The Mourning Period and my Door Decor

I'm sitting here wondering whether or not to write about the elephant in the room---the election. More precisely whether or not by the time this post goes live will everyone have beaten that poor elephant to death and are ready to move on. As I write this three days before it will get published I'm not ready to move on and the few people I've talked to about it are also still in the early stages of grief over the way the election turned out. But what can we do except to (sooner or later) move on to acceptance? It's not as if we're going to storm the capital and demand that our way is the only way it could have gone. Democrats believe that our elections are safe from wide-spread fraud. And now that it went DJT's way so does he. What is so hard to make peace with is the fact that so many people could ignore the sick and twisted lack of ethics and morals in a man they just put in charge of our nuclear codes. That fact alone clearly proves the democrats have the moral high ground here. 

The TV commentators are picking away at all the things they think Harris did wrong or didn't do or that Biden did or didn't do and I agree that the biggest mistake of all was that Biden didn't keep his promise to be a one term president. If the party had had a normal primary season it could have made a difference. But beyond that I'm not willing to concede much more wrong doing on Harris's part because what makes me crazy is that with all the finger pointing going on the pundits don't seem to put any blame on the low information voters. And they don't put any blame (or enough blame) on the fact the our soon-to-be president lied at every turn, talked out of both sides of his mouth and took credit for things he didn't do and he made promises that if he keeps are going to bankrupt our country. 

I saw one report published by ABC that said: "…estimates that to deport even one million undocumented immigrants a year would cost over $88 billion dollars annually, for a total of $967.9 billion over more than ten years." And when DJT was asked about the cost he said, "The price tag doesn't matter. We have to do it."  I hope those who voted for him remember that when the price of our food goes sky high because there is no one left to milk the cows or pick the crops on factory farms, and butcher and process beef, pork and chicken in the slaughter houses. We're not going to see the Proud Boys rushing to fill those jobs. And we're not going to see Elon Musk use his own money to foot the deportation bill. He's reportedly the richest man in the world and could afford to do it out of his petty cash account. He's a TJD whisperer now and he's telling 45/47 that all immigrants coming into our country need to have a documented, high IQ. I'll bet the hospitality industry will have a thing or two to say about that. Hotel and restaurant workers don't need to know physics and calculus and between them and the food production industry they employ the lion's share of new immigrants.

Tim Walz made a speech on Friday about taking time to mourn and when we're ready to fight again to jump back in "because there are still plenty of ways to make a difference in our communities." My niece says she's going to start attending school board meetings because five out of the seven recently elected members are MAGA republicans and book banning is a big issue in her district. That's the kind of 'make a difference' kind of fight Walz was talking about. I'm searching for my next cause and I think it will be the ACLU or something to do with the environment. It was a great speech and I would have loved to hear more from him over the next four years. He has that down home, folksy way of comforting people that makes it easy to recognize that what he says is coming from the heart. He cares about people. Harris, too. Her rhetoric is more polished but it's clear her years of public service comes from a place of wanting to help people. DJT never does anything if it doesn't help him.

Door Decor: I have this framed piece of chicken wire that I can hang things on when I'm in the mood to express something. I pin things to it….kind of like posting meme's on a computer only this frame can hang on my apartment door. There are only eight people living on my hall (including me) to see what I post except in the winter time when there are hallway walkers. Two are rabid 45/47 supporters and we've never got in each others faces over politics or had conversations over the issues. I have my Tuesday night 'liberal ladies' dinner for that and people on campus know who we are but we're all very civil to one another. Still, things slip out once in a while like when a republican made comment about shooting Harris and that "bitch" Hillary. And like this noon over lunch when a MAGA person overheard myself and another woman quietly talking about how sad we were over the election and the MAGA fan said, "Be careful what you say. In a few weeks everything will be great again and you'll have to eat your words." How can anyone be so naive?

On election night when it looked like it was going to he-who-shall-never-be-named-in-this-blog-again's way I posted three vintage postcards which were about Dan Quale but seemed to fit how I was feeling at the time about DJT. (See below.) The day after the election I posted a card of Tammy Fay Baker, also below. Currently on my door is a postcard of a Renoir painting (up above) with the words, "If you can't find me, I'll be in France drinking wine for the next four years." I'm tired of hiding my disdain and feelings from the people I live with! But I do promise to move on in this blog. Next week I plan to walk the hallways and photograph the door decor and write a post about how everyone has embraced fall around here. ©

Until next Wednesday!

Blame my Mom – Elephants, Rocking Chairs and Rolling Libraries

One of the bad things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to pursue it. One of the good things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to purse it. Is that a dichotomy or what? I really don’t know. Am I using the word right? Is there a better one to describe how something can be both bad and good at the same time?

My most recent self-indulgent obsession has been binge-reading about African forest elephants and if a herd of them comes wandering through my yard here in Michigan this summer I’ll be ready for them. If they raise their curled trunks high in the air and spread their ears out perpendicular to their heads I’ll be hiding under the bed, knowing they were about to charge me. But the most fascinating thing I’ve learned is that elephants communicate with low-frequency rumblings that are below the hearing range of people. They can communicate this way over a hundred square miles and their favorite time to send messages is during the night when the atmosphere helps their rumblings travel farther. A researcher with Cornell University’s Listening Project, who is compiling an elephant dictionary, says they have identified and defined seventy distinct messages they send each other. Some of their messages can be felt by humans as vibrations in our diaphragms if we’re in the area and paying attention to our bodies. We can, of course, hear some of their vocalizations and trumpeting but the vast majority of their communication is infra-sound that can only be heard using special equipment that can triangulate the exact location of the elephant sending a message and the location of the elephant that replies back. Simply amazing.

I realize it might seem odd that a blog categorized as a widow’s blog is going on and on about elephants and I’ll only share one more story about them before I move on: They mourn their dead. As many as 300 elephants will line up and walk by the body of a dead pachyderm, vocalizing and touching it with their trunks and this can go on for days in the rain forest of central Africa, the funeral procession only ending when the head matriarch breaks away. Even after nature has reduced the carcass to a pile of bones the immediate family unit of that dead elephant comes to visit whenever they are in the area and they’ll fondle the bones---one was even observed for over an hour rocking a skull back and forth in her trunk and tears were running down her face. And some of the stories I’ve read on how a family unit works together in a circle to try to save a dying newborn can’t help but break your heart and make you realize the largest land mammals on earth are very much just like us.

I blame my mom for my wanting to share my binging on subjects that catch my attention. When I was in grade school I’d get home from school, settle on her lap and she’d say, “What did you learn today?” It was such a well ingrained habit that by the time I got too big to sit in her lap she’d still be the first person I’d want to tell if something new and exciting crossed my path at school. To this day when I see one of her two rocking chairs still in the family, I get a warm fuzzy feeling. She loved her rocking chairs and when she wasn’t rocking me, one of her cats or dogs or grand-kids she was reading.

After I met Don, I learned that he was just as interested in whatever I might have read as my mom was and he got my “book reports” like the one I shared up above. On vacations, he loved talking to the people he met along the way and I was content to stay in the motor home reading. When he’d get back in to drive the next leg of our trips we’d give each other “reports” on what we’d both just learned. One time out west he went into a gas station and didn’t come back out for several hours. After the first hour I went inside to check on him and there he was sitting with a group of locals around a pot-belly stove swapping stories and drinking coffee---his two favorite things to do. We traveled well together and I didn’t mind Don being Don, storyteller extraordinaire, as long as I didn’t run out of reading material. He lived life, I read about living a life. (I'm experiencing deja vu. If I wrote about Mom's rocking chair and/or the rolling library before, I apologize for repeating myself.)

With age comes wisdom, or so they say. To me it’s more like watching a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle coming together. We can see how all our life experiences come together to form the unique human beings we each become. With age and widowhood we have the time to reflect and apply our memories to explain away our idiosyncrasies. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. ©

Elephants call Long-Distance After Hours 

The Elephant Listening Project 

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence 

Circus Acts and Widows Who Bake Bread

Every where you find widows you’ll find someone making the statement that the second year is harder than the first. They say it with the conviction of Captain Obvious declaring that water is wet. We’re suppose to accept this as a Universal Truth and I’m sure it is true for many---if not most---widows who wandered through their first year in a fog of shock and disbelief. But we’re talking about people here, not cookies all cut from the same cutter. The emotional make up of widows come in many shapes and shades like frosted lions, tigers, and bear treats on a plate for a child’s party. Many widows in the first year are like bears that hibernate to protect themselves through the harshness of winter but there are also widows, who like the lion, fight to keep their place as the king of the jungle, the new head of the family. And there are widows like the tiger in the wild that stalks prey to solve its empty belly problem, searching for answers to questions that have none.

