The Mandelbear's Musings

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Along with a lot of procrastination (see below), 2023 was notable for

• A trip to the Netherlands with N and G, taking in Leiden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam. Its final week was marred by...
• The untimely demise of our household's pocket panther, Desti.
• Several other deaths, not in my immediate family, but not far from it either.
• My battle, officially from the end of September, with prostate cancer. As of a couple of weeks ago I appear to be winning, but October, November, and about half of December were exceedingly uncomfortable.
• The sale of Rainbow's End North, our house on Whidbey Island. The last house I'll ever share with Colleen.

On the whole, it wasn't a very good year.

And now it's time to wrap up the year's accomplishments procrastinations, and see how I did -- or more accurately didn't -- against the goals I laid out last New Year's Day.

( Dismal details )

So all-in-all, 75+40+80+40+25+10 = 270, out of a possible 800. Terrible. I'm not sure prostate cancer is much of an excuse, but I'll grasp at that straw anyway.

Fred Hutch takes a "whole person" kind of approach to patient care, which isn't something I've experienced before. My "care team" currently includes three oncologists, a social worker, a "patient navigator", an "integrative medicine" specialist, and (added only this week) an accupuncturist and a chaplain. I would never have thought of looking for help with "Spiritual Health -- they came looking for me based on some of my answers on the mental health section of one of their many questionaires, but from the brief conversation I had on Monday it sounds as though it will probably be better for me than most of the previous counseling I've had. It's a strange feeling, and a strange position for an atheistic Reformed Druid to be in, but there you have it.

Physically I seem to be doing better this week, as my shrinking prostate releases its grip on my urethra, and my current mix of laxatives deals with my arse. It's all still annoying -- I'm nowhere near being back to the way I was, say, a year ago, but I'll take whatever slight improvement I can get. And today I got a referral to a physiatrist specializing in pelvic floor rehab. (I only encountered the term "physiatrist" a few months ago, but apparently the term dates back to 1938. TIL!)

This is turning out to be a long, strange trip indeed.

I'm starting this at a quarter after ten pm on Friday the 13th of October. It will either wait for a week before completing it, or push it out sooner and add a Part II next week. ( Content warning: Medical bad news, serious and maybe triggery, but not hopeless. )

( See CW above; enter at your own risk )

So this is kind of a follow-on to mdlbear | River: Something about me and my cat, which I posted a little under three weeks ago. (I'm starting this one on Tuesday, October 3rd, and will probably finish it sometime Friday.) The rest of this post is mostly medical TMI and may be disturbing,

( so feel free to skip the rest of it. )

Today is my daughter Amethyst's thirty-third birthday. (I'm not sure why I decided to use present tense this time instead of past conditional; it just seems right. Maybe it's connected in some weird way to the fact that I'm also (still) working on Desti's memorial page and post. Grief has its own agenda, I suppose; I'm not going to try to second-guess it.)

Where was I? In a fantasy, presumably.

I'm picturing Ame and Colleen each with a cat in their lap, sipping gin-and-tonic as they sit on the grass and watch the Viking warriors on the field between the Rainbow Bridge and Valhalla. It's a lot like the SCA. Curio would be in Colleen's lap, as usual, and Desti in Amethyst's. They're both purring contentedly. Bast is probably over at the other end of the field rolling in catnip with Freya's chariot-cats.

Yesterday, in one of my online grief support groups, someone wrote that she felt lost, and the only thing she saw in her future was [don't want to quote -- it should be obvious from my reply]:

Sympathy. I have pretty much the same vision for my future -- sitting home alone and petting my cat. But I'm selling the house -- the last house that Colleen and I lived in together -- and planning on moving with my chosen family, and packing up memories. I'm not in the best of shape right now, and feeling very much adrift.

Which immediately reminded me of N's song "Staying Home Tonight" (based on a Zenna Henderson story). I got to the last line, "An aging world and woman who are staying home tonight", and fell apart. That's a good thing -- I'd been wondering whether, between age, alexithymia, and dysthymia, I'd lost the ability to cry. Apparently not.

It mostly seems to happen with songs, (or other things that I've written), which I guess kind of makes sense. Because I can't usually tell what I'm feeling, but it sometimes comes out in my writing anyway. Not that I've written much besides blog posts lately. Or someone else's song will hit me at just the right spot, at the right time. Like this time.

I think I probably had something else I wanted to say, but that was yesterday, and it's gone.

ETA: Note -- most of this post was written on Monday 6/5, so "yesterday" would have been Sunday.

