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Letting Go
  
I would like to hear from others who have lived with a chronically ill spouse, and to hear how each of you coped with the complex of emotions--the fear, anger, hope, sadness, resentment and occasional joy you felt as your spouse became more dependent upon you while the weeks turned into months, and months into years. For my part, I know our relationship isn't what it once was (whose is, you might say), and yet it is the most important relationship I'm ever likely to have. I cling to the memories of what used to be even as I grieve for what we can no longer share and long for what is no longer possible.
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Rafting and such Jun 23, 2008 4:57 pm
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Well, I got back from the rafting--THAT was a welcome distraction. It was a 6-hour whitewater ride down the river, with eating and socializing squeezed in over the weekend. I don't know when I'll be making my last trip down the river, but at least I am still well enough, and enjoy the excitement enough, that I found joy in the sheer physical effort of this most recent trip. One person was thrown from the raft, and that same person hurt her knee in a separate accident during the ride, but she has vowed to return despite the setback.

It's always fun seeing how the new folks will react. This person who was injured was one of the more nervous ones setting out, but by the time we got down to the lower half of the river, she had moved up to the front of the raft where it's a bit more risky -- but also a bit more exciting -- and even tried "riding the bull" at the end. "Riding the bull" is the act of straddling the bow and using the safety straps as reins while you ride the rapids as they buck the boat down the river.

I was a little disappointed that we didn't manage to get out dancing that last night, but, even without the dancing, I think a good time was had by all. I certainly enjoyed myself, in any case.
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Jenny May 30, 2008 12:36 am
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Jenny was just finishing up her second year of college, majoring in biology. She loved working with animals. She grew up on a farm, so she was used to being around them. She even had a pet pig when she was a little girl. She was a horse-faced woman who wasn't especially tall, but she was all legs, and that made her seem taller than she was, and her hourglass figure got her all of the attention she wanted. In fact, as she finished her day, wending her way through the zoo attending to her duties, she was thinking about her date that night. As was often the case on the weekends, she was headed over to Newport to the Riverboat this evening. Sally was having a bachlorette party there that night, and she was looking forward to having a few drinks, and getting out onto the dance floor. Who knows? Perhaps she'd even find her Prince Charming in among the crowd.

Later that night, she picked out out an ivory silk blouse with taffeta applique that showed some cleavage and a patterned full skirt that gave her room to move around in. As she was showering and getting ready, she noticed that her throat felt a little scratchy, so she took a couple of vitamin C pills that she kept for just such an occasion.
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Personal Note interjection May 29, 2008 3:53 am
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The rafting trip is set. I'm leaving 3 weeks from tomorrow to raft on the following day. It'll be nice to have a weekend all to myself--the first one in quite a long while--over a year, I think--though I've had half days away here and there.

Ok. I'll try to get back to the story tonight.
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Somethin' tells me it's all happenin' at the zoo May 26, 2008 4:30 pm
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Jennifer was new to the job at the Cincinnati Zoo, and perhaps because of that, she still took a lot of pleasure in watching the animals interacting with one another. When she got to the aviary, however, he immediately got the sense that something was wrong. She could still heard a few bird sounds, but nothing like the loud, raucous chorus that usually greeted her when she went in to replenish the feeders. She looked around and nothing really seemed amiss--she could see the cranes and egrets at the artificial pond and several the birds of paradise there among the branches. She couldn't hope to make anything resembling a bird count. The birds were too good at camoflaging themselves to make that possible in the little time she had. "'Sides," she thought to herself as she closed the enclosure behind her, "that's WAY above MY pay grade."

And, with that, she continued on about her duties without giving it another thought. She chalked the oddity of birds being muted in Spring to a timing oddity or something, and she didn't give it another thought. She didn't even remember it when, later in the day, she threw some bird feed too close to her open-toed shoes and one of the peacocks who roamed freely about the park actually poked a small gash in one of her toes in pecking at the seed. It hurt like the dickens, too. She hobbled over to the nearest bench, took her shoe off and inspected the damage. Not much thankfully. She rubbed the sting away. "I've got to be more careful," she thought ruefully. "Some of these animals are a lot more dangerous than a peacock, and, with them, a slip that like could cost me dearly."
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The canary in the coal mine May 25, 2008 3:41 pm
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There was a bird flu scare a year or two ago. Viruses are scary things--and many viruses are resistent to the treatments that we have available. The Black Death in the Middle Ages was estimated to have killed between 30% and 60% of the population of Europe.

The Ebola virus has, by some reports, a 90% lethality.

