Personal Journal

My future plans

I have my future plans. Is that wrong of me? Some of them are tentative, some of them are definite, and some are a little of both.

I promised myself that when she was gone, I would get a kayak, because I always wanted one. And I will - probably very soon after. I'm on a leave of absence from work, and since I can't have "bereavement leave" I plan on just staying on the LOA for a while after she passes.

I thought that I would get a kayak and go down to Big Bend park in Texas and make that my first kayaking place. I don't know if I'll have the money to do it, and I may have to go to New Jersey instead.

I need to go to New Jersey because that's where Jean's ashes belong. I just know it. She told me the story once of the little creek that ran through her backyard. When she was a wee little girl, she would chase frogs through that creek.

She has a pet cemetary with every cat she ever had buried there. It's a beautiful, bucolic woods area that occupies several acres and forms a big communal back-yard and woods for a bunch of houses that are set in a circle around it, facing outwards. There are deer and foxes. And her cats. I'm going to take the ashes of the two cats she's lost here, and take them there. And I'm going to take those ashes and bury them with the rest of her cats.
I think I might even cast Jean's ashes out there too, if her family thinks it appropriate.

Then I'm going to drive down to Maryland (this NJ trip would be a driving trip) and see if I can't find someone I met there when I was on travel last year.

And at some point, I need to go to Carlsbad Caverns again. There's something about that place that is supremely spiritual to me. I went there when I announced my divorce to my wife. It is a good place to contemplate change, and the delicateness of a human lifetime in contrast with the vastness of geological time.

But we'll see. I wonder how long life insurance claims take to process? All of this travel depends on that (and I'm not planning to grandiosely spend her life insurance money - it's just the immediate liquid funding needed to take her ashes back, or to take my trip to big bend, etc.) I guess I worry about what readers think in this...
I suppose it's natural to, though.