Opening the other door

I've been feeling a great surge of energy with the coming of Spring. Even the advent of miserable allergies can't dent that feeling of wanting to and being able to move forward.

One of the things that's changed is that I'm participating in one secret and one closed group on Facebook. The secret group is related to the grief writing course I'm taking. The other is an accountability group for writers, where we each check in each day to talk about whether we've met our goals for that day.

Both of them have gotten me writing again, and focused on my writing projects again. After the depression and grief of the winter, after being trapped in those dark feelings, the feeling of openness I'm living with now is an amazing relief.

One other thing that's changed is that I just finished an amazing blogging course, which has inspired me to try and breathe new life into this blog. I know I'll never be an every day blogger, but I'd like to write more here, so that's my goal.

Let's see how I do, now that the other door is open.

Moving on

Today, I sent back the paperwork in which I accept the voluntary buyout that was offered at work.

This means that come the middle of April, I'll be unemployed for the first time since I was laid off in 2001, which led me to the job I'm leaving.

It's a big scary thing to walk away from a job with nothing lined up. But I know this is the right thing for me to do, even as scary as it is.

My life has been out of balance since the end of 2013, when we made the decision to try to find a clinical trial for Jay. I need to find my own balance now, without him and without this job that I long ago lost my joy for.

I'm still in the process of updating my resume and my LinkedIn, but very soon I'll be actively looking for local employment.

I'm hoping for a little bit of time off between leaving my current job and finding a new one, but not so much that I start to get panicky about money.

This change means I'm not going to get do to a lot of things I was hoping to do this year, like buying a convertible, and doing a lot of travel. I'm going to be in the position of having a lot of time and no spare money.

Let's see what I can do with all that time ...

I never thought that life would find me laughing with the pale moon

I know I've been quiet here.  So here's a little catch-up catch-all ramble of a post, a little bit of everything.

I stopped doing my tracker posts because I was bored with them, and have been keeping track of those things privately.

My exercise program has gone to hell, but that's mostly because I've been spending very little time at home, and haven't yet quite figured out how to keep up with it where I've been staying.

Jay didn't have cable, and I don't either, so in all the time I've been in Portland up til now, I've spent almost zero time watching local news. I've seen so little local news that now that I'm getting to see it once in a while, I realize that my brain still expects to see Baltimore-related news. It was a profoundly surreal moment when that finally sunk in.

And Portland weather reports? Let's just say I've never seen anything as complicated as the weather we have here. There are so many zones and areas and whatnot. I wonder if the local meteorologists have to go through special training just to be able to talk sensibly about our weather.

I'm in the new- to early-settling-in stages of a relationship. I've been reluctant to talk about it, because the last time I talked about love, it fell apart in my hands. So here's fair warning that you may never hear about it again, and you probably won't know if that's because I'm being cautious or if it's over.

I feel like I've lost something of myself in losing Jay. I listen to recordings of conversations between me and Jay and friends, and wonder who that clever, funny woman with my voice is. I miss her, I miss being her.

I've been starting to think more seriously about where I want to move in Portland when my lease is up at the beginning of June. As much as I really really don't want to pack and move again, I know that living in Jay's house is not a viable long-term solution. I'm glad for the year I will have had here; it will have been a good transition for me from being with Jay to being here on my own.  But I need to move on, to shake things up again, so I don't root here where I'm not entirely comfortable being.

Recent events have taught me how easily I get hung up on not-knowing. This discovery is driving me a little bit crazy, as is the realization that I can't quite close the door completely.

The upcoming New Year has got me thinking about grief again. This will be my first New Year's Day since Jay died. That feels like it ought to be profound, but I'm not sure it is. We'll see how I feel on the day, especially since it will also be the 7 month anniversary of his death.

Life goes on.

Knowing the name of the portal

I finally figured out which portal I walked through recently.

I'm starting to move on.

It feels profoundly wrong to be doing this so soon after Jay's death. I apologize every day to the pictures of him on my dresser. Even though I know it's what he would have wanted for me, I feel guilty.

But the process has begun. I set my relationship status to single on OKCupid (and then went on a fantastic first date). I haven't quite yet felt the need to change my relationship status on Facebook, but then all my friends there know me and know what I'm going through, and the truth is I am still in a complicated relationship with Jay.

As I said to a friend at lunch yesterday, in my heart of hearts, I'm still waiting for Jay to come back. But knowing how my life works, as long as I'm waiting for him to come back, he won't - but the moment I stop waiting, he will.

