Personal Journal

Tuesday from work

Is it so much to ask to have work to do when I am in the office?

I’m not doing good today, actually. I’m fighting depression already, and I’ve only been here 90 minutes. I’m having a mild panic attack, perhaps. I feel here like I used to feel when the sun went down at home: hunted. I have an in-box at work, and I haven’t checked it since November.
There were cards in it. I figured sympathy cards. But one was a hopeful message that Jean would be comfortable, and the note inside from the person who gave it to me offered to run errands for me so I could stay with Jean. The other was a Christmas card.

Those transported me back to when Jean was alive. I don’t know why I’m sweating and having such a horrible hotflash. I didn’t sleep worth shit last night, and I haven’t eaten a meal in… coming up on two days, just some nutri-grain bars. I’m experimenting with how long I can go without eating something substantive. I ate the nutri-grains to bring down a hunger spike. Fasting, of sorts, I guess, for the spiritual experience, hoping to have one. Maybe just because I’m curious how long I can mentally ignore physical hunger. I don’t feel it all…

But there I was again, with Jean alive and on the path of a death more imminent than I ever could have imagined. Do you know how stunning that is for me to understand? I could not even imagine what was going to happen, and I have the best imagination of anyone I know. That scenario, of the thousands or maybe millions that I ran through my mind, was never in there. Dead three weeks after Thanksgiving. My last picture of her from the Thanksgiving meal.

All that I can do now is WISH that I could go back to that Wednesday before she died, when she still knew who I was, when she received and transmitted love perfectly.

I’ve been pretty comfortable with my position alone in the house for the last week. I haven’t cried since… Saturday. I guess that’s not too long, come to think of it. It feels like a lot longer. I still see her sometimes in the hospice bed in that room when I’m lying on the actual bed. I say goodnight to her, and that I miss her.

Why am I not sleeping well? I had been sleeping so very very well.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn