Widows and Memory Triggers

 

This week I learned that if you ever need a dose of ‘nice’ in your life all you have to do is go to the grocery store with your arm in a sling. People give you understanding smiles, offer to help you reach stuff, and are more patient when you’re clearly in their way and the cashiers offer to get you help loading bags in your car. I even heard a few stories about grandmothers who fell and broke their arms. I experienced the same kind of gestures when I shopped with my wheelchair bound husband but he’s been gone 16 months now and I ‘d forgotten how society can be when you really need a little ‘nice’ in your life.

Speaking of Don, it occurred to me a few days ago how impossibly complex it is for widows to “just move on” and put the past behind us. The memory triggers keep coming and coming like this week when I saw a classic MG, the exact model year and color of one Don and I found on vacation years ago. It was a fixer-upper that we would have had to be trailer back to Michigan and we were headed out west to the mountains at the time. If it was meant to be, we decided, it would still be there for sale when we passed by on our way back home. It wasn’t but it sure gave us a lot to dream about on that trip. All those dreams came rushing back upon seeing the restored MG on the road, dreams of taking “our MG” through the Smoky Mountains and along the California coastline. But the MG memories also reminded me of how lucky I am that my memory triggers are mostly good ones. How hard it must be on widows who had bad marriages to be constantly reminded of things they’d rather not remember. Oh course, in the beginning months of widowhood my memory triggers came with a heavy dose of melancholy for what can never be again. Now, my memory triggers just valid the fact that my past life was never dull or empty with Don around.

Having my broken elbow in a sling is slowing me down but my Plan B includes purging filing cabinets, cleaning drawers, ordering books online, and researching my next major purchases---a washer and dryer---so I’m finding things to do. In the second drawer I cleaned I ran across two memory triggers, trinkets that were given to Don and me at a drummer circle we took part in 4-5 years ago. It was a chance meeting in a park we were wandering around when we came upon a group of people beating drums. After watching for a while, they motioned for us to come join them. Don was given a rattle to shake, I has handed a tambourine to beat and for the next hour we fell into the rhythm, at one with the group. To this day I don’t understand who or how their percussion shifted from one rhythm to another without spoken words but it was an amazing experience. Native American cultures believe instruments have a persona and life of their own so maybe it was the instruments, not the people setting the pace? How do you throw away trinkets that remind you of a feel good memory like that sunny afternoon in a park spent with a group of nice people who without words made us feel at one with the world? I did and I didn’t. I kept the beads off the whatnots to sting into a necklace and threw the other parts away. Others might call that silly to keep the beads but I call it progress to throw out what I did.

We spend much of our younger years looking ahead and now I’m in a phase of life when I spend much of my time looking back. If we had had children and grandchildren things might be different. I think they help you keep looking ahead as you exchange grandparent stories with your friends, but that’s just a weak theory on my part. Old people stereotypes that include us telling endless stories from the past didn’t just magically appear, whole clothe doesn’t get woven without thread. As we go through life we keep mementos and souvenirs, we write journals, take pictures and then we wonder why our elders and widows often seem to be living their lives in reverse? My best theory? If we were only meant to live in the here and now the invention of cameras never would have caught on and tourist destination shops would only sell ice cream and soft drinks because memory triggers would be of no value to us. Therefore I conclude its part of old people DNA to review and make peace with our own personal histories; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Yesterday I got another one of those infamous widowhood memory triggers in the mail. It was a letter addressed to Don with these words printed in big block letters on the envelope: WE MISS YOU AND WANT YOU BACK! That piece of junk mail acts as a marker on how well I’m doing as a widow. A year ago it would have made me cry. Yesterday it only brought a moment of sadness as I said out loud, “Me, too. Join the club.” ©

Broken Arms and Plan Bs

I’ve always known I can’t successfully do two things at the same time and Monday I acquired a broken bone to prove it---the head of the radius in my elbow. Note to self: trying to hook a water bottle on to a fanny pack while walking causes you to trip on you own feet, fall down and fracture bones. On the good side, I didn’t hurt the elbow that I broke years ago and is screwed back together in three places. On the bad side, the break is on my dominant arm so writing, eating and brushing my teeth have all been adventures in patience. Typing one-handled is coming along good but I discovered Windows 7 on my laptop has voice recognition so if I get to a point where I want to challenge my aging brain to learn something new, it’s there for the taking. If nothing else, life teaches the importance of always having a Plan B because you never know when you’ll need one.

