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Where are you, Dr. Suess?

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“We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”                         Dr. Suess

You are not on a trip. You are not on a ship. You are not at work or having a quirk. You’re not with your hobby or alone in a lobby. You, my love, are nowhere.

When I really absorb that fact, it’s like the elevator doors opened and I am in freefall. I’d much rather live in lala land, thinking my other half is at Shoprite getting his chocolate ice cream. Instead, I have to literally catch myself from thinking that his car, which is no longer even in existence, will be pulling into the driveway.

Dr. Suess said ‘Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.” Blech.  The fact is, when I think about a funny story I want to relate about the grandboys or about a something that made me laugh,  I can’t. Not much to smile about there.  I will never see his face, or crack up at his crazy voices. I won’t pain for his lessened quality of life or be scared all the time about what’s coming next. And of course, I won’t be frightened that one day there will be a medical dead end to what the doctors were able to ‘fix’.  But then, ‘dead end’ is just a really bad pun now, isn’t it?

I don’t like green eggs. Not even that crazy about ham. But the man I loved, the one who more than shared my weirdness, will always be part of who I am.

“To the world, you maybe me one person. To one person, you are the world.     Dr. Seuss

 

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Facing The Music

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We had a moment, just one moment
That will last beyond a dream, beyond a lifetime
We are the lucky ones
Some people never get to do all we got to do

Carole King, Now and forever  

 

We loved music. Listening to it. Watching it. Even singing it in the car at the top of our lungs. We couldn’t get enough Broadway. In fact, one of our earliest dates was to Hairspray, where my then new boyfriend suitably impressed me as much with the front row seats he procured as a bird’s eye view of Harvey Fierstein.

I often teased this thoughtful, musical guy about his Rudy Vallee voice but I admit it was a good tenor. I could hear him singing shower show tunes – on the next floor! (He never knew I taped him, standing outside the bathroom, during full voice one day. I felt bad (as I laughed) at the time, but am so glad now I have yet another piece of him.) Continue reading →

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Universe Lesson #7,423

daniel_schaefer_portfolio_002_970px1Hey, universe….your lessons are really getting old.

My stomach was whining for breakfast this week as I waited for a business colleague at the diner. I waited. I waited. And then (brilliant idea) I called her to see if she was running late. Ooops. I never checked that she got my confirmation email. She didn’t. And I had egg on my face I didn’t get to have for breakfast — which was my second meet-up that went awry this week.

Two nights before,  I waited for a friend with the aroma of thin crust pizza filling my head. So, I dialed and found out that unfortunately, the date slipped through the cracks. It became instead a date with a sick grandson, hers not mine but totally understood. I ordered slices to go and headed home, annoyed at myself for not confirming BEFORE I left the house. Of course, hindsight comes easy as well as the realization that I broke my perfect record of never having been ‘stood up’. First (and second) time for everything.

Lesson learned: Don’t Assume. (You know what they say about THAT) Continue reading →

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Celebrating the Knight who said — ‘pie’

FullSizeRenderThey say a knight in shining armor is a man who never had his metal tested. I met a few of them; I even dated them. You know, the dudes whose metal suit was actually tin foil. That’s why I almost missed the knight whose armor had as many dings and tarnishes as his car bumper. He was the real deal. He fought his share of dragons, especially the most fearsome of all. And when you constantly battle the beast, even the most deepest of loves have emotional jousts. But then again, as I stood all those years beside my husband, he had way more than his ‘metal’ tested. His spirit, self-confidence, courage and self-esteem were tried way beyond what most people can tolerate. And each time, he got back on that horse (or green Nissan) to battle another day.

Today is this knight’s birthday.

He loved everything about medieval knights. He had a little room full of toy collectible Knights of Agincourt who hung around castles he painstakingly crafted. This was a guy who took supreme pleasure in sharing his love of those men in armor with our grandsons at Medieval Times for their 5th birthdays. I could never decide who loved the pageantry more – him or them. The last time we were there, we joked that we had to rest up before we took one the smallest of the teenies but that will never happen. Grandpa knight died barely 2 months later. Continue reading →

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I’ll Get You, My Pretty.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

The Wizard of Oz

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Lions, tigers or bears, sooner or later, grief touches everyone. And when it does, nothing looks or feels the same, not even your simple nightly routine. You turn off the lights, lock the doors and head upstairs. Simple. Been there, done that more nights than I can count. It’s repeated nightly in every household around the globe. Yet these days, even simple routines — suck. Every nuance screams I’m in a different world now – a world of one. My life made a major detour to the flip side of Oz.

