It was a small group at Bikram today. I have been bothered by the absence of one of the regular students. I finally asked the teacher what was going on. I learned she had injured her foot and is taking time off. It’s a community; we watch out for each other.
Kathrin speaks English pretty well, but she still struggles for a word now and then, misuses a word or uses an incorrect grammatical form. I have been correcting her with her permission and the clear understanding that if she not up for it, she can ask me to halt. One of the thrills of teaching English to speakers of other languages is discovering more about my language. Yesterday, I was explaining when to use this versus that, and these verses those. Dorothy, my sister, would love, love, love to be involved. I am thinking of connecting the two over the phone.
This morning she was asking me about the use of ain’t. Alicia Keyes used it in one of her songs. “I ain’t nothing without you.” She played the song for me as we were driving to Bikram. I was blindsided by grief. I certainly don’t feel that I ain’t nothing without Mike, but boy, I’m not what I was. What’s left isn’t nothing, at least by my estimation, but it is just not the same. Besides the enormous psychological change, there are the physical changes that come from losing the person I’ve been around daily for 45 years. Our biomasses were changed by each other. I think some aspects of grief are comparable to drug withdrawal.
When Kathrin and I got home from Bikram, I sat in the car and just talked about my grief. She was great. In the past, she has moved to touch me to comfort me. That only worked with Mike. This time she stood at a distance and just listened to me. Thank you. Thank you. That was perfect.
I went into the library after we got home for some reason. Looking at Mike’s books, I was overwhelmed with grief. For the first time, I wept openly about the loss. My guess there is more coming. Each person’s grief takes its own course. Some say the first year is the worst; some say the third. All I can do is allow myself to discover what is in store for me and accept it.
Kathrin made a special dish last night for us to eat. Boy, she is one good vegetarian cook, and she loves playing around with spices the way Mike liked to. Besides all the good food I’m getting out of this deal, it is good to have someone in the house who loves to cook. Mike could have been a professional cook, and Kathrin can be one too.
Over dinner, I told her Mike and Betty stories, the fun ones, how we met, how we resolved a problem, how we laughed together. . .
After dinner, I went into the library to sort through more paper. Kathrin loaded a huge bag of recyclable paper into the car to drop off at the transfer station on Thursday. I’m almost finished sorting paper. I filed the old tax returns in the one remaining file cabinet in the guest room. Once I’ve done all that sorting, I will do the final clean up and take pictures of Mike’s library for posterity. Then I start filling orders for books and shipping them out. Did he ever imagine what it would mean for me to have this responsibility? I don’t think he thought about what it would mean for anyone to do what I’m doing now. I’m not complaining; it gives me something to do.
I do know he had some fantasy that the seminary where he taught would take his whole, carefully curated collection- - in his dreams. I would have to build a new wing to house his 3,744 books. They said no, period end of sentence. The librarian in the New Orleans seminary gave more of an explanation. People are continually donating books, mostly inappropriate for their library. They often don’t bother opening the boxes but store them in the attic. I guess there no place for the early Raymond Chandler books in a seminary library.
Thanks to John Coughlin, I was able to create an online catalog of all the books. The seminaries can choose which books they want and leave the rest for me to deal with. (Oh, Mike. I am so sorry that your dream will not come true. If I could do it for you, I would – in a heartbeat. God, I did and do love that man.)