When my husband first had his stroke and was learning how to live in a one-handed world I taught myself how to do many things one-handed so I could then teach him by example. I even have a book on the topic, but cooking one-handed is something brand new to me. The first night I tried to fix dinner one-handed I cooked a large beet in the microwave and trying to cut it up caused my kitchen to look like a crime scene. Even the floor was red with beet juice skid marks. The dog got to the fallen beet half before I did and he managed to track red paw prints as he escaped to the living room to eat it. It was a juicy sucker and Levi looked good with red lips. Thankfully that caused me to remember the high sided cutting board and rocking knife made especially for one-handed cooks that was storage in the garage. (It was a gift someone gave to my husband who didn’t know that in his entire life Don never did anything more complicated in the kitchen than make coffee.) So now I have no reason to get frustrated cutting stuff up. But I’m worried I’ll impale myself on the deadly looking spikes in the middle of the cutting board that holds your food still. What would life be like if worry-warts like me didn’t have something to worry about?

At one the three medical facilities my broken bone took me to this week someone called me “sweetie.” Getting called sweetie struck me the same way it did the first time I got called “madam” instead of “miss”---like I’d just crossed over the border into the Land of Irrelevance with no return ticket in hand. I don’t know what came over me, maybe pain, but I stopped in my tracks, stepped back to her window and said, “Now, you don’t know if I’m sweet. I could be the crankiest old lady you’ve ever met.” She laughed (along with her co-worker) and replied, “I took a chance.” I had no come back for that so I laughed, too, and went on my way. But I do worry if someday I’ll bitch-slap someone for just trying to simplify her life by calling everyone over a certain age the same thing.

I saw my orthopedic doctor on Friday. He did both of my knee replacements and I love the guy. He said in a week when the swelling goes down in my wrist and elbow---thanks to his handy packet of Prednisone---I can try writing, typing and eating with my dominant hand again. He took away the rigid splint formed to my arm at the urgent care center that went from my fingertips to my armpit and he’s not making me have a permanent cast to replace it so long as I promise not to pick up anything heavier than a fork and I keep my arm in a sling when I’m not sitting or sleeping. I would have signed that pledge in blood if he’d asked me! He’s also setting me up for testing that could lead to me to get some treatments to strengthen my bones. Hallelujah! Maybe I won’t end up in nursing home someday with a broken hip and an aid that calls me “sweetie” or “dear” or some other bogus endearment that only means she does know my name. Life is good again…or it will be in 4 to 6 weeks when I can ditch the sling. In the meantime it could have been so much worse and I am grateful to the gods of good fortune that my streak of bad luck could actual end with something good---bones of steel! Wouldn’t that be too cool for words! ©

Dreams

painting by Betty Pieper

It’s three o’clock in the morning and I can’t get back to sleep. A dream woke me up, a dream where Don was telling me he was leaving. He said he didn’t want to go and couldn’t figure out why he felt that he had to do it. He didn’t know when it would happen, he said, but soon. “Fine, then go!” I told him. “Do it right now!” I wasn’t going to beg although I wanted to do just that. We were standing in the basement of my old house. We had just started painting the walls and I was feeling overwhelmed with the idea that I had to do that huge job all by myself. I wanted my life partner back but he had already left me in spirit, I thought, so what was the point of him staying around physically? I woke up trying to figure out what my dream meant. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand the setting of the dream was inspired by my recent basement flooding and my feelings of being overwhelmed by all the work that came with it. And now I’m worrying that Don’s spirit (which I’ve always felt close by me since he died) is fading and will one day just be a distant memory. 
 

