Journal: 05/18/06

Another piece of mail came for Joann today after a hiatus of a couple of weeks. This mail was different though, as it came from Monterey County Social Services, informing me (though it was addressed to Joann) that her Medi-Cal benefits would be stopped by the end of May 2006. The letter cited the fact that she was "deceased" as the cause for this action. It didn’t take them long to cancel her benefits as the notification to local, state and federal agencies went out on April 25. I imagine that I will be hearing from other agencies shortly. With fifteen days to go until the next income from Social Security, I’m naturally a little nervous.

"Hibernating" Not "Coasting"

After my outpouring yesterday in these pages, I thought about my situation a little more closely. Actually, I slept on it. Researchers say that when you sleep your brain replays everything that happened during your "awake" period in order to make associations between the day’s events and remembered events and learns from these associations. This is why, so they say, that sleeping on a problem produces better judgments and actions than making critical decisions immediately.

I think I’m taking my "coasting" analogy a little too literally. I believe that I’m actually "hibernating," cocooning within myself, so to speak. It is also some comfort to realize that I associate hibernating with "incubating" as the internal process. This better describes my current state than merely coasting. I’ve become more inner-directed and introspective as I sort through all of the memories, dreams and realities of my past with Joann. I guess I’m mentally doing to my brain what I did when I "housecleaned" the apartment, there’s just so much more stuff to go through.

This explains why I feel so sluggish and unenergized, not because I’m hiding out in the depths of my grief, but because the creative part of me is assembling my next move in my own life. So, there is an end to the drifting after all; the longer I keep myself stable, the quicker the process will be. I’ve learned from the Mother’s Day episode and am sure that type of event won’t occur again, and then I could be wrong all over again as well.

Looking at my momentary life this way sheds new light for me. I’m not as dead as I thought I was and I know the gears are turning, albeit slowly for all the mounds of memories to sift through. I won’t inhibit the process by worrying about it anymore. In fact, I’ll give myself permission to complete it in its own time.

Journal: 05/17/06

Another day, another dollar but at least I’m feeling better and eating again. It must be age that makes my "rebound" time grow longer the older I get. By the time I’m sixty, it will take me a week to recover from a one-day binge. It’s taking me three days to get back to normal after Mother’s Day now. Maybe one more night of lengthy, deep sleep will finally fix me up. As far as the binging is concerned though, I don’t see myself giving up my beer anytime soon, just being more careful about the binging.

Comfortably Numb—Still

I’m still coasting, days centered around going to work on time, sleeping until noon (I go to work at 1:00 PM), spend my days surfing the Internet and drinking too much on my day off. I can feel the intelligence running out of my ears but am powerless to do anything about it. This lack of interest or activity must be some form of low-level depression and though I’m getting tired of feeling this way, the inertia of my life is so great that altering course would take more energy than I have at my disposal. Sometimes I think that having a major breakdown and getting it all out—the grieving for Joann—and getting on with my life would be a blessing as opposed to immobility.

As I drift down the river of pathos, I look for signs on the riverbank that might give me a clue as to how to break out of my emotional prison, but I have noticed few. The guideposts clearly shouting for my attention are acknowledged, but not acted upon. Energy to act derives from inspiration, and I have none. Curiously, intelligent ideas are not investigated and clearly illuminated paths not taken.

In all of this, there lies a drabness, a grayness of life as though all of the color has been drawn out and the outlines of things have blurred. I have become comfortably numb to everything around me and it shouts out "apathy." I have adopted a callous indifference to my life and made it mine.

If I don’t find a way out of this soon, I’ll lose everything I have gained on the Monterey Peninsula. I have to take action to restart my life instead of merely sitting around paralyzed. Good luck to me, I haven’t done anything constructive in weeks except write this blog.

Journal: 05/16/06

Today was "better," at least in the medical sense of the word. My hangover was gone, but I remained lethargic in mind and body, my soul like a wrung-out cheesecloth. Staying focused through the day wasn’t all that hard, I did manage to get ten hours of sleep last night. I’m going to bed early tonight also, so I can continue my unbroken record of arriving at work on time every day for the past month.

Joann’s Obituary (Update)

Joann’s son David called yesterday and we had a nice chat. I had left a message on Sunday on his cell phone, but he told me he had been out of town. He read Joann’s obituary that I posted on this blog on May 8, and told me that there were a few corrections that needed to be made. First, Joann was born in Scottsdale, Arizona, not Texas, and her father’s last name was Mahan, not Dubuc. All of the information I used in her obit came from our marriage license and her death certificate, and at least in the case of the marriage certificate, she wrote her own information down. I’ve made the corrections and am republishing Joann’s obituary here, the original posted on May 8 with stay uncorrected, in the spirit of not making corrections to any published post. If there are any other corrections to be made, I’ll put them up here as they come about.

Joann Gottlund-Scott August 24, 1951—April 6, 2006 MONTEREY, CA.—Joann Gottlund-Scott, 54, passed away peacefully in her sleep at her home in Monterey with her loving husband by her side on April 6, 2006, from complications of end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and coronary artery disease. Joann was born on August 24, 1951 in Scottsdale, Arizona; she spent her childhood and teen years in Modesto, Ca. and was a thirty-year resident of the Monterey Peninsula. She divided much of her professional career as a Registered Nurse working at the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP) and the Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) of the Monterey Peninsula. She was well respected in her field by employers, colleagues and patients. Joann had a great love of life and a boundless passion for living it, even through the final three years of her life as her disease advanced. She was always there to lend a hand to friends in need, especially when they were ill or having surgery. Joann was a wonderful wife, loving mother to her son David, and stayed in daily contact with her mother, Mildred, the entire year before she passed away. Joann will be missed by everyone who knew her. Joann was preceded in death by her father, Joe Mahan, and her mother, Mildred Mahan. Her husband of eighteen months residing in Monterey, Ca., James A. Scott, her son residing in Sacramento, Ca. David R. Shorey, her brother Bobby and sister Janie residing in the Modesto, Ca. area, survive her.

Journal: 05/15/06

It was a warmer day than usual for this time of year and that just made me cranky. I didn’t get to sleep until 7:00 AM, although I did manage to drag myself out of bed at 12:20 PM, even after forgetting to set the alarm clock. Hung-over and with a "breakfast of champions" beer start to the day, I nevertheless made it to work on time. I did have to call Bill and ask him to bring me something for lunch, as I didn’t have time to make anything for myself. That didn’t matter anyway, in the long-run; as I didn’t eat anything at the office. Luckily, it was a slow day, not enough people walking through the door or calling to piss me off, and everyone respectfully stayed off my case, even the guests, what few there were. I suffered in silence with ill humor, but I didn’t drink anything but coffee and juice at work, for which I gave myself a hearty pat on the back when I got home.

Considering Mother’s Day

In retrospect, I should have known what was coming. As I noted yesterday, so far I’d managed to avoid any direct confrontation with my loss, simply by making sure I get to work every day. That stratagem will always work though, there are going to be times when I am caught unawares and pay the price for having not come to terms with Joann’s death.

At the same time, I’m also not sure how to bring my grief to the surface and face it. I also don’t know if the reason behind not confronting my grief is that I’m suppressing it or dealing with it differently.

It’s similar to when I stopped smoking, all of the literature told me to be prepared for "backslides," and backslide I did when the pressures of taking care of Joann became great. When I talked a few days ago to Joe, the VNA bereavement counselor, he pointed out that certain events or memories could trigger a depression like the one I went through yesterday. That’s backsliding too. Just when I thought I had everything under control, something comes along to challenge my grip on sanity.

Journal: 05/14/06

I really hate it when things sneak up on me and bite me in the ass. In this case, it was Mother’s Day and the unexpected surprise it dealt me. Actually, if I had been working today I probably wouldn’t have reacted to the day as I did. In the end, today was a pretty messy day. I did manage to accomplish one thing though, I cleaned up the two side-by-side tables where I’ve been tossing mail, receipts, and other odds and ends. Those tables haven’t been cleaned since Joann and I moved into the new apartment.

Mother’s Day

My reaction today to Mother’s Day wasn’t a pretty one. The day started well enough, but in the end I was so depressed I couldn’t get to sleep, though I did take a three-hour nap in the late afternoon. The beer flowed and I was a mess.

Two things got to me. The first was the total absence of anyone to celebrate Mother’s Day with, the second was a cascading sense of loss that started with Joann and moved onward to finally reach my own mother. In a sense, I was grieving for three mothers, not just one.

I took it hard that there was, for the first time in my life, no one to focus on for Mother’s Day. My own mother died two years ago in January, and I talked Joann’s mother, Mildred, into being my surrogate mother, a task that she took on gladly. When she died this past January, Joann was still alive and not in home-hospice yet. Now, with Joann gone, this year’s holiday was a bleak one with no one to direct my attention to. As well, because funds are tight, I wasn’t able to go anywhere with Bill, like out to dinner or something.

As the day rolled on, I just became more miserable, drank more and ultimately passed out cold. If I had been working today, as I normally would have been, I could have made it through the day without a breakdown. That’s how I’ve made it through other days in the last few weeks where there were anniversaries and the like. Keeping myself busy and distracted seems to do the trick. Leaving me alone where I can sit around and dwell doesn’t work so well.

I’ll be better tomorrow, if I can get a little sleep.

Journal: 05/13/06

Mother’s Day approaches tomorrow and I have the day (Sunday) off again. Expect a lengthy post tomorrow as I write my way through the first holiday Joann, Bill and I celebrated in Snug Harbor. Maybe next week will be the seven-day long one that I thought this one would be. I asked the managers if they wanted my to just keep Sunday as my day off, but they said that this was just an exception and things would be back to normal next week. We’ll see.

Thinking About the Next Book

One of the top promises I made to Joann before she died was to finish one of my books. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do in that respect and I believe I’m finally there.

I have always been great at starting to write new books, I’ve written four, fifty-thousand word stories that all need to be edited into saleable books, but never went far beyond the initial effort. Every November, for the last four years, I have competed in the National Novel Writing Month competition to produce these four stories that never were completed. The plots are good, the ideas fresh, reflecting life in the motels I’ve lived and worked in. Basically, your "underdog does good" story, dealing with the issues of the working homeless and the traps they are prey to.

After Joann passed on, I thought I wanted to write something that followed, to some degree, the path of this blog. I felt then, and still do now, that not enough is said about the intensely personal experience of personally taking care of a dying spouse or child. Especially about the aftermath for those who must continue on and deal with whatever their new lives hold. After taking Joann through the home hospice experience, I believe I’m well qualified to put that experience out into the world. And, I have just the vehicle to do it.

One of the stories I wrote was called "The View from Snug Harbor," and is the story of Joann, Bill and I and how we lived in the original apartment in this motel. The idea I have is to take this blog-line and overlay it onto the Snug Harbor story, using these blog entries as the book’s chapters and matching the pieces of the original novel to each Snug Harbor chapter as a flashback. By intertwining these two stories and not randomizing them chronologically, I believe that this would produce a powerful way to tell the story of all three of us, past and present, simultaneously.

I’m excited about the idea and now that I have it firmly in my head, will start working on the outline and selecting the chapters to use. Not only will this be a tribute to Joann, but also I’ll finally produce a marketable novel.