For the past couple of days I have been suffering with the onset of a head cold. A faint cough began Tuesday afternoon and evening as post-nasal drip hailed the start of ten days of sheer joy. I managed to get through the work day yesterday, but only just. Once I was home I collapsed on the bed for a two hour nap, followed by a bowl of chicken noodle soup. (Note to self: next time make sure you buy regular chicken noodle soup, not the creamy kind.)
After dinner I was up for a couple of hours, and even managed to clean the pile of dishes in the sink. However, after a short hot bath to relax I was back in bed by 8:30 pm. The sinus pressure in my head was enough that every tooth in my upper jaw felt like it was abscessed. Four Motrin and a Sudafed later I was able to get to sleep. This morning I felt considerably better, enough so that I came into work. I may run out of gas before the day is through but I am upright at least.
The hardest part about all of this, especially when my jaw was so sore last night, was being alone. When you are married or have a loving partner there is someone there to fetch kleenex or make soup, and you don’t have to try and think through the fog of drugs and illness about what needs to be done. I missed Michele terribly all evening until about 10:00 when I was in so much pain that I started crying and said out loud that I needed her, that I didn’t want to be alone. Within seconds, Nekko (who was really Michele’s cat), was on the bed laying right beside me purring loudly. Whenever Michele was upset Nekko always came to here as if to comfort her. Having her appear just when I needed Michele the most was incredible. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone, and the pain in my head was less, and I was able to sleep.
Sometimes the enormity of Michele’s death hits me particularly hard. The very idea of death is so hard to wrap your mind around that, when coupled with the death of your life’s love, you really can’t grasp it all. Or even begin to understand it all.
The only analogy I can find is the fable about the blind men in a room with an elephant where each man describes a different animal for he only examined part of the whole. Experiencing grief is like that as well. Your mind can’t accept or process it all at once, so you move through grief in bits and pieces, only rarely catching faint glimpses of the whole. My memories of my sister’s death and my reaction to it are naturally jaded now. Thirty-three years of life experience will warp any memory to its will. But I do remember not being able to understand or comprehend what had happened. Certainly the coping skills and thought processes of a twelve-year old are ill suited for something as momentous and shattering as the death of a sibling in childhood.
It turns out that the coping skills and defense mechanisms of an adult aren’t much better at making sense of death either. Or rather sense of the aftermath death creates. I understand intellectually that Michele is gone. She killed herself deliberately. I found her, and I saw her dead. There is no doubt that she is gone from this lifetime forever. This intellectual fact doesn’t fit into any place of recognition in my mind however. There are still times when I turn around thinking she’ll be there smiling, or holding one of the cats. I expect my cellphone to ring and to hear her voice in my ear. These phantoms created by my mind’s need to be with her still, only create situations where I relive to some degree the pain of losing her all over again.
Perhaps the mind is protecting itself by only examining the grief and the enormity of death piecemeal. If death were the elephant and my mind a blind man examining it, then I would only be able to explore a bit at a time. “Seeing” the whole elephant at once isn’t possible. Trying to take it all in at once would likely shatter my bond with reality. Understanding this process and accepting are two different things entirely. Cycling back again and again to certain aspects of our relationship, her death, and the aftermath I’m sifting through is brutally difficult. Like pulling a bandage off I want to do it swiftly so as to get it over with, not start and stop and hesitate.
And so as I wander through the rooms in my head where Michele still lives, and I reconcile those memories with the reality of her being dead, I very much feel like a blind man desperately trying to figure out the nature of the enormous creature with which I am confronted. The trick, I think, is to examine enough to satisfy and then move on; for trying to understand the whole elephant would take more than a lifetime, and at the end of my life, my death will answer the questions I so desperately want answered now.
Patience, grasshopper.
For the past two years I have been a daily user of Google’s GMail service. I was never impressed with Microsoft Hotmail and I have a strong dislike for Yahoo’s invasion-ware tactics when you install their chat client, so I was pleased to discover a simple, easy to use, and very slick web-based mail tool. (I have invitations if anyone would like.)
When Google introduced their homepage I immediately set one up for myself and it has been my starting point ever since. So when I learned a few weeks ago that Google was developing a web-based calendar I couldn’t wait to try it. As of an hour ago my patience was rewarded. My daily visit to TechCrunch paid off as the lead story was about the launch of Goolge’s Calendar beta.
My initial impression is a good one. I was able to successfully import all my iCal ics files (something Mozilla’s Sunbird and OSAF’s Chandlerhave consistently failed to accomplish) although I haven’t been able to create separate calendars yet.