So it turns out that today (assuming this gets posted on May 3rd, as intended) is National Widow's Day. Not to be confused with International Widows’ Day, which is June 23rd. The latter is specifically for widows and not widowers, which is fair: in much of the world there is a lot of inequality between men and women, which leaves a woman who has lost her husband a great deal worse off than a man who has lost his wife.

Some of the organizations associated with National Widow's Day, like the Hope For Widows Foundation, are also exclusively for women. Others, like Widow Wednesday, the faith-based group that started the observance (you can't really call it a holiday) in 2014, mention widowers as well, but not very prominently. A quick search only turned up one blogger who called it National Widow/Widower’s Day, and she dropped the "/Widower" part the next year.

I'm not here to complain about widowers' lack of representation today, though, nor about the heavily Christian slant of most of what's written about the day. I'm not really sure why I am here, except perhaps to use it as an excuse to put Colleen's name into a post. Not that I need an excuse. Neither do you. As this post on Hope for Widows says, the greatest gift you can give someone who's grieving is to let them know that their person is remembered.

I think there was something else I thought of saying when I started this post yesterday, but I've forgotten it. Thanks for listening.

... another trip around the sun without Colleen to share it with. But that's what happens when you get old, I guess. It still beats the alternative.

I was pleased, if rather bemused, to see a long string of birthday wishes in my FB feed; if you posted one of them, thank you. I mostly avoid the Face Place except for a small number of groups, and following up the occasional email notification.

I don't think I have a whole lot more to say, and as Tom Lehrer didn't exactly say, if you don't have anything to say, "the very least you can do is to shut up!" So I'll do that.

So yesterday was our 47th wedding anniversary; the second one without Colleen. I'd planned to drink a toast with some Glenlivet -- the last remaining bottle of Glenlivet from the case we got for our 25th (I think) anniversary from her oldest cousin and her uncle. But I'd somehow gotten confused, thinking the day was today. I was never confused about the date - the Third. I forget a lot of dates, but that isn't one of them; something just didn't line up in my mind.

It's happened before: usually with August 4th, so I think it must be some kind of defense mechanism. Anyway, I guess I'll have that shot tonight, if I remember.

... and so ends another year. Not as bad as the previous one (a very low bar), but I've gotten very little done.

1. The new top goal is moving down to Seattle to live in N's ADU (variously called "the studio" or "the lair"). In particular, I have to move the cats before c leaves in the spring; that means also moving a bed and a recliner, minimum.
   Well, the recliner wouldn't fit, and the bed is really too big for the room -- maybe I should have left the bed and kept the chair. But home is where the cats are. 95% is pushing it a little, but it's my list. I'll take it.
2. I'm keeping self care near the top; I actually did fairly well with this one last year. Not going to be any more specific.
   I'm going to say 75%. Pretty regular exercise (thanks to my physical therapist), not a whole lot of walking -- not going to look at the counts. A trifling amount of weight loss. Two COVID boosters. As for mental self-care, I'm in a couple of grief support groups, and as I said last year, "I didn't actually do much, but I didn't fall apart either."
3. Write more, doomscroll less. I still want to add a couple of "real" posts to my week. I'll settle for an average of one, besides done, thanks, and the occasional s4s. Track by appending the previous month's summary to the monthly Rabbit Rabbit post.
   Well, so much for tracking. But this year's stats so far are: 95854 words in 195 posts total in 2022 (average 491/post), compared to 107466 words in 170 posts total in 2021 (average 632/post). So I wrote fewer words, but averaged nearly four posts/week. And this doesn't count a few posts in GoingSideways, plus a couple more attributed to a certain crab. So I'm going to give myself 75% on this one.
4. Finish what I call my EOL paperwork -- will, advanced directive, power of attorney, and guides to my paper and electronic files. Five items. Includes finding a lawyer and maybe an executor.
   Well, I got maybe half of the documentation done, no lawyer, no executor. So 10%, if I'm being generous.
5. The remaining parts of wrapping up Mom's estate. The financial part is still in progress, and I've done nothing about her computer, files, and online accounts. And I still have to make her memorial page. EEK.
   Um... I think the financial part is basically done, except for the transfers to my own brokerage account. And a few of her belongings have been distributed to the kids and others. So... 50%?
6. Sell or give away Colleen's medical equipment. That will probably mean going through an agent.
   Nothing. Zip. Zero.
7. Singing, dammit. Not much more detail (see last year for that).
   Some planning, a little practicing, and one concert. Maybe 30%? That's stretching it.

