Good news: Status quo
Bad news: None.
People are coming up to me and saying how strong I am. Nothing I have done over the last seven weeks has required what I consider strength or sacrifice. It all just seemed right, organic. An act of true self-sacrifice for Mike’s sake would have been traveling to Scotland as a tourist. I don’t like being a tourist. It’s a meaningless activity to me. Everything I have done since Mike got sick is full of meaning and love, love for myself, love for Mike, honoring Mike’s love for me, and indulging my love for Mike. I can’t think of a place I would rather be.
I had no trouble getting up this morning at 6am. Made it to Bikram. The class wasn’t as great as yesterday. My accomplishment, keeping my thighs locked, is getting old. On to the next challenge.
When we moved here, Mike’s intention was to do nothing but concentrate on me, besides finishing off his book on theology and volunteering to run the distance learning program for the Josephinum. We managed to go to one mass, where he was still anonymous. During that mass, the pastor, Fr. Lio, told us that he was so understaffed he was going to have to cancel the Sunday noon mass. He also said that his father’s dementia has progressed to a point where he didn’t recognize him anymore. He choked up.
The next Sunday, Mike went to mass alone. At the end of the mass, he walked up to Fr. Lio and said, “I’m a deacon.” Fr. Lio said, “Don’t move.” The rest is history. Fr. Lio knew he could rely on Mike to do the sermons for any mass he did. I am under the impression that Mike was helpful to him in a lot of ways. The request for donations to St. Michael’s debt reduction fund is an attempt to relieve Fr. Lio of some stress since I can’t return Mike to him.
There is a legend that the island decides who gets to stay here and who gets to leave. I have seen situations where living here was made impossible for people. When Mike and I arrived, we felt the island was saying, “What the hell took you so long?!” This has worked out perfectly for us. Our house is perfect. A Bikram studio opened shortly before we moved here. I found a school setting to work in where I am valued. Mike started working as a deacon for the local church.
After Bikram, Yvette came up and did some more Graston on me. She threw in a little massage. I am very enthusiastic about doing work a little bit every other day instead of just meeting with my chiropractor once a week for half an hour. Also, Yvette is gifting me.
While I was working on paperwork and writing this blog, someone came to the door. It was a woman I didn’t know holding a flower arrangement in a pot. Ah, someone from the church brought me flowers- not. She was just delivering the plant. The card said it was from my buddies at Licking Heights South.
Until this year, Mike would travel to the area to do some work for the seminary, and I would go and visit the teachers I had worked with. Working at the Licking Heights School District was the highlight of my professional career. Here I was 65, working part-time, teaching a peripheral subject, English as a Second Language, never participating in school meetings, and still accepted as a valuable member of the teaching team. Trust me that doesn’t happen everywhere.
The woman at the door with the pot in hand owns a flower shop, the Kona Flower Shoppe. While we can’t have a lot of flowers at the funeral because it is Lent, we can have one small one. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be perfect if we had the same gorgeous plant Damon ordered for Mike when he was in the hospital.” Mike was able to enjoy it briefly. It soon became hard for him to see it because he had his eyes closed all the time. Then once he was moved back up to the ICU for the second time, we had to get rid of the flowers. They aren’t allowed there. No flowers, no fresh fruit. Fear of contamination. I showed the woman the pictures of the arrangement. She said she could do that, but she would have trouble finding the coconut vase. She would work on it. I called Judy to tell her about the development. She said she had such a vase – if she could find it. Wouldn’t that be great!
I sent the draft of the obituary for the West Hawaii Today newspaper. It had to be in by the 15th, two weeks before the funeral, and one week before it’s publishing date. She told me it would cost $410. This was the long version that I posted on Facebook. This was a short version that included information relevant to folks here on the Big Island. We planned to add a photo. I gave Damon the email address of Norma Adamson-Fetz on the obituary desk at West Hawaii Today.
I wondered how Norma coped with her job. She is always talking to people who have just lost someone they care about. I don’t remember what she said, but I have some sense that she saw this as an important service to the community. She did a great job dealing with me. She didn’t make me feel like just another customer, but a person with her own interesting story.
