I feel so isolated. So terribly alone and isolated.
I’ve always felt different, felt like I didn’t fit in with the group. Belonging has always meant hiding or submerging some part of myself so I don’t stand out from the group. Emotional camouflage is my forte and my refuge. In the weeks and months since Michele died I have felt more acutely than ever my disassociation with the people around me. I am like an orphan wandering the streets on a cold, snowy evening peering into the windows of homes at the families inside, together and warm. I can see the connections between people, and I understand that I have connections with people, but they don’t seem real, they don’t seem to have any substance.
It is embarrassing to me to have to rely on the courtesy of others in order to be okay. While I am forever indebted to all the people in my life who have reached out and given me a place to just be, I chafe at the imagined obligation this places me under in return. My uneasiness grows only stronger when I realize that having successfully navigated this far in the turbulent waters caused by Michele’s death, I am faced with a new set of rapids to survive - those of my mother’s death.
How can I return to the same people who, to my eye, have extended themselves time and time again while I flail away at the elephant of grief camped in the middle of my life only to say to them, I’m back, and I have more grief, more sorrow, more need. It pains me greatly to feel so helpless and adrift. To be lost without the largesse of others, and to now, so soon after overstaying my welcome, to return needing more of the same.
And so I sit here today, alone, isolated and bereft of sanctuary. I can’t escape the reality of Michele’s being gone from the rest of my life. And I don’t want to accept the impending death of my mother. And I can’t bring myself to burden the people around me with my pain and sorrow.
I am alone. So terribly alone and isolated.
Unleashed is a rather startling little film about a young man who has been raised violently by a petty criminal, but who ultimately finds redemption and salvation in music. Co-staring Bob Hoskins, Morgan Freeman, and Jet Li, Unleashed was surprisingly good.
Rating: Worth a place in your Netflix queue
An email from my mother left me crying uncontrollably this afternoon. In it she related that she is less and less able to do with out oxygen; that she is more and more aware that her days are numbered.
In the past few weeks she has had visits from her sister and surviving brother, as well as from nieces and nephews. There have been trips to Normal to see her grandchildren, and they have come to see her as well. I have been able to get over to Illinois twice, and I cherish that time spent with my mom.
Next weekend I will return to my childhood home again, to see my mom and continue the long gentle goodbye we have been sharing since she learned her cancer had returned and was terminal. In a letter I sent to her shortly after her birthday I shared some of my memories of her, and in her email and our conversations she has shared some of her memories and thoughts as well.
I know much has been made throughout history of a boys love for his mother. Not nearly enough has been made of the impact a mother’s loss has on her children. Even with daily juxtapositions between my desire to see and talk to Michele again against the reality of her death; I am unable to comprehend even for a moment what the world will be like when I can’t call home and talk to my mom.
For the past couple of days I have been suffering with the onset of a head cold. A faint cough began Tuesday afternoon and evening as post-nasal drip hailed the start of ten days of sheer joy. I managed to get through the work day yesterday, but only just. Once I was home I collapsed on the bed for a two hour nap, followed by a bowl of chicken noodle soup. (Note to self: next time make sure you buy regular chicken noodle soup, not the creamy kind.)
After dinner I was up for a couple of hours, and even managed to clean the pile of dishes in the sink. However, after a short hot bath to relax I was back in bed by 8:30 pm. The sinus pressure in my head was enough that every tooth in my upper jaw felt like it was abscessed. Four Motrin and a Sudafed later I was able to get to sleep. This morning I felt considerably better, enough so that I came into work. I may run out of gas before the day is through but I am upright at least.
The hardest part about all of this, especially when my jaw was so sore last night, was being alone. When you are married or have a loving partner there is someone there to fetch kleenex or make soup, and you don’t have to try and think through the fog of drugs and illness about what needs to be done. I missed Michele terribly all evening until about 10:00 when I was in so much pain that I started crying and said out loud that I needed her, that I didn’t want to be alone. Within seconds, Nekko (who was really Michele’s cat), was on the bed laying right beside me purring loudly. Whenever Michele was upset Nekko always came to here as if to comfort her. Having her appear just when I needed Michele the most was incredible. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone, and the pain in my head was less, and I was able to sleep.
Sometimes the enormity of Michele’s death hits me particularly hard. The very idea of death is so hard to wrap your mind around that, when coupled with the death of your life’s love, you really can’t grasp it all. Or even begin to understand it all.
The only analogy I can find is the fable about the blind men in a room with an elephant where each man describes a different animal for he only examined part of the whole. Experiencing grief is like that as well. Your mind can’t accept or process it all at once, so you move through grief in bits and pieces, only rarely catching faint glimpses of the whole. My memories of my sister’s death and my reaction to it are naturally jaded now. Thirty-three years of life experience will warp any memory to its will. But I do remember not being able to understand or comprehend what had happened. Certainly the coping skills and thought processes of a twelve-year old are ill suited for something as momentous and shattering as the death of a sibling in childhood.
It turns out that the coping skills and defense mechanisms of an adult aren’t much better at making sense of death either. Or rather sense of the aftermath death creates. I understand intellectually that Michele is gone. She killed herself deliberately. I found her, and I saw her dead. There is no doubt that she is gone from this lifetime forever. This intellectual fact doesn’t fit into any place of recognition in my mind however. There are still times when I turn around thinking she’ll be there smiling, or holding one of the cats. I expect my cellphone to ring and to hear her voice in my ear. These phantoms created by my mind’s need to be with her still, only create situations where I relive to some degree the pain of losing her all over again.
