The Weight

It’s Friday morning, the kids are off to school. I have some bookkeeping and reading to do before the guy comes to inspect our furnace/boiler/HVAC system to make sure we are ready for the upcoming heating season.

I have been getting my much needed sleep and feel sooo much better than I did when I put up my last posting. Amazing what six hours of snoring will do for a guy.

Tomorrow, J and his good friend, A, will go with me off to the Wisconsin river town of Osceola (the birthplace of my paternal grandmother, Mildred) where we will spend the day with a thousand or so other car enthusiasts at the annual Wheels and Wings car and aircraft show. I think that I have talked about this in the past and maybe even put up pictures of some of the exotic autos that we have seen there.

It is easier to enter your car in the show than to find a parking place and make the walk in as a visitor, so for the past eight or nine years, J and I have entered my car and tried to park it with other Audis if we can find them in the mix of over one thousand other cars. It is a big deal for J and he and A spend the day discussing the finer points of all different vehicles they see.

Some friends from Duluth are coming down for the show and I hope that they will stay the night with us. I had hoped to get a little poker game going, but I didn’t give folks enough advance notice. Who knew that people actually made plans and commitments to other people. As you can tell, my planning horizon has been measured in minutes for quite some time. I think that is beginning to change.

And speaking of change, I am feeling it. I can’t really do justice to the internal thoughts and feelings that have been fermenting in me over the past six months. When C was so deathly ill and it was apparent that we had done everything we could to reverse or delay the progression of her disease, it became a waiting game where my role was to try to minimilize the pain and care for her basic needs as best as I could. Emotionally, it was a dead zone. I knew something was coming, but I did not know when, or in what shape it would appear. I thought I had prepared myself as well as could be expected, but in the end, I never really had a chance.

When C did die, the emotional impact was profound. Others have written beautifully and poignantly about the process of grief and the impact it has – Joan Didion comes to mind – so I won’t try to detail my experience here, now. Let me just say that for the past three months, I have felt like I have been living with a huge weight pressing me down into the ground. That is starting to change.

There have been moments when I have actually felt happy; felt joy; felt lighter. The weight is still there, but it feels like someone chipped a chunk of it off and has allowed a bit of sunshine to beam in. I can’t tell you how nice that feels.

I hope that this process will continue in this direction. I hope that I can continue to process the grief and the “letting go” steps that need to happen over time. I hope that I can report positive results in the battle with my own disease in the next couple of months. And I hope that we, as a family, find ways to cope with the upcoming holiday season, which will include C’s birthday, Thanksgiving, and her favorite, Christmas. Wish us luck.

P.