Casimir Pulaski Day 2022

At work today, I started talking about losing Jenny with a union rep with whom I had just completed a bargaining over in-office minimums. Coming out of the holidays and with Jenny's birthday next week, she has been more on my mind than I care to admit. 

My sorrow is back, and I thought I had banished it to a small closet in the basement. I am so sad. So very sad. I miss Jenny. I grieve over the terrible pain she suffered through. No human should endure such agony or suffer for so long. I feel like talking about it today was like the time I pulled a band-aid off my skinned knee as a kid, taking the scab with it and reopening a heretofore healing wound. 

I drove home wishing I could call her, wishing we could talk one more time. The day my best friend Corey died (we had been in a fight over some rather choice things I said to his girlfriend), he stopped by my house and we made up. We hugged, and he left to go swimming. He made his way across the gorge, slipped and his life was swept away. But, we had completed the circle. The pain I felt then over his loss was something I couldn't have explained or expected. However, because we had resolved this thing between us, it wasn't as terrible as it could have been. I can never have that here. I don't think there was ever a time, from the time the affair was known about, that we could have repaired anything. But, the guilt I feel, the terrible sense that there was something broken that should have been fixed, remains. It isn't logical, I know. I did everything I could to care for her, to make her life easier to the best of my ability, and to the maximum tolerance level without breaking. I nonetheless am deeply troubled by the idea that she died with all of this stuff hanging out.

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 1.14.2023 5:11 a.m.

I woke just before 5, the word alchemist stuck in my head, a word I couldn't find last night despite a desperate search. March 3, is fast approaching, the day we lost Jenny. It happens that March 3 is right around Casimir Pulaski Day in Illinois and Wisconsin. I bought the Sufjan Stevens album Come on Feel the Illinoise when it was released, but somehow didn't listen to it enough to appreciate his brilliance or to remember Casimir Pulaski Day. As Jenny was dying, I stumbled across a cover of Casimir and it spoke to me and was on heavy rotation for weeks. The painful feeling of loss, the sense of reviewing all that happened leading up to the death of a lover from cancer, the search for meaning in life, the struggle with loss, remembering moments of joy, the pain and suffering of others around the dyad. It's all there. There is something almost reverent that comes through.

I am wracked with sorrow in the early morning darkness. I am thinking about how much the children Jenny taught loved her, the outpouring of love she received from them on a routine basis, the loving things they said to her when she was sick. I lost my music teacher in 8th grade. I loved the gentle soul. I didn't know a thing about him, but had spent 30 minutes each week with him since 4th grade. I was crushed at his leaving. Jenny's connections to her children were much deeper than mine to my music teacher. She changed lives. She saved lives. She gave children hope and reasons to believe they could be successful. She changed the lives of families whose children had prior to working with Jenny, been written off by the school district. I saw it. I remember it. I know. Meanwhile, I excel at firing people.

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I am not ambivalent about Jenny. I am mad at her, crushed by her leaving me even while she lay in the same bed with me, leaving it to me to discover her deceit, dissembling and devaluing of our marriage. I love her fiercely, in a once in a lifetime love kind of way. I still believe, even absent the betrayal we would have divorced after Abby graduated high school, because I believed the marriage was a wreck, although not in the state of shambles as it turned out it was.  Almost a year out, and despite the love for her and the overwhelming feelings of loss, I carry with me this anger over 19 months of madness, 19 months of sheer disregard and desertion of her children, abetted by people who purported to care about the family (or perhaps only the children). I don't present as bitter, and would like to say I am not bitter. I won't lie to myself, however. I am bitter at my own failings, the part I played in this tragedy written into the lives of two innocent children who deserved nothing of this madness. If I could just turn off this painful existence without creating more pain. . .