Perhaps the mind is protecting itself by only examining the grief and the enormity of death piecemeal. If death were the elephant and my mind a blind man examining it, then I would only be able to explore a bit at a time. “Seeing” the whole elephant at once isn’t possible. Trying to take it all in at once would likely shatter my bond with reality. Understanding this process and accepting are two different things entirely. Cycling back again and again to certain aspects of our relationship, her death, and the aftermath I’m sifting through is brutally difficult. Like pulling a bandage off I want to do it swiftly so as to get it over with, not start and stop and hesitate.
And so as I wander through the rooms in my head where Michele still lives, and I reconcile those memories with the reality of her being dead, I very much feel like a blind man desperately trying to figure out the nature of the enormous creature with which I am confronted. The trick, I think, is to examine enough to satisfy and then move on; for trying to understand the whole elephant would take more than a lifetime, and at the end of my life, my death will answer the questions I so desperately want answered now.
Patience, grasshopper.
For the past two years I have been a daily user of Google’s GMail service. I was never impressed with Microsoft Hotmail and I have a strong dislike for Yahoo’s invasion-ware tactics when you install their chat client, so I was pleased to discover a simple, easy to use, and very slick web-based mail tool. (I have invitations if anyone would like.)
When Google introduced their homepage I immediately set one up for myself and it has been my starting point ever since. So when I learned a few weeks ago that Google was developing a web-based calendar I couldn’t wait to try it. As of an hour ago my patience was rewarded. My daily visit to TechCrunch paid off as the lead story was about the launch of Goolge’s Calendar beta.
My initial impression is a good one. I was able to successfully import all my iCal ics files (something Mozilla’s Sunbird and OSAF’s Chandlerhave consistently failed to accomplish) although I haven’t been able to create separate calendars yet.
Google Calendar
For several weeks now my broadband cable connection has been somewhat flaky. I first noticed that it was dropping the signal perhaps a month ago, and at that time unplugging the modem and plugging it back in seemed to clear up the problem. Two weekends ago it dropped on a Friday evening and no amount of resetting seemed to work. From past experience I know to unplug the router and modem, as well as the cable itself for a period of thirty or so seconds. Even this method of resetting things didn’t clear up the problem. Hooking up the cable before powering on the modem and waiting for the sync light to be solid was fruitless; the sync light would blink faster and then slower but never became a solid connection.
I called Road Runner and they were able to determine that it might be a problem on the line. The first appointment time available was the following Monday morning. However, by Saturday afternoon my connection was up and working again. So first thing Monday morning I called can canceled the service call. A couple of times since then it has been flaky, but immediately reconnected. Last evening it dropped and again refused to reconnect. This time when I called Road Runner they hinted that it might be my modem. The technician said that she was getting a “weak signal” that might indicate a problem with my equipment. I went ahead and scheduled a service call for this afternoon (“Can you be there between 2:00 and 5:00 pm?”) just to eliminate line problems before buying a new modem.
The Linksys cable modem is five years old, maybe older, as we acquired it in South Carolina in the fall of 1999 or early winter of 2000. I suppose it could be going bad, it has been in almost continuous use ever since being purchased. It is a supreme pain in the ass to have to take time to be at home waiting, but I am not going to continue to suffer a flaky broadband connection
Turns out my cable modem was going bad. The technician came and tested the signal strength in my apartment and declared it “perfect.” (He said a range of +15 to -15 was acceptable, but that -3 is where you wanted to register. Mine signal is a -6.) He did swap the final three feet of cable (from the wall outlet to the modem) with a high quality one so that when he left everything was working.
Within twenty minutes the signal was dropped again. So I went off to get a new modem. Thanks to a friend at work I tried the Road Runner office first and was able to get one for free (it’s included in the monthly charge) which save me from spending $70 or so at the computer store.
After coming home and getting everything installed I was faced with another problem. The ThinkPad would wirelessly connect, but neither Mac would. I ran Network Stumbler on the ThinkPad and discovered that several of my neighbors are running WiFi hotspots all on channel 11. So I switched mine to channel 6 and now everything connects just fine. A quick reset of the Lexmark and Tivo to get them connected again and I am once again up and running.
Next project: converting to fixed IP addressing so that each device maintains the same address through reboots, and recycles of the router. I do enough machine to machine stuff that I would be nice not to have to look up the target IP address all the time.
In eighth grade metal shop class one of our projects was to make a zinc-carbon battery and a wound field DC electric motor. The battery kit contained a tube and the end caps, as well as the paste that filled the battery. My best friend’s battery kit was damaged so we used his paste and mine to fill one tube. Our battery clocked in at an impressive 2 volts or so, whereas the regular kit only yielded 1.5 volts.
The motor kit contained the armature, with an axle and stand, and some copper wire to produce the windings. Having succeeded with our combined battery we took the time to carefully wind as much copper wire around each arm of the motor as carefully as possible, tucking the coils in tightly and uniformly. Naturally this resulted in a better electromagnetic field, and our motor really hummed when coupled to the battery made earlier.
I seem to remember something about electric motors needing a load or they would burn up; without a load they just spin faster and faster. In the past few weeks I have started to feel a little bit less like an unloaded electric motor. Either I am managing to get the right amount of load to keep my emotions and mental processes in check, or I am getting used to the free spinning, unloaded condition of grief.
Certainly some of the physical symptoms of grief are fading. The incredibly tense, painful tightness in my neck and shoulders has dissipated. My sleeping pattern is gradually returning to normal, although I still have nights where I can’t get to sleep as easily as I’d like. Finally my appetite seems to be returning, although my general ennui makes it difficult to prepare meals at times. Even though I am taking pains to prepare for my mother’s death I am not looking forward to the return of these symptoms. As Michele always used to say, it isn’t being at rock bottom that hardest; hardest is when you managed to claw your way back up off the bottom only to get knocked down again.
The impending loss of my mother will certainly knock me back down the slope. The trick will be how far and for how long.