Wake up call

I feel like I've been sleeping my whole life and am only just now being called to "wake up, wake up, this is your life, what you do makes a difference".   I used to say that about my middle schoolers, why it was that they were at that "ripe moment of desperation" where true change was possible.   I hope real change is still possible for me too.

I've noticed that I have a body, and that it's mine and that it's not in very good shape for the home stretch.  How to take care of it? Why to take care of it? Do I really want to live?  I have so little sense of what I (which one? the farmer, caretaker, poet, house designer?) want, in contrast to unconsciously gravitate toward (chocolate, giving away too much, imagining and then {exhaustion} trying to actually do it).

An old refrain, "WHO are you? WHY are you? WHAT do you WANT?"  is playing on the radio in the back room of my mind.      I don't know.      And I'm not sure how to find out, except to have patience with my patience.  I am still newly born to this single life where everything is newly experienced.  Newly, the same old with a different perspective.

This I know
I want to want to wake up; I'm willing to risk discomfort and put in effort to wake up.
I don't want to waste this ephemeral act of breathing.

The Gil Celebration is over

I just took Chris to the airport.
And now I'm facing the rest of my life without him.   I knew this would be one more level of realization but it still is knocking me off my feet. I know this is normal, I guess.  But not for me.  I'm not the emotional type. Has he changed this about me too? Am I ever going to get back to my old normal?  What the hell is normal? What am I going to do with all this left over food? He's not around to eat it!!! What guiding principal will inform my use of Time?  Will it ever get easier!?! How long? How long??
I just woke from a dream fragment where I found him in an attic apartment and he called out my name.
I want to go back to sleep and not wake up.

The Gil party is ON!!

My invites have been scattershot, apologies.  For those of you still reading, pass it on.

I've been focused on getting ready and may get back to musing on life and the hereafter,  after.

Getting ready

I'm getting ready for the party
and for guests who are coming
getting ready for a mortgage appraiser to say what our house is worth
I'm getting ready to start exercising and losing weight, learning a new relationship to my body, my only true responsibility right now
I'm getting ready to get my financial house in order, and to do my 2011 postponed taxes, to figure out if I can live on my retirement or will I need to use savings or go back to work.
I'm getting ready
to think and write and explore what's important about my living my life, to me
Perhaps mostly, I'm waiting like Ferlingetti in Coney Island of the Mind,
waiting for my rebirth of wonder
I have days of dry busyness
dreams where I'm hoping, searching for contact
wondering is it possible?
I'm in Limbo, not quite here or there, somewhere else instead
I'm waiting, getting ready for the next phase, the next step, the next "right thing"
but loath to leave the "vale of tears"
I know I have a precious resource, me, my mind, my body my idiosyncratic way of being and digesting my experience.
but I'm still just getting ready, I'm not there yet
waiting
waiting
for the rebirth of my wonder

Family

I just returned from a week out East with family.  It was an odd mix of overstimulating and busy and quiet  and slow.  It was good.
I found it interesting to watch the reflection of our family's genes, in all their different permutations, over the generations.  I saw my dad, almost 87, rigid and anxious yet wanting to want to get back on the self care wagon so he can continue caring for and snuggling his wife, and the marriage of a nephew who is obviously willing to give his soul to take care of his new bride who is recently blind.  We Pipers love to caretake, and vary in our skill levels of self care.  Each family member has his or her own take on the themes of creating projects, often around food and self sufficiency, athleticism, music, but with a large dose, for the most part healthy, of being of service to others.

But my Family is not only my root stock, it's also the folks I love who I've chosen to graft onto my life and share my life force with.  Gil's family has become mine.  Though we are very different by our nature/nurture inclinations, they profoundly enrich and feed my life, as I hope I do theirs.  Sometimes in my busyness I haven't relaxed into the openness and acceptance/curiosity to fully experience their world, but I want to; they're my family.

I returned to Wisconsin, and immediately was struck by how loving and generous my wonderful circle of Friends/family are.  Friends are the family I choose and though we don't share the same inborn life habits, their gifts support me, shift me, strengthen parts of me which may not be as strong as theirs are.

I became aware out East, that though we can get on each other's nerves big time, and though it's so easy to be critical of each other (it's so much easier to judge our own weaknesses in our sibs), seeing our family themes played out through many lives is comforting.  Just as I've been thinking that I need to shift from focusing on Gil as a particle, with all his specific in time attributes, to Gil as a wave, rippling through all the lives he touched,  so too I can feel all of my families influencing and carrying me forward into the future.
Progress.

It's a wet day

As I prepare to go East with family,     it's only me      packing.  I've been wanting to note that this grieving isn't all pain, it's only a small part and in an odd way almost a pain/pleasure.   There is also an altered state kind of lightness and disorientation of time and place.  I'm learning to appreciate this sense of groundless freedom (I have so much time! and so little obligation!) though at times I do still feel slightly nauseous from it.  I am overwhelmed by the love folks are showing me, and I feel slightly drunk from it all.
I'm listening to the music we put together for Gil's visitation and weeping as I water plants and fix the chicken fencing.  After days of busyness, it feels sort of good to be immersed in the pain of missing, missing, wanting him.  I imagine getting to the point where the pain will be less intense and wonder if I'll miss it.  I suspect I will since it makes me feel him so deeply.  You know, I was with Gil more than a third of his life, and he was even more of mine.  And I am so different than when he found me. But I'm a glutton; I want more!  I love weeping to his music.  Perhaps next winter I'll find the time to go through and listen to ALL of it, as he had started to do in that last month.  Now THAT will be a wet day!
I hope to have the Gil Celebration full to bursting with all of his music, and if I can really channel the Miller I'll have burned copies for folks to take.  He'd want me to, but I'm not sure I can without him

What the dead have to teach

Death is real; he is not coming back.  He won't be here again even if I really need him.  His body is gone, gone, gone; his hand will not use that handkerchief, or fix that remote.  I don't really believe how final this is.  I'm holding on to little things (some gross like his blood stained handkerchiefs) because I can't quite grasp this death thing.  It makes me aware of how, though we think we know with the front part of our brains, things like birth (there's two people and then, there's three, where the hell did that person come from!?!) and death (the magical thinking that somehow he's just gone away for a while and then we'll get a chance at a do over and he'll still be able to play billiards and fix the TV remote when it gets moody with me),    my body is going to take a looong time to realize it.

I wonder a little more about is there still a specific Gil in the hereafter, though I feel even more strongly that it is irrelevant to us on this side of the divide. What ever it is,   it's not for our knowing.  There may be     all sorts of possibilities, but where I am is here, now, with my life to be responsible for living.  All I can hold on to is the way Gil changed me and the way I live in this body now.   I'm still swimming in denial but I can feel the shore of acceptance in the distance.
Here's a poem (slightly edited by me) which seemed to speak to this.

Letting Go of What Cannot be Held Back by Bill Holm Let go of the dead now. Let them fall, sink, go away, become invisible as they tried so hard to do in their own dying. We needed to bother them with what we called help. We were the needy ones. The dying do their own work with tidiness, just the right speed, sometimes even a little satisfaction. So quiet down. Let them go. Practice your own song. Now.