Moving Right Along

All Good Things Must End

Hello dear friends and family of The Artist Formerly Known as Sara.

I wanted to let you know of some important changes that are going on over the next couple of months.  You are all aware that since Sara passed I appropriated, without prior permission, her blog as a place to connect with you all and share what grief I needed to, and I thank you all for the opportunity.  Still, the blog is overall her opus, and it should be preserved as such.   In addition I am paying Typepad fees I'd rather not be paying them for. 

I considered exporting the web site, and importing into a locally hosted WordPress blog, but it is notoriously difficult to export pages from TypePad in a way that preserves the functions and features of a blog.  The more I thought about it the more I realized that I don't need to preserve her work as a blog, but that preserving her work as static pages would work just as well, but it would be much cheaper and easier. 

So, I have begun to do just this.  I have made complete complete copies of her blog and website already.  Over the next two months I will send her sister copies of all Sara's digital work, rehosting the blog pages somewhere else, possibly through her website and shut this blog down.  You will still be able to find her words, pictures and recipes but all interactive items (i.e. comments) will no longer work. 

I am open to suggestions and ideas, so if you have any, please let me know.   After I send her sister CD ROM copies to be the off site backups I will continue to move forward. 

So, if you have any ideas, May is the month to share them!

My Sara

This is how I will try to remember you, always.

Much is Easier, Nothing is Better

This is what I say to Sara when I think of her, which is often.  In another week it will have been 52 weeks since she passed.

I'm afraid I don't have much to say still.  I'm still not ready for anything approaching communal grieving, but at least I can talk to her friends and family on rare occasion without a total collapse.   There are still things I must do for her.  More donations, more jewelry to post for sale, her cookbook to preserve, her mother's pastel to hang, and making sure her sister has copies of all her digital works.

It's coming, it's coming. 

Erik

Six Months of Saturdays

On Friday nights I used to try to play video games or watch TV until I'm too exhausted to stay up a moment longer I try to avoid the inevitable, to sleep through the waves of grief that will hit me come morning but nothing I can do will save me from another cycle on the water wheel.  Lately I've learned that it is actually easier to grieve when you are not also exhausted, so I've given in. 

In my heart's memory every Saturday begins the same way.  At 7 AM Sara is in pain, and I spend the morning running from pharmacy to pharmacy to get her the prescriptions the doctor orders.

No amount of drugs or rearrangement of the bed seem to help her feel comfortable.  By 5 PM she's having trouble breathing, I am opening windows, cleaning fans and putting them in.  At 6 PM she's in too much trouble and I can't help her, so I call the paramedics.  They arrive in 15 minutes.  I have copies of the DNR and Health Care Proxy ready, along with a list of drugs she's taken.   They put her on an oxygen tank and put her in an upright chair to carry her out of her bed, and down the stairs.  I know this is the very last time my sweetie will be in the house with me.   I break down and cry, but still I realize I need to take the car or I won't have transportation back. 

They take her into the ER.  Two doctors look at her, she needs water desperately, she's barely got the strength to tell them I'm in charge when they ask.  A nurse comes to tell me how she's going to die.  That after she's gone she'll still breathe, her face will tense, and she'll gasp for air.   A paramedic comes in to take blood tests.  I decline, sobbing, there's not a damn thing they can do for her.   She looks at me in between thrashing to try to breathe and get more air into her lungs, and says just once in between mutual affirmations of love: "I'm so sorry."

At 7PM they find her a private room.  Nurses who have taken care of her before and met Lynne and I are there to take care of her.  She's thrashing.   Around 7:10 she calls my name  out once, and she's gone.   I am not sure, though so I run to the car, I need the phone, and come back, the nurses are all around, they look at me with sorrow and tell me she's really gone.  In a way I'm glad.  I've been watching a horror movie.  Imagine watching the one person in your life who ever loved you get eaten alive by some strange alien creature for the past two years.  I am glad for her.  I am glad she cannot feel pain, and I feel incredibly guilty at the selfish insensitive bastard I've become when I realized how our life together would end, and as I took care of her, and how happy that bastard is that the vomiting, the midnight thrashing, the wasting away of the most beautiful creature in my life has stopped. 

These are my Saturdays.  Today marks 6 months of them.   I hate them, I despise them and I fear them more than any of you could possibly know.  I am still angry at those who had knee-jerk reactions of sharing more of her with me without asking me and yet, I can't offer those who did everything right anything better, which is to say my anger and hatred and desperation at the entire fucking ordeal.  My bile at the patients in England who are living longer with melanoma thanks to new tumor shrinking medicines.  I would sacrifice them, their children and pets if it would give me another good month with my Sara, knowing it would assuage the incredible guilt I feel now at not being more able to share in everything she was going through, the pain, the love or the courage or loneliness she was experiencing.    This guilt is literally killing me and I hold it at bay only thanks to small selfish spurts of exhaustion. 

I put this all now to explain to all of you that I withdraw not because you are not interesting enough, or too inconvenient to reach or that I'm so rich with friends that I don't have time for you, or that you did not do enough.  In all cases the opposite is true.  I am truly and completely utterly alone, and this is as much for your sake as it is for my own.  There is nothing so good in my life that it can mask or cover this up, no memory I can post in shared humor or melancholy with you that is any less obscene in it's despair, and I am too tired to hide it anymore or warn people off with gentle, socially acceptable hints to be misinterpreted later.  This is all I have to share with you. 

Be well, be merry, and understand there is nothing more positive within me I can offer you in your own grief than my absence.

The Utility of "Bitch"

Bloggers more well read than I have written about the use of the word "bitch."  But usually they are interested in how the label supresses the power of women in society.  

Some feminists have taken ownership of the word, even going so far to treat it as an anagram such as: Beauty In Total Control of Herself.  Neuropsychologists have published papers written on how curses are unknowingly used by us to activate the amigdala of the recipient, and in so far as this information helps us better understand ourselves, I applaud them.   Unfortunately, this posting, this hijackign of Sara's blog, has no such purpose. 

Instead, I want to celebrate the utility of the word.  Have you ever known or dated a total bitch?  Could you imagine how long it would take you to describe this person to some one else if you couldn't use that word?  How many times have you started an apology by saying "I'm sorry I was a bitch to you last night.... "

What made me think of this?  Spanish has no truly equivalent word.  "Puta" is a whore, while the literal translation "perra" (female dog) when used to describe a person really is closer to "whore" than "bitch".  "Bruja" (witch) is closer, but still, it's more like "crazy bitch." 

So, with all of it's flaws, with all of it's misuses, take a moment, and be grateful we have "bitch" to shorten our conversations and give us more time free to do things other than talk about the bitches we've known.

Thank you.