Google Calendar
For several weeks now my broadband cable connection has been somewhat flaky. I first noticed that it was dropping the signal perhaps a month ago, and at that time unplugging the modem and plugging it back in seemed to clear up the problem. Two weekends ago it dropped on a Friday evening and no amount of resetting seemed to work. From past experience I know to unplug the router and modem, as well as the cable itself for a period of thirty or so seconds. Even this method of resetting things didn’t clear up the problem. Hooking up the cable before powering on the modem and waiting for the sync light to be solid was fruitless; the sync light would blink faster and then slower but never became a solid connection.
I called Road Runner and they were able to determine that it might be a problem on the line. The first appointment time available was the following Monday morning. However, by Saturday afternoon my connection was up and working again. So first thing Monday morning I called can canceled the service call. A couple of times since then it has been flaky, but immediately reconnected. Last evening it dropped and again refused to reconnect. This time when I called Road Runner they hinted that it might be my modem. The technician said that she was getting a “weak signal” that might indicate a problem with my equipment. I went ahead and scheduled a service call for this afternoon (“Can you be there between 2:00 and 5:00 pm?”) just to eliminate line problems before buying a new modem.
The Linksys cable modem is five years old, maybe older, as we acquired it in South Carolina in the fall of 1999 or early winter of 2000. I suppose it could be going bad, it has been in almost continuous use ever since being purchased. It is a supreme pain in the ass to have to take time to be at home waiting, but I am not going to continue to suffer a flaky broadband connection
Turns out my cable modem was going bad. The technician came and tested the signal strength in my apartment and declared it “perfect.” (He said a range of +15 to -15 was acceptable, but that -3 is where you wanted to register. Mine signal is a -6.) He did swap the final three feet of cable (from the wall outlet to the modem) with a high quality one so that when he left everything was working.
Within twenty minutes the signal was dropped again. So I went off to get a new modem. Thanks to a friend at work I tried the Road Runner office first and was able to get one for free (it’s included in the monthly charge) which save me from spending $70 or so at the computer store.
After coming home and getting everything installed I was faced with another problem. The ThinkPad would wirelessly connect, but neither Mac would. I ran Network Stumbler on the ThinkPad and discovered that several of my neighbors are running WiFi hotspots all on channel 11. So I switched mine to channel 6 and now everything connects just fine. A quick reset of the Lexmark and Tivo to get them connected again and I am once again up and running.
Next project: converting to fixed IP addressing so that each device maintains the same address through reboots, and recycles of the router. I do enough machine to machine stuff that I would be nice not to have to look up the target IP address all the time.
In eighth grade metal shop class one of our projects was to make a zinc-carbon battery and a wound field DC electric motor. The battery kit contained a tube and the end caps, as well as the paste that filled the battery. My best friend’s battery kit was damaged so we used his paste and mine to fill one tube. Our battery clocked in at an impressive 2 volts or so, whereas the regular kit only yielded 1.5 volts.
The motor kit contained the armature, with an axle and stand, and some copper wire to produce the windings. Having succeeded with our combined battery we took the time to carefully wind as much copper wire around each arm of the motor as carefully as possible, tucking the coils in tightly and uniformly. Naturally this resulted in a better electromagnetic field, and our motor really hummed when coupled to the battery made earlier.
I seem to remember something about electric motors needing a load or they would burn up; without a load they just spin faster and faster. In the past few weeks I have started to feel a little bit less like an unloaded electric motor. Either I am managing to get the right amount of load to keep my emotions and mental processes in check, or I am getting used to the free spinning, unloaded condition of grief.
Certainly some of the physical symptoms of grief are fading. The incredibly tense, painful tightness in my neck and shoulders has dissipated. My sleeping pattern is gradually returning to normal, although I still have nights where I can’t get to sleep as easily as I’d like. Finally my appetite seems to be returning, although my general ennui makes it difficult to prepare meals at times. Even though I am taking pains to prepare for my mother’s death I am not looking forward to the return of these symptoms. As Michele always used to say, it isn’t being at rock bottom that hardest; hardest is when you managed to claw your way back up off the bottom only to get knocked down again.
The impending loss of my mother will certainly knock me back down the slope. The trick will be how far and for how long.
Over the weekend I traveled to Chicago to see a holy union ceremony between one of my oldest friends and his partner. Quite simply it was a beautiful service performed in an atmosphere of love, acceptance, and understanding. Normally I am not a church going person; the rote rituals and dogmatic following of traditions don’t interest me. However, I would make an exception for the Broadway United Methodist Church of Chicago. The air of inclusion and acceptance there was palpable. The ministers and congregation didn’t just give lip service to these ideals, they lived them. It was a place that Michele would have dearly loved and appreciated. Were we to ever live close enough to attend regularly she would have wanted to join.