I read something in another widow’s blog that describes exactly how I feel about widowhood, 16 months out from Don’s passing and having just gone through my first crisis---the flood---without him. She said she was on the peripheral of many people’s lives but the center of no one’s. I can’t get that sentence out of my head. No one has my back, no one is at the center of my life or me the center of theirs. People care and show concern but it's not the same as having a life partner. I have known this from the funeral, of course, but that fact slaps you in the head whenever there is something good or bad going on in your life you want to share.

I was at the senior hall yesterday for a lecture given by a couple who in retirement spent seven years sailing around the world, living on their sailboat while at ports in places like Italy, Spain, Casablanca, the Canary Islands even some countries in the Middle East. What interesting and brave people they were. In my early twenties I owned a little sailboat and the lecture/slide show reminded me of some of the dreams I had in the days before Don---the non-swimmer---entered my life. The first week of their voyage the woman broke her arm in the middle of the ocean and had to wait to get it set. I would have turned around right there and then. But she didn’t let anything, much less her pain, get in the way of living out her dream. By contrast I just live to armchair dream. As they say no guts, no glory.

While at the lecture a wood carver was in the back of room with some of his creations. He was trying to drum up interest in a class he wanted to teach and it took me about two seconds to add my name to the list of interested people. He’s going to call us all to work out a day and time that suits the majority of students. So while other retired people are out seeking adventure around the world I’ll be sitting in a rocker whittling a block of wood into shavings. Oops. Back in the 80s I took a wood carving class and I still have an unfinished turtle to prove it. In college I once spent an entire semester carving a piece of marble into a woman’s torso---it started out as a rejected tombstone with a misspelled name and I got an 'A' that semester. Having seen Michelangelo’s Pieta when it was brought to The States for the 1964-65 New York’s World’s Fair, I wanted to be just like him. In my naivety I didn’t realize how huge I was dreaming. Now, I’ll settle for finishing my turtle before I die. My dreams are getting more doable with age.

Tomorrow I’m going back to the senior hall for a Victorian Tea. It will feature a speaker from the public museum who will come dressed in a Victorian nightgown and over her hour and a half presentation she’ll dress in traditional period garb layer by layer explaining each garment’s purpose and history as she puts it on. For more than a few decades of my life I was enamored by all things Victorian so I expect to have a good time. But I’ll be haunted by a summer when Don and I looked at every run down, fixer upper Victorian house for sale in two counties. We dreamed of restoring one back to its original glory. And now? I dream of finding something suitable in my closet to wear to a formal Victorian tea. 

There are all kinds of dreams in our lives---big ones and small ones, old and brand new dreams plus broken dreams due to the death of someone important to us. Then there are dreams realized like the couple did who sailed around the world, and youthful dreams gladly discarded to make room for love like I did with Don and my sailboat. Our daytime dreams are unlimited but the ones that are the hardest dreams to make my peace with are the ones that come in the night and keep me from falling back to sleep. Like the dream I had tonight that forces me to acknowledge what my heart doesn't want to admit is happening: Don has been gone physically a long time now and I'm feeling his spirit around me less and less often. And that takes my sadness to a whole new level.©

One Week in the Life of a Water Logged Widow

SUNDAY: I couldn’t have gotten through last Sunday (or the rest of the week) without my handy Crocs rubbers. My basement was covered with three inches of water----every square in of it---and that’s how I know that Mother Nature has a sense of humor. She decided if I was going to bellyache about feeling guilty over my good fortunes in life (see my April 24th post) then she’d give me something to cry about. The sump pump that I often wondered what it did in the basement besides scare the bejesus out of me out failed while trying to keep up with the 100 year flood and record rain falls in my township. The guys who came today to pump the basement out couldn’t keep up with the water coming in from the broken sump pump so they packed up their hoses and left me standing in the water saying they’d be back at 8:00 AM Tuesday, assuming I could arrange for a plumber to install a new sump pump by then.

MONDAY: I woke up at the crack of dawn, so I could get a hold of the plumbing service where I left an S.O.S. late yesterday. Their White-Knight-to-the-Rescue showed up at 2:00 PM and left an hour later after handing me a bill for $275. The rest of the afternoon I spent behind a push broom, creating a series of mini wakes in an attempt to help the water find the new sump pump.

