The Masquerade

We all wear masks Hi, I'm fine At 20 paces Smile and nod You're doing fine They all think You're genuine We all wear masks So no one's prying Your trompe l'oeil It looks so real It works if they Can't see you crying And here's the deal: This thing ain't lying You can't be real And still survive No one gets out Of here alive Careful, dance The masquerade Bow and curtsy, Take your place Step into The self you've made Never let them See your face. (written 1/28/2015)

I thought I knew you; what did I know?

I'm looking through you
Where did you go?
I thought I knew you
What did I know?
You don't look different
But you have changed
I'm looking through you
You're not the same

Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
Your voice is soothing
But the words aren't clear
You don't sound different
I've learned the game
I'm looking through you
You're not the same

Why, tell me why
Did you not treat me right?
Love has a nasty habit
Of disappearing overnight

You're thinking of me
The same old way
You were above me
But not today
The only difference
Is you're down there
I'm looking through you
And you're nowhere

Why, tell me why
Did you not treat me right?
Love has a nasty habit
Of disappearing overnight

I'm looking through you
Where did you go?
I thought I knew you
What did I know?
You don't look different
But you have changed
I'm looking through you
You're not the same

Two years ago, a week after the funeral, I lost my best friend.
I'm trying to write about this. I still can't get myself to do it. To write about the whole scope of our relationship. How long was it? 20 years?
She had already stopped speaking to me over something else, before that. I had hurt her feelings inadvertenantly. She told me this when I finally spoke to her the week after the funeral when she basically told me she didn't want to be friends anymore. She could not handle my problems on top of hers, she said.

And I had just buried Nelson. Grief on grief? Yes. The two were so intertwined, then.

I only write about it now because it has been two years since I have last spoken to her and I have finally reached the point where I can say there is nothing left of that friendship to salvage. At one point I still had hopes, somewhere deep down. But I have to admit, now, if I saw her, what would I say to her? After two years? The two worst of my life? The anger has given way to a dull numbness. I would say hello, how are you, how are things. But we would not be friends again. Some broken things cannot be healed again. Not even the warm nostalgia of twenty years can mend this kind of silence.

There's so much I'm leaving out of this account still. This is as much as I can bear to write, now.

It's as much as I can do to admit that it's gone and won't come back. That she's gone and won't be my friend anymore. It hurts bitterly. Even after two years. Two and a half.

CPE, CPE, CPE, is there anything else? Oh yeah, CPE...

So it looks like I missed the big Camp Widow contest......Win a scholarship to Camp Widow, yada yada yada...Yes, I missed it. I have been running myself ragged and am plumb wore out. Let's say, in theory, I'd won...I'd still have had to scare up airfare out of thin air. And expenses. And hotel fees, assuming a friend didn't let me crash on their sofa for the weekend...only to return to another two weeks of insanely intense CPE. I said uncle. Next year, I hope...

That's assuming I'm not scheduled for an on-call shift that weekend. I can't remember. I'm only keeping track one week ahead. This week, I had Tuesday night. That was Tuesday all day at the hospital, then all night, then into the next day. I was there til 4 pm the next day. That is a long time.

The trouble with CPE is that, what with HIPAA and privacy and everything else, I'm not sure what I'm allowed to share. Suffice it to say that three people died on my on-call shift last Sunday night, and I spent time with a dying man and his family last week. I'm spending time in the borderlands...No, it's not all people dying, but last week definitely marked a mental boundary shift in my mind. Just like with Nelson's death, there's the Time Before and the Time After.

I hear that you can get a job doing chaplaincy work in hospice with only the first unit of CPE. Part of me finds that idea appealing. But is my job right now a major PTSD trigger? Um, yeah, and I had it beforehand. I need to do something about that so I can do something for others. Because doing this just reinforces that I want to do this. This resonates with me. Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment...or maybe I've found my charism, as my priest puts it....

May is among the cruelest months.

November is the cruelest month. (Sorry, T.S. Eliot...November, not April.) That was when Nelson died. This is the month of the six-month sadiversary...this year, it's a year and six months. Everything is counted by that. Everything.

