kvetching up

 Entry 1     8:18 a.m. Mornings are the worst. I sit alone crying. I ruminate on the terrible suffering Jenny endured. Job couldn't have kept the faith had he gone this. Not for more than a few days, anyway. She made it 19 months--a blessing and a curse. She was in constant discomfort, frequent pain, and psychologically riding on an uncharted sea. We were all lost. I miss her presence, smiling or glowering, chatty or sulking. I miss getting her breakfast, learning about her plans for the day. Of course, these feelings are marred because I know she woke and texted el pinchè first thing in the morning, that she lied to her friends about how I took care of her (especially around breakfast), that her morning grumpiness was contempt for me, and that the plans she set forth were either abject lies or had material omissions. This makes grieving all the more messy. The fact that Willow routinely sneaks over and drinks my coffee in the morning as I "space out" doesn't help ge...

 Entry 1    3:35 a.m. Link to draft slideshow for memorial: Click Me      

 Entry 1     8:56 a.m. Early mornings are the hardest. I wake up without the routine, the ritual. She isn't beside me, just the empty space where the hospital bed sat. I can see her dying in it, her final gasps mechanical, nothing more. Eyes shut, chest heaving every minute or so. Breathing was so intermittent, I kept believing she had died. But when it happened for real, I knew. "She's dead," I said to Leiney and Jane. We had been there with her, talking amiably.  The fish breathing, as it is called, started a day earlier. Her suffering, which had become such a part of her life, our lives, had entered the realm of the banal. Not for her, to be sure. She fought with every fiber in her being to stay alive. It only prolonged her suffering. I would rub her head and kiss her. I would whisper "its okay to let go. I love you." Her life already gone, her sentience a question mark, I just didn't want her to suffer anymore. I couldn't stand watching as the ca...

 Entry 1   1:29 p.m . Jenny told me on several occasions over the last few years, before she was diagnosed with PDAC and while  in a state of agitation, how empty she felt. Sobbing, typically prone on the bed, or in a corner of our old couch, she would tell me she was worthless. She said she was the worst person in the world, that no one was more terrible than her.; that no one had ever felt more empty. She was serious. It happened not frequently, but more than a few times. I didn't brush it off, but didn't give these statements the attention they deserved, in hindsight. She was seeing a therapist, and I urged her to tell her therapist about it. I suggested she ask about changing her antidepressant. She said no one could understand, no one could help. I don't know if she ever did talk to her therapist. She would snap out of it each time, relatively quickly. These feelings didn't stick around for more than a few hours. I simply wrote her lamentations off as evidence o...

 Entry 1    8:32 a.m. I miss Jenny and cry for her too much for my own good. I am crying as I type. I am immobilized in grief and depression. I am hoping this writing will help. Love you all.

 Entry 1     10:49 p.m. I posted this picture on FB tonight. It was taken October 11, 2011. Jenny and I were barely speaking since she had changed her mind and stayed in Washington with the kids. I was up from California, for what had become and would remain my regular weekly visit. By this time Jenny was certainly having an affair with a family friend, Jason. They started regularly having dinner 1-2x a week almost as soon as I left town. But here we are smiling, cheek to cheek. While the picture masks the strife, it is reflective of much of our lives together since 2011.  Mind you, I suspected nothing of the affair. For my eldest, who saw it up close and personally, it was different.  Leiney, when she found out about the affair with el pinche in 2020, after she stopped crying and could talk again, immediately asked me about whether Jenny had been having an affair with this guy. I asked what would make her think that? She said that each week Jenny woul...

Entry 1. May 21, 2022 The days of my children's early youth often would find me behind a camera to capture the fleeting moments of childhood, of life. I stopped really taking pictures around the time Abby was nearing high school. I dunno why. Nevertheless, now that I am digging in, trying to force myself to finish start the slideshow project, there are too many pictures to go through and not enough time. I don't know the correct strategy to find the best pictures, but I will do my best. If there is an artifact of grace in this project, it is it captures the many good times there were. From the joyous moment Abby entered the world, to the bittersweet COVID driven home graduation ceremony for Leiney, there was magic in our lives. There was love and joy. But photograph s can and do lie. For instance, there is at least one photo below that was taken in the midst of the affair. I can't prove when the affair started, but I know it started in 2018, before our month long trip to E...

5.21.2022 (Friday)   Entry 1.    4:29 p.m. Raymond Carver: I canceled my backpacking trip slated for Memorial Day. I don't want to move, let alone  leave the house. How then, could I even conceive of preparing for and then going three days over hill and dale?   I did force myself to go to therapy today, which was painful. Clinical depression coupled with grief has stripped me of any veneer. I am always on the precipice and always on edge. My therapist listens to me and asks questions and from that exercise extracts examples of emotional and psychological abuse going back as far as I can remember.  Hearing our relationship described that way is quite eye opening. While Jenny and I had drifted apart these last several years, I didn't see what now is plain as day. These little things and big things, uttered and done mostly when we were places others outside our immediate family weren't privy to, became reality for both of us. I saw the world as if she cre...

 Entry 1.    9:22 a.m. After I discovered the affair and stopped sleeping in the marital bed, Jenny would often sleep with a picture of us on her side of the bed. It was poignant, but she wouldn't stop the affair. She was dying. I felt so sad for her. Believing in her sincerity, which had long ago departed, I agonized over her sorrow. I loved her. Despite this, or perhaps because I loved her , I never gave in, never slept in the bed until she turned toward death. But, I was heartbroken and privately questioning if my resolve was cruelty. To find out as she was dying, that these emotions of hers, this sorrow and regret, were some sort of fun house kaleidoscopic mirror, less substantial than shadows of gossamer, made me feel the fool who had no limits to his guilelessness. We want to believe the people who we are with love us. To find that we can at best read tea leaves leaves me with little hope for a future of trust. That old saw, "You don't really know anyone," actua...

 Entry 1     1:11 a.m. I got an estimate for a fence.  Mind you, it wasn't for a four walled fence, just a fence at the front and a fence at the back of the house. The front would be hog wire, and would keep the dogs down below. Given the massive amount of blackberries, no fence would be needed on the south end of the yard, nor on the bottom north. I envisioned a hog wire fence up top, 5 feet in height, and a six foot chain link on the western edge (there would still be an entire space west of it larger than the groomed yard, but it is trees and again a blackberry jungle. All City's quote, cash before delivery--25k.  Now, I don't build fences, but if I did, I think the materials wouldn't run me that much, maybe a few grand. Not a lot of wood.  But, I am struggling to swallow the price. I can afford it, it just seems bonkers to lay out that kind of cash. Bonkers. I am awake, listening to all the music I have been posting since Jenny died. Some of i...

 Entry 1     7:16 p.m. Abby gems :

 Entry 1     6:42 p.m. Trying to be constructive today, I am.  I have committed to making a slideshow for Jenny's memorial. The sense that this is the detritus of 20 years of digital pictures is real.  So many photos.  I am a shutterbug. Or, I was when the kids were smaller. Here are a few snapshots of a wee Leiney: