As hard as it is to imagine, I am actually lower today than I’ve been in the two months since Michele died. The threat of losing my job in a month has taken the one “stable” part of my life and, not only made it unstable, but made it the biggest threat I’m facing. Most days I have a hard time getting up and facing the day, now I have to find the desire to search for, interview and evaluate, and select a new client/employer/engagement?
I don’t know how to do that. I mean I know how the process works, but I don’t have any desire to even think about the steps. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been coasting along, pleased with having successfully navigated Thanksgiving, and giving myself a break before facing Michele’s birthday and Christmas. Now I have to add to the stress of those events the stress of finding a new contract.
They say you shouldn’t make major decisions when you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. HALT. Well, I am angry (about two things now), as tired as I’ve ever been, and lonelier than I thought possible. And now I have to choose a new employment engagement. And choosing wrong means I’ll get to do it again soon.
I want so badly to talk to Michele tonight. I want to talk to her all the time, but I really miss her wisdom and counsel when the shit hits the fan like it did yesterday. She was so good at giving me a place to vent all the frustrations, hurts, and madness that comes from being blind sided. And about goading me until I was truly done with my venting. Then she was able to help me see alternatives and strategies for moving forward. I feel very helpless without the safe place to fall or the wise counsel.
My attitude tonight is one of “I don’t care” and that scares me a little because I know with the emotional period around her birthday and Christmas just a couple of weeks away it is only going to get worse before it gets better. If it gets better.
This is so very hard.
Ah the nomadic life of a technology knowledge worker in the free trade market. In what is becoming an all too familiar scene in my life, I was informed today that my contract will be ending on January 12, 2006. And on a Friday too, so I can spend the entire weekend feeling helpless and out of control.
Could it get any better?
Granted I am being given a month’s notice, which is very generous, and the local market is large and, seemingly, full of opportunity. Of course the next four weeks contain two of the largest holidays of the year and represent the low-point in annual productivity in most office settings. I suspect there aren’t a lot of hiring interviews the last week of December.
My biggest concern is how to measure any potential engagement at a time in my life when deciding what to watch on television is monumentally hard. I am not myself these days, and I shouldn’t have to be, after all, Michele just died 59 days ago. I haven’t even cleaned out her side of the closet yet.
And if you should be a potential employer who stumbled on this site and wonder if it is me, I assure you it some other guy with the same name. If it is the same guy just treat this as a sarcastic blowing off of steam, the regularly scheduled professionalism normally displayed here will return shortly.
I’ve written a two month letter to Michele over on her site. I find that expressing some of what I am thinking and feeling as if I were writing to her (something I did almost daily for most of our relationship) helps me.
After first becoming aware of Shaun Inman’s latest website statistics package, called Mint in September, I have been debating about switching from Shortstat, his previous offering. The new tool costs $30 per domain and the demo movie was really too small to see much detail.
Recently however, I noticed that there was now a viewable demo site, and I saw that Mint was good. Very good. So last evening around 9:00 I took the plunge and purchased a copy for this domain. Setup is a snap: setup a MySQL database through your host provider’s web interface, plug the database connection values into the configuration file for Mint, upload the whole deal to your domain, and add a single line of JavaScript to each page you want to track. What could be simpler?
Within minutes I was already seeing traffic reported via Mint’s very slick interface and, thanks to a nifty “block my visits” cookie option, no worries about counting my hits. While some might question the use of JavaScript to trigger statistics collection is prevents referrer spam from inflating the counts artificially. Best of all there is an API for extending Mint called Pepper.
Nothing better than highly useful software with a well-developed UI, and an even better sense of humor.
There aren’t too many things I regret from the past ten years of my life. Michele and I met online on December 28, 1995 and, until her death two months ago, we were inseparable.
1996 USAKF National Karate Championships The dojo I belonged to hosted the nationals in 1996. I was at the peak of my ability then and managed to place third in kata, behind my Sensei and one other 25+ year veteran, and 6th or 7th in kumite (sparring). Michele dearly wanted to come to Illinois for the proceeding but I was reluctant. I wanted my parents there and I wasn’t prepared to introduce them to each other for fear that my parents would say or do something to drive a wedge in our relationship. Also I knew that I would have virtually no time for Michele and I didn’t want to subject her to the rigors of 16 hour days at the tournament site.