May is a heavy month. My aunt died in May, 20 years ago, a week before my 16 birthday. It's another sadiversary, many more years removed than Nelson's, but it still reberverates across the decades. It leaves echoes.

It's now been two years since I graduated from seminary. Two years ago, I graduated, and was radiantly happy. Then I moved back to my home state, away from my beloved, because there were more jobs there. I never would have done that if I knew he were going to die...or were in any danger of dying whatsoever. And yet he was. His heart was about to give out, and I left NY, and him, thinking it would only be a temporary separation, not knowing that our temporary separation was going to turn into a permanent one.

And now I'm afraid of long-distance relationships, because in my mind, the two things are somehow connected...A friend of mine had a long-distance relationship with someone in another country and it honestly petrified me on some level. Long-distance means they'll die! Of course, rationally, I know it doesn't. Tell that to my simmering subconscious.

Two years ago, I graduated. A year and a half ago, the world ended. My internship is coming up, but so is the second anniversary of that awful summer, the last summer we had together, in which we had hardly any time in each other's presence, in which I had migraines lasting weeks at a time, and he had a kidney stone. And I couldn't drive up there to help him because I was immobilized with a migraine. I look back, and I wonder why it took me so long to finally seek medical attention for the migraines. It wasn't until I got a prescription drug that they finally went away. Recently I read that migraines lasting over 72 hours put you at risk of a stroke. No wonder the attending physician recommended a CT scan. I never got one...

I still have to remind myself that it's not my fault that he died, but I still wish--with all my heart I still wish--that I had spent that summer with him, not with my parents and the shitty job and the migraines in Virginia.

And today...Today is my birthday. Never mind which one. I feel like I've aged a thousand years since Nelson died, and yet the world around me's hardly changed at all. Happy birthday to me?

Sometimes it's hard to write to this blog because I spend so much time trying to keep afloat, keep going, not think about it too much lest it overwhelm me...and sometimes there are just no words for it, just a feeling of sadness, emptiness, and loneliness, and everything else.

Or there'll be a crisis, like I had last week--well, not a crisis-crisis, just something I needed to vent about really a whole lot to someone I trusted implicitly. That list has gotten pretty damn short since Nelson died. He would have been my automatic go-to person. I would have told him, we would have agreed on what a travesty the thing I got upset about was, and I would have gotten it out of my system. I eventually found someone to confide in, but it wasn't the same. It just isn't the same. It's never the same anymore.

"Here and now/ Will we ever be again?/ For I have found/ All that shimmers in this world is sure to fade/ Away/ Again"

So. Christmas. And New Year. Yeah.

It went ok.
The beginning of the month was hard. The beginning of the month is always hard. Because that's when It Happened, you know. It's the every-month-sadiversary. I do not like it.
And it seems like I spent the rest of the month furiously knitting Christmas presents--I knit three, first for my older nephew (who specified what colors he wanted in his yarn); then for my younger nephew (rainbow yarn); then for my brother (dark brown yarn and light brown yarn). I was going to make jewelry, but when the time came, I found myself staring at my jewelry-making stash, saying, "...I used to know how to do this, I need to get my memory jogged, but there's no time!" Nothing like that mental-blank-just-when-you-need-to-get-something-done-right-now feeling. Baking also happened. Cookies. There were several days of cookie-baking.
The beauty of the knitting and the cookie-baking was that I was so preoccupied with getting ready for Christmas that it occupied a great deal of my mental space. Christmas itself was celebrated by my family on Christmas Eve, at my aunt's house, and the day after Christmas, at my family's house. We had my brother and his family over (my awesome sister-in-law, and both my nephews); plus my aunt and uncle, their three adult children, and two cousins-in-law. It was fairly awesome. I would have found it hard to deal with last year.
The post-Christmas let-down, though. Wow. It's been like a hangover. Blargh.
And then there was the scary letter from my student loan company, leading to two days of panic attack hell. I called them. I got a forbearance. I'm getting a loan mod. Things will be ok. For the next month at least.
I'm also freaking out about not having a job. And how am I going to pay for my meds (I'm hypothyroid and etc.). 
I'm tired of feeling like Wile E. Coyote. Enough with the anvils!

