Random thoughts and Routine Days...

 Sitting here reading a paper I got at the spouse loss meeting last night and the words "It's possible to take two to four years to recover..." now couple that with going to bed last night feeling like my life, how I lived it, and that I was comfortable with, is over. Trying to grapple with these feelings this morning, feeling alone...feeling all the losses in my life since a child beginning with my mother and not feeling very good and started to cry...then the phone rings, and I think I am almost happy that I have been interrupted and can talk to someone...instead some one says something quickly and where they were from...and a group of women just start to sing and laugh through a version of Joy to the World and We Wish You A Merry Christmas and hung up on me...as I cried through the whole call, crying because of my deep reaching sorrow and that there is no way to feel joy or have a merry anything right now and I needed to talk,  not be hung up on... The best wish I have received thus far is that Christmas be peaceful and I will be thought of...that was honest and heart felt. And the stinking splinter remains as a reminder that all is not well. Off to pay a bill and leave this sad, quiet, empty house for a while only to come back to it and trudge through another night. 

But before I leave there is this...I have been searching for a notebook I was using last spring semester...seems so long ago. But anyway, some things are in it I need but today instead came upon another notebook from 2002. I write pretty random notes so as to not forget because I tend to think pretty random thoughts...anyway looking through it I found recipes, knitting directions, and list's of books to get or read as well as other assorted stuff. One book was,  'Gwen John:A Painter's Life' by Sue Roe. Oddly, a year ago I was in a class with the instructor showing slides with the subject being the life and work of Gwen John. This week I stopped at a used book store, something I have not done in a very long time. A year...maybe more. I had a book in mind but it was not there instead though, were a few things I have had on a running list in my head. As I perused the store to make my way out the door empty handed I stopped at the art section and as I read the spines of the books there was the Gwen John book I have wanted for what eleven years? Also a biography about Lee Krasner, wife of Jackson Pollock by Gail Levin! But to make the pot even sweeter was the two volume set of Drawings of Rembrandt with commentary by Seymore Slive! I borrowed those from my instructor and she let me hold on to them for a very long time as they were wonderful to study. She had told me to try to get them as one can always learn from him...and there they were! I don't know what this post even means in regards to the sharing of it but I guess I just needed to tell 'someone' of my finds and excitement towards them as it told me I still care deeply, somewhere inside about something I have cared about all of my life. This awareness after an expressive dance rendering grief with my body in my studio that even Maggie came in and participated in, and then falling in a heap on my studio floor in deep wracking sobs...found the notebook not looking for and you know the rest. Grief, what a bumpy, unsettling ride...
Maybe the point is the routine of one's life and the picking up of that routine after a loved one has passed away...I was reading this morning also where one must slide back into one's life...I realized sadly on many levels, Richard was my routine, my life revolved around him and his needs for a very long time and before that my children were my routine. So then what? One is faced with the daunting thought of how to make your own way, your own life, and routines...so were the books bread on the path? Maybe...

Sorting...

I am going to try to write here what I feel.  I have just read over my blog since the beginning and so much has changed.  My last post I was busy working on an art degree of which I finished and graduated with honors in May with a second BA in Studio Art/Painting concentration.   Hardly seems possible that 3 and 1/2 years have passed since beginning that journey.  I don't know if I ever worked so hard at something in all my life...sure I did but boy it was a journey on many levels but it is done and I will sort it out as I need to.

There have been so many changes while these three years were passing buy.  My dear Amy passed away at the age of 15 from  natural causes.  I had not realized the all consuming grief I would feel for her.  I miss her still these 2  years later. 














Then my Mother passed away suddenly.  She lived 3000 miles away so I did not see the decline...then my dear Abby, my cat of 10 years  became ill and was gone 8 weeks after the diagnosis in January.

But the most life changing loss is happening slowly and sadly before my eyes as my husband was diagnosed with two terminal illness's and their respective complications and was told to think about home hospice...and that is what he chose.  With me as his primary caregiver we have been traveling this path, this path that leads nowhere...that leads everywhere.  The photo of him and I was taken a year ago.  He has changed considerably some 13 months later and so have I.  He has lost all fat and most of his muscles.  I have been pushed to the limits...examining everything I have ever believed and then some.  We have been on an end of life roller coaster and to say it has not been easy would be an understatement.

So with school behind me and at the moment I am not feeling much like a painter, I am not feeling like me even,  I am going to write about my losses as it is a huge part of my life these days just to try to sought it out.  I am not looking for pity,  so please refrain from that but comments are welcome.  I am trying to walk through this as best as one can.  I can barely put two clear thoughts together and have them make any sense at all.  So I expect there will be wrong words, spelling mistakes, and run on sentences...so no blogging police please...free pass for now.

My husband is failing and I know it and he knows it but as for time it is anybody's guess.  He sleeps a lot now and talks and eats little.  He is disengaging and that makes me so sad.  He has some better days and some where he sleeps right through and it scares me.  I am alone most of the time and sometimes I am so sad I don't know where to put myself.  Then other times I embrace being alone and try to make sense of it all...impossible at present.  For tonight I needed to 'talk' with no one telling me that it will all be alright because after all,  it won't be for a long time.  We have been married for better or worse, for 49 years.  It will change and all be different...it already has changed so much that I no longer recognize my life.

If you happened by...thanks for reading.  Grateful... Have a good night or day...depending.