Christmas 1999 We had moved to Charleston South Carolina for my job and neither of us was happy with life in the south. My seasonal depression was particularly bad that year and I didn’t really do much for either her birthday or Christmas. I know she was disappointed. I was disappointed in myself and her acceptance of who I was at the time only made me feel worse.
Winter 2005 Virginia, her mom, was very ill, in and out of the hospital and nursing home. Michele worked for hours every day setting up services for her mom, and she also struggled daily with her decision not to travel to Manteo to be with her mom. Michele knew all to well from past experiences that being around her mom would only make the situation worse and more difficult. Still it was brutally hard for Michele to not see her mom in the final months of her life. I regret that we hadn’t made a trip east in almost two years when Virginia died in June 2005.
Financial Chaos One of my life lessons this lifetime seems to involve extreme financial chaos. More than once Michele would lament the difficulty of living with constant seemingly out of control issues with money. She would always end by saying that she knew this was part of who I am before she agreed to marry me, and that it would always be a part of me. Still it hurt me to know that the chaos that follows my money matters frightened her at a very deep level, bringing up nightmares from her childhood and her parents chaotic financial lifestyle.
Losing Our Home in Illinois While I know she was thrilled to be an Adjunct Instructor at KCKCC, and that her position there never would have come about had we not moved to Kansas, losing our home in Illinois was a huge blow to both of us. We had discovered a very comfortable rhythm to our lives, we loved the house itself, and the pool we installed was more than special to us. That we lost our home in part due to actions on my part has always bothered me. More than once I tried to sort through this with Michele and she always stopped me by saying that I had done nothing wrong, and that she didn’t hold me responsible for what unfolded in the Spring of 2004.
Her grace and acceptance knew no bounds, her compassion for everyone and everything was endless, and her quest for growth and knowledge was inspiring.
I will always measure myself against her high water mark.
Okay. It’s been nearly two months since Michele shuffled off this mortal coil and I am starting to discover a rhythm to my daily existence. For what it is worth, here is a typical evening at Chez Mark.
Normally you arrive home between 4:30 and 5:00. There are chores. Cat water to fill, kitty litter to sift and empty. Perhaps a trash can to empty followed by a brief jaunt, in the now cold evening air, to the dumpster. Dinner is next. Depending upon the emotional barometer the previous weekend there maybe leftovers for easy heat-n-eat. Or not. Cooking, and the subsequent cleanup can easily consume an hour or so. (Get it?)
By now it’s 6:00 or maybe 6:30. Several hours loom before a reasonably bedtime. This is where buying a laptop three years ago really pays off. One laptop plus a WiFi router, a comfortable couch, a throw, and two cats makes for a cozy hour or two in front of whatever the Tivo has captured. The older, larger cat adores having her ears rubbed. But only when she is on the back of the couch or easy chair and you are seated in front of her; so you have to raise your arm uncomfortably to reach, she is the cat and you are the staff after all. Stopping before she is satisfied results in the top of your head being pawed relentlessly until you start again.
The smaller cat loves to curl up on the throw and sleep. This is nice as it warms your legs where she lays, and the companionship warms your soul. Various web surfing activities ensue while Alton Brown does his mad scientist routine or Jon Stewart pillories the day’s “news.” Eventually the battery runs low in the laptop or the Tivo’s collection of tripe wears thin and thoughts of sleep start to make sense. Perhaps a chapter or two in the latest Neal Stephenson novel, or an hour of CSI on the other Tivo before yanking the plug on another day and trying to sleep.
Sleep comes easily some nights and barely at all others. There is no reliable bellwether so you have learned to accept getting up and spending another hour or two puttering around the desk until exhaustion overcomes the internal slide show keeping sleep at bay. Some nights you give in and take a Xanax to chase the twin phantoms of what if and how come away. On those nights when sleep does come easily it does so quickly, and mercifully your dreams do not intrude on your waking in the morning.
