I am glad you wrote Joy and also glad that you speak of yourself and your family. I understand how all consuming everything is, how each and every teardrop is like a crack opening up in the dam and how quickly the trickle can become like water gushing out of a firehose.
Yes, it sure is a thread that your son is going off to college and to major in theater which our son just majored in! Our son's name is Gabriel by the way. Sounds like they might have a major interest in common.
Right now I feel betrayed by my son. He has been seduced and brought under the spell by one of the nieces, Martha. She has finally found a way to get under his radar as someone who cares and wants to help. It's all a ruse.
None of my wife's wishes are going to be carried out I can see that. She wants her ashes and mine to be together someday, but I am sure the family if and when that time comes, will take over the crematory process and receive the ashes of my wife and that I will never even get to hold the urn in my hands. My wife also wants me to have her convent crucifix, but I don't want to take it off her wall now right above her, but that will be tackled when the time comes by the family like safeties go after a quarterback making a dash toward the end zone and with just as much frenzy and fury.
I am sorry, I woke up being consumed with this. The condo is in my son's name or soon will be and I have always wanted it that way. When we got bad news about how ominous my wife's last CAT scan was he came home and told me to begin packing my things, that he will sell this place immediately though we have only been here a couple of years so there isn't much equity in the place.
Now it is becoming crystal clear that he will go to Matha's place and I will be walking down these stairs to wander around in a daze on the streets heartbroken over the loss of my wife. I wish I was the type to become a barfly, but I don't drink anything but fruit and vegetable juices and I don't suppose you can drink yourself into a drunken stupor with those substances.
I apologize for writing so cut and dry, or so infantile sounding, and perhaps I am seeming a bit self-centered here or a lot. I am under constant tension and I worry about the impact all this is having on my health. After all; all I have to take care of me is me.
As far as your question to what I do, well, basically my day is filled with reading and writing, along with taking walks, mainly over to the library, but to stores too, and that's it. I guess I am addicted to books or to reading, though most the time what I read doesn't seem to have any relevence to anything. Guess it is my daily fix.
Sometimes it all seems so futile, but I can't think of a better way to fill up my day though I long to travel far and wide in this country and maybe Canada, if only on a Greyhound bus. I dream of living my life out on a Greyhound bus going from town to town only stepping of at bus terminals to buy another book to read while on the bus. I could get one of those passes for indefinite bus riding and keep renewing them or buying another one.
I do receive a stipend from the government, on SSI, which isn't enough to live on really in southern California unless you are satisfied boarding in a room in someone's home or living in a hotel room in south central LA with crack addicts outside your window in the alley below with the occasional gunshots going off, but I am sounding so dramatic aren't I? My son chooses not to want to be with me when his mother goes so I will be losing him as well almost immediately.
He got interested in acting when he was in ninth grade and was in a play. It all started when some actor teacher gave him a lot of praise for that performance and I don't mean to worry you, but since he's gotten interested in acting and actors he changed. Instead of being himself, it seemed like he went through being like the different actors he admired. First there was James Dean and boy was that a rebellious time with him and also the silent and strong or macho. There have been so many and now it is Johnny Depp, though I must admit he has really matured as a caregiver to his mother and even got a new interest in perhaps helping others by wanting to get into the medical profession, so he went back to college to take classes in biology and chemistry.
I love theater myself and the movies, and I find certain characters in movies also that I really identify with and almost want to use that character as a blueprint for life, especially those characters immune to human weakness and emotion, you know, the hard shell types. I do admit to finding solace in those types which I don't need to name here. It can be overpowering, but even more so in the very young, but I know I am an emotional weakling when all is said and done.
Joy, I apologize, I know this is rambling, to use an overused word along with venting, another overused word that I haven't heard actually in awhile, and I know I am not writing in my usual style.
Sometimes it seems I won't be able to draw up the word I need to express myself. It has happened in this letter. Yes, the floodgate is down. There will come a time when I won't be able to exprss myself, won't be able to write another poem and what then will those that like me have to hang onto? What will be left or worth knowing?
Our son has brought in that Trojan Horse and let the nieces into our temple here and they are going to ravage and defile everything they can get their hands on. I should be so concentrated on my wife, but I don't even have the patience to sit by her bedside anymore. I am so full of fear and perhaps other things too that I am sure others will inform me about. Maybe I am going off the deep end. Sometimes I wish I could become a stark raving mad lunatic. The problem is I am too sane. That's an illness too.
I hope you continue to write to me and write spontaneously whatever enters your mind. I think that is what I do. If people are going to really accept you for what you really are then they have to first of all accept your spontaneity of what you express. My son has sounded like a movie script for years now, though he has gotten away from that interest as of late and even began considering the medical field, but when his mother passes it looks like he just wants to take off traveling.
You are very blessed to have a son or sons, unsure of how many, sorry, but you are so blessed to have a son that loves you enough to want to make you laugh and cheer you up, it shows how much he feels what you are going through, and your son, sorry, you didn't mention his name, but it shows how empathic and loving he feels towards you and I bet all the birds in your heart burst into song when you dear beloved spouse laughed. That is something very precious and I am glad you were in the moment to capture that.
I think it is good to hear others and what they are going through, cause it takes us out of ourselves for at least a little bit. That is why one I will so miss the internet soon. That is when I will really feel so alone and won't be able to express it to anyone.
My son just ignores me now. He knows I am helpless to stop or change anything he and those niece are planning to do. Maybe I am just paranoid, but sometimes I think it is better for me to leave now under my own will rather than in desperation.
And please, Joy, don't ever feel you have to keep writing to me. Often times our first impressions of people we meet change, especially online. I think how I am writing now to how I was just writing a couple of days ago is a drastic personality shift. I feel so self centered now and it must seem so distasteful.
I do have to get out and take a walk. My body is telling me it needs it but what a restless anxious walk it will be. This is the kind of anxiety you just can't exercise away, or dope away for that matter. I know, there is prayer and praying and in the last couple of days I have been lax there, but sometimes I feel that my whole life is a walking and sleeping prayer, at least that is the way I hope God takes it.
Things are not going so good with my wife now. I am an emotional mess and can't speak to her without getting tangled up in my own fears, insecurities and even anger of what I see coming down the pike. I so fear the coming silence and darkness, but that is where I will also have to find my comfort and perhaps even my redemption.
Thanks for listening Joy. Treasure the moments of happiness that are bestowed on you for they are a gift and blessing from on high. Mountains wouldn't be mountains without the valleys that shape them. I will never reach any peak or even step onto the foot of the mountain, but I can look up and admire and be in awe of their majesty, but in truth, I would much rather be on a mountain peak looking out over the valleys then lost in the valleys looking up at the mountains. Something in me always seeks the highest perspective.
I guess I better move on out or continue to get ready to abandon ship.
From the deck of the titanic
Mike
