Prolog: James Aaronn Scott—Blog Administrator

Hello. My name is James Aaronn Scott (though everyone calls me "Scot") and I’m "WriterByTheSea," the creator and author of this blog. If you have read my earlier posts, you might have guessed that this blog in about my wife, Joann, and the final stage of her terminal illness. This post being my third in the series, at this writing I haven’t had any response from others, but I expect there to be a divided audience with some thinking I’m a horrible person for putting my wife on display in this manner, and others who will gain something for themselves from the experience of reading this. Well, to my detractors I say: "Don’t read this then." To everyone else: "Welcome."

Joann and I created this blog as a therapy project for ourselves, to keep family and friends updated on the progression of her illness, and to share with as yet unmet persons who are in the same position, be they the caregiver or the care-receiver. For both of us, this is a completely new situation to be in. As such, I expect to be stumbling through the learning process during and after Joann passes on. This blog is intended to cover my readjustment to life alone as well as Joann’s passing.

Joann, on the other hand, felt that we could express things to each other through writing better than we could by talking. That isn’t to say that we don’t spend a great deal of our time together lately mauling the subject. Surprisingly, our paths of communication have been as open as they always have during our relationship. Being able to sit and be truthful with each other is one of the central pillars of our relationship.

Joann and I have been living together for three years now, one-and-a-half of those years as a married couple. We have known each other since 1997 and good friends for the past nine years. Our relationship has always been based on comradeship and companionship. In the last three years, Joann has brought me a stability I have rarely encountered in my single lifestyle. That stability translated into assuming responsibility for her, our home, and our lifestyle, something new to me after a life of wanderlust. I guess she made me grow up a little more.

Throughout the three years Joann and I have been together, she has been in the stage of her illness where she was considered fully disabled. It came as no surprise then that her current "final" stage and hospice status rapidly came upon us. We were expecting it; in fact, she had already outlived her primary doctor’s prognosis twice, by a year each time. Because of her illness and its progressive nature, I was accustomed to taking care of her in certain ways, and watching for signs and indicators of any downward slide. In those years we went through distinct opportunistic diseases such as pneumonia, severe acid reflux, severe anemia, accounting for four hospitalizations and numerous episodes at home requiring special medications and machines. Upon occasion, the Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) supported her at home after hospitalizations.

I understand that there is a difference in the way survivors act if the illness of a loved one has been long and arduous. I suppose I fit in that category. I’ve watched it happen to my father when my own mother died. She was in the hospital for a year and my father, being retired, spent all his time with her. Her passing wasn’t a sudden event, but a long, slow slide, wearing my father out in the process. I can see the similarities with Joann’s illness. That is one of the reasons we created this blog, self-induced therapy, one last thing she and I can share together.

A Short Bio

I was raised in San Diego, California, and thoroughly hated it. I couldn’t stand the heat in the summer and torrential rain in the winter. For whatever reason, I couldn’t stand the city either, except for Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo.

When it came time, I fairly ran (via Greyhound Bus) to Berkeley, California, where I attempted to get an education. I wrote term papers for a living becoming one of the most prolific original, bogus term paper writers in the country, until I discovered computers. From then on, programming and systems design would rule my life until I had a stroke in 1992, which effectively took me out of the game.

In the early years of freedom I lived in Haight-Asbury, then spent years plying my term paper and computer skills all around the country, becoming a fixture at countless universities. In 1973, I landed in Denver, Colorado, and made it my base of operations for twenty years. After my stroke and subsequent burnout, I struck off for Monterey, California seeking greener fields. I decided to give up the technology game and retreat to a more bohemian lifestyle and do a bit of writing. I was all ready to wait tables or some such nonsense to support myself until I got something published.

In retrospect, I have to say that I never did anything in life the easy, normal way. I turned out to be too old to wait tables and there were no other jobs in the offing. The Monterey Peninsula is a small little collection of towns almost completely dependent on tourism. I had left all of my computers in Denver thinking that the spirit of Steinbeck and a portable, manual typewriter would change my life. When the money started to run out, I went back to programming computers, this time for the Navy and Department of Defense, while supplementing my income editing thesis for students at the Naval Postgraduate School.

All that changed in 1997 when I went through three back surgeries, each one more invasive and metallic. For a while, now that I owned a computer again, I built websites for motels on the peninsula. Soon enough I had saturated my market and began working behind the front-desk for those same people for whom I built websites.

Front-desk work gave me a lot to write about. The characters who populate cheap motels in a mecca of wealth and tourism, the boot of the motel owners on the necks of migrant housekeepers and dirt-poor white front-desk people, and countless other gripes about economic expatriatism. Today I live in the motel I work at. My apartment is newly constructed and quite comfortable. It is a harbor where Joann can remain at home and I am never farther away than the front-desk.

After all these years, I have achieved the simplest of things, stability for myself and Joann.