I had my first haircut appointment since Mike’s death today. I am slowly resurrecting myself. (Wish I could do the same for him.) First, I got back into my Bikram classes, then a facial and now a haircut. Mike loved my hair short. Randee Jennings of Salon Muse rocked my cut. While Mike never noticed the impact of a facial, he always noticed my haircut. Unbelievably, Randee gave me the haircut as a gift. I can’t imagine this happening anywhere else other than Hawaii that I have lived. It’s the spirit of aloha.
I checked my phone before I left the beauty shop. There was a text from Yvette telling me the mailman had just delivered Mike’s ashes. Okay. I called Judy immediately and asked her to meet me at the house. When I arrived, there was her car in the driveway. She was sitting on the sofa. And yes, the package was a box with his ashes and 10 death certificates. No, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be. Reducing that body, I loved because it contained Mike to a bag of ashes was a tough decision, even though it was the only one that made sense. Everyone on all sides of the family has been cremated for generations. He was going to be cremated eventually. I had pretty much adjusted by the time I got home.
Sandor called to ask me about the design of the plaque for the burial box. He had written “Deacon Michael David Ross, Ph. D.”, and the dates of his birth and death. How did I feel about the Ph.D. after his name? Damon and I agreed that it would be great. He was deeply invested in education. Then I thought it should say, Ph.D2. The students at the Josephinum would call him, “Doc Squared,” or “Double Doc” because of his two Ph.Ds. Sandor also said it was a tradition to put a star next to the date of birth and a cross next to the date of death. How did I feel about making the star a Jewish star? Perfect. How anyone makes all the decisions on their own is beyond me.
I took a satisfying nap after Judy left. Then, after walking Elsa, I made myself some dinner. I wasn’t very hungry, just a bowl of that great veggie soup and bread and butter. I carried the hot bowl of soup wrapped in a towel in one hand and something else in the other. When I went to set down the bowl on the coffee table, it did a perfect flip. I landed completely upside down. What a mess! To boot, I was working on sorting photos I had found. The soup didn’t touch one of them.
I cleaned up the mess, refilled the soup bowl, heated it, and had better luck getting it safely onto the table. After finishing that, I went to work sorting the photos. I knew there were some old photos from Germany, but what I discovered was a trove of letters. Some of them marked by the censor. These were written from people in Germany during the war. They’re all in German so I can’t read them, but they are historical, like my father’s letter to my mother, which my sister found in her possessions. I have to do some more sorting and send the letters to my sister, Dorothy, to get them translated. I’ll share them with all of you if they prove interesting. Some of the letters may be between my mother’s friend, Lotte Levy, who was the correspondence go-between my mother and father before my mother immigrated to join up with my father.
Lotte’s story: My mother and father tried to get her out of Germany. My dad found someone through connections who was willing to sponsor her. My parents couldn’t do it because they weren’t citizens yet. Sal Diamond provided the affidavit for Lotte. Everything was in place: the affidavit and the visa. But she didn’t come. My parents were frantic, Why wasn’t she coming? She waited until her visa had expired before she told my parents. Her mother, a wealthy woman who would have paid for her trip to America, refused to give her money. She felt it was Lotte’s place to stay and take care of her mother. My parents were very saddened by the situation. They both told me that they would have found the money to pay for it themselves if they had known. Both Lotte and her mother died in the Holocaust.
Sometime during the evening, Damon wrote that he might want to say something at the eulogy. I was told that we only had 15 minutes to speak. We had to end promptly at 10:00 am for the mass to start. Now, my speech was something like 5 minutes; Yvette’s looks a little longer, and now Damon’s on top of it. We had to end promptly at10 am for the mass to start. I was more stressed out over this situation than anything that has transpired so far. I started worrying about how long it would take us to get up on the altar, how long the transitions would take from one speaker to the next, how long an emotionally driven pause would take . . . You get the picture. I had an easier job dealing with taking Mike off life support.
At the end of the day, I watched some Vera reruns, walked Elsa, went to bed.
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