Sacred Cows

    I probably shouldn’t say this. It’s getting so there are so many sacred cows in the world now that they’re all stampeding. I might even say I’m taking my life into my own hands by using them to write my thoughts down. After all, political correctness has taken us so far that we can’t even laugh anymore. It’s insensitive to make fun of ourselves.

I don’t care. I’m just gonna write like no one’s reading.

Every single summer it’s hot. If you look up the word summer in a thesaurus, you’ll find these synonyms: brutal, sweltering, sweaty, exhausting, hellacious. Wait. No. Sorry. Those are the synonyms for Phoenix.

I’ve lived in the Phoenix metro area for forty-five of my sixty-five years. I lived on the gulf coast of Florida for another ten. The remaining ten spent in northern California’s Pacific coast are the only years of my life on planet earth when I owned a coat. I am experienced with hot climates.

What the heck is someone like me doing here? I don’t have the complexion for this.

And yet, here I am, a freckle faced pasty-skinned girl whose pastimes include growing skin cancers, thriving in the Arizona desert. Where summer runs from March until November and spring and fall are tiny bookends to our version of winter. Only the tough survive here and I don’t mean meteorologists.

It must be lonely to be a weatherman. Half the time you’re wrong and the rest of the time you’re not right. It’s miraculous the kind of job security this occupation provides. Still, summers like this one keep us glued to the weather channel, anxious to find out if the heat wave will ever end. Especially a couple of months from now when even locals will be begging for relief and the kids go trick or treating in shorts and tank tops. My favorite ever weather guy was a comedian. Every September the anchorwoman would make small talk by asking him, “When will the cooler temperatures arrive?” And every September he held up the same handmade sign for viewers at home to read: “The Second Week of October.”

He’s the only meteorologist I know who was always right.

It's Arizona. It’s freaking hot here. I don’t know why I live here. Maybe because I don’t know where else to go. When I was a kid growing up, the only air conditioning we had in our house was a window unit in the family room. The rest of the house depended on a swamp cooler for relief, including the bedrooms. We didn’t even have ceiling fans in those days. And when the summer rains, the monsoons, began each July, evaporative cooling was worthless. We hit 118 every single summer which forced us to hide out in that family room for days on end.

It was miserable but not unusual. Unless it happened on a date not previously known to reach 118. Then it was front page news. I ask you, what difference does it make if 118 happens on June 23 or July 2? The difference is called a “record.” As in, record breaking heat.

We love breaking records. Competition is in our boiling blood, even if we’re just competing with ourselves. This summer Arizona has outdone herself. Not only are meteorologists the stars of the show, but our dehydrated state is the belle of the ball. Today we celebrate our thirty-first day spent at or above 110 degrees.

Big deal.

Here’s the thing. Once we hit 105, there’s not a lot of difference between that continuous, monotonous heat and the super scorching 118 I grew up with, or the shocking 122 Phoenix became notorious for in 1990, which I’d like to point out occurred thirty-three years ago. It’s just that big numbers like that make headlines. But is it really hotter than summers in Florida where you still risk heat stroke in the humidity because it’s harder to sweat? Not in my experience.

Miserable is miserable, whether it’s a dry climate or a wet one. Pick your poison.

I know this isn’t a popular perspective. That’s why I’m putting it out there, because I might be the first one to do it. And doing something for the first time is record breaking. Like thirty-one days spent at or above 110 degrees.

Yes, I’m sick of it. The problem is, it’s only July 31. We still have another three months to go. While Hobby Lobby is already rolling out Halloween and Christmas decorations, and department stores are switching out swimsuits for turtleneck sweaters, us desert rats are still hiding inside in the air conditioning and dreaming of a white Christmas.

There’s nothing unusual about hot summers here. We don’t praise the Lord and put on a sweater when it cools down to 102. The numbers may vary, but the intensity is the same. It takes tenacity and endurance to survive this annual season, but we know when the sun moves to the south, the heat will go with it. We’ll get through one more summer just like we always do so long as the media and politicians leave us alone and find something else to panic over. Arizona natives know there’s hope just beyond the horizon. It happens every year.

The Second Week of October.

With thanks to Spike Stitch for permission to use the angry cow photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: cow | Spike Stitch | Flickr

Naturally

I have struggled against this. Struggled with this. Reasoned against reason and listened to the professionals who are paid to know more than I do. But the only one who knows my heart, besides my God, is me. Learning to trust my heart has been harder than learning to trust my God.

Death is not natural.

It’s not. It’s a thief. It’s a liar. It’s an illusion.

I’ve been reassured without reassurance for more than two years that death is a natural part of life. That it is, as songwriters insist, the “circle of life.” This is exactly why music is so powerful. And also, at times, dangerous. Caught up in the emotion of its swell and passion, who really listens to the words? Yet the words are the most important thing.

Death is the enemy. How can we believe it’s a natural part of life when it is the exact opposite of life? The day the palliative care doctor called and said Rob wanted to “die a natural death,” was the day my heart began to beat out of rhythm. Something wasn’t right. Those couldn’t have been his words. It didn’t sound like Rob. It didn’t sound like God either. What is supposed to be so natural about a life ending?

That’s the point. Life doesn’t end. Death is an unnatural separation of a soul from its body. Our bodies were designed by God to last forever. That’s the reason it’s so hard to die, because we weren’t meant to die at all. And by that, I mean that our bodies were not meant to die. Something has interfered with God’s design.

We stood at the foot of Rob’s hospital bed watching as he labored to breathe, listening as the cheerful hospice representative voiced the pattern we were encouraged to follow. “You can go now, Rob,” she insisted. “It’s all right. You can go.” Easy for her to say. He wasn’t the sun to her moon. He was mine.

The idea was that he was now hesitant, despite what we’d witnessed when we asked him ourselves if he wanted to “die a natural death.” Again, words spoken in the pattern of the professionals. The implication was that we were unwilling to let him go. That we had to release the reins of our hold on him so he could escape his body in peace.

But here is what I struggle with. If letting him go was the greatest act of love I could ever give him, why am I still in so much pain? I have been robbed of Rob. He was robbed of the future we dreamed about together. Of watching his grandchildren grow and investing in their hearts and lives. They grieve his loss still. Surely this is not natural.