I am a lion---a cowardly lion but a lion none the less. I am fighting to prove (if only to myself) that the second-year-is-the-worst is a myth for some of us. I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to be pre-programmed into believing the second year is going to be worse than the one I just came through without examining the concept more closely. In another widow’s blog on this topic she said words to the effect that her load was lighter in her second year but her ability to cope was breaking down and that makes perfect sense to me. That armor we wear around our hearts gets heavy after awhile and we have to set it down. If we accept this idea then maybe we have to accept that grief is no longer the main issue in the second year. Maybe finding a better set of armor is---one that is lighter and less battle scarred---is what we have to work on?

I baked bread for the first time since Don past away. I used to bake bread every three days. It was my only claim to fame in the kitchen. It impressed and pleased my husband and brought back memories of growing up in a farm family where his mother cooked everything from scratch. But I always felt like a baking fraud because I was making artisan no-knead bread, the kind where you mix up a big batch and can keep it in your refrigerator for two weeks and it gets better every time you’d bake a loaf from the batch. Don and I could eat a loaf of artisan bread in three days but for the very first time a loaf of bread I baked got stale before I could use it up. Not wanting it to go to waste, I made croutons for the first time in my life. Then I had to make a pot of soup so I’d have something to eat with the croutons. All this soup, croutons and bread eating made me gain two pounds this week so now I’m kicking myself for wanting to be a lion in my kitchen again. I think the gods of good examples just wanted to give me something to illustrate how it’s not just the big things that change in a widow’s life.

I have a book on how to teach dogs circus tricks. Levi can do a few things like the ‘shell game’ where he finds a treat planted under one of three cups and he can do the ‘which hand’ trick that also depends on a dog’s sense of smell. I used to have a poodle that could jumps through loops and other entertaining stuff you’d see at a circus. But the trick that always got the most laughs and attention was when my dad would tell his dog to wag his tail after I’d show off my poodle’s many accomplishments. If wasn’t fair. I’d worked so hard at teaching tricks and everyone with a dog knows that voice tone alone can get any dog to wag its tail. If there is a lesson to learn here it’s that a dog is at its best when he’s just being a dog.

So here I am. I’ve shed my first year’s widow armor and I’m feeling like a dog dressed up like a lion and paraded around a child’s circus themed party. As a widow at the start of her second year I’m expected to act a certain way when inside I’m just an old dog trying to learn new tricks. Can I learn to bake a half a loaf of bread? Maybe. Probably. I’m king of the jungle, aren’t I? I can do things other beasts of the night don’t try and I most definitely don’t cry over making a batch of croutons. Well, almost never. When I’m wearing my lion’s costume I roar instead, “I made a batch of frigging croutons!” ©

The Dark Side of My Grief

For some reason the dog decided to sleep in the living room last night instead of on Don’s side of the bed. I’d gotten so used to him being there whenever I glanced over that his absence took me to a very dark and lonely place, a place where I couldn’t stop thinking about all the changes that I’ve been through since Don death. I missed Don terribly and not even taking an Ambien could sweep those thoughts away and replace them with the sleep I craved.

I wandered the house by the glow of the night lights in every room, I attempted to let the computer distract me with a boring game of chess, and I even thought about physically forcing the dog to leave the comfortable little cocoon he’d made for himself in my chair and lock him in the bedroom with me. That latter thought made me feel even lonelier. When your dog---the one without opposable thumbs to open up the bags the treats he craves morning, noon and night are in---has to be forced to spend time with you, that’s pretty sad. Darn dog! Why did he have to pick last night to demonstrate a streak of independence?