TUESDAY: I was back in the Crocs rubbers this morning so I could alternate between watching the water extraction guys work in the basement and worrying that it wasn’t going as fast as I wished. After four hours of sucking up the standing water, they placed industrial fans and a refrigerator-sized heater/dehumidifier in the basement and together they sound like I have a couple of jet airplanes warming up down there. (I don't even want to think about what this will do to my electric bill.) Then the crew made a series of appointments with me before leaving, for them to move their equipment around each day. I guess you could say they’re my new best friends. After they left, an old friend who owes a clean up service came over to help me get the worst of the wet and ruined stuff out of the basement.

WEDNESDAY: It was back in my Crocs rubbers to work in the basement where the Mold Prevention Patrol showed up to do a treatment. So far this little flood zone has cost me roughly $3,500 and the bills aren't all in yet. The landscape guy was here today, too. He added a 50 foot temporary drain extension at the end of my sump pump pipe to drain the water farther away from the house and my soggy yard. Now, my house can correctly be described as the one with a river running towards the storm drain. When I wasn’t downstairs I was hauling stuff to the deck in an attempt to dry it out in the sun.

THURSDAY: The ‘fans and giant dryer’ guys came back in the morning to move their equipment round down in the basement. This afternoon I was able to breath easier and go on a tour I’d signed up for weeks ago through the senior center. It was to the 911 dispatch center that handles all the 911 calls for 4-5 counties. It was an interesting tour but it brought some unexpected bad memories to the surface of times when I had to call 911 for Don. At one point those old “flee” or “cry in place” widow feelings washed over me, but I toughed it out and did neither one.

FRIDAY: When I wasn’t working in the basement I was thinking about the damage down there. My basement wasn’t a finished basement so my flooding could have been far worse. There are people in town who still can't live in their houses due to water damage---several weeks after the river crested---and other people in high rises who just this week were given permission to take their insurance adjusters in to see their water logged cars that were in the underground parking area. Due to electrical issues those people living in high rises still can't move back home again either. The most important things I lost---at least to me---was an old leather suitcase full of Valentines from the 1800s and my artwork dating back to my college years and after---four decades worth of folders full of drawings, etchings, lithographs and painted canvases. I’m telling myself that losing the artwork can be a blessing in disguise, a gift from Mother Nature. When I get around to taking up art again---which is on my Bucket List---I won’t have to compete with the talent of my youth. I can start fresh with no expectations or mourning over skills I might have lost in recent years.

SATURDAY: I got a break from the flood zone and went to an outdoors wedding in the country.  It was a beautiful, sunny day and I was so happy the couple didn't get the 40% chance of rain that was in the forecast. The reception was inside a near-by barn and it was a fun way to end an exhausting week. As often as I saw the water extraction crew this week, though, I should have asked the crew leader to be my date for the wedding. (He really liked the 'art studio' I set up in the basement and if there hadn't been a forty year age gap between us, I would have called it flirting.) Oh, well, I’ll see him and his crew on Monday, I hope for the very last time because that will mean the "jet planes" are no longer needed in the basement.  I want to get my basement put back together again and to put all this behind me over the next week or two!! ©

World Events, Widows and Finding Oneself

Florida Porches by Raymond Cloutier

Four days after the Boston Marathon bombings I went to a bridal shower and was surprised at how many women there hadn’t heard about it yet---about a third of those in attendance. With the injured people numbering over two hundred and three people dead how can people in this age of social media and wall-to-wall TV coverage not hear about an event that big?  I don’t suppose they know about the Texas fertilizer factory explosion, either, that happened close on its heels that injured over two hundred and killed fourteen. And now, the disaster in the Bangladesh where a garment factory collapsed and the death toll has climbed to over 300 as they pull more victims and dead bodies out of the rubble. So much pain, so much heartache and so much healing will need to come forth before life can return to normal for all the lives affected by these tragedies. I don’t know whether to envy or scuff at people who don’t stay tuned into what is going on in the world. I feel overwhelmed by current events right now---restless and impotent and with those feelings is a growing anger. Anger that I don’t know where to aim. Life seems so much more complicated than it was a few short weeks ago.

Over the past thirty-forty years when ever I’ve felt this way I’d find myself daydreaming about being in the Federal Witness Protection Program. I’ve always been a sucker for books that use this scenario for a plot device. Pacifiers for adults I call them. I can daydream myself being placed on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania or in a cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My imaginary life in the FWPP would separate me from mainstream civilization but with my own private guardian angel to keep me safe. I suppose turning off CNN, internet news sources and social media is another, more practical way I could accomplish the same thing, to escape the overload of information coming at me. It’s something I instinctively did in the months following Don’s death. Handling my own grief was enough and the world had to wait. If I’d gone to a bridal shower back then, I would have been counted in the Clueless Club if something major was going on in the world. Sometimes we’re the Yin and sometimes we’re the Yang.

These past few weeks I’ve been reading and am half way through a non-fiction book about a political activist who left New York City to stay alone in a cabin on an island off the coast of Maine. She had no phone service, no electricity or inside plumbing and she learned to eat off the land and the water. I keep thinking to myself, Could I ever actually do that? Be a hermit, be a recluse? And then I remember all the times since Don died that I’ve felt like a bird in a gilded cage with no one to hear my morning songs. You don’t have to be totally isolated from society to feel isolated. But the thing is, the author of the book didn’t feel isolated and alone. She was finding herself in the simplicity of living close to nature, finding  oneness with the world. Maybe my infatuation with the Federal Witness Protect Program is more about running away than running to something like Ms. Shulman did in Drinking The Rain.  I've often thought I feel too connected with the world...but isn't that just right brain, left-handed liberal non-sense? How can you be too connected to the suffering of mankind?

Today was the first time this spring it was warm and dry enough to sit outside and I welcomed hearing the birds chirping. For a brief moment I entertained the idea of planting a garden so I could spend more time outside listening to the birds. Then I decided that what I really need to do is to learn NOT to multitask. If I want to listen to the birds I shouldn’t have tend garden to justify being outside. Life is too short and unpredictable. As a septuagenarian I need to start pondering age-old questions like: Why does it take adversity to bring out the goodness in people? Why can’t we skip the bombings, the fires and the buildings collapsing and go straight to the part where people step up to show extraordinary kindness to others? Sometimes the contrary forces that govern the world suck! I want the light without the darkness, the highs without the lows, the love without the hate and life without death. Since I can't have any of that I want a porch overlooking an ocean where I can come to terms with the fact that disasters and evil are as much a part of the Natural World as the sun rising and setting. Utopia is just a fictional island we can only dream of seeing through the mist or on an artist's canvas or read about in a book.  ©

Contrasts, Bag Ladies and Floods

our main street downtown

 
Yesterday I had to go to a part of town clustered around our former industrial base. I say ‘former’ because in recent years that industrial base has dried up or moved on to other cities. It’s a depressed and rundown area from what it was just five years ago. One thing that struck me was the billboards I saw advertising phone numbers where people can get help for drug or alcohol abuse, child abuse and neighborhood watch groups. We don’t see those on the other end of town where I live.

On one corner where I had to wait for a traffic light a woman about my age was sitting in a wheelchair holding a sign that read: “Need help and money for food.” Was she for real? A dozen questions went through my head as I waited for the light to change including why would she sit on a busy corner where there was no place a driver could pull over and park if she/he wanted to give the woman some cash. It wasn’t likely she’d spring up from the chair and walk over to a car to collect the money. Would she? She was old enough for Social Security, Medicare, subsidized housing and many other safety nets our community provides to needy people. Why would a person her age need to sit on a corner holding up a sign begging for money? Perhaps she wasn’t mentally capable of navigating her way through Social Services. Perhaps her grandchildren were using her to get money for drugs. I wish I’d had a sign I could have held up that read: “Call 211 for help!”