Going to such a life affirming celebration was surprisingly difficult. I hadn’t consciously prepared myself for the pang of grief that came over me midway through the ceremony. I was crying because I missed Michele, and because she missed J’s wedding day. And I was crying because seeing the love shared by the two J’s reminded me that my life’s love is gone. A part of me wonders whether I’ll ever be so fortunate as to be in a deeply loving and caring relationship like that again.
With the slow passage of time I am growing more accepting of my new position in life. Moreover I am increasingly accepting of the fact that I will have to move on from the place where I am at currently, I cannot know what the future looks like for me, and I am not yet done mourning the loss of the future I had envisioned for Michele and myself, but I can accept that the shadows of my grief are slowly being replaced by the dawning sunlight of a new lease on life.
Since learning of my mother’s terminal condition almost two months ago, the amount of contact I have with my parents, in person and on the phone, has naturally increased. Even having just seen her last Friday I am already contemplating my next visit. Not knowing when the last visit will happen, but knowing that it is inevitable has given me a certain motivation.
Our visit last week was more poignant than the previous one in March. I had a chance to sit and talk to my mom, and we shared some tears. I have worked hard at saying to her the things I need to say so when her time comes I’m not left with regrets forever. I don’t know that I would have a premonition or not, but I didn’t feel like this weekend was the last time I’ll see mom alive.
My social calendar has some upcoming events on it, making the next trip to Illinois possible in two weeks, or in four weeks. The four week date will coincide with my 45th birthday. I have all sorts of mixed feelings about that weekend. On the one hand I am wanting to be selfish and keep that day for me. I am going to miss terribly the special little things Michele always did in the past on “my” day. Not having her around this year will be tough. However, I would have a hard time forgiving myself if I stayed away that weekend and didn’t see my mom alive again. Having just spent the last three days driving to central Illinois, then Chicago, and back, I am not keen on making another trip in just two weeks. My plan is to talk to mom and dad and gauge how she is faring before making a firm commitment, but I am thinking I’ll return to Decatur again in four weeks.
Now that I have eyes that see at two non-intersecting focal lengths I’ve discovered a neat (if strange) visual trick. Those of you without mono-vision will just have to image the effect. For the rest of you here’s how to see your very own 3D images without the colored paper glasses.
Cool. Strange, but cool.
What I think is happening is that my brain is seeing both the in focus background from the distance eye, and the in focus hand from the near eye and overlaying the two images. When I was a child I was fascinated by an optical illusion using a cardboard paper towel or toilet paper tube. Put the tube in front of one eye and your hand against the tube, in front of the other eye. With both eyes open it will appear like there is a hole in your hand. Your brain is overlaying the two images.
My little 3D trick is like that, only without the tube.
Tomorrow it will have been two weeks since I underwent LASIK eye surgery to correct my vision. My patience (never something I possess in abundance) is all but gone. I am not able to see with out squinting, or sitting 5 inches away from what I trying to do. Driving at night is surreal and awful - there are halos around all the lights and I have a hard time focusing my attention on just the road. I will admit that I am terrified that I have made a huge mistake and that I’ll end up regretting this for the rest of my life. My fear is that I am going to need glasses in order to see past the alterations that don’t seem to be helping me see yet.
The literature is very vague about healing times and what to expect when. I understand that it could take a month or more for the cornea to fully heal, and that my vision might fluctuate for up to six months, maybe longer. Reconciling that understanding with a daily struggle to simply see to read the computer or watch television is frustrating and wearing me down. I had thought that doing something good for me, something that would eliminate the frustrations I had with bifocals, was a good idea. More and more I am thinking that stacking the need for patience and acceptance on top of my current emotional load might have been really stupid.
At present I can see a slightly out of focus and strangely luminescent image beyond arms reach with my left eye. Text on the screen is manageable, but not in focus. Unless this improves in the coming weeks and months I will need a corrective lens in order to see clearly. Between two and eight inches I am able to see quite clearly; unfortunately leaning into the computer screen to see with my right eye for eight or ten or twelve hours a day is killing my back. So my choice is comfortable seating position, out-of-focus headache producing sight, or in focus, back killing posture sight.
I am not at all happy about this, but I am resigned to my fate. Hopefully in three or six or twelve months I’ll be writing a new posting retracting all of this fear and upset.
Oh, and just to rub salt in this particular self inflicted wound, the first monthly payment statement arrived in the mail yesterday.