Journal: 12/13/06

All right, I can’t blame my friends; I know they were being polite. After all, you really can’t tell a nut-job that they’re a nut-job. It’s not polite, and the nut-job won’t listen anyway because he’s ALWAYS right. Right?

I have only myself to blame. No one else, no outside parties, no mystical "higher power," like Fate. Just me. Only me. All me. My bad.

I’m supremely thankful that I still have friends. People who actually give a damn about me and have enough sense to steer clear when I’m wearing my nut-job hat. Like Rose and Bill. Maybe David (Joann’s son) too. I count him as my friend, I hope he counts me as well.

It took me eight months to make the connection. By normal people standards, that would be considered retarded. Okay. Call me retarded, emotionally downs-like (I don’t want to give a perfectly respectable syndrome a bad name by association though), morally hydrocephalic, intellectually miniscule. I deserve it.

In my defense though, there are certain things you learn only from first-hand experience. Immanuel Kant would have called it "practical reason," "a priori" (relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions), things that need to be experienced and through that experience, we learn. Freud would have called it "Napoleon Complex." What I wound up with was "a posteriori" (relating to or derived by reasoning from observed facts).

Who knew that keeping your dead wife in a box on the living room table for eight months was a bad thing?

Obviously, not I, but apparently everyone else knew. Rose says that that was the reason she hasn’t been over to see me for eight months. Bill candidly states that he lived through it, but I can see veins throbbing at his temples when he claims that.

I thought that I was carrying out Joann’s wishes. I believed that this was normal mourning, grieving behavior. I can just hear the shrinks chortling over that as they draw up the commitment papers. A genuine, class-action internment in a nice, comfy room away from all the bad effects of reality.

Geez guys. I’m really, really, really sorry for all the horsey stuff I made you people slog through. I am wiser though. Not any smarter, maybe, but a hell of a lot wiser. Not to mention greyer.

Acceptance

Joann is free now, and I can finally wrap some closure, acceptance, around her passing. Sunday and Monday went along fine, slipping past as smoothly as oysters on the half shell. Yesterday, was another thing altogether. Rose pointed out that eventually stuff like this comes full circle and bites you on the ass. At the moment, I have a band-aid on my butt the size of Texas. Sorry, I don’t mean to malign Texas, but after all, aren’t you the people responsible for Dubya? You elected that fool enough times.

With closure, acceptance and a day of binging on booze and rock music, comes the return of normal bodily functions, like breathing. It also gives me some distance.

I will always love Joann for who she was, one of Monterey’s Florence Nightingales, a woman who simply couldn’t stop helping others, even though she was in trouble herself. She loved purple, kitties, anything stray on four legs or with feathers.

And, she loved me. For that, I’m immensely thankful.

Moi?

Where to now? It’s different being alone again. I don’t want to be who I was pre-Joann, I don’t know who I am post-Joann. At least, not yet.

Turn the page, get a clean sheet. I can be who I want to be. Not many people have that opportunity.

I do.