It’s not. And I’m weary of being told that it is the final step in life, as if we are, as that melancholy shepherd journaled, flowers that bloom in the field only to disappear when a wind sweeps over it. (Psalm 103) Only that’s not exactly what he wrote. It’s an analogy, because David was an artist who painted with words. But words matter. When you read that in context, he prefaced it by saying, “As for man, his days are like grass.” Here today, gone tomorrow, our days are like grass, disappearing quickly, difficult to remember. But mankind, humans, are created in God’s image, the image of the Eternal One. The One Who does not die. And neither do we.

I think the problem lies here—the topic of death has been taken over by humanistic logic. Evolutionary explanation. A reduction in our value. If we are simply another in the animal kingdom, then we can be summed up by the words, “Start” and “Finish.” We become walking tombstones, lacking the details as represented by a three-inch hyphen separating “Birth date” and “Death date.” That’s it. That’s the total summation of a human being. You were born. The wind blew. You died.

Pathetic.

I will not accept that death wins. Nor that it is “normal” and “natural.” I don’t have to. Jesus didn’t, or he wouldn’t have stood in his full humanity at the grave of his friend, Lazarus, and ugly cried like He did. Of course those who are released from the confines of physical bodies are jubilant afterward. I’m not an idiot. I fully realize that Rob wouldn’t want to come back here even if he had the chance, no matter how much he loves all of us. And he loves all of us tremendously. I get that. If he needed my permission or my blessing to be set free from his suffering and an interminable future in a broken body, I loved him enough to put his needs before my own and I did.

I am through being mollified or patronized with the idea that having to make a decision like that at all is “natural” or even “God’s will.” I've lost my person and half of my heart. This is no place for judgment.  I won’t be convinced to put a new spin on Rob’s death by painting it up with flowers and flourishes labeled as “natural.”

If death was not natural to Jesus, then it is not natural to us either. He’s the one who called it the Final Enemy and promised it will eventually be put under his feet. I admit, it would soothe my heart in this terrible meantime between losing Rob and being with him again if I could view his death as a common transition. If I could stop fighting against the unfairness of it all. Stop pushing back against the idea that it is normal and ordinary, even expected, to see God’s damaged, perfect creation perish.

But I can’t. Because He doesn’t.

We are not grass. We are eternal. Created in the image of God.

This Is That Story

Two inches.  

What good is two inches? If you’re hitchhiking, that two-inch thumb might get you a ride. If you’re hangry, a snack sized Hershey’s bar cheers you up. If you like pickles, a gherkin makes your sandwich sparkle. If you don’t like pickles, it ruins your lunch.

Two inches of something indulgent is no cause for alarm. Unless it’s a pickle. Two inches of something crawling up inside your denim capris is a different story.

This is that story.

I’ve lived most of my life in the desert southwest. I was born in Arizona, so even though I should have been born in Ireland, I’ve adapted to sweltering heat and harsh terrains. I owe my resilience to the invention of air conditioning and a good dermatologist. What I haven’t adjusted to very well are two-inch invasive species. It’s a fair descriptor. Native or not, some species shouldn’t invade my space.

When I was in the sixth grade, my family and I moved to a small house in the desert where, one afternoon, I stepped outside and crushed the life out of a scorpion with my bare foot. I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t see him. But I felt him. It scared me to death to step on the creepy thing, but the pain was no worse than a bee sting for me. I thought I’d learned my lesson—shoes matter. It was the only time I’ve ever been on the wrong side of a scorpion.

Until last week.

In my own living room.

Wearing shoes.

And denim capris.

I’ve probably killed about two dozen of the crunchy little demons in my lifetime, but only one of them with my bare foot. All the rest I’ve pulverized wearing sturdy shoes. It’s easy to recognize Arizona’s dangerous bark scorpion, even on my fake wood floors. Sure, they’re the same color, but they still look like a scorpion.

Maybe overconfidence was my downfall.

When I’m sitting at my desk like I was last weekend, lost in my writing and enjoying some iced tea, I’m not usually thinking about scorpions. Not until I realize a two-inch version is crawling inside the leg of my capris. Suddenly, intuition becomes better than vision, and I don’t need to see the freaky beast to realize I’m in a lot of trouble.

No one was here to watch me boogie last week. Or stomp my leg until the terrorist fell to his death on the fake wood floor, crushed by my frenzied dance moves. He deserved it. Nor did anyone hear me sob like a baby as the venom quickly spread across my shin and encircled my lower leg. Within seconds, from knee to ankle, my leg throbbed with fiery pain, pulsating my nerve endings like a TENs unit set to warp speed.

I kid you not. 

My daughter, Katy, came over to administer first aid, but as it turns out there is no pain relief for an attack like this. You just put up with the effects of its powerful neurotoxin for the next seven hours, making sure you can still breathe, and facing the fact that it’ll be close to a week before residual numbness goes away.

Oh, goody.

I had my home sealed last year by professionals against criminals like these. They missed a spot. Yesterday they came back to re-seal my foundation and go after all the door jams that don’t jam and gaps in the plumbing, as well as every air vent in my ceiling. Never underestimate predatory arachnids. They are contortionists on steroids, able to squeeze inside the house my contractor promised was impossible for them to penetrate.

im·​pos·​si·​ble.

I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.

There’s not a lot to do while sitting with your leg elevated except shallow breathe and wait for the poison to work its way out of your system. For the next two days, while every nerve in my lower leg pulsated to the bizarre beat of some frantic jungle rhythm, my unnerved thoughts drifted to my grandmother. Not because she was bohemian or a bad dancer, but because she was well acquainted with scorpions.

For twenty-five years, she and my granddad lived on fifty acres of desert land, raising their family in a home devoid of both air conditioning and evaporative cooling. In the extreme heat of Phoenix summers, equipped with only floor fans and cross ventilation to alleviate their suffering, she developed frequent, massive migraines.

One afternoon while dealing with one of those awful headaches, a scorpion, meaning to add insult to injury, crawled over and stung her on the leg. Unfortunately, I don’t know how she would describe the pain that followed. All she told me is that her migraine instantly disappeared.

Gone.

Kaput.

Vanished.

Vamoose.

Umm, bu bye. And instead of showing up every few weeks, it didn’t return for six months. So, while she rubbed her throbbing leg instead of her throbbing temples, she came up with a brilliant idea.

Now, this might have been a side effect of the neurotoxins ravaging her body at the time. Possibly she was hallucinating from the pain. I’m pretty sure that’s what I was doing last weekend. I actually wonder if Grandma had an out of body experience, perhaps something akin to what Peter Parker encountered when a radioactive spider bit him. (Well, they are distant cousins of scorpions.)

Yes. I’m saying it right here. That savage beast changed Grandma on the spot. She leaned into her new superpower Spidey Sense and, every six months after that, whenever a new migraine tried to take over, she invited another willing scorpion to sting her. On purpose.

I’m telling you the truth, they don’t call them the Greatest Generation for nothing. That woman was tough. Sad to say, on the advice of her doctor, who lacked spidey sense, she eventually gave up on her homeopathic remedy and resorted to enduring regular migraines for the rest of her life.

I often wonder how much better she’d have felt if that horrified doctor hadn’t discouraged her from trusting her own instincts. It’s not like the poison transformed her into some kind of mutant. She didn’t start climbing up walls with her bare hands. She didn’t develop supersonic hearing. And she didn’t become a crime fighter on the back streets of Phoenix. She just wanted to get rid of a bad headache.

In other words, the neurotoxins from scorpion stings seemed to counterattack whatever triggered her migraines. It’s like two negatives making a positive. Isn’t that what science is all about? Or maybe that’s math. I don’t know.

So, while I sat there ruminating on Grandma’s courage, I wondered if I, too, would reap benefits from a severe scorpion sting. Maybe the poison would clear up my chronic hives. Or my chocolate cravings. I don’t really want to look through walls like Superman, but it would be nice if my eyesight became an even 20/20 again. Is that asking too much for everything I went through?

Science and math will never know. Because I’m not as brave as Grandma. I’m doing everything I can to keep two inches of pure terror from ever tormenting me again. I’ve sealed up this house so tight I’ll probably asphyxiate from lack of oxygen.

This is my new normal. That, and glowing in the dark. Hmmm. Grandma never mentioned that side effect. 

With thanks to hjl for permission to use the great visual aid seen above. His original photo can be viewed at this site: Horizontal Measure [50mm + 12mm macro extension test] | Flickr

Spaced Out

In the last two months I’ve knitted three blankets, one sleeping bag, and I’m halfway through two more throws. Meanwhile, the experts in Utah still have no clue what’s behind all the anomalies lighting up the skies every night on Skinwalker Ranch. At this rate, if they don’t sort it out soon, JoAnn Fabrics will be out of yarn and my wrists will be in traction. At least I do something productive while I binge watch mysterious documentaries. 

I’m addicted to learning about things no one can explain.

Exactly the reason, I think, why they never find explanations. It keeps the sponsors happy and their bank accounts delirious. I think I’m okay with this arrangement. I have an insatiable curiosity and if ever it were to be satiated, I might lose my reason for living. And knitting.

Yesterday morning I woke up in time to sit on my back patio and enjoy what was left of a cool morning in the shade. I brought a cup of hot cocoa out with me, leaned back in my mesh patio chair, and looked up at the thousands of green leaves hovering above me while a refreshing breeze swept across my skin. There were birds hiding in the branches, but I could only hear them, not see them, camouflaged as they were by the dense foliage. And it occurred to me that in about four months every single one of those leaves was going to metamorph or something and fall to the ground on my clean patio like an avalanche of orange, and I’d be forced to sweep their daredevil little lifeless carcasses the entire length of my house and out the gate to decompose.

Leaves are selfish little narcissists.

This might be the reason I got a C- in high school biology.

And then I remembered a story I’ve heard several times about the changing of the colors every fall. Supposedly, all those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges which explode from deciduous stands of trees were there all the time, hiding beneath their green exteriors, just like all those invisible birds who drop poop bombs on my patio table every day. When cold weather arrives in September or, in our case, every February, the sap stops flowing, the chlorophyll starves, and a tree’s true nature is exposed. Or something like that. I reference here that C minus.

I wondered if I could convince a leaf to reveal its true inner self early. What if I carefully skimmed one with a razorblade. Would it uncover a golden underskirt? I ran that idea by my granddaughter, but she scrunched up her forehead, exposing the eleven between her confused brows, and told me, “No.”

Fine. That’s what comes of earning an A in biology. No sense of adventure.

Before long, I abandoned my hypothesis and let my mind wander across other mysteries of the universe. Between the leaves of the tree, I could make out patches of blue sky. Now my thoughts turned heavenward where stars and galaxies and exiled planets like Pluto exist. And, with my thoughts going full circle, I wondered once more, what is going on with Skinwalker Ranch? Could there be visitors from other worlds planning vacations in ours? Are these lifeforms friendly? Are they actually superior to us in intelligence? If so, why do they keep crashing their aircraft into our mountains? Don’t they have mountains of their own? Sure, we’re mesmerized by the speed and vibrant lights emanating from their space age, sophisticated saucers, but don’t you think an advanced race of beings determined to explore outer space should hire better pilots? I do.

That’s why I’m not afraid of aliens. I’m not any good at flying aircraft either, but at least when I know I’m terrible at something I quit making a fool of myself and find something else to do. Like knitting.

That’s not my main concern about UFOs, though, or, as they are now referred to, UAPs, which stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and, of late, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, because even scientists who came up with the Scientific Method can’t make up their minds what to call things that they can’t identify.

Here’s my real question about the whole subject, though, whether we’re discussing UAPs in Utah or mysterious lights over Phoenix. Let’s suppose for a moment there really are spaceships which are not of this world but which keep flying over us and crashing into us. And, let’s assume they’re not manned by Artificial Intelligence, the way Washington is, for example.

Who created their pilots?

I’ll wait.

I don’t recall reading in the Bible about civilizations in other galaxies. I’ll admit, there were parts of Deuteronomy and Numbers and even Leviticus which I may have skimmed over in Sunday School, so perhaps in the long list of genealogies recorded in those books some of the names mentioned are of extraterrestrial origin. I mean, you’ve got to admit a lot of them sound pretty weird. Adonizedek comes to mind, although not without a lot of effort. Or Cushan-rishathaim. If my parents had given me a name like one of those, I’d have crashed my spaceship into a mountain, too.