2010, I never liked you. Good riddance. Don't let the door hit you on the way out!

New Year's. I'm going to a party. I'm a bit nervous. Last year's party had a movie, with lovey-dovey couples. Very triggery. I'm a bit scairt. But I'm bringing board games. Board games aplenty! Pity everybody else is a teetotaler, I think New Year's Eve would be easier to stand sloshed...It was always Our Special Day. Now it's just a day. To get over with. Well, let's get on with it then. Tally ho. Board games ahoy.

I would like to thank the Academy...

...Har har har. In all seriousness, I would like to thank [dead link, bye-bye], a website devoted to promoting psychology programs, for recognizing my blog in its "2010 Top Widowhood Blog" award category. Most of the other award-winners were already on my blogroll; the ones that are not, I will be sure to add. If you click on the badge link to the right, or on the link with this post, you can see the full list of winners. This award is kind of a bright spot in a huge bummer of a year....for obvious reasons. I don't think anybody sets out wanting to write a widowhood blog. I was a vanilla blogger, and I lost the love of my life, so I started this.

Thank you for reading my blog, [dead link, bye-bye]. I deeply appreciate it.

2012 Update: I have gotten two testy emails from [dead link, bye-bye] and per their request, I have removed it. I'm keeping this post, since it's kind of a historical record and such. This blog is no longer active--I post new posts to WordPress. Except today. Bless your little pea-pickin' heart, [dead link, bye-bye], and I mean that in the most SOUTHERN way possible. But, *snif,*  thanks for the memories.

One Year...

...as of last Saturday, November 6th. I was too full of grief that weekend to post. I went up to NY for the one-year memorial service. It was good. More on that later. It's still too fresh now...

I hear that when one of the new Star Wars movies was bootlegged and dubbed into Chinese, they translated, "Nooooooo!" that someone said when a character died, into "Do not want."

Yeah. I think that sums it up pretty well. Do not want. The whole shebang and ball of wax. Do Not Want. Waiter, this is not the life I ordered, may I send it back? Ugh...

...And now, for my second set of holidays without him. Do Not Want.

Eleven months, and Sunday would have been our third anniversary

I look at the roses he gave me last year. I had just finished drying them. I only saved the rosebuds. I would have saved the roses entire if I'd known they were to be The Last Roses. They weren't supposed to be. We were About To Be Engaged. Everything I hated about my life--living with my parents, my shitty job, allergies from hell--was endurable, because I knew that soon they would end and we would be married. I sound like a silly seventh grader. 2getha 4evah! No, not quite. I feared the other shoe dropping, but the other shoe that I feared was a breakup.

Sudden death? I'm afraid my cognitive therapy had worked too well. I told myself his symptoms could have been caused by any number of non-life-threatening conditions. Good God! If I knew then what I know now, I would have hit that panic button so hard...Would it have made any difference? Who knows? What I know about men is, you can't make them do what they don't want to do. And he did not like being nagged. I did not want to take on the role of His Other Mother. Oh no.

...And this is where I remind myself, once again, that it was Not My Fault. It was just Something That Happened, that was Tragic. It was not caught within the window that it could be prevented. There's nothing that can be done about it now but let it go....

Light my way out of darkness

O Lord,
I am so lost  
Help me
Light my way out of darkness.  

O Lord,
You who are 
The light of the world,
Light my way out of darkness.  

O Lord,  
You who are  
A consuming fire  
Light my way out of darkness.  

O Lord,
You who led
Israel out of Egypt
with your pillar of fire and your pillar of cloud
Also light my way out of darkness.

Things I dread...

I dread October. October 3rd was our anniversary. That weekend last year was also the last time I saw him alive. That will be 11 months' sadiversary, one year since I saw him alive...Dread, dread, dread...

Labor Day weekend was the last time I saw him here...he came to visit me. Oh dear, and it's next weekend. And it's the first weekend of the month...the anniversary part of the month. Who knew that months had their own anniversaries? I didn't, before this....

And then the month after October. November. November 6, he died, and the world ended...It has faked its continuance fairly well, I must say. The sun continues to rise and set. But November is coming. And then it will be Thanksgiving again, another Thanksgiving without him. Last year it was so awful. No one mentioned him. I think they were afraid. I'm not sure what they were afraid of...the worst has already happened.

How is it, after the world's ended, that the earth keeps on turning? Didn't it get the memo?

Seriously.

Hearts shouldn't stop before their time

Hearts shouldn't stop before their time;
They should work properly, and do what they're told.
Folks should wait to die, for when they're good and old;
To die beforetime breaks all sense and reason.  No,
They should wait, til they're long past their prime,
For the old-folks-in-rocking-chairs-season:
When the children are grown, and the grandchildren too;
When the balm for their survivors' tears, is
"Well, he was old and full of years."

He wasn't old and full of years.
My love was young, and sparkling full of life;  
And full of plans, and hopes, and dreams;
And one was to make me his wife.      
And now I am left with what's left,  
When your love, and your dreams, are both buried.  
I died with him also that day--don't you know?  
But it was him only they carried.

What I cannot get out of my head:
He isn't supposed to be dead.


written Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 4:46 pm, 5:00 pm 
revised Thursday, August 19, 2010, 4:02 am

The Long Sojourn

How do I get there?
To the place of unmisery    
To that place that isn't   
The worst of places to be-- 
How do I get there?
Does it exist anywhere?
Where's my directions?  
I'm tired; I'm tired of traveling blind,
Though it keeps the sandstorm
Out of my eyes-- 
Oh good Lord I'm tired
Whittled-down tired
I'm tired to the core of the core
I've had enough, and enough, and enough,
And I don't want to take anymore.
Can you hear my cries?
You did not warn,  
I was led to the desert to die
In panic, confusion, and sorrrow, and haste--
Oh, rescue me now from the trackless wastes
Lest I be food for vultures and jackals-- 
Did you lead me out of Egypt to perish here,
Without even a reason why?
O rescue me, O lead me out
With your pillar of fire and your pillar of cloud--
If truly me do you cherish
Then save me from hence, lest I perish.

written August 17, 2010, around 3 am

Jabberwocky's Cousin

Beware the counterfactual hypothetical
The jaws that bite, the teeth that snatch;
Beware the jub-jub bird, and shun
The frumious bandersnatch.

The counterfactual hypothetical
That cousin to the Jabberwock--
That knits a daisy chain of Ifs
That trap you fast, after it stalks.

It lies in wait;
It casts its net.
It won't let you remember
It won't let you forget.

So grab your vorpal blade, my son!
Follow its trail, and stalk
The counterfactual hypothetical,
That cousin to the Jabberwock.

Yes, grab that vorpal blade, my son,
And let thy blade go snicker-snack!
Cut off its head, and with it dead,
You'll come galumphing back.

Callooh! Callay! O frabjous day!
We'll chortle in our joy.
The counterfactual hypothetical
Can only be killed by means
Equally fantastic
And purely theoretical.

What If, If Only, Might Have Been--
Slay rhetorical nonsense
With nonsense equally rhetorical;
Slay the soul-killing guilt trip
By that sword hyperborical.

Oh vorpal blade, what happy day
Awaits your snicker-snackery!
Although Jabberwocky's Cousin,
He's quite the nut to crack
But that vorpal blade is surely going snicker-snack.
This I promise and I will not take back.

If only, if only, if only--
Then I wouldn't be sad.
Then I wouldn't be lonely.
Does this make me not sad?
Does this make me not lonely?

No! It does not.
It is with its own web
That it's got to be caught
Then you can break its back
And that vorpal blade can go snicker-snack.

written 4/15/2010

the text of my inspiration, Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"

Meaningful pseudonyms

So there was a church event tonight and I had a chance to chat with a friend that I haven't chatted with in a while. We talked about a mutual friend (isn't she great?) and I mentioned having chatted with her on Facebook. Oh, said my friend, I'm a little nervous about joining that.

I said, you don't have to join using your real name! I'm on there with my real name and a psuedonym. So I told her my pseudonym--it's my name on this blog, and on the Facebook and Twitter accounts that go along with it--Hira Animfefte. My friend is Greek, so I didn't need to translate. She laughed.

I said, Hey, it's what I am! I embrace it! The unwedded widow.