I know that sounds crazy, but that's how my bargaining/denial/disbelief is expressing itself these days.

All the usual disclaimers apply, especially the one that watches for the changing of the month.

But I've taken that first big step into the rest of my life.

Leveling up? Achievement unlocked? Something like that ...

Passed through another portal since the Crater Lake trip.  I'm not quite sure what happened, but something surely has.

I'm back to a place of relative acceptance, with relatively little emotional overwhelm. I'm still sad and still grieving, but everything is less painful than it has been.

I feel stable for the first time in a long time.

I also have no illusions that this will last, but for the moment, I'm coping well.

We'll see what the next little while brings, especially as we approach the start of November.

But for now, doing pretty darn well.

It's a far cry from the world we thought we'd inherit

This weekend is tough. Bad enough that this week brought the four-month anniversary of Jay's death. But today is my two-year anniversary of moving to Portland, and I'm celebrating it alone.

That's not meant to be a sweeping dramatic statement, just a statement of fact and emotional truth.

This weekend I'm reprising the trip we took together last year to celebrate this anniversary, driving down to stay in Klamath Falls and visit Crater Lake. We were thwarted last year in actually seeing Crater Lake by the government shutdown.

So here I am this year, on my own, going to see the sights we didn't see together last year.

So much changed over the last year, and looking back over it all, I can't even begin to think where I'll be this time next year. While Jay was alive, we were living in the two-month box - the time between his scans. Right now, I'm living in the one-month box - the time between the start of months, every turning of the calendar page another stab to the heart.

But I'm starting to feel the stirring of an emotion I consciously shut down while Jay was alive and ill - I'm beginning to feel hope for the first time in a long time. I don't know hope for what yet, maybe just hope for a new life. But I can feel it beginning in tiny excited flutters, from time to time, in and around the grief.

So I mark this anniversary, knowing that this time next year, I'll be in a different place, and looking forward to seeing where I might be.

The closing walls and the ticking clocks

I unpacked my last box today.

With the arrival of my old sideboard into my dining room, I finally have the space to unpack that box so I can now figure out what combination of Jay's kitchen stuff and mine I'm going to keep.

But that got me thinking about being finally moved in, and how odd my history here has been.

I moved to Portland at the beginning of October 2012. At the time, I was staying at Jay's house, with only what I had brought in the car with me. The plan was that I would stay with him until Nancy & I found a house to rent together.

The process of finding a house took longer than we anticipated, and it wasn't until January 2013 that the POD with all my stuff from Baltimore finally got unloaded into the rental house in South Tabor.

But by that time the necessities of caregiving and the growing bond Jay & I had had complicated the living situation. Even though most of my stuff was in the rental house, I was still living essentially full time in Jay's house. I lived out of a suitcase for a long time, long after Jay had offered me closet and drawer space in his bedroom.  I finally gave in - don't ask me what took me so long, I have no idea - and unpacked my suitcase into the closet and drawer.

I generally only spent time at the rental house when Jay was out of town or when he had intimate houseguests.

Neither place really felt like home. My stuff was one place, my heart another, and neither was really home. I am a nester, and that made things difficult because the place where I was most wasn't really mine and the place I could have made comfortably mine I rarely was.

We lived in this condition until sometime in the fall of 2013, when Jay officially asked me to move in with him. At the time, I think my plan was to keep the rental house and just move the stuff I needed into Jay's house. This morphed over time into Emily helping me discard stuff and pack up the rest during one break from the clinical trial ordeal, and then my dear friends moving my stuff into Jay's house while we were in Maryland in March or April 2014.

The hope was that we would come home from Maryland in April and that Jay would be well enough that we could together integrate me into what would then be our home.  Obviously, that never occurred.

So now I'm all moved in to what is now just the house I'm renting and also the place where Jay's life ended and his stuff still remains.

I'm left starting my life over in the ashes of his life. I'm essentially curating the rest of his life in this place I'm trying to make my home. It's tough and only occasionally rewarding. I often wonder if I've made a mistake staying in this house. But some of that doubt is just exhaustion from this, my third restart of my life since 2011.

Down a winding garden path

One of the things I've been dealing with since Jay's death is my issues around food.

If I really want to keep my addiction recovery program going strong, I need to cook more. If I want to keep my budget in good shape, I need to cook more. Are we sensing a theme?

And yet, I've been finding myself really disinterested in cooking. Mostly because I can't find things that I want to eat that I can cook.