So all-in-all, 95+75+75+10+50+0+30 = 335 out of a possible 700, or about 49%. Which, honestly, is lot more than I expected it to be. It was 41% last year (65% the year before, but that was then). So I'll take it.

I really should have included getting the house ready to sell. Which would have rated about 20% at the outside. But I didn't. I hired an organizer to help with putting an estate sale together, but she turned out to be an anti-vaxxer and I decided I couldn't work with her. Other things not done include the landscaping -- the yard is a total wreck after having been abandoned for two years -- and repairs on the house.

Things I did accomplish that weren't on the list included getting the cats to vet appointments (at vast expense), and maintaining and updating GoingSideways.blog. (Mostly not writing -- N did most of that -- but actually getting posts and photos together and uploaded. I should write up the process -- it's effective but probably wouldn't work for anyone but me.)

Posting stats:
all of 2022 by month:
   9076 words in 22 posts in 2022/01 (average 412/post)
   6034 words in 15 posts in 2022/02 (average 402/post)
   6961 words in 18 posts in 2022/03 (average 386/post)
   6624 words in 12 posts in 2022/04 (average 552/post)
   6742 words in 13 posts in 2022/05 (average 518/post)
   7601 words in 21 posts in 2022/06 (average 361/post)
   8632 words in 17 posts in 2022/07 (average 507/post)
   9263 words in 20 posts in 2022/08 (average 463/post)
   8397 words in 16 posts in 2022/09 (average 524/post)
   7634 words in 11 posts in 2022/10 (average 694/post)
   8734 words in 15 posts in 2022/11 (average 582/post)
  10156 words in 15 posts in 2022/12 (average 677/post)
---------------------------------
  95854 words in 195 posts total in 2022 (average 491/post)

With the departure of c for Colorado this morning, the cats and I will be alone on Whidbey Island for the first time since, well, just about forever. (Actually the cats are alone up there this afternoon, because I've been down in Seattle all week. They're okay by themselves for a day or two, but I'll have to either stay up there or bring them down this week.)

It's a logistical nightmare because the Studio (ADU) in Seattle isn't cat-safe yet, and there's too much going on and I've procrastinated too much and I might have been able to have E' help when she was here cleaning and I procrastinated asking and and and... And that's not what I wanted to write about.

Because I won't have any humans sharing my living space anymore, and even the studio in Seattle is a detached structure, and now it's just me and the cats and an entire house and garage full of memories and boxes that haven't been opened since two moves ago. And artwork and books I should probably try to sell rather than donate.

And I know that these feelings are perfectly normal in grieving, and so are the problems associated with moving, and I'm just complaining because complaining helps me feel better, I guess. And writing helps me work through things. <old man yells at cloud>

Colleen and I spent most of our lives together surrounding ourselves with beautiful things and interesting books. And now I have no place to put them, because my place is going away. (So did my parents, for that matter, and there's still a large box full of things from Mom's apartment that hasn't even been opened, and art from her collection on the walls. So if anyone wants a four-foot-diameter abstract painting, let me know.)

Colleen died one year ago today. By an odd but wellcome coincidence, my grief support group meets the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, so there's that. (It runs from 10:00 to 11:30; I will probably post this sometime in the afternoon. I started writing this post two days ago, so please ignore any temporal confusion or calendrical parallax.)

My life seems to have been torn in half -- in part literally, shuttling back and forth between the houses in Freeland and Seattle. But also metaphorically, because so much of it revolved around Colleen. That includes nearly all of my social life.

I haven't gotten anything done in the last year. I've been reading, as usual, taking refuge in group theory and other rabbit-holes, but I'm just now getting back into singing regularly, and as for sorting and packing,... Actually, I've never sold anything on Craig's List or anywhere else online, and things that I could easily get wrong worry me. My daughter, E, is coming up to the house week after next to help with the sorting.

I've had plenty of support, mostly low-key, which I think is what I needed. Need. I haven't been left alone for more than a day or so, which is probably what I've needed even though it's not what I would have asked for. And I have the cats, who are also taking care of me in their own way. And a grief support group that meets via zoom on the second and fourth Thursday of eacy month, so they/we met this morning. There's also a Facebook group.

I don't actually know much about support, either asking for it, getting it, or giving it. Which makes being in a peer support group kind of problematic? Basicaly I'm faking it.

It's like object-oriented programming -- if a simulation is good enough, you can use it in place of the thing you're simulating. Or as Alan Kay famously said about Smalltalk, "If it quacks like a duck and it waddles like a duck, you can't tell that it isn't a duck." I just have to hope I'm waddling well enough.

Aside: the next post will be a signal boost for the James Webb Space Telescope's first images, released earlier this morning. A day that starts with that much beauty and wonder can't be all bad. And after that a boost for this morning's GoingSideways post.

I realized a few minutes ago that I hadn't made a "Happy Father's Day" post. So here it is if you want it, late enough that it's more like "hope you had" than "have". I got a call from my daughter, and a shout-out on Discord from my son (who may be even more phone-phobic than I am).

My own father died 23 years ago, and I still miss him. Happy Father's Day, Dad, wherever you are.

Today is Colleen's seventieth birthday. Unfortunately she can't here to celebrate it with me, but knowing her she would have insisted that I go out and celebrate anyway. I'm not going anywhere, but at least I can lift a glass of gin in her honor -- that will have to do. Somewhere, she'll be having hers with tonic and a large slice of lemon.

Twenty-two years ago yesterday I wrote a song for Colleen. I sang it this morning, and got to the end without falling apart too badly to keep singing. Close, though. I've posted about it before, so go there or the song page for lyrics. I finally did get some audio up; see the song page for that, too.

So here's Eyes Like the Morning again. You'll probably be seeing it a few more times this year. Not sorry about that.

Well, today was our forty-sixth wedding anniversary, and the first without Colleen beside me to celebrate. I have hauled out the last remainibng bottle from the case of The Glenlivet that Colleen's uncle and oldest cousin gave us for an anniversary. (I forget which; possibly our 35th or 36th; the first mention of Glenlivet in my log is in 2010, but it could have been earlier. I wish I could ask Colleen -- she'd remember.)

Rather than spending the day writing (as I'd hoped) or moping (as I'd feared) I spent most of it fighting with WordPress. So far it's a draw.

Good night.

Hey, 2021! Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And I thought 2020 was bad... Last New Year's day I wrote:

I would like to think that 2021 will be an improvement on its predecessor, but I am not so foolish as to say so out loud for fear that it will be taken as a challenge.

It didn't work. A year that starts with an insurrection (which one assumes was just practice for the next one), goes on to include my wife dying half-way through, and ends with being snowed in, is not a good year by any stretch of the imagination.

So here are my goals from last year:

1. I'm going to put self-care back at the top this year,... back exercises, walking,... getting vaccinated against COVID-19,... [l]osing weight,... and [m]ental self-care. (5 sub-goals, but fractional completion is likely for most of them.)
   Um, right. 20% each. Back exercises: I count 76, so 20*76/365~=4 percentage points. Walking: 54 -> 3. Getting vaxed: 20. I said it would be a no-brainer. Losing weight: that's easy -- 0. Finally, mental self-care. I think I'm going to give myself 20 for this one: I didn't actually do much, but I didn't fall apart either. Total: 47/100.
2. [T]aking care of Colleen.
   I did what I could. She had two weeks at home before her final 10 days in the hospital, and I was able to visit her there, and be there when she finally left me. 100.
3. Wrapping up Mom's estate... taking charge of her computer, files, and any online accounts....
   As it turned out, I still haven't really dealt with the computer and accounts, and there are plenty of financial loose ends, but I'm going to say 45 anyway.
4. Update paperwork, because 2020. Wills, advanced directives, powers of attorney, Colleen's passport and ID renewals, and guides to my paper and electronic files. (10 items total, to make it easy at year's end.)
   Well, I started... just barely. And I at least looked at my existing will; it's close, anyway. Half of those 10 items proved to be moot, of course. I'm going to say 10/50=20.
5. Music: singing ... and hopefully recording... recorded or streamed concerts, too... Two hours of singing per week gives a nice solid total of 100
   Well, 95 lines in the log, which is more than I expected, but most of those were a lot less than half an hour. I'm going to say 50%, which I suspect is an overestimate.
6. Doing the rest of the sorting in the garage would be a good idea too. Sub-goals of getting all the book boxes sorted and re-boxed by category, sweeping out the northeast corner, putting up the lights, and making the workbench usable.
   I got one light up, and sorted somewhere over half the boxes. 25%?
7. [D]ecluttering, ... downsizing, ... Getting rid of Stuff. Finding places for things. Moving to Seattle part-time makes that hard to assess, but I'll give myself 25% for this mostly because of Colleen's stuff.
8. I should write more.
   Ha! 15%, maybe? Hmm: 168 posts and over 100K words so far this year, and I almost forgot to include $writing-gigs 3-6. Maybe I should say 75%? Still doesn't feel like it.
9. [W]ebsite maintenance needed, including updates to lyrics, cleaning out cruft in the older websites, and creating a memorial page for Mom.
   10% maybe? That's being generous.
10. I should write more software, too... tracking singing and self-care time, auto-linking concerts and DW posts from song pages, and the long-delayed command-line DW client.
    Mostly a lot of 1-liners for tracking, `make save` in MakeStuff/blogging, and not much else. 10, maybe.

Total for all that, 47 + 100 + 45 + 20 + 50 + 25 + 25 + 75 + 10 + 10 = 407/1000, which rounds to 41%. Pretty poor, compared to 68% last year and even 48% in 2019. But I've already said that 2021 was a bad year. I got through it, which maybe should have been a goal all by itself.

As for posting, ...

Posting stats:
all of 2021 by month:
  10548 words in 17 posts in 2021/01 (average 620/post)
   6945 words in 12 posts in 2021/02 (average 578/post)
   6914 words in 12 posts in 2021/03 (average 576/post)
  11164 words in 19 posts in 2021/04 (average 587/post)
  11244 words in 15 posts in 2021/05 (average 749/post)
   6672 words in 11 posts in 2021/06 (average 606/post)
   9853 words in 13 posts in 2021/07 (average 757/post)
   9099 words in 15 posts in 2021/08 (average 606/post)
   9155 words in 15 posts in 2021/09 (average 610/post)
  11220 words in 17 posts in 2021/10 (average 660/post)
   7573 words in 13 posts in 2021/11 (average 582/post)
   7059 words in 11 posts in 2021/12 (average 641/post)
---------------------------------
 107446 words in 170 posts total in 2021 (average 632/post)

As the title says, this was my first Thanksgiving without Colleen. Not the first time we were separated for Thanksgiving -- there have been several when she was in the hospital or otherwise too sick to travel. The first was 2008 -- she was in the hospital after having been diagnosed with Crohn's, and I spent the day driving down to LA from San Jose for Loscon with the kids. But she was part of our family's Thanksgiving even if she wasn't physically present at the table. It didn't feel anything like this year.

I'm not sure how to organize this. Let me start with the chronology. We started making Thanksgiving dinners together before we were married -- we had the two of us plus Colleen's mother, who couldn't cook worth a damn. Once we'd moved to San Jose the feast naturally moved with us, acquiring additional household members along the way. People brought appetizers or side dishes; we roasted the bird and made stuffing and Mom's cranberry relish.

After Colleen's mother died in 1999, we started going to Loscon for Thanksgiving weekend. That meant driving down to LA on Thanksgiving Day, stopping at Pea Soup Anderson's for dinner right around lunchtime. They did -- and probably still do -- a good job of it. When we moved up to Seattle in 2012, we went back to hosting it, in whatever house was biggest: N's rented place the first year, then at Rainbow's End, then in the Whidbey Island house.

So this year, down at Rest Stop with N's family and G doing most of the cooking, was just... I'm not sure how to describe it. Wrong? Different? Hollow? More hollow than the others, I think. Something huge that's missing. Which makes sense, I guess. (I note in passing that something making sense to me is not necessarily an indication that it will make sense in absolute terms, whatever that means, or to anyone else.)

This seemed when I started like it was going to be more interesting than it turned out. I was expecting it to be more about my mental state. But alexithymia.

Thanks to this post by @elf, we have a fascinating article: What if emotions aren’t universal but specific to each culture? | Aeon Essays. Apparently recent research contradicts the widely-held theory -- the article calls it the Basic Emotion Theory -- that a small number of "basic emotions" are "hard-wired" by evolution, and that a person who is unable to recognize them in themself or other people is afflicted with a disorder called "Alexithymia", which translates roughly as "not having words for emotions". According to the Aeon article (from which all quotes in this post are taken unless otherwise noted),

The Basic Emotion Theory – also called the Universality Thesis by some of its critics – goes back to the 1960s, when the US psychologist Paul Ekman (who consulted on Inside Out) conducted studies with the Fore, an Indigenous society in Papua New Guinea. Ekman showed that the Fore could match photographs of faces with the emotional expressions they depicted – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, afraid or surprised – with a fairly high degree of correctness.

But what if the experimental subjects were just making educated guesses in matching a limited number of faces to a similarly limited list of words for emotions?

In one experiment, published in 2016, just 7 per cent of Trobriander subjects correctly identified anger from posed photographs. The prototypical disgust face, in turn, was often seen as sad, angry or afraid. Only the smiling face was, by a slim majority of volunteers (58 per cent), matched to happiness. By contrast, a control group in Spain, shown the same photos, correctly identified the depicted emotions 93 per cent of the time, on average. In another study, Crivelli found that Trobrianders consistently ‘misread’ the paradigmatic fear face – eyes wide open, mouth gasping – deeming it angry and threatening. And when the standard forced-choice procedure was relaxed, about a fifth of the subjects insisted they didn’t know what emotion they were looking at when presented with a sad or a disgusted face. (In fact, in this study, the most common response to all but the happy face was not an emotion word at all but ‘gibulwa’, which roughly translates as a desire to avoid social interaction.)

So it seems that the way people identify emotions has a very strong cultural or linguistic component.

These differences can be startling. ‘I ask my American participants how they’re feeling,’ [Yulia Chentsova-Dutton] tells me. ‘I give them a list of emotions. They are done with that list in under a minute.’ With Chinese participants, the same task would take many minutes to complete. In Ghana, the experiment verged on ‘a disaster’. ‘My students would sit there with this one page of emotion terms for 30-40 minutes, just that page. And when I ask them what is happening, they would say: “Well, I understand all the words … but how am I supposed to know what I feel? … And as an emotion researcher and a cultural researcher, I was stunned because the fact that people know how they feel is never something I questioned.’

There's this phenomenon called "Chinese somatisation". Research in the 1980s found that depressed Chinese patients did not experience the illness in the ‘correct’ way. Instead of the expected psychological symptoms, they reported various aches, lack of sleep and exhaustion, leading scholars and doctors to puzzle over the missing emotions.

The Aeon article ends with this delightful quotation from one of Chentsova-Dutton’s most recent papers (behind a pay-wall, alas!), which swaps terms like "alexlthymia" and "psychotherapy" with "lexithymia" and "somatotherapy", etc.

The term lexithymia describes a dimensional personality trait characterised, at the high end, by an extreme and potentially problematic tendency to think about one’s own emotional state and to describe these states to others … Lexithymic patients often do not respond well to, and may grow frustrated by, traditional somatotherapies (see ‘Somatotherapy with the Garrulous Patient’, Rolyat, 1980). Although local epidemiological studies suggest that high levels of lexithymia are relatively rare, there are some intriguing cultural variations. Mounting evidence suggests that lexithymia is much more common in so-called ‘WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic] people’, who tend to live in societies where an independent model of self-construal predominates … Rather than aiming to treat lexithymia, WEIRD societies have developed many indigenous approaches that encourage patients with various health problems to talk at great length about their feelings.

I find this a very apt description of the way I have to think about myself in relation to other, "normal", people. And I love the acronym "WEIRD".

To finish up with, here are a few quotes about alexithymia and therapy:

From The Most Important Personality Trait You’ve Never Heard Of | Psychology Today: People high in alexithymia are poor candidates for psychotherapy, while at the same time having higher risk for a variety of psychological disorders. -- which I think explains a lot about my own experiences.

From Here's What Alexithymia Actually Is—and Why It Can Make Therapy Challenging | SELF, When you first enter therapy, it might be surprisingly difficult to answer the question, "How are you feeling?" Answering that question can be even more of a challenge if you deal with what is known as alexithymia... (That article goes on to call it a "disorder", of course.) Here's a paper that calls it a personality construct characterized by altered emotional awareness, which is certainly closer to the way I tend to view it.

( Content warning: sad anniversaries. )

A lot of things still need doing. Getting Colleen's name off bank accounts. Tracking down online accounts. Tracking down subscriptions. Finding a new executor for my will, and a health care power-of-attorney (which neither of us ever did because we were mutually next-of-kin). Find a lawyer, which we never did either.

Downsizing and moving is a big one. Deciding what to throw out, what to give away, what to move to Seattle, and when. What I can't bear to part with. What to sell, including the expensive and still-good items like the patient lift and her scooter. Scooters. Actually selling things, which I've been putting off for years.

And that's not even counting the stuff in the garage and scattered around the house that hasn't been done since we moved in, in 2017. (Some of which hasn't been looked at since we left the Starport in 2012.) Hanging artwork. Clearing off the workbench and installing lights in the garage. And the unfinished projects, most still hanging around from previous workbenches I never cleared off.

I think another large part of what's going on in my head is that I haven't yet adjusted to my new living situation. I'm splitting my time between Seattle and Freeland, and neither really feels like home right now. Maybe three months isn't long enough? Very little of my Stuff has been moved; I'm still carting a suitcase back and forth every weekend. I haven't put anything on the walls, or in all but two drawers of the huge dresser that once held most of Colleen's clothing while we lived at Rainbow's End.