I love having a title. Not just a label. A title. It's a badge of honor.

Rejoice? O Unwedded Widow...

I've done a lot of connecting with widows online lately, and I'm feeling more and more comfortable self-identifying as such. It's liberating. There's a word for me! I'll just add a modifier. "Unmarried widow." It reminds me of the classic Orthodox hymn, "Rejoice, O Unwedded Bride" (otherwise known as "Agni Parthene" in the Greek). If the Holy Theotokos (God-bearer) and Ever-virgin Mary can be called Unwedded Bride, why can't I be an Unwedded Widow?

Not so sure about the "Rejoice" part...But if somebody can write a hymn called "Glory to God in all things" (which is beautiful, by the way) in the Gulag, starving to death in a concentration camp in Siberia, maybe at some point I'll be able to actually rejoice. (How on earth did he DO that? Well, I also wonder how St Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia managed to survive over a decade in a black basalt pit underground without losing his mind...I visited it once...Darkness, dampness, and silence...)

But one thing I can rejoice at: there is a word for me! Widow! Unmarried widow, unwedded widow...Add a modifier, I have a phrase. Hira Animfefte (Xera Anymphefte) (Greek), Vdova Nenevestnaya (Russian/Slavonic), Unwedded Widow.

Hira is actually Greek for widow, so literally my moniker is Widow Unwedded. It's my title; nay, it's my badge of honor.

I had The Real Thing. I loved truly, I loved much, and I was loved as much or more in return. Warts and all. Oh, I know what all his faults were, and I remember them with affection. A wonderful thing a friend of mine told me the week after my beloved Nelson died, when I was desperate for stories of him--she told me about a time he was waiting for me outside our dorm building while she was smoking with her then-boyfriend. Remarking on my lateness in getting myself out the door, he remarked affectionately, "Oh, it's just one of her adorable little quirks."

I miss the way he would look at me--with love, with affection, sometimes with barely-contained lust...I miss talking to him for hours about anything and everything. I miss learning about classical music from him. I see my nearly 2-year-old nephew displaying some musical aptitude, and it hurts that he won't have an Uncle Nelson to teach him to play the violin...It hurts that we never got to be married, even for one day. It hurts that we never got to have children together. What a waste of good genetic material!

I was at CVS yesterday to pick up some perscriptions, and spent some time in the shampoo aisle...Before he died I would periodically buy him curly hair products. I used to love encouraging the curls in his hair to do their adorable ringlet thing. For some reason he usually just smooshed it down, which made it wavy...but given the right conditioning product and playing with it with your fingers, it would totally do the ringlet thing. *Swoon!* And he loved it when I played with his hair. It felt good to him. And he liked the results. ...So now I see curly hair products and they all scream "Nelson! Nelson! Nelson!" and I want to cry, but I can't, because I seem to need to reach critical mass on tears before they come out or something. AAAURGH!

Eye products too. For contact lenses. He was always carrying around a gigantic bottle and putting eyedrops in his eyes. Before he died he'd replaced his contacts with glasses...He was going to get contacts again, he was planning to, but of course it never happened...So the contacts solution aisle also screams "Nelson!" and it's like a knife in my heart. And I think, he shouldn't be dead. He shouldn't be dead! He shouldn't be dead! He was only 45. He had so many big plans! He was so lively, so vibrant!

Well, that's enough for now...I'll write more later...Thanks for reading...

I found The Real Thing.

True love. The whole nine yards. It's true. It's possible. It happened to me.

And then, in a half-hour to forty-five minutes, I had lost him. He died. I found out a half hour later. I nearly fainted. It was November 7th, 2009, a half hour after midnight, and my life had forever changed.

In this blog, I will recount my story.

We had planned to wed. Circumstances intervened. I was expecting a proposal around December 2009/January 2010. I was expecting to spend Thanksgiving with him. But he was gone.

Are you an unwedded widow/er? Did you lose the love of your life, who wasn't your spouse?  I'd love it if you'd connect with me. Are you the regular kind of widow/er? Please connect with me too! We who are in that club that nobody wants to join, and that has the WORST hazing procedure imaginable...we need to unite and support one another. Lest we go mad.