But back to the question of creation and the physical evidence of pathetic piloting. I don’t mean to alarm anyone, and possibly our government is lying when they say they are not developing sub-standard aircraft incapable of making it over a mountain, let alone to infinity and beyond. But what if they’re telling the truth for a change? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That God has a secret family He’s not telling us about?

Oh. That’s not what you were thinking. You were thinking that our government can’t handle telling the truth. And also about that C minus. 

You're right. Good idea. I’ll just pull out those knitting needles and get to work on another blanket. Maybe tomorrow I’ll explore the existence of Bigfoot. I’m pretty sure he’s mentioned in the Bible, too. 

With thanks to Arnet for permission to use the phun photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: UFO ? | Arnet | Flickr

The Voice of the Heart

I thought I needed a good night’s sleep. Maybe a long drive through the desert at sunset. A cold, chocolate Breeze from Dairy Queen. A solid cry from a bottomless well. A moment with God. A talk with a friend. A comedy clip to make me laugh. A hug from a grandbaby. Some days one or all of those things help. Yesterday wasn’t one of them.

But I never. Never. Ever put on music to ease my pain. It doesn’t work for me. So why am I tormenting myself watching American Idol? For three years I turned away from this favorite show of ours. In 2020 when they made people perform in isolation on their own back patios. In 2021 when I recovered from covid and watched my husband die. In 2022 as I packed up my meager belongings in the garage apartment I’d called home since Rob’s death and prepared to move into a home of my own. In each of those years it was easy to say no to watching the dreams of young people come true. There were more important things on my mind.

Like surviving.

2023. There’s a silent rhythm now in my life. The sound of my own voice is all the company I have most days. It’s not enough. I long for him. I ache for him. My soulmate. My darling. My best friend. My love. Gone in a heartbeat, Solomon’s ageless words come to mind. Life is a vapor, vanishing quickly, leaving nothing behind. Except Rob left everything behind, including me.

Maybe there should be college courses on sorrow. Something to give people like me at least an outline of what grief looks like. Because when you fall into this deep, dark place, devoid of light and without even a map, everything is upside down. The echo of my weeping bouncing off the walls of this captivity make it that much harder to get my bearings.

How long, Lord? How long? Will it take forty-six years of sorrow, equal to the time we had one another, before I can breathe again? This roller coaster ride traveling between relief and desperation is confusing. Just when I think I’m on level ground again, it gives way and I’m catapulted into a freefall once more. My expectations do a nosedive right along with my heart in those moments. “It’s been more than two years,” I hear myself say. “Snap out of it. Trust in Jesus. Look on the bright side. Rob’s really happy where he is. You know he’d never want to come back even if he could.”

Sometimes I hate the sound of my own voice.

So, last night I turned on the TV so I could listen to someone else for a while, and landed on American Idol. I’m rooting for every single musician on the show. Their stories of heartache, survival, broken dreams, terrible experiences, all of it winds up in their music, drawing me in, making me weep, drawing you in, reminding us we’re not alone.

Music is the voice of the heart.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that music makes me cry. I’m crying anyway, draining off every new day’s pain, looking for some sunshine after the dark clouds. What I find strange is that I can read song lyrics without crumbling. The words are always the most important thing to me, but they rarely affect me like music does. So, when a friend with good intentions sends me a YouTube link to a song that makes them think of me, instead of listening to it I look up the lyrics. Give me the black and white text. I can handle that. But let an orchestra touch the shattered places of my heart? I won’t make it through to the first chorus.

The world is divided by cultures, religion, appearance, politics, and language, among many other things. But when it comes to music, there are no borders. A pianist from Japan can read the same sheet music as a musician in Milwaukee, both will perform it as written, and never need an interpreter. They say it’s the universal language. That it’s more powerful than words.

I’ve tried to write songs. It’s really hard to condense my thoughts into three verses, one bridge, and a chorus. It takes poetic license and often leaves the curious listener wondering why clouds’ illusions mean you really don’t know clouds at all. It’s because you need more words.

Words, as painful as they are to read sometimes, feel safer to me than music. It’s the personal stories behind the songs the Idol contestants sing that capture my attention. I’m just putting up with the orchestra. Maybe music makes me cry because it doesn’t speak clearly enough. It makes me wonder what the composer meant. It makes me work too hard to find hope.

I still love music even if I rarely listen to it anymore. I love drives at sunset and long talks with friends, hugs from grandbabies and Dairy Queen ice cream. But when my heart is scrambled with pain and longing, upside down in another whirlwind of sorrow and I’m lost in the darkness, I gather up these shards of glass and piece the fragments together. Making sense of my pain is one way back to solid ground. For me, words are everything. The mosaic reveals the story.

Thank you for your willingness to listen to my story.

With gratitude to Leeds Harold for permission to share the beautiful mosaic seen above. The original photo can be viewed by following this link::

DSC00416 | A mosaic created from broken pottery and glass. T… | Flickr

Addictions

I’ve taken up a new hobby. Well, to be honest, it’s an old one with a new twist. I was dinging around on You Tube since there’s never anything on TV, and with a mouth full of chocolate chips and half a cookie still waiting in the queue, it occurred to me that if I kept my hands busy doing something besides snacking, I’d feel less guilty about my sugar addiction. 

Deep in thought and polishing off those cookie crumbs, I pondered this idea. Mmmm . . . I mean, hmmmmm. There are so many hobbies I’ve taken up over the years. Sewing clothes for my troll dolls in the 60’s. Creating clothes for myself in the 70’s. Stitching outfits for my babies in the 80’s. In the 90’s we wove rag baskets. Which led to lap quilting. Followed by stamping. Pie making. Pie selling. Pie eating. Coupon Sense. Fermented foods. And blogging.

With all these hobbies to manage, it’s amazing I ever had time to clean house or make dinner.

Alas, the golden age of nearly all these fads has passed. No one asks me to weave a shabby basket for them anymore. Stamping has gone the way of troll dolls. Frankly, I just got bored with most of these things. Sewing clothes is more expensive now than buying them already made. Everything changes. But eating chocolate chip cookies? That’s forever. 

And so are the pounds they accumulate.

I had to do something. Finding a fresh pastime seemed like a good idea. It turns out I’m not one of the fifty percent of grieving widows who gag at the thought of swallowing food when their hearts are broken. Lucky me. I blame that on all the cookies I was given as a child in exchange for my tears. Homemade chocolate chip cookies. I mean, come on. As in touch with my emotions as I am, I never even had a chance.

I wracked my brain, trying to get it off of chocolate. What about in-person classes for senior citizens? Now that the pandemic is more or less behind us, it’s considered safe to gather as human beings again. I didn’t know if I wanted to commit, though. What if there were no snacks? Or worse, only the healthy kind?

Enter You Tube. Such a lowly name for a resource that rivals all of the World Wide Web. Want to learn to bake a cake? How about repair stucco? Maybe you want to install a dishwasher? Or diagnose your own terminal illness? Well then, sit back, turn up the volume, and prepare to be enlightened. You can do all of that in your pajamas and no one will ever know the difference. You Tube is better than a dictionary and more current than the encyclopedia, which isn’t saying much. Every time I have a question about how to do anything, my kids remind me they discovered how to perform brain surgery while living off the grid, just by watching this channel.

Forget millennials and xennials. This is the You Tube Generation.

I put on my pajamas, grabbed my favorite cookies, powered up the television, and hit the search button. “K – N – I – T – T – I – N – G,”  I painstakingly spelled.  Baziiinng!  I knew it. You Tube even cares about Baby Boomers. And to prove it, here was the hobby first taught to me by own grandmother. I scrolled through all the options and settled on a beginner’s project I thought I could handle—blankets using only a knit and pearl stitch. Cuz that’s all I know how to do and it's all I want to do. I’m not trying to get fancy or make sweaters here. I’m trying to overcome my chocolate chip cookie addiction.

I found a blanket pattern I thought would make a cozy addition to my living room, studied the technique, and took notes. Then I drove to JoAnn Fabrics, bought a bunch of yarn and tools and, as soon as I got home, I started knitting one and pearling one and knitting one and pearling one. Instantly, I was addicted. And elated! I’d solved my snack problem and identified my purpose in life. As long as there is Christmas and people who don’t know how much they need my blankets, I will never overeat chocolate again. It was that easy.

You Tube is a genius.

Except. The girl on the tv wasn’t giving directions away for free. She was advertising for her Etsy business. If I wanted to find out how many rows of knitting make either a throw or a lap blanket, I would have to track down her Etsy account and pay for that information. Aren’t they pretty much the same thing though? You know, like, “Throw me a lap blanket.” I felt confident I could figure this out on my own. I graduated high school. It doesn’t require a college education to know when a blanket is big enough. I’d just cast on a few stitches and knit until I was done.

I found an exciting UFO documentary to binge watch, and in hardly any time at all I knit and pearled a blanket all over myself. It was awesome. I loved the texture of the yarn, the color I’d chosen, and the clickety-click of the needles.

Knitting was better than cookies.

It was relaxing. It was comforting. It was low calorie. I knitted and pearled and knitted and pearled until my shoulders ached and my hands cramped and the wooden needles caught fire. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I had to stop.  I ran out of yarn. Proud as punch with my finished project, I held it up as high as I could in my stocking feet and then took ten steps backward. It stretched out in front of me like a woolen river, covering the living room from side to side with every skein of Lion Brand Natural Heather I could find. I was as proud as a new mother could possibly be. It didn’t look much like what I’d seen on You Tube. It wasn’t exactly a lap blanket. And it was too heavy to throw anywhere. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a creation like the one I brought into the world.

It appears I knitted myself a sleeping bag. If you fold it in half and put in a zipper on one side—yep. That there’s a sleeping bag. Hunh. Maybe I didn’t need to purchase quite that much yarn. Or watch that many episodes about aliens.

I think we’ve all learned a lesson here. A lesson about moderation. About trading one addiction for another. And about overconfidence. But the most important thing we’ve learned here today, something they won’t even tell you on the You Tube, is this. Sometimes the best things in life are not free.

I should have just paid that Etsy girl. It would have been a lot cheaper than buying all that yarn.

With thanks to Martin Cathrae for tempting me with the mouth watering image seen above. While I go bake up a batch for my next binge watching event, you can view the original photo by following this link: Saturday Night Cookies | Allie made cookies to aleviate her … | Flickr

If Only

I miss you. My head hurts today and you’re not here to rub my neck. For two years and one month today, you haven’t been here to rub my neck. It feels like forever since you’ve been in the same room with me, talked to me, lived life with me in the ignorance we used to enjoy. We didn’t know you’d be gone so soon. Too soon.

I cry a lot. I make sounds I never knew could come from a human being when sorrow smothers me. I cry so much it makes my eyebrows hurt. Who knew crying does that? Two years and one month. Eleven more months and I’ll hit three. Maybe then I can take a deep breath again. Maybe by then I’ll have found direction for this life I’ve been left with, the one without you in it. Maybe I’ll feel passion again, or a slice of happiness. Or hope. Maybe.

It isn’t fair, Rob. Can you read this from your side of the veil, the side I can’t see but I assume through which you can? You were strong. You cleared an entire cabin of furniture on your own, carried it down wooden steps and stacked it in the cabin’s garage while I was at Walmart picking up groceries. You took care of yourself. Seeing a doctor for annual checkups, keeping up with INR checks for the blood thinners. Your levels were right where they were supposed to be from the very beginning. You never wavered. You were optimistic and excited about retiring to our mountain home. You always beat the odds. Always won when things were stacked against you. We called you the luckiest man on earth.

And then we got sick. Both of us. The same day, the same symptoms, the same diagnosis, the same hospital. And that’s where everything changed. Now nothing is the same.

I miss you. I miss everything about you. I miss the way you teased me just so you could get a rise out of me. I miss your bare feet and seeing you in the orange Gators sweatshirt I keep in my dresser now. I miss the crooked index finger on your right hand that you injured as a two year old spinning the blades on a push mower. I miss your laughter. Your goofiness. Your stubbornness. Your kindness. Your tenderness.

I miss the way you looked at me. I miss the cards you loved to surprise me with. I miss the Peppermint Pattys in the refrigerator that you brought home when I wasn’t looking. I miss curling up in your arms and taking a nap while you chewed your fingernails and watched football. I miss our disagreements and misunderstandings and the way you tried to improve how I make meals. There’s no one here to tell me how to rearrange the dishwasher because “it’s easier.”