It’s hard not to remember, as I climb the stairs, not only how I found my husband lying there just months ago, but how this home once rang with voices. The only thing ringing now are my ears from the buzzing lack of sound. Like the train tracks I had to draw when I was learning perspective, endless nights just like this, stretch ahead of me. But, when you think about it, don’t most things come down to that – perspective. Continue reading →

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Four Funerals and a Wedding

Happy couple in their new home concept

Nope, not the Hugh Grant comedy.  Jill Smolowe’s book, Four Funerals and a Wedding, is pretty much anything but comedic. Her book chronicles not only her personal grief journey but how she coped and grew along the way. In one chapter she mentions how her therapist suggested that her grief began on the first day of her husband’s diagnosis. That struck me as pretty profound.  Given that my husband’s diagnosis was levied 3 months before we were even married, I realized it would not be at all surprising that unconscious grief followed us through those years. Even as we lived and loved as fully as we possibly could, we grieved by inches.

How do you measure the knowledge, however much you stash it in the closet or ‘put on a happy face’, that many dreams just won’t come true? No, my mind never went in the direction of Charlie Brown’s Sally who said “She didn’t want to live and threw herself in front of a Zamboni”. It was just that gray leaden feeling, a sense that no matter what your plans, there would always be an expiration date that coexisted with the daily business of living. Where cancer lives, everything becomes more complicated and layered. All of life takes on a different hue. Continue reading →

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And the winner is . . .

crop-canapes1-wfbtzobnsuuyIn my dating days, I had more than my share of goofy events, hopeful suitors, and odd match-ups. I thought I knew what I wanted but as one of my friends kidded me, I should have been more specific. Maybe that’s why ‘the list’ was born.

Made up of all the must have’s as well as plenty of “don’t touch that’s”, the list seemed so reasonable — on paper. Basically it was about making good choices; knowing opposites may attract but oil and water still separate. That the more you know, the less you’ll be disappointed by the man behind the curtain. And hey, what doesn’t work better with guidelines? I learned a lot in those few years. I realized what I could tolerate, where my values lay, my own weak points, what drove me crazy, what I craved, needed and could do without. I also knew what inspired me, what I admired and respected.  I just had to pay attention. Continue reading →

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Picture this . . .

_DSC0203Photo junkie that I am, I have an embarrassingly h-u-u-ge amount of pictures on my computer— and I make no apologies. As I tell my kids and grands when they protest their gramma-razzi sneaking pictures, pictures are all we have in the end. With literally hundreds of pictures of my husband alone, I am pretty grateful for my addiction to photo opportunities.

No, I don’t pore over these pictures constantly. But there is always one that pops up in one way or another, and when it’s a shot of my husband, it sometimes does me in. The funny thing is that I don’t even have to look too closely to see so much more than the camera lens shows.  With just a glance at his face, his arm around me; mine around him and I can’t look away. I analyze, romanticize, tear up, melt down. Continue reading →

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Use Your Words…No, Not Those.

Sincere Condolences

We were word people. We both loved words so much that my husband was forever making up his own puns – and himself up cracking in the process.  We watched Jeopardy and did the crosswords – competitively of course. I kidded him about being the grammar police. It’s hardly surprising then that words can also make me scratch my head, thinking ‘what’? Really?

As I stood in line at a wake this weekend for the wonderful young son-in-law of a dear friend who lost her own husband as well, I couldn’t help thinking of what I would say to this heartbroken young wife. I knew her since she was a teen and it seemed more than important that I say something, anything that spoke what was in my heart. I knew most on that line behind and in front of me might be thinking the very same thing. Don’t we all want to speak words that make sense of the unthinkable? Being so recently in her place myself, I know how impossible that is. I know it is as hard to receive most words of awkward consolation as it is to say them. Sometimes, seeing their struggle, we often want to comfort — those who comfort.  We all want so much to say what is comforting, gift verbal pieces of our heart and sometimes just mumble odd sentiments instead. We say tired clichés. We offer what we’ve been conditioned to say, hoping somewhere in there, the person who’s hearing the words knows that our clumsy attempts at consolation are heartfelt. They do.  Because let’s face it, we all are awkward – even those who’ve been on the receiving end of well meant words.

Maybe the next time we yearn to say what’s in our hearts, we’ll measure the words differently. Maybe we can hear them as the bereaved might. Maybe we’ll even say no words at all because sometimes silence is better than words and phrases like: Continue reading →