Beyond the missing of you …..
Beyond the not having my best friend, my teammate, my lover, my all-things-in-life go-to person ……
Beyond not having our future to look forward to, or our today to live …..
Beyond all of that, and above and in addition to all of that ….
Quite Frankly ……..
and let me be blunt ….
Your death is a pain the ass.
I am on month 2 of no income, no job (aside from a few very tiny at-home, temp work opportunities that are barely enough to cover groceries). I go back to work in September, but I don’t get a paycheck until October 1st. I lost my summer teaching job – the one I have had for years, each summer, that normally gets me through the 3 month stretch just fine until fall semester starts up again. Well, this year, and going forward, the powers-that-be decided that my courses were no longer needed in the list of required courses for graduation. So nobody signed up, resulting in the courses being cancelled. I will no longer be teaching in the summer months.
So, since about mid-May, when the spring semester ended, I have been scrambling around like a madwoman trying like hell to find work, or some source of income. My email inbox is literally filled with rejection letters and reply emails that begin: “We received your resume and application, and unfortunately, there is nothing that you are a good fit for at this time.” Which is sort of how I feel right now, in life. Like I’m not a “good fit” for anything, and I don’t know quite where I belong. The things I want to happen can’t happen right now. The things I want to pursue, I cant pursue. The things I do have feel shaky and all over the place in my brain, and the things I had that I loved, are gone and dead. After 5 years of that reality, where do I go next? Where do I fit? Where am I the “good fit” that someone or some thing is searching for? I really have no idea. But those are the bigger issues. Right now, it’s the “other” stuff that is currently pissing me off daily, and making me want to constantly scream at Don for dying, or at his heart or God or the universe or whoever or whatever force, decided that he should be dead. How dare they?
Yesterday, while smack in the middle of writing my weekly TV review, my computer went down, as did the entire Wi-Fi system. After cursing up a storm because my almost-written review was now gone, I spent over an hour playing with wires and buttons and plugging and unplugging and rebooting and on and on and on, until FINALLY, I got everything working again. Turns out the power cord was bad, so I had to replace it with a different one. In the end, I spent over 90 minutes in total frustration on something I know nothing about, and it ruined my mood the rest of the day. When Don was alive? It would have gone like this: “Boo, the computer just went down.” “Ah, okay. Let me see what the problem might be. Oh! There we go. Looks like a bad power cord. Let me change that for you.”
Your death is a pain in the ass.
Yesterday, I was searching around the apartment for the longest time, trying to find something that looked like it might be worth eating. Since Im nearing the end of whatever I bought on my last grocery trip, the choices are slim, and I’m not. After looking for what felt like years but was probably 20 minutes, I unenthusiastically decided on some elbow macaroni with butter and parmesan cheese. Yeah. This is basically the typical meal of my 3 year old niece, but I had nothing else, so that’s what it was going to be. Until I picked up the pot to put it in the strainer, tripped over the damn cat and dropped the pot of macaroni all over my kitchen floor. If Don were still alive, I wouldn’t be in the situation where I would be desperate enough to eat that lame excuse for a meal in the first place, therefore I wouldn’t have dropped it anywhere.
Your death is a pain in the ass.
This morning, I woke up, and proceeded to walk out into the kitchen to make some coffee and get started on my daily ritual of looking through endless job sites and emails. I noticed the refrigerator door was wide open. So Im guessing it was open all night. Why? I have no idea, other than the fact that my roommate and I live in an apartment with a crappy and old refrigerator that has weak megnetics on the door, so the slightest change in breathing might cause it not to close correctly. Washed down the door, scrubbed the inside, tried again and prayed that all our food hadn’t gone bad already. If Don were here, I wouldn’t be living in this apartment at ALL, never mind with this shitty refrigerator from the Carter adminstration. Who knows where we would be living by now together? I do know it would NOT be in weird and annoying Flushing, Queens.
Your death is a pain in the ass.
All the little things, and bigger things, that I now have to do because he is dead. Killing roaches. Killing mice, or picking up the ones that my cats leave half-dead on my bed or on the floor by our entrance-way. Dealing with the idiots on dating sites, and dealing with dating, period. Yes, there are moments when I feel joy or when it’s exciting to discover someone new and everything they bring to the table. But in the moments when it feels really hard, or where I feel like I have no idea what Im doing or if Im going to end up hurting someone or hurting myself – I just can’t help but want to scream: “I WOULDNT HAVE TO DO ANY OF THIS IF YOU WEREN’T FREAKIN’ DEAD!!!!”
Does that ever go away? That whole “Six Degrees of You Being Dead” thing? Where every single thing you do, somehow relates back to them being dead? Will there ever be a day where something goes terribly wrong in life or Im having a really awful time with something, and I DON’T immediately think: None of this would be happening if you didn’t die.
Honestly, I don’t know if that will ever happen. I don’t know if I will ever be able to seperate the two things. Life after losing my husband, and his death. Can those two things ever really be seperate? Probably not. Because one led to the other. So maybe that’s just the way it is. I don’t know anymore, and I don’t pretend to know these things. I only know this:
Your death is annoying.
Your death is a nuisance.
Your death is a pain in the ass.