I miss wishing you’d go play golf so I could have a few hours to myself after you retired, knowing you’d be back for supper. You never come home for supper now. You never come home at all. I miss your snarky comments and the way we narrated mystery movies together and figured out in the first ten minutes who done it. I miss being bored together and talking you into going for a drive. I loved watching you drive.

I miss having you hold my hand, and guide me through a door with your hand at the small of my back. I miss driving through Starbucks and texting you to see if you want anything. I miss breathing the same air you breathe and reaching for your hand in the dark and knowing you’re there when I have a bad dream. I miss the smell of your coffee in the house but I won’t keep a coffee pot around here anymore because you’re not here to drink from it. I miss seeing your excitement about playing the tenor drum with the pipe band.

I miss watching you with our grandkids. Planting trees for them. Trimming trees with your daughter. Sharing a beer with your son and son-in-law. Teasing your daughter-in-law and watching her laugh. Reading to the grandbabies. Tucking them into bed after you sang their favorite, The Unicorn Song, to them.

I miss competing with you at cards and Rummikub and Scrabble. I miss trying to figure out if the current argument is in my limited four per cent of being right and if I should hold my ground or give in to your computerized memory. I miss my Florida boy. My Gator Eyes. My K.I.N.S.A. I miss the inside jokes and the life we built together and the movies we watched and enjoyed side by side and hearing you sing and whistle. I miss the good, the bad, and the ugly because we got through it together, you and me, the way we promised each other that we would.

I miss what it feels like to be married. To take a long term marriage for granted. To live every day convinced that death will never come to call, never threaten to destroy, never tear us apart. Ignorance is bliss. I miss bliss.

I used to be able to breathe because all the things I miss were once right where they belonged in my life. But when the shattering happens and what was whole becomes fragmented, now every time I take in a breath another jagged piece of what we used to be together stabs me. Do you know how hard it is to breathe with broken shards stabbing your heart?

I don’t know who I am anymore, Baby. The woman I was died the day you did. Grief changes a person. I’ll never again be who I was. I’ll always know how easy it is to lose your world with one heartbeat.

I keep hoping that if I keep writing that it will help my soul find rest. Find relief. Find peace. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s like turning on the faucet so the water will run out. It never does.

You used to write poems to me. Love letters in those unexpected cards. Post pictures of us every time an anniversary of any kind came up so your Facebook friends knew how much you love me. I would so much rather read your current words of love than my words of sorrow. If only the tears would run dry. If only the clock would go backwards. If only we could have saved you.

The saddest two words in the English language are those.

If only.

An Invisible Tide

There are days when I feel more like a widow than on other days. Strange to see that written here. Some words, once reserved for the misfortune of others while kept safely out of reach behind museum glass, reside in my life’s story now. And I hate it. Words like widow, died, when, and I can’t imagine. Those were the descriptors for other people’s pain. Other people’s tragedies. Other people’s sorrow. Now I know how it is. There are no other people. We’re all human and we’re all going to lose people we love. 

Love is a risk.

I regularly chat with another woman who, like me, is also a reluctant member of the Widows’ Club. We’re pen pals, separated by a distance of seven or ten states, depending on whether or not you take the scenic route, yet joined together by this simple phrase we use often while writing to one another, “I know that you know.” Five simple little words that say it all. Your heart is shattered like mine, and the pieces reflect one another. We process our pain, refusing to offer advice, weeping in the reading, validating with our responses.

Sometimes when one or the other of us writes, the letter begins with, “Today was a grief day.” Five more little words that need no explanation because, “I know that you know.” Grief days roll in on an invisible tide, which is so unfair because you never see it coming. At least when you stand at the ocean’s edge, you can watch the waves gather and rise, backing up dramatically into the horizon beyond before they slam in fury onto the beach where, only moments before, you walked in peace. If you’re paying attention, you can get out of the way.

But you can’t get out of the way when the tide of sorrow rolls back in. There’s no escape. And there is no warning. It catches you up in its undertow, threatening to pull you out to sea which, on some days, would be a huge relief. No one could blame you for expiring in the depths of an angry ocean that refuses to let you go. But no, these sorrowful waves spit you out Jonah-style, choking and sobbing with nasty green stuff hanging in your hair, onto the salty shore of your own tears, exhausted and weary, but still . . . breathing.

The most you can expect from your life on a grief day is to keep breathing.

Those are the days when I feel the most like a widow. When the waves beat relentlessly against the shoreline of my battered heart and I wonder if I’m about to lose my mind right along with all the security and dreams that were stolen from me when I lost Rob two years ago. Just when I think I’ve turned a corner, there it is in the shadows, waiting for me again. Grief. It’s not a condition—it’s an emotion to be managed, like hormones and low blood sugar. Oh, people told me it would change, but I think that’s splitting hairs. It never goes away. Grief steps into the void as a companion you learn to live with—a really lousy substitute for Rob, if you ask me.

On the days when I’m swept out to sea, drowning in my own tears, I worry that I’m right back to square one. Back to the moment the doctor called and said Rob couldn’t fight anymore and I had to let him go. That day. That second. That nightmare. In those agonizing moments, which I’ll admit have spread themselves out since the early days when their assault on my soul felt like a Normandy invasion, I fear that I will never be happy again. Never know my purpose again. Never find passion again. I didn’t know until my life was shattered how much those things matter to me. How much we need them while we keep getting up and putting our feet on the floor every morning.

By now, I think I’ve heard and read in one way or another all the platitudes that try to offer hope and vision for my future. “People grieve differently.” “Everyone is different.” “It’s going to take time.” There is truth in all of them. We do grieve as individuals because no one else can feel firsthand what we each feel in our hearts. I know of people who fill up every waking moment so they won’t have to think about all they’ve lost. Distraction is the name of the game. But I wonder if there is healing in it, or simply a covering over that camouflages the wound beneath the surface. Sometimes you have to take a break from the sorrow, for your body’s sake if not for your heart’s. But a diet regular in diversion, I fear, can leave a person bound up, if you get my drift.

I’m not discounting the differences in personalities. I’m validating the necessity to feel the feels. My counselor told me the week after Rob died that the only way through grief is through it. There are no shortcuts, even though my worn-out heart really longs for a shortcut. Suffice it to say it wasn’t good news. But it was honest, and it gave me permission to be authentic and to let grief happen. If shortcuts lead to nowhere, I’d rather go through this thing I never wanted and make it through to the other side without wasting time or risking a heart abscess somewhere down the road.

I just didn’t realize what a long journey this would be. I’ve read that when you love deeply, you will also grieve deeply. But I'm telling the truth when I say that I would not wish this pain on my worst enemy. We want so much to be in control. All my insecure life, I’ve desperately grasped for the elusive safety of control, only to discover that it is an illusion. I’m not alone in this. We are all, at our core, control freaks. But life is a risk. And we cannot control all the risk factors inherent in living and loving. If I’d figured this out forty-five years ago, would it have made any difference? Who knows. I’ve always done a pretty good ostrich imitation, and it’s hard to see with your head stuck in the sand.

I see it now, though. I have no other option. That’s become my standard reply when people remind me that I’m strong. “What choice do I have?” I ask. Today I read of extreme losses suffered by another woman, and when she was asked how on earth she survived, her reply was, “I didn’t mean to. I just kept waking up every morning.” I wish I’d thought of that.

Some days I feel more like a widow than others. Other days, though I recognize that I am on my own now without Rob, the tide is out and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I can breathe without thinking about it. Maybe two years isn’t long enough to bring healing to a broken heart which was loved by a great man for forty-four years. Chonda Pierce, who lost her lifelong sweetheart in 2014, said it was nearly three years afterward before she felt like she could take a deep breath.

That seems about right to me from where I still stand most days, struggling for air like the widow I am. Feeling the waves crash as the earth beneath my feet washes away. Waiting for the tide to go back out and solid ground to reappear. Again.

Some days.

Rrrrrrroooombah

I’ve been thinking about getting another dog. My best bud, Brody, decided he’d rather hang out with Rob and Jesus instead of me last year, and now when I drive through Starbucks they won’t give me a pup cup full of whipped cream anymore. I can’t figure that out. I always gave them to Brody. Honest. Usually. Whatever.

So far I’ve owned three dogs, pound puppies we got from the same maximum-security joint. The first one, a rowdy little redhead we misnamed “Harmony,” was on death row when Rob and I rescued her. The second, another female, had eyes like Cleopatra and a fear of enclosed places, such as dog crates, SUVs, and fenced yards. Though we called her Sydney (under the delusion that she was part Australian Shepherd), a better name would have been Houdini.

Brody was a charmer, our first male dog, who we won in a lottery at the same Big House where his adopted sisters had once been incarcerated as well. Rob always had the magic touch when it came to contests or raffles, and six other families went home with broken hearts the day we took Brody home with us. He was the biggest dog we ever owned, and though, as a yellow lab/shepherd mix, he was exactly the dog I always dreamed of, he was a lot more dog than I could handle. He was my Christmas present that year, but by then I had no illusions about how things would shake out. From the get-go, he was Rob’s dog just like the other two were. So, I understood when he chose to join Rob in heaven rather than stay with boring old me, but I still miss him.

Now that I live alone without husband or puppy underfoot, my feet are lonely, just like the rest of me. My grandkids have been telling me for months that what I need is a sweet little lapdog to keep me company. Nothing too big. Definitely nothing that sounds yappy. Furry but not prone to much shedding. Old enough not to chew up my new furniture, young enough not to die too soon. The perfect pet. That’s what I need. I don’t think they make those.

Still, if I could find myself a slug dog that doesn’t need to be walked every day, I’d be open to the idea. This may be harder than I think.

They say it takes about a year for an animal to settle into the groove when you bring him home, and in my experience that sounds about right. It took Harmony a year just to remember her name. Sydney never did learn that there’s no place like home and was forever searching for Oz. Brody was a puppy to the very end. All of them needed more attention than I gave them. All of them drove us crazy. All of them were irreplaceable. It’s just that the last time we had a dog, Rob and I both were here to teach them to behave like decent human beings. Now there’s just me.

I don’t think I’m qualified.

I got to thinking about options and how to ease myself into the possibility of owning another pet, beginning with the problem of excess dog hair everywhere. I hate it because I hate to vacuum. I also hate doing laundry. And bathrooms. And dusting. All the things. But especially vacuuming. I thought if I got a little help with floor maintenance, keeping up with doggie debris might not be as hard as it used to be.

So, I bought a Roomba. They should have named it Rum-ba. The thing behaves like it’s drunk. It’s a rotund little robotic floor sucker that roams around the house in circles, bouncing off the furniture, and randomly snorting dirt and lint and crumbs up off the floor like the tasty morsels they are. I read the fine print, all the reviews, studied the stars—there were 4.5—and settled on a mid-range version that people raved about because it is especially good at picking up dog hair. Which I don’t have. Yet.

There was only one problem. All but two of the reviews were written in Spanish because this model, for some unexplained reason, sells best south of the border. And that explains why, when my Rrrrrrroooombah (it’s important to roll the R’s) chokes on the floor-length drapes in my living room and comes to a complete stop awaiting my rescue, I don’t always know it’s in trouble even though it’s yelling at me from across the house.

Because I don’t speak Spanish.

Perhaps I missed some of the finer fine print when I did my research.

I also don’t know how to re-program my sucky robot so it can yell for help in a language in which I am fluent. Like English. Or pig latin. Possibly even a smidgeon of French. The only word I have recognized so far is por favor, and that doesn’t begin to describe for me the kind of trouble Rrrrrroooombah has gotten into once I recognize the phrase.

So far, it’s tried to eat five of my drapes. Has vanished without telling me where to look for it. Overeaten all my rug’s fibers until it winds up with conditions I can only describe as both a carbohydrate coma and an intestinal blockage. Frequently, it disappears beneath the living room sofa and turns itself off, refusing to come out even if I say pretty pretty por favor. Yesterday it went after a used Kleenex, and by the time I figured out why the floor was covered in white confetti, its brushes were clogged up like the 202 at rush hour.

And here’s another thing—it’s kind of noisy for being so small. To compensate for that I’ve been running it in one room while I’m somewhere else trying to ignore it. But this house isn’t very big which means I’m not that hard to find, so that little tyrant keeps tracking me down. The only time I go looking for Roomba is when it chokes on too much lint or can’t swallow the curtains. Then all I can hear is an explosion of what I assume are Spanish expletives followed by piercing silence. That really chaps my hide. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s passive aggressive appliances.