Yesterday I got another letter from a volunteer at a local widow’s support group. She was inviting me to call if I want to talk to someone “who has ‘been there’ and knows how it feels.” The first four letters---one a month---got thrown away. I was doing okay, getting my ducks in order, handling things just fine, thank you very much. But for some reason this fifth letter got set aside to reread. I AM doing fine but the loneliness is starting to sink in, feel more permanent, and I know I have to do something to change that. My brother had been to a few meetings with this group but he had a typical guy reaction and said “he couldn’t take all that crying.” Then he joined an exercise class instead. I guess the main reason I haven’t checked out this widow group is because I’m kind of afraid I’ll end up being the one with the shoulder that others cry on. Been there, done that in caregiver circles and I’m tired of being the strong one who has to weigh every word because someone is looking to me for guidance.

It’s funny I could write that last sentence because this past week I discovered that a website I used to hang around a lot before Don’s death to debate politics has added two new forums: one for ‘Caregivers’ and one for ‘Grief and Mourning.’ Since these forums are not connected with traditional support groups, and people who have no experience with either state of being can chime in, I’ve been shocked at the hostility and lack of empathy going on. It’s like watching a train wreck about to happen to read through the topics. So as quickly as I made this discovery I’ve checked these forums off my list of places where I want to spend time. Caregiving and grief are both too fresh in my mind for me to stand by while bullies pick on people traveling down those roads. So, for my own well being I must stay away. I need to seek out peace, not turmoil.

According to the calendar it has been almost five months since Don passed away. Don: if you can hear me, let me tell you that not a day goes by that I don’t feel your love still wrapped around me. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank you for everything we shared. You and I both know that I will survive and thrive again in time---even if I have to resort to locking our derelict of a dog in the bedroom with me each night until the loneliness of your absence goes away. ©
 

My Late Husband

This morning I ran across this question on a widows’ support site: When do you start referring to your spouse as your ‘late husband’ or ‘late wife’? It was being asked by someone who’d lost their spouse six months ago. It’s a serious question that evokes a lot of soul searching regarding when you’re ready to let go of the past and let someone else come into your life and other things I’m not far enough into this journey, yet, to understand. But when I first read the question I started laughing because people have been calling Don ‘late’ his entire adult life. He was notoriously late for everything but work and even then he’d clock in at the very last second.

One time we got invited to a family reunion and my mom didn’t want us to show up late so when she passed the invitation on to me she set the time back an hour, telling me it started at 1:00 instead of 2:00. I knew it was important to my mom for us to be on time for this event so when I told Don what time it started I told him 12:00 thinking we’d then get there by 1:00. Don in turn said something like, “This time we’re not showing up late and embarrass your mother again!” so he wrote down 11:00 in his day planner. Months later when the reunion day rolled around all these ‘time swaps’ were forgotten, but wouldn’t you know it’s the one time out of a hundred when Don was determined to be on time and we showed up for the reunion at 11:00. Of course, no one else was at the park three hours early. No tables were lined up for an event of that size. So we called my mother thinking we had the wrong park and that’s when it came out all three of us had backed the start time up by an hour. We had a good laugh at Don’s expense but that wasn’t the end of the story. We had three hours to kill before the reunion began so Don wanted to run a few errands. I should have known he couldn’t go anywhere without running into someone to swap long-winded stories with and if you haven’t guess by now, we ended up getting to the reunion almost an hour late.

Today is two months to the day since Don passed away and, no, I’m not even close to calling Don my ‘late husband’. People who’ve been at this mourning business awhile tell me I’m trying to rush it along and grief can’t be rushed. Like so many other things in life, it has to run its course, set its own time table. I still have moments when I can’t believe he’s gone---surely he’s just in another room. I fight unexpected tears daily. Yesterday they came when I opened up an envelope that contained my very first union associate member card. Last November Don wanted me to apply for membership as associate because the union will protect my spousal rights with the company. As I left the mailbox, that card in my hand, I was crying so hard I could barely find my way up the driveway. I was seeing more than just a piece of paper. Today the fact that the card was so late strikes me funny. It should have come in December or January, but for once being late turned out to be a good thing because I got another lovely show of love and concern from my always late husband. If the card had come on time, before Don's death, it wouldn't have felt so much like a warm fuzzy hug. ©