I ran across this in my searches about viruses at

URL: http://seniorfriendfinder.com:

All the genes of all influenza viruses in the world are being maintained in aquatic birds, and periodically they transmit to other species... The 1918 viruses are still being maintained in the bird reservoir. So even though these viruses are very ancient, they still have the capacity to evolve, to acquire new genes, new hosts. The potential is still there for the catastrophe of 1918 to happen again.

--Dr. Robert Webster, Influenza Expert, Present Day.

That's what I plan to use as my jumping off point for interjecting a crisis that will affect all of characters with whom I have peopled my imaginary world....and for the others who'll turn up along the way. I think of apocalyptic books as a kind of dystopia that paves the way for a new social direction.....some will try to seize the moment in order to turn the situation exclusively to their advantage. Others will try to take a longer view and try to make a world that is better for the human group. Things like clans, religions, and nations bring us together, but they also exclude those who are not part of the group. Will there come a time when the group of "humanity" becomes the one that each of us holds nearest and dearest? I can hope, though I think the jury is still very much out on that one.
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Making a note May 25, 2008 3:10 am
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I woke up in the midst of a dream this morning about 6 enlisted men being marched to infirmary so that they could be given an experimental vaccine--two were somewhat out-of-shape sargeants, and 4 were new recruits. I'll probably incorporate that into the novel as I go. Right now, I just wanted to make a note of it to help me remember.
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LA Breakdown May 24, 2008 5:51 pm
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Sam Jessup was having a run of bad luck--trouble was, the run was going on several years now with no end in site. As he scratched at his 3-day growth of beard, he marveled at how even a weekend vacation in Vegas could go so horribly wrong. For the first time in a while, he was starting to think his luck was changing. He'd bought a lottery ticket on the spur of the moment, and the ticket was actually a winner--oh, not the big prize, but the $5000 he DID win was enough for him to pay the overdue monthly bills, get a month ahead on the rent and still have enough left over for a weekend trip to Vegas. He figured, if he was on a roll, he'd try his hand at the tables. Only he never made it that far.

Oh, he he took the puddle jumper to Vegas fine, and he managed to get to the hotel without any problems. But that's where the lucky streak end--if you can call it that. He thought he'd have a drink or two at the bar, grab a bite, then check out the action on the strip. While he was at the bar, he had the misfortune he met Monique. He always thought he was too smart to be someone's mark, but he was wrong. When she sat down at the bar one seat over, he didn't think anything of it. It had been a long time since he'd enjoyed the company of a woman--especially one as attractive as she. And he loved the French accent. He bought her a couple of drinks while she told him about how she grew up in ...French Guyana was it?...as the daughter of some low level diplomat. When her father was reposted back in the states, she landed in DC for a time, but took a job in sales that had helped her defray some of the expenses of what she thought of as her travel habit. The couple of drinks turned into dinner together at the hotel, and during the dinner and the sharing of a bottle of wine, she let slip that she was a lingerie purchaser, and that she was here in Vegas for a major show the following evening. He thought he was being soooo smooth when he told her how attractive she was and how he'd dearly love to see her modeling her product if she happened to have brought a few samples with her. His heart leaped for joy, when she got into the spirit of the flattery and cajolery. Over dessert, she confessed that she HAD brought a couple of negligees that she particularly liked--one red and one black--and she was curious as to which of the two he might prefer. Over an after-dinner irish coffee, he actually talked her into taking him up to her room for what he thought was to start out as a fashion show and end on the other side of paradise.

Once in the room, they'd embraced briefly before she gently disengaged herself to say that she was going to slip into something more comfortable--she actually said that. The last thing he remembered is her walking toward the bedroom. The last thing he felt was a sharp blow to the head.

He came to when the female half of the couple who had actually reserved the room let out a scream from behind the bellhop. He spent the next half day in the hospital being checked out with a police escort for company, and most of the day following that explaining to the cops just what had happened. Then it took him two days to hitchhike back to LA--she and her accomplice had managed to empty his wallet. The one solace was that the credit card they took was already maxed out, so that, at least, wasn't going to do them much good.
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Here, I am, an old man in a dry month May 21, 2008 5:59 pm
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The alarm wasn't set, but the sun woke him up at 5:59, just as if he still needed to get up and get ready for work, even though he'd long since retired from the pharmaceutical company that had given him purpose for much of his waking life. He felt the crink in his neck that he always gets if he lies on his right side too long, so he turned onto his back and looked over to his right, still expecting to see her, then he felt that same empty feeling that he gets when he wakes to remember that she had long since passed on....what was it? 5 years now?....no, 6. But only a moment before they'd been together in his dream, squabbling amicably over the same issues that had preoccupied them for 20 years or more.

Even now, he missed her terribly--not the woman she became: the debilitated, sunken-eyed ball of pain that she was in the end -- but the wonderfully insightful, perspicacious companion with whom he'd shared his life for more years than he cared to remember, and with whom he'd argued and fought and coddled and and adored and who, at the same time, could infuriate him beyond mind or measure.