If any of that happens while it slips out of view, I have no idea where it may be hiding. It won’t come when I call. It won’t even give me a beep to let me know whether I’m hot or cold. It just sits there, pouting, until I find it and apologize for making it wait.

I don’t know. This is all beginning to feel very familiar. Either I’ve purchased a cranky Mexican housekeeper or I’m in a relationship with a narcissistic automaton. Now all I need is to introduce Roomba to some barking little shitzu and let the games begin.

It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing that any time soon. In the quieter moments when Roomba is just running around bumping into my dining room chairs, the steady hum and clunking make me feel like I already have a pet, only cheaper. This one doesn’t require rabies shots or Purina Robot Chow.

I just need to put a collar on it that glows in the dark so when it finally stops yelling at me and shuts down, I can find it. Or not. 

With gratitude to Marci Maleski for permission to use her perfect photo of both her roomba and her annoyed dog. The original photo can be viewed by following this link: Ambivalence | Beau is not too sure about my choice in applia… | Flickr

732

Seven Hundred Thirty-Two. It doesn’t sound as long as it feels. Two years and two days since Rob left us. Two years and three since I last saw him. It might as well be a thousand. Before we know it, it will be.

The first year was an empty slate of disbelief. There are so many ways people describe the first three hundred sixty-five days after loss. They use words like numbness. Shock. Depression. Fear. Anxiety. Paralysis. I have felt all of those things, but most of the time I simply couldn’t believe what happened. Coupled with the extreme amount of stress I was shouldering, I suddenly couldn’t remember anything about our lifetime together. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, why my brain wasn’t working. Was I to spend the rest of my life living without Rob while simultaneously robbed of our memories together?

There is so much opportunity for fear.

Each morning when I woke up, with the first ray of sunlight that hit my face, realization dawned with it. And I began to cry. Every morning. Every night I fell into bed exhausted and alone, and cried myself to sleep. I still do. In the hours in between, I counted the minutes and reminded myself to breathe. One breath in front of the other, I signed papers and made important decisions that most people have the luxury of postponing for at least a year, while I tried not to think about how normal life seemed only twelve months earlier.

I learned about the unique experiences grief affords, like, “All the firsts.” The first Easter without him. Then my birthday. Soon, his birthday and our forty-fifth anniversary. Followed by the first of thousands of questions—was I supposed to say we were married forty-four years or, since I’m still his wife, can I count the forty-fifth and forty-sixth as they arrive? Is there a book somewhere with all the rules laid out? How long is it appropriate to feel sad? Does my best source of advice on that one come from people who have yet to experience firsts?

The first Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went, precursors to the worst first of all, the first anniversary of Rob’s death. I hate to even write those two words together. Determined to soften the blow, I loaded up the Tahoe I had to buy on my own and drove as far away from my sorrow as I could go. Hilarious. I forgot the universal rule about suffering of any kind—wherever you go, you take yourself with you.

Finally, on the three hundred sixty-sixth day, I began to breathe without needing to remind myself to do it. I’d made it through all the firsts. This was really something. Maybe I was stronger than I seemed and braver than I believed. Or maybe I just had no other choice. When you’re a new member of the Widow’s Club, survival is worth celebrating even though throwing a party would seem super awkward. But let’s say you do it anyway. You eat a cupcake, toast to your success, and when the last bit of confetti falls to the floor, a shocking thought occurs to you.

That calendar of firsts is perpetual. Now you get to go through it all over again. Welcome to Year Two.

Year Two arrives with experience. By now, I had fifty-two counseling sessions under my belt. Lots of guidance and regular reminders to be kind to myself, show myself compassion, make space for the pain when it demanded my attention. And breathe. What is missing in Year Two is any sense of numbness. Now as I looked to my second birthday without Rob, the second anniversary on my own, the second Christmas holiday season, and the second anniversary of his death, I did it with all my senses (nearly) fully intact. It was as if the anesthesia had worn off. Picture dental surgery without novocaine.

The good news is, my memory returned. The bad news is, memories are not as comforting as Hallmark thinks they are. They remind me of all that I had and will never have again.

Two days ago was the second anniversary of the day we lost Rob. Or the day he went to be with Jesus. Or the day he died. Mostly, it’s the date when we said goodbye. The date I pushed as far from my mind as possible for forty-four years. The date over which I had no control. The date that ruins the word “date” for me.

I did my best to get through it, as did the rest of my family. We held onto each other just like we have for the last two years. We got together by Zoom two nights ago and toasted Rob with his favorite Scotch whiskey from the McLeod homeland, Scotland’s Isle of Skye. The same whiskey with which he lifted a glass to his children on their wedding days, and each of his six grandchildren on the day they arrived on earth. It was a sacred toast filled with deep love and respect for our hero. He was, after all, and always will be, the finest man each of us have ever known.

This year I did not run away from February 19. I watched it coming for five slow weeks, the same amount of time it took two years ago for Rob and me to be hospitalized, separated from one another, and eventually separated for all time. I know this is a hard read. Believe me, I’m trying to find some hope here while I journal the journey. Hope is always a good idea when your world has imploded. It’s there somewhere, even if it seems hidden among all the debris.

My heart aches for him. The questions are difficult, and answers don’t come easily. Some will never come at all. Such is the stuff of faith. And trust. Which I’m not really that good at. And on top of it all, yesterday was the first day of the Third Year, not entirely unlike the Second. What these two years both have in common is the realization that we have lost Rob and this loss is permanent. Acceptance may be one of the feelings identified in the so-called ‘stages of grief,’ but it is just as transient as the rest of the stages.

I’m talking to God again, have I mentioned that? I missed him almost as much as I miss Rob. It’s a strange thing in loss to know that God had Rob’s best interests at heart when He released him from his broken body and set him free to really live, with Him, while at the same time God was holding me and my family in His arms, too. Rob’s best day was the beginning of my worst. But somehow there is also the recognition that God is good. And that He feels every tear I shed. 

Seven hundred thirty-two. You have no idea how many boxes of Kleenex that represents. On the up side, I’m seven hundred thirty-two days closer to seeing Rob again. And in between all those firsts and seconds and thirds, hiding somewhere in the confusion, I believe there is hope.