There's no damned reason why I haven't done the things except that they're very uncomfortable to think about. Which I suppose is my usual reason for not doing things. Some, like selling stuff, are uncomfortable because I've never done them before. (Have I mentioned that I procrastinate? Or did I put that off as well?) I try to at least do one thing every weekend. It would be nice if I could get that up to one thing every day, but don't hold your breath.

I've been drifting -- going down Wikipedia rabbit-holes, re-reading the Foundation series, puttering around with computers (instead of actually, you know, writing code. Or writing much of anything else.) I guess I've been drifting for most of the last three years, but at least a couple of times a day I'd have to stop drifting and do something for Colleen. Now I'm just adrift. Caregiving was a major part of my life, and it's not there anymore -- there's this huge hole I haven't figured out how to fill yet.

Some things I miss:

Sharing a bath with Colleen. Back before her arthritis made it difficult to get out of the bathtub (until finally it took her over an hour to get out of the tub -- that's when we decided to get a walk-in), one of our pleasures was sharing a bath. The bathroom in the master suite that we added on around the time our first kid was born had a lovely six-foot Jacuzzi tub. It was long enough to stretch out in, wide enough to be comfortable for Colleen, and had the spout in one corner so that neither of us had to sit with it poking into our back. sigh

Our st/rolls around the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden. It was an easy walk from our house, and when Colleen got her scooter it could go slightly faster than I could walk. Such a pleasure having to catch up with her rather than waiting for her to catch up.

Driving in circles. Big circles. Just for the sake of being together in the car. We hardly ever went anywhere in particular; all Colleen wanted was to be sitting next to me. One of our favorite loops went over to Santa Cruz, up the coast on SR 1 to San Francisco, and back home via I 280. It took about three hours. Or up 101 to something in San Francisco -- often the zoo -- and home via the coast.

Indian buffet dinners. We always had masala chai, and gulab jamun for dessert; the rest varied depending on what they had out, but almost always included tandoori chicken and chicken tikka masala. The Bay Area had -- still has, I guess -- a far better selection of Indian buffets than Seattle does.

Hsi Nan, the little Szechuan restaurant in the Town and Country shopping center on the Embarcadero just across El Camino from the Stanford campus. After we moved in together, it was an easy walk from our apartment. That's where we courted. We could walk in, give Louie, the owner, a price per person, and be sure of getting something wonderful. Glazed bananas. I've never had glazed bananas anywhere else (except at home, the few times we made them). Cook bananas in boiling sugar syrup at the hard-crack stage, then drop them into a bowl of ice water.

The Mandelbear's Memoirs

I realized Saturday morning, after waking from a dream involving a moving van and a house that was sort of like the one I grew up in, that some of the grief and anxiety that I'm feeling now is for places. It's not at all surprising -- I couldn't possibly separate my memories of Colleen from memories of the places we've lived: Grand Central Starport, our st/rolls around the San Jose rose garden, the restaurants we frequented... Or my memories of my parents from the house in Norwalk, Connecticut where I grew up, the grape arbor, the apple trees, and the little brook that ran along one edge of the lot. That was replaced by a freeway interchange, sometime in the early '70s. Or Rainbow's End, in West Seattle.

Our homes were just as much characters in our stories as the people we lived with. I remind myself that it's okay to mourn for the ones I've lost. It feels as though I'm always leaving places just as I'm getting settled there. I'll be doing it again, too soon. I'm not ready. I rarely am.

I'm going to have to update that line in "Eyes Like the Morning". It started out "Fifteen years together"... Then I changed it to "Half our lives" (on Dec 24, 2000, via git-bisect(1)). I guess "Fifty years" will have to be the last update.

sigh!

We met sometime in the summer of 1969, the year I started grad school at Stanford. I sat down at a table in the coffeehouse and struck up a conversation with three young women who turned out to be 17-year-old high school students, in their senior year at Palo Alto High. Afterwards, one of them -- the one with the Cheshire-cat grin and the beautiful grey eyes -- turned to her friends and said "That's the man I'm going to marry."

Five years later her two friends were the bridesmaids at our wedding.

I would later tell people that she stalked me for five years, but in fact she simply became my best friend. I've never met anyone who made friends as easily. We used to go for long walks around Palo Alto, and talk for hours over dinner at Hsi Nan, the Szechuan restaurant just off campus on Embarcadero Road. She invited me to an SCA event, telling me that I'd be sure to meet some women there. Did I mention that she was sneaky? That's about when she suggested that we become best friends with benefits.