Whatever the woman’s back story, she was the personification of every fear I had during my younger years, of what my old age would look like if I didn’t play my cards right. Don and I both were both children of depression era parents who’d gone through a lot of tough times in their lives. It was in our DNA to believe that bad luck and hard times could be just around any corner. Consequently, we were workaholics most of our adult lives. Fast forward decades later and I didn’t turn into a bag lady and unless the whole world falls apart, I most likely won’t ever be one. Still, the woman sitting on the corner bothered me---the contrast between her life and mine. In the stroke support community I was a part of for twelve years I’d met a lot of people who thought their futures were secure but they watched it all slip through their fingers when their medical problems and lack of insurance caused them to go bankrupt. Sometimes people get beaten down through no fault of their own.

I drove back to my end of town taking a broad boulevard that makes its way past two well groomed college campuses, several upscale malls and a large botanical garden. I was driving a paid-for car that had just gotten its first anniversary “buff and shine”---warranty required for its clear coat---and I was feeling guilty because by the grace of God or good fortune or the forces of the universe I wasn’t the one sitting on the corner holding up a cardboard sign begging for money. Whether it was a scam, or not, she was still a woman who’d lost all dignity and pride. And that’s sad.

Oh cripe! I just thought about something else to feel guilty and sad about. We’re in the middle of dealing with a 100 year flood with the river that runs through town and record rain fall. I wonder if anyone helped all those homeless people evacuate who live under the bridges and viaducts. Where did they go, who took them in? The lower levels of dozens of buildings downtown are flooded including a five star hotel, the museums, and high-rise apartment buildings. Homes along the river near-by where I live look like little islands and the evacuation of a nursing home was well covered in the news. But my storm damaged yard was put back to normal with a phone call to my landscaper. My biggest flood related problem has been trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B because of road closures. More contrasts. More good luck versus bad luck. I might be alone in the world. I might be a lonely widow. But I’m one lucky, alone and lonely widow. And I hope I never forget to count my blessings as well as the tears. ©

2-3 miles from where I live

The Widow's Kitchen: Part Three Cooking-For-One

It’s an understand statement to say that the cooking class I signed up for---Cooking-For-One---isn’t what I thought it would be. The dietitian teaching the series announced at the beginning of our third session: “Beans, beans, are not the musical fruit. The more you soak the LESS you’ll toot!” Oh, my gosh! Two hours on identifying, cooking, storing and tasting beans is not something I expected to do on a fine April day in middle America. “Slow soak. Hot soak. Quick soak. Gas-free soak.” Who cares? Mashed pinto beans on pizza? Really? Who makes pizza for one? And don’t pretend a six inch tortilla is as good as pizza crust. I’m not that gullible. In fact, talking about pizza for one made me realize I miss pizza! A gooey, cheesy thick crust pizza supreme, I haven’t had any since Don passes away. Every so often we’d drop the dog off at doggie daycare, and then we’d go into town for a pizza. I’ll bet Levi misses those play dates as much as I miss the pizza.

Back on topic: The class instructor seem to think whatever we make we can add protein packed beans to it---tuna melts, banana or zucchini bread, brownies, salads, waffles, etc. I’m surprised she didn’t give us a recipe for a bean facial scrub. But I must say, the bun-less black bean burgers we had in class topped with a mixed bean salsa, avocado and sour cream was tasty. And the white bean pancakes with strawberries the dietitian also served I would order in a restaurant. But would I make them? No. Making a big batch of something like pancakes, then freezing part of them to pop into a toaster later on is not the kind of cooking-for-one I envisioned learning how to do. Duh, I can split recipes to freeze without a class and it's rubbing salt in the widow's wound when you have to cook like that---or is it just me?. Besides, I’ll bet the Iron Chefs on the Food Network never freeze a batch of pancakes or a half a can of beans to use later on. I don’t want to be an old widow with a freezer full of split recipes. Hey, that might make a good episode of Chopped, though. Open up a widow’s freezer and empty it out for the mystery baskets full of ingredients for their cook-offs contests.