I found what I hope will be the solution while reading Jay's blog.

Stay with me here - there's a connection, I promise.

I'm in the process of making my third pass through Jay's LJ. The first time, I read through his posts since we met; the second time, I read each day's posts from the beginning of his LJ. This time I am reading each individual post as well as all the comments.

Somewhere as I was reading through his March 2008 posts, it occurred to me to wonder what *I* had been blogging about at the same time. So I wandered over to my now defunct and locked-down original blog and took a look. (That was a fascinating exercise all on its own.)

One of the things I discovered was that for a while in 2008, I posted weekly menus. I was trying to get a handle on what I was eating and trying to learn how to do menu planning, so just like I post my daily trackers now, I was posting weekly menus and talking a little bit about how the previous week went.

Being the good indexer that I am, I even tagged all those posts as "menus".

And there was the answer to my "what the hell am I going to cook" dilemma - I printed out all those menus posts, and marked them up.  I'm going to compile a list of meals and probably keep them in Evernote, since everything in my universe is tucked away in Evernote. That will help me plan my week's food better, and get me back into the habit of going grocery shopping every weekend and spending time cooking ahead. (I don't think I'll ever completely break my habit of eating planned leftovers.)

So to celebrate this momentous occasion, and since so many of the things I used to make were based on things from Trader Joe's, I went and bought a whole bunch of TJ's food. My freezer is now nearly full, which is such a good feeling.

Now my mind must go on holiday, torn from its hook, a broken valentine

Three months on

Here we are, three months after Jay's death.

The past week brought a lot of changes and subtle movement in what I hope is a positive direction.

I quit therapy.  I had a month off from it between my schedule and my therapist's vacation, and when I started thinking about going back, I started getting anxious. So I thought about that for a little while, then said to myself: what if I quit? Then I thought about that for a little while, and decided it was the right thing to do.

That decision propelled me into a couple of other movements forward.

I'm doing the Artist's Way again, mostly focusing on doing morning pages. I've done this before, two or three times, but I think I'm finally to the place where they will do me some good. And maybe I'll finally break through the block that's been holding me back.

I also went on a date this week for the first time since Jay died. (For anyone who doesn't already know, Jay & I were non-monogamous; he would have been quite happy had I been dating throughout our relationship, which I did a bit of. So this is not quite as weird as it may seem.) I'd been dithering around on OKCupid for a while, and someone found me who I didn't want to resist. It was lovely, and a little odd emotionally, and I hope for more of the lovely, if this thing takes off.

One kind-of tough thing this week: a doctor's appointment, which was fine, but it was the first time I'd been back to where Jay was treated in Portland since his last trip. It was harder than I anticipated.

But this three-months-since thing ... my heart is really tender right now. I'm back in that place where everything is making me tear up, like going to OHSU to see my doctor, who was also Jay's doctor. And I'm also in a place where I am beginning to understand that this is my normal-for-now, and where I am beginning to accept that it's OK and livable.

Harder for me is the psychological reality that I'm still waiting for Jay to come home from whatever trip he's on.  The disbelief that he's truly gone is pervasive and deep, and I think this, too, is just part of my normal-for-now.

But I did have a sweetly tender Jay moment this week: as I was dithering around trying to decide what to wear on my date, I could hear Jay's laughter in my head. To the point where I started laughing and said out loud, "Shut up!" in that way that we always did when one of us lovingly hit on a sore point. And when I got home, I told him all about it.

I miss him so terribly. That will never change either, I don't think.

Find the ashes here and there

There's been a lot of change around here this week.

Saturday brought a swap of dining room tables. I wanted mine back from Nancy (but was too shy to ask for it directly), and we discovered that Jay's would fit in Nancy's dining room if the leaf was removed. So, a swap was made.

I tried to find a picture of Jay's table in situ, but was unsuccessful.  It's almost impossible to search his Flickr for anything useful.  But here's a shot of the new table:

It fits perfectly in the space, much better than the old table did.

Sunday brought the purchase and delivery of a new sofa.  It was a bit of a struggle getting a sofa out of a flat-pack box and birthing it into something that could be comfortably sat upon, but I got it all together.

And here's a shot of the old sofa:

And the new one:

More and more the place feels like mine, but I'm afraid Jay's getting lost in the shuffle.  I'm trying to figure out ways to keep his energy in the house without feeling overwhelmed by it.

I'll figure it out eventually.