Then she asked me to marry her. I said I'd think about it, and in any case couldn't possibly give her an answer when I didn't know whether I could support her (PARC having gotten rid of their contractors a few weeks before). I kept thinking about it, uncertain whether I was really in love with her, whether I had any idea what love really meant, and whether I had any idea what I was doing. I finally decided that living with my best friend for the rest of my life would work well enough. (According to Merriam-Webster the acronym "BFF" first appeared in 1987.)

I fell in love with her several times over the following 45 years.

She was also the toughest woman I've ever met. She earned the nickname "Turbo Snail" in rehab, pushing herself to walk again after the surgery that damaged her spinal cord. After that she had her hair dyed purple so that people would see her as "the lady with the purple hair" and not as an old woman in a wheelchair.

The night our daughter Amethyst was stillborn, 31 years ago today, she had sent me home to get some sleep. She did the same the night her mother died. And again the night before her last surgery, which we both knew was going to be incredibly risky, expecting that I'd get back to the hospital before the afternoon when it was scheduled. She called at 11am to say that the surgery had been rescheduled, on an emergency basis. The last thing I said to her was "I will always love you."

I went home that evening, knowing it was what she would have told me to do, but when her doctor called at 10:30 to say she was fading I went back. I figured she didn't get a vote that time. She died at 4:30am; we had been married 45 years, 6 months, 8 days, and 11 hours.

I suppose the proper term for the state of the bear at this point is "widowed". It's all completely surreal. Colleen was away -- in hospitals and rehab -- for all but three weeks between the end of March and the middle of July. I sort of got used to the way the house feels without her. If I don't think about it everything seems the same, until it isn't. Until something reminds me.

Usually it's wanting to tell her something, or ask her something. She's the one who kept track of all our social connections. Without her I'm adrift, in uncharted waters. I'm sure there are dozens of people I haven't contacted. Maybe hundreds. Many who I don't even know exist. Colleen knows; I should ask... Oh, right.

Emotionally,... Note that the combination of dysthymia with alexithymia makes that a little complicated, and very uncertain. I tend to figure out emotions by backtracking from the environment and physical effects. I mean, I know that I'm grieving, but it's hard to be more specific. I do know that I made it through this morning by curling up with a stuffy (the rhino, Cyrano; I have Colleen's platypus, Platy, down in Seattle) and whimpering, so I guess that says something. No outright crying, though I expected it. The rest of the time I've just been a little more down than usual.

Right now I'm mostly keeping busy by trying to organize things like drugs that need discarding; medical supplies, Desitin and baby wipes that can be donated; and so on. Need to track down some paperwork, too. I'm currently splitting my time between Whidbey and Seattle, so figuring what will go where is another thing. Keeping busy is good -- I can just do the thing and mostly not think too much about why I need to.

I really appreciate your comments and other messages of support. I don't think I have the energy to respond to most of them right now, but please know that the fact that you're thinking of us makes a huge difference, somehow. I'll see everything posted here, and most direct messages and mentions on LinkedIn, Discord, and that face place.

Colleen's memorial will be on Zoom starting at 3pm PDT, August 3^rd, two weeks from tomorrow. I'll post the meeting parameters closer to the day.

Karen Colleen Savitzky, better known as Mama Colleen, Grandma Colleen, Mama Con, The FlowerCat, and Colleen Elizabeth de Cassis, passed away at 4:30 am this morning. She never regained consciousness after an epic surgery that we both knew going in was risky as hell. (See Episode 9 for the details.) Doctor Rangel, who pulled off a minor miracle two years ago when Colleen was dying of a raging infection, was on duty and called me about 10:30 last night to say that she was fading. Her blood pressure was still dropping, even after being maxed out on medication and fluids. I drove up with N to spend the rest of the night in her room in the ICU.

Colleen was the toughest woman I ever met; after beating the odds two years ago and living a good and mostly happy life for a year and a half more than anyone expected, we all kind of figured she'd win this fight too. I'm deeply sorry to have to tell you that we were wrong.

It was a good thing she never got the transfer to UW -- at Whidbey General she was surrounded and cared for by people who'd known her and loved her for years. We joked with the people at the reception desk about needing a frequent flyer card, and everyone knew her as the woman with purple hair.

I cut off the braid with the last of her purple hair, gave her a final kiss, and said goodbye. When we got home I sang "Eyes Like the Morning".

...

I'll post more later -- Colleen was too great a force of nature to be summed up in a single post. Or a hundred. No need to send flowers; the FlowerCat doesn't need them. Hug somebody close to you and tell them you love them, because you never know whether you'll get another chance.