But there was no help, that was then and this is now...and there is only now. He stetched his arms out and flexed his fingers enough to feel the swelling go down and the pain subside enough to take the naxt step: swinging his legs off the bed and onto the floor while, at the same time, feeling that old familiar twinge in his back as he moved to a sitting position.

"That wasn't so bad," he thought....now to stand. As he stood, he was unsteady on his feet for just a moment, but then his feet found their purchase, and, as he stood, he thought of that literary fragment from his youth: "many times the cry went down, 'He's up'! And so he was.

He ambled into the kitchen to start the coffee before shaving and taking his shower, but as he passed the living room windows on his way from bedroom to kitchen, he knew that something wasn't quite right about the day.....the noises were different somehow. Normally, on this Spring morning, he'd wake to the sound of male birds crying for the priviledge to mate.....Whitman came to mind, though he'd long since forgotten the name, or even the tenor of the Song of Myself....I'm LONELY, the plaintive cry seemed to say. I don't want to be alone! I no longer want to feather my nest alone!

But this morning, even the birds were silent and, as he started the coffee, he wondered why.
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Wake Me Up When It's Over May 18, 2008 4:47 pm
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Wonderfully sad song by Nora Jones. On to tonight's work...

Meredith and Eric Johannsen's kids had moved west after college--Kathy (or Katrina) to Los Angeles, Langston to San Antonio. Kathy is taller than her mother by almost a foot, and pretty without being beautiful. Langston has the looks of his father and more of the sensibilities of his mother. About a year ago, he had moved to San Antonio with his wife of two years, and they are now expecting their first child.

....I'm afraid I'm not going to get far today. I need to make a decision about going rafting soon, and I'm preoccupied about that. I'll probably go, but, until I actually vocalize my intent, it's still an easily reversible decision. Once I send off my share of the rafting money, it will be much harder to change my mind. That has to happen soon if I am going to do it.
3 Comments
In the city May 17, 2008 4:45 pm
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In Cincinnati, there is a neighborhood which the non-gentrified residents call the East End, but which is known as Columbia-Tusculum by its newer, more prosperous residents. Gentrification had improved the looks of much of the neighborhood, although the houses between the railroad tracks and the river were untouched by the effects of modernization, largely, I'm sure, because these houses were in the flood plain, and were still subject to the ravages of the rising spring waters.

In one of these houses lived the Wasserman's: Jake Wasserman was a sometime mechanic who was good at what he did, but he was also an alcoholic who would go on drinking binges for weeks on end. This would invariably cost him is job, and the more jobs he had lost, the more difficult it was to find the next one. As our story begins, he'd just turned 50 and was in the fourth day of celebrating. He wasn't a mean drunk, but when he drank, he withdrew completely from the rest of his family.

Ms. Alice Wasserman was the true breadwinner of the family. She had worked steadily since the week after her high school graduation when her dad had found her a position as a live-in maid with a family in Falmouth and told her in no uncertain terms that it was time for her to leave. That night, she had packed her few belongings, moved to Falmouth from the sharecropper farm her father rented, and, ever since, she'd worked hard at mostly clerical jobs of one sort or another.

Clarisa Wasserman was a junior at Withrow and was working as a candy striper on the weekends in anticipation of one day becoming a nurse.

Her older brother Walt Wasserman was the hope of the family. He was in his second year of college at Raymond Walters. He had originally thought vaguely, that he'd become an engineer, but, though he was good in math, he never very good at science, so in his second year, he'd started taking more general courses--history, literature, fine arts--in an attempt to find something more to his liking, though he felt guilty because he felt the crushing weight of his family's hopes and he always had the gnawing feeling that he wasn't quite living up to expectations.

....That's it for tonight.
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Most Recent Comments by Others
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Rafting and suchvalentinefeb14Jun 23 8:49 pm
JennyChrisChadwickMay 31 6:02 pm
Personal Note interjectionSassySouthernGalMay 29 7:56 am
Somethin' tells me it's all happenin' at the zooMinnietedMay 27 5:24 pm
The canary in the coal minebunnysparkleMay 26 9:39 pm
LA BreakdownLuvshack_2007May 24 11:33 pm
Here, I am, an old man in a dry monthlilchic1497May 21 8:02 pm
Wake Me Up When It's Overhoneycup12May 18 7:57 pm
The Old HomesteadSentimentallllllMay 15 6:49 pm
Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild, with a fairy hand-in-hand...BRGeorgiaPeachMay 15 2:06 pm
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./I do not think that they will sing for me...."Abelle2May 12 3:04 pm