Saturday, March 13, 2021
I walked back and forth, talking to Mike. Boy, I miss him. I was never the 'little woman." Mike was the more confident decision-maker when we were younger. Mike's response was to push me to be more confident and take over more responsibility. As his kidney disease left him weak and tired, I took over more and more of our daily decision-making, except for food. That remained his domain until the day he went to the hospital with his fatal pancreatic attack.
I have a full life without Mike, but it's been two years now that I'm without him, and it's starting to wear on me. Mike helped me with stress relief. Life is full of those minor disappointments and unpleasant surprises. "The heartache and thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to." As I've said before, what separates the men from the boys is our ability to deal with those shocks, not just respond appropriately to the situation but release the trauma, writ small, that results from those encounters. Mike was someone who helped me with that. I could tell him of my disappointment; he could give me some perspective and strategies for responding, and he would hug me. With a big hug, all the stress would just ooze out. Now, I have to figure out how to release those traumas on my own. I actually know how. I am a trained meditator. I completed over 10 10-day courses in the Vipassana form of mediation, and I used to meditate two hours a day. I stopped doing it when Mike hurt my leg, and I could no longer sit cross-legged, which I deeply associated with the process.
Besides how Mike helped me release stress, he also added so much to my life. They say that a relationship must have a ratio of 5 to 1 positive interaction to survive. When it goes below that, the relationship is more negative than positive. I would say I had a 20 to 1 or higher ratio in my relation to Mike. Also, there were wonderful moments that I would give them more than one point. He would do little things that showed he knew who I was and remembered me. He would bring home something I hadn't asked for when he went food shopping, but he knew I could use. Those small acts caused love and gratitude to balloon inside me. And can I forget his kiss? His kiss was one of the best things in life for me. I loved spending my life with him. I was so lucky.
The relationship may have been better for me than it was for him. I know he was happy with me, but I don't know if it was equal. I know he was grateful for things I did for him: give up my life in NYC and move to Princeton to be nearer to his son; insist he get his second Ph.D. because I knew how much he wanted to study, get a full-time job so I could help support us, and put up with his being in DC when I was in Princeton; and finally, giving up my life in Princeton to move to Columbus, Ohio so he could work at the Josephinum. But none of those things felt like sacrifices for me. They all felt right, and I benefited from them all. I loved making the man happy, but these moves also brought things into my life that made me happy too. We were a good match. I miss him. I miss the opportunity to make him happy. Of course, given his compromised physical condition, I don't know if there would have been anything anyone could have done to make him happy had he lived. That would have been a nightmare. I guess the final thing he did for me was die and not subject me to a long grueling caretaking experience that had no rainbow at the end.
My left leg and hip had been bothering me. I used the infrared lamp on that inner thigh. I don't use it as much as I would like because getting into a position where it shines on that part of my body is an athletic event. I get pretty close to that left inner thigh by lying on the sofa and resting my leg on the coffee table. All was going well when there was a sudden momentary electrical outage. The standing light came right on again, but the infrared lamp didn't. I thought the bulb must have been blown. Damn! But I would deal with it. When I finally got up, I saw that somehow, I had jerked the lamp and unplugged it. That would keep it from turning on. Problem solved.
I spent most of the day getting my 10,000 steps while walking in the house and working on updates and blogs with a little time out for dusting. Then I needed a good nap. Grief is exhausting.
At three, I had a session with A. He is a mystery. He cannot use context to figure out what the word might be. I thought he had significant auditory processing problems, but he could repeat good-sized sentences almost verbatim and always with the same intonation. However, if he has to figure out the meaning of a word from the surrounding ones, forget it. I started working with him on sentence comprehension. Here I ask questions that have to be answered only using the words in the sentence.
The cat sits on the windowsill.
!. What sits on the windowsill?
2. What does the cat do?
3. What does the cat sit on?
I once did that with a long sentence from an SAT exam and generated 100 questions. I believe this is what our minds do automatically as we read. The questions become more complex in a long text as sentence two references sentence #1, etc.
It stopped raining, and Elsa and I could do our before-dinner walk outside. Juniper, the six-year-old who lives down the block, was riding her bike as she has been every night of late; since she learned. Juniper is a very cautious little girl. She is both attracted to Elsa and afraid of her. She is afraid she will scratch her and bite her. I told her it was not impossible but unlikely, so I started teaching her about risk-taking. She is a little too cautious. That's not going to serve her well in life.
Her mom was the one out in a beach chair by the roadside, watching her ride up and down. I told her about the driveway yoga classes on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. She manages an online site for Nordstrom. While they are happy to have her work from Hawaii, they're located in Seattle, she has to follow Seattle hours. After the time change, she will have to start work at 6 am. She's good with it and happy they're good with her working from Hawaii.
When I got home from the walk, I did a run-through of the PowerPoint Presentation. I'm trying to go through it at least every other day. Damon had recommended that I write a script and rehearse it. Wonderful advice. It's building my confidence. Once I'm through with the Step-Up tutors' presentation, I'll design one for YouTube that won't anticipate audience reactions.
Spinoza has been my dinner companion of late. I'm reading another of the Very Short Introduction series. God, that man was mentally constipated. Nietzchze referred to him as a febrile recluse. However, I see a lot of similarities between Spinoza and Buddha. The difference is Buddha's thought is clear and straightforward; Spinoza's is tortured. Buddha's focus was on helping people. I don't' really know what Spinoza's objective was. "Creating knowledge? Adequate thinking?" Spinoza possibly never even heard of Buddha. However, the way the Buddhists wrote at that time is pretty tedious reading, too.
I watched some more of Pippin. I can't say I think it's a great show. It's antiwar, but it doesn't ring my chimes.
Judy called on her way home from a local Thai restaurant. She didn't feel like cooking tonight. Her brother-in-law is dying. He has been sick for a time, or at least his body has not been at its best. Each day they think this is going to be his last. So far, I've lost four people that were significant to me. Yvette's birth mother died when we were forty; she was also forty. My college roommate, Barbara. Then my mom, and finally Mike. Of course, I lost other people when I was younger. My dad, uncle, and grandparents, but that all seems like another lifetime now. Mike and even my mom, who died in 2001, are all current losses.
I had it with Pippin. It's annoying me. I turned on the Crown. It is very well done. Thatcher is a nightmare. While living the royal family's life is also a nightmare, it is steady. I like stability right now. What is going on now in the royal family is more disconcerting. It's not that I think Harry and Megan aren't telling the truth. It's just that it's blowing the royal family cover, designed to remain stable and fulfill the duty. I think we all need people who are committed to duty at this time; we need a steady image. The royals pay the price for living that way. God go with them. All that money and privilege don't compensate. Once we have a basic decent living standard, housing, food, and medical care, the rest doesn't compensate for living a life divorced from the self.
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