the bottle took that funny, caring, wickedly-witted man away from me, and 2 days ago death took what was left of him.

When they took him off of the ventilator, his heart so very gradually started to slow down. We all just stared at that monitor. I would close my eyes and pray over and over for strength to endure this, and open my eyes to look at the monitor. It went down into the 40s and then the 30s, and then the 20s. So very, very, very gradually. I couldn’t understand why we can take a dog or a cat to a vet when we know that death is imminent and have them given a shot to hurry their passing, but we can’t do that with people. More crying and praying over and over for endurance. Then his heart went to 19, then it started to go up, and up into the 40s and 50s. There was that little surge of hope, that maybe they were wrong. Into the 60s... and then to 0.

I have so much guilt to contend with. His daughter was up yesterday and I sent his computer home with her. I put pots of tulips in its place. I cleaned off the shelf where he had his cigarettes and telephone, feeling guilty that I was somehow wiping him out of my life. There’s a bag of tacos in the refrigerator that he bought last week. For some reason, I can’t throw them away.

I miss him so much. I miss the man that he used to be.

When Lukas was born, it was a horribly horrendous time (he was 4-6 weeks overdue). The local hospital and doctor botched up so bad that the nurses at NICU in St. Paul, which is where Lukas was taken after he was born, would tick off on their fingers what should have been done and hadn’t been. One of them told me I had to do something about them (that wasn’t the first time they had screwed up, which I didn’t know at the time). Lukas spent a month in intensive care down there. He has epilepsy and cerebral palsy. He’s gone through 7 operations to keep him out of a wheelchair. The only way that I could cope with all of it was by burying memories. I decided I needed to do that once when Lukas was a baby, and I was going over and over in my mind some of the things of when he was in the hospital. I was driving and crying and wanted so bad to go 100 mph and drive my car into a tree. So living just in the moment is a form of self-preservation for me. That’s one of the reasons I blog and keep a diary. So all of these things in my life are somewhere besides a deep hole in my mind.

Last night I decided I need to do some mental digging. All I have of David are recent things, of anger and bitterness. I need to dig and find those happy memories, and I’m going to write them down here. It’s a coping mechanism for me.

Don’t anyone pity me. I know, as much as I know that the sun is coming up tomorrow, that the next thing that David knows will be the resurrection. Right now he is a memory in God’s mind. (Quick history lesson: The common belief of a soul that separates from the body after death is not a Bible teaching [Google nephesh]. That is Greek philosophy that crept into Hebrew doctrine when the Greeks expanded their empire into the middle east. It didn’t become a Christian doctrine until a couple of hundred years after Christ died). After Armageddon, death is done away with. That’s when the resurrection begins, as Paul wrote in Acts 24:15, of the righteous and the unrighteous, and not in heaven, as Christian church doctrine teach, but on earth, as the Bible teaches (2 Peter 3:13, Psalms 37:29, Isaiah 65:17-25 are just a few out of the many scriptures that tell about this). At that point David will wake up in a re-created body, young and healthy and happy, and he won’t have to watch Lukas ever suffer through another seizure or operation, because Lukas will be in the same condition, healthy and whole. He will be able to find things to do that will bring him happiness without destroying his body and mind.

2 days. Today I watched my husband die and made arrangements for cremation. How could life change so much in 2 days?

David is gone. The nurse called at 4 this morning and told me he was getting worse. So this morning I went down to North Memorial and asked to have him taken off of life support. Kelly, his sister and Jim, her husband, and Dusty, one of their boys, Sean and Teresa, his children from his first marriage, and my sister, Elaine, were there. Once they took him off of the ventilator, his heart just beat slower and slower, and then it raced, and then it quit.

This man I’ve known for over 30 years, I’ve loved him with all my heart, and at times I’ve despised him just a little bit. He struggled with alcohol, and he lost his fight with it, as did 2 of his sisters. The doctor thinks he had an infection, and his body was too run down to fight it, and he didn’t go to the doctor or say anything about not feeling good. So by the time he got some medical help, it was too late. His organs were already shutting down.

From the beginning, David was my closest friend, but over the years the alcohol was too much competition, and when he started saying hurtful things to me over the past couple of years, I withdrew to protect myself from the pain. Maybe if I hadn’t done that, he would have been more communicative. As my sister says, though, hindsight is always 20-20. All I know is that he’s gone, and I hurt so much, and I don’t know what to do. I’m full of regret and guilt and grief.

My husband, David, is in the hospital on full life support. Something happened yesterday evening, and we had to call 911 because he couldn’t stand. They took him to Monticello, and had to administer CPR because his heart stopped. They stabilized him and then took him to North Memorial in the cities. His kidneys have shut down and he’s on dialysis. He’s not breathing on his own, so he’s on a ventilator. They don’t know what happened, and why this is happening. All they can do is keep his body alive and hope something ‘optimal’ happens.

I talked to the ICU doctor this morning, and he said that the kidneys could come back on their own, and it could take days or weeks, and even if they do, there’s no way of knowing how badly his brain has been affected.

I have people telling me I need to have him taken off of the machines, that he would not want this. I agree, but I’m having a very difficult time making this decision. I know very well he wouldn’t want to be hooked up to machines to live, and I know very well that he wouldn’t want to be in a condition where he would have to be taken care of by others. I know this is the right thing to do.

But I am having a VERY hard time saying it. There’s the guilt, maybe I should have just made an appointment after he fell down 3 weeks ago instead of just urging him to go to the doctor. The guilt of just wanting to let him go. He’s spent most of his adult life trying to find happiness with a bottle. He’s been miserable the last few years, and he turned into a crabby old man who seemed to blame me for everything bad that’s happened to him. Maybe it’s true. Maybe if I hadn’t been so angry at him for choosing the bottle over us, maybe it would have been better. And the guilt of thinking about the hospital bills, about nursing home bills. The doctor said it could take days and even weeks of being hooked up the dialysis machine before finding out if the kidneys recover. The fear of having him mentally and physically disabled and having to take care of him, on top of Lukas. Lukas is our 23 year old handicapped son, and he lives at home with us. Am I letting all of these feelings push me into making the wrong decision?

And then there’s the finality of that decision. It’s saying goodbye to the person I fell in love with 30 years ago, even if he hasn’t been that person for years. It’s not having him here. It’s saying goodbye to 30 years of life with him, and the hope that he would overcome the alcoholism, and go back to that caring person who could make me laugh.

How do I make that decision? How do I not make that decision?