Journal: 04/10/06 to 04/14/06

Lots of stuff to tell in this post, but first:

Sorry I Missed the Last Week!!

So much stuff went on after Joann died that I stayed overwhelmed for a week. Yesterday, April 14, I went back to work for four hours yet slept the rest of the day. I felt like I had been beaten with hardwood bats, I was so sore all over. This whole adrenaline run for the last two months or longer made me both a physical and emotional wreck.

I have been trying to put together a blog entry for the last several days, but every time I approach the subject, I get out only a few sentences and then become so distracted that I can’t continue. Its not that I’ve been neglecting my readers, dear constant ones, just that I’ve either been busy or in heart-soul pain on a level I’ve never experienced before. To get things rolling though, let me start at the beginning—when Joann passed away—and offer up this outline of events to catch everyone up. This is a long entry, but stay with it.

Joann’s Cremation Fecalith

Everything went no detours, free hand-basket included, straight to hell hours after Joann passed away, beginning with the mortuary.

Time-Line after Joann Passes Away

04/06/06 3:45 AM—Joann passes away. I call the VNA for the next step. I also call Bill, Rose and Joann’s son David.
 

04/06/06 5:30 AM—Paul’s Mortuary comes to collect the body. VNA nurse dumps all narcotics prescribed by the VNA in the toilet. This phase is now over.
 

04/06/06 8:30 AM—I call my friend Rose and am shortly over at her house shedding stress with a few drinks. During this time, the Paul Mortuary calls and we set up an appointment for later in the afternoon so a representative can get the paperwork together and I can figure out how to make payments for Joann’s cremation. AdvantaCare®, the service used by Medicare and VNA for all of Joann’s medical appliance needs also calls and we set up an appointment for the next day to have everything picked up. At this point, everything looks okay, except that I’m feeling lost and not sure where to take the next step. I’m back home by noon.
 

04/06/06 Early Afternoon—The Paul Mortuary representative and I meet and she collects all the pertinent information. I’m not having a good time, but Bill is on site to lend moral support and nudges when I freeze up. My brain does stick a couple of times, I forget the name of Joann’s father, a tidbit of information I knew well (Joe Mahan), the place where she was born (Phoenix, Arizona), and her grandparent’s name, that I never knew but I’m sure the relatives did.

Then I ask about payment arrangements. Now, I’m thinking that I’m just like everybody else, when a spouse dies, you get to make payments if you are, understandably, a little short. Well no, not in this case. You get to make payments if you are still alive, making payments on yourself, or your spouse is still alive, and you are making final arrangements. It appears that in this day and age, dead is dead and too many people are dropping corpses off and just walking away thinking they are done with their job. This attitude makes it tough for those of us who really need some slack cut so the County doesn’t get involved.

Understandably, I’m a bit depressed and yet again, overwhelmed, knowing that Joann is going to lay in mortuary limbo, equivalent to lying on the bank of the River Styx, until someone pays the Ferryman to cross.

I went back to Rose’s place for a couple of hours to mull all this over. I had until Wednesday, April 12, to come up with $1500.00 to complete Joann’s wishes, and not an iota of an idea or what to do about it if I had one. Additional input was necessary. Rose made some phone calls, but that didn’t make things any better. In the end, she remembered that when her brother-in-law died her sister had to use her credit card to have him cremated. No payments there.
 

04/06/06 Early Evening—I’m back home again and not doing well. Freaking out seems to be the order of life today and I haven’t had time to be sorrowful yet, though I know I need that desperately. It becomes an empty night calling my family and letting people know what happened, drinking beer, and hoping tomorrow will be better. It wasn’t.
 

04/07/06 (Friday)—AdvantaCare® comes over to pick up Joann’s hospital bed, SAT monitor, wheelchair, oxygen tanks and oxygen compressor that she has had for two years. I try to start cleaning out the stuff left behind by two months of VNA Home Hospice care, especially the things from the last week. The VNA came over to give Joann baths in the last week because of her stroke and left many things that needed to be tossed out. This would be the mantra of the rest of the week ("tossed out"). In the beginning, I thought I would make a sweep through the apartment and get all the obvious items in a garbage bag. Five minutes later, I decided to take it a little bit at a time. I simply couldn’t deal with the reality of cleaning house yet. Too much of Joann was here, and I didn’t want to make her go "there." Rose did come over and pick up a couple of Joann’s things she wanted and I was glad there was a use for some of Joann’s stuff.
 

04/08/06 (Saturday)—By Saturday April 8, I’m just a walking sore. Disconnected from everything except the task of raising money to cremate Joann. I go over to Rose’s place to get away for a while and talk to someone other than Bill. Yes, Bill is a great friend, but you have to talk to more than just one person who knew Joann. I’ve been dealing with her son David and giving him reassurance, now its time for me. Bill probably needed the break as well. Rose was going to barbeque a couple of steaks but I found I couldn’t stay long enough to make that happen. In the mid-afternoon, I took my leave and went home with one of the raw steaks thinking I would make it up at home. The steak still sits in the freezer.

Bill Walker, consummate roommate, artist and friend told me that he was opening up his entire collection of art as gifts for donators to Joann’s cremation. Paralyzed as I was about Joann’s cremation, and at a complete loss for any way out, this gives me hope. There are many unanswered questions, such as how we are actually going to do this in such a short time frame, but at least I can sleep tonight.
 

04/09/06 (Sunday)—The day before I had been called by the managers of the motel and asked if I would work for three hours. I thought that I probably needed to get away from the apartment for a bit and have some semblance of normalcy, so I agreed. Today I worked three and a half hours and it was liberating. I didn’t have the beer breakfast I had been used to for weeks, and I was able to deal with people without my pain getting in the way. Aside from the exhaustion after my shift, I wasn’t too depressed. Bill and I had dinner and a short game of cards. After some television, I was ready for bedtime. I was still on my adrenaline run and stressed about getting the money for Joann’s cremation, but I felt a smidgen better.
 

04/10/06 (Monday)—This is the first day of hunting for donations. I really didn’t have a clue what I was going to do. Whom do I call? Where do I go? Bill and I spent the day strategizing, thinking that people would be eager to get a piece of art in return for a donation of some kind. In the end, the economy is tight, all I know are motel people and the motels are doing poorly this winter, and we were out of time. Bill’s offer would have made sense if it had come a month earlier, but who was to know? There simply wasn’t time to put art pieces on EBay, make flyers to paper the city with cries for donations, there wasn’t even time to put pictures of his art out to my website and attach a link to this blog. I was sitting on the train tracks waiting for the juggernaut to hit. Late at night, I decided to grovel and do a little direct donation hunting from my past employer. Sleep would have been slow in coming, if not for the sleeping pills I’ve been taking lately.
 

04/11/06 (Tuesday)—Groveling is part of my way of life. I had to fight my current bosses for the time to stay at home and take care of Joann. I groveled to keep my job. This day I went groveling to my former bosses for a donation I was sure they would have a hard time making. By the end of the day though, I had a commitment for $400.00 for Joann’s cremation, with the proviso that I would pay it back in a month. By this time, I was willing to take any conditions. Then I tackled my current bosses for more. They gave me $100.00 that I didn’t have to pay back; I just needed to get to work again. The theory was that if I had some money, I could back off Paul Mortuary a little longer. I would be able to pick up the $400.00 tomorrow, deadline day.
 

04/12/06 (Wednesday)—This morning started with a call from Paul Mortuary saying that they would make a new contract with me. The total price was now $900.00 instead of $1500.00, and they would accept the $500.00 in donations I had raised, giving me another week to pay off the remaining $400.00. After a wait until I could get in touch with my $400.00 donator, I picked up the check at their offices, called the Paul Mortuary representative, and the transaction was completed by evening. Joann would be cremated on the ‘morrow. I felt as though a great weight had been lifted, I could finally complete Joann’s final wish, at least the part about cremation.
 

04/13/06 (Thursday)—I had been scheduled to go back to work on Wednesday, but I put that off for a day to deal with the mortuary. However, a different problem surfaced this day and I had to move my work back another day, and the boss gods were not happy, but it was necessary. In the afternoon, Bill and I ran out of time on the outside storage we were using in front of my apartment. Most of the stuff was Joann’s clothing; she had a lot of clothes and shoes. In our society, it seems to be okay if live women resell their stuff in "recycle" stores, but nobody wants to wear dead women’s clothing. I had spent all week trying to give Joann’s things away, but no one wanted them, and Bill and I were out of time. I also cleaned the closet in the apartment of her clothes as well believing that no one would want those either. It was a traumatic time, having all her things go to the Marina City dump, but I didn’t know what else to do. I still have some of her things in the apartment awaiting her son David’s picking over, but the bulk of Joann’s physical life is gone now. Her memory and presence remains as strong as ever.
 

04/14/06 (Friday)—Went back to work today, without the beer breakfast. The deal with the bosses was that I start at four hours for the first two days, six hours for the next two days, and then back to the usual nine-hour daily grind. I figured that I needed to work back into this gradually. Truth was that I knew I needed to start sleeping a lot. Sleep repairs the body and mind, and in my case helps me detox from all the beer I’ve been drinking to get through this. I need the job, people have to go on and I’m not into being homeless. Work went fine; I was exhausted at the end of my four-hour shift and took a good three-hour nap when I came home.

So ends a rough eight days. Sorry it took me so long to get back on-line, but death-in-the-family is harder than I thought it would be. I hope that at this point, I can get back on a regular posting schedule.

Thanks for staying with me through this.