I may poke fun of taking an entire cooking class about beans or say that splitting recipes makes me sad. I may say I didn’t learn anything useful for a woman living alone but being in the class, sampling and laughing was a fun way to spend an afternoon. Plus I got a cute little booklet of 50 ways to add beans to your diet with the advice that we each need to eat a half to a full cup of beans a day. Who does that? Certainly not me but the class did bring back a funny memory of Don. He once asked me to buy him a half a dozen cans of beans for an upcoming hunting trip. It was a guy thing and something to do with a yearly farting contest. “Beans, beans, the musical fruit. They drive your tent mates outside while you toot.” ©

Spicy Roasted Cinnamon Chickpeas  (I liked these!)

Ingredients

1 15oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

½ t cumin

½ t paprika

½ t cinnamon

¼ t coriander

¼ t cloves

¼ t kosher salt

⅛ t cayenne pepper

⅛ t smoked paprika

1 tablespoon parsley, finely chopped

Instructions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees and spray a baking sheet with cooking spray.

Combine all ingredients except parsley in a small bowl and toss to fully coat.

Spread chickpeas out on baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes, tossing 2-3 times.

Add the parsley before serving. Experiment with various combinations of spices and try adding nuts for variation.

Doctors, Dentist and Widows on Diets

 

The dog got a tooth pulled and his teeth cleaned and what a little sissy he turned out to be. All afternoon he alternated between pacing the floor and sitting at my feet baying like there was a full moon outside and it was his job to let everyone know. Even though the post-surgical instructions were pretty clear I called the vet hospital back to make sure the schedule for pain medication was correct. It was. No pill for Levi until bedtime. Today he’s back to normal and for just under $400.00 we now have a set of before and after color photos of doggie teeth to hang on the refrigerator along with Levi’s tiny, blue ACE bandage from where they gave him assorted intravenous fluids. I got my teeth cleaned this week, too, but I didn’t get before and after photos. Why not? WHY! That’s my burning question for today.

What I did get, though, was high praise from my internist when I saw him for my bi-annual check up. He’s the one I’ve been sending fatty-fatty-two-by-four accountability e-mails to each month regarding the healthier eating plan/diet I’ve been on. He wanted me to lose the pound-a-month I put on during my first seven months of widowhood and I did that plus ten more. The main thing he wanted me to do, though, is to stop the grief induced binge eating I’d been doing when I saw him last fall. Mission accomplished! I ought to have a gold star covered widowhood report card to hang on the refrigerator for that, don’t you think? I just wish I could get the doctor to agree that I need to start sending him accountability reports to get my retail therapy binges under control. I traded in my comfort food binges for an addiction to kitchen gadgets and Crocs.

My annual check up with my allergist was this week, too, and he drew a conclusion that involved my widowhood. Isn’t that too cute for words? All of 2010 and seven months into 2011 I suffered with chronic hives. He, my internist and a specialist on autoimmune diseases were unable to pinpoint the cause and they went away as mysteriously as they started. It’s the same pattern every time hives plague me for months on end which has happened five times in my life. Allergists ask a 100 and one questions about your environment and life so I had to tell him about Don when he said, "Are you sure nothing has changed in your life since our last appointment?"  Thus the twit concluded that since I didn’t get the hives back after Don died then we can “officially rule out stress” as being the cause or a contributing factor in my bouts with hives. Jeez, I could have told him that considering I didn’t get them when Don first had his stroke or when my mother and dad died, but what do I know? Now it's officially written in stone on my computerized medical records for every doctor and nurse in the city and assorted others across the nation to read: “Husband’s death did not cause chronic urticaria to return.” What a surreal experience that was to hear him dictate that little tidbit into my records. Here's another gold star for your report card, widow lady. ©

Widowhood Report Card for 15 months Out
Widowhood Challenge	Accomplished! Gold Star for You!	Shows Improvement Silver Star	Bad Girl Back Sliding
Crying under Control	check
Melancholy Moods Lifting		check
Binge Eating Under Control	check
Didn’t get grief induced hives	check
Moving Forward Emotionally		check
Loneliness factor		check
Finding Friends			check
Controlling Retail Therapy			check
Happiness Level		check
Keeping Busy	check