The number of people I connect with and interact with on a daily basis has only gone down by one and yet it feels as if I have no connection to anyone at all. I sit alone in this apartment staring at the walls with mindless television or movies droning on to mask the oppressive quiet. I long for the phone to ring, to bring me human contact, and then, when it does ring I can’t wait for the person to go away and leave me alone. I no longer know if I am coming or going. What once made sense now seems insane, and nothing seems normal any more.
On a daily basis I used to send Michele at least one email from work, usually something banal to let her know I’d arrived safely. We always talked on the phone during the day, sometimes several times. Not every evening was filled with conversation but there was always a recounting of our activities apart, a sharing of the other’s life that brought us closer together.
Now I rarely take the phone out of my coat pocket, some days I leave it on silent because I know it will never ring with her on the other end again. And the rule in my mail in box that caused the computer to chime when the mail was from her will be forever unused.
The connection quotient of my life has only changed by one and yet that one was more than all the others combined, more than all the others multiplied. Being alone in this apartment is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Sometimes I can’t stand the silence here and I have to go out, just to be around other people. But then I feel exposed and vulnerable and I have to come back to this place to feel safe. Only I don’t feel safe here anymore. I am totally uprooted and adrift, helpless in the currents of grief and despair.
I am alone.
This morning I screwed up my resolve and went to the credit union to have Michele taken off our joint account. To my surprise the bank officer there counseled me to wait at least six months before proceeding with her removal. As she put it, “Once her name is off the account there is no way to put it back on, and if you get something, like a tax refund, that has both names it will be extremely difficult to sort out.” At the very least she advised me to wait until after this year’s taxes were completed and any refund had been received.
I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with this piece of administrivia anyway. I can wait until May to take another run at it.
The silence in my life is the hardest thing to deal with now. Coming back to the apartment from work or the movies or dinner out is coming back to a place of silence. And in that silence all I can hear are my own fears, thoughts, questions, musings, screams, whispers, and silence.
Running a load of dishes in the washer or doing laundry adds to the mechanical background present in any urban setting. The white noise of a fan or the furnace blower isn’t loud enough to block out the thunderous silence here either. At best I am able to distract myself from the silence by immersing myself in a book or television show, perhaps some music or talking out loud to myself. But I always run out of sounds and lose momentum, coming to a halt on silence again.
For the first few weeks of this prison I kept my sanity by talking out loud to Michele at every turn. Little conversations about what to wear to work or have for dinner, giant conversations about the purpose of death and the futility of life. Over time, however, I have gradually stopped talking out loud so much. I still converse with Michele verbally from time to time, but the pain of not hearing her voice is too much to bear now.
I saw something in a movie or television show recently where one character says she can’t remember someone who is gone. The other character says you have to put a context around the memory or it won’t work. Oddly enough this is true. Every night that we went to bed at that same time we had a ritual around how we said good night. I still say my part out loud in the dark just before I go to sleep. And in my ears I faintly hear Michele respond. Other times when I try to conjure up her voice I can’t hear it any more.
So the context of being alone is preventing me from connecting with my memories of our life together and all I am left with is silence. Life goes on whether we want it to or not. The inexorable forward movement of time is slowly carrying me away from the context of being her husband, of being her best friend, of being with her. A part of me will always be these things and more. A part of her will live on inside of me until I die. But my life continues to move away from our life. It is simultaneously poignant and heart breaking. I know intellectually that this is how life works, but emotionally I don’t want to accept the hand that fate has dealt me.
So I sit in silence that is a raging tempest of sound and fury. And I rage and scream in the middle of a seemingly endless silence.
I’ve picked up the first book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver for the second time this week, to read. As with his earlier Cryptomonicon I’ve had to take two running starts at the book to get rolling in it. I believe it was more than a year after I purchased Cryptomonicon before I started it the second time and finished it. Now it easily ranks as one of my top ten all time favorite books, and depending on what I’ve read recently, it hovers around the number one spot. The receipt being used as my bookmark indicates that I’ve had this copy of Quicksilver since October 3, 2003; hopefully like fine wine it has aged well on my shelf.
The Baroque Cycle is daunting in just sheer number of pages: 2,618 by my count. And I’m all the way up to 50. A least I have all three volumes here and ready, so that I can continue the story without interruption. Of course more pages is good - this story should last me the rest of the year and maybe beyond.