Journal: 06/05/06

I was up at 7:30 AM and by eight o’clock, Bill and I were winging our way to Salinas and my appointment with Social Security. Originally, I had planned to make the Salinas jaunt and the other errands in Monterey as a single trip. Bill decided, and wisely so, to break the trip into two parts, with some time at home for a bit of lunch. When we finished everything late in the afternoon, I took a well-deserved nap before dinner. All in all, I completed everything I wanted to do and also set the main task for next Monday.

A Lot of Joann-Related Things Accomplished

Dealing with Social Security was the big task of the day. I filed for Joann’s death benefit and for my own disability income. Joann’s death benefit wasn’t a problem and it should appear in my bank in a week. As far as my own disability status is concerned, and as far as the government knows, I’ve been "disabled" since June 1997. That was when I first took disability for my back surgeries and I’ve been in that status ever since. This is good news, because it also let’s me become eligible for Joann’s survivor insurance, or my own Social Security, whichever is higher.

Achieving my own Social Security income isn’t a "quick fix" for my current financial problems and I never thought it would be. The whole process will take about six months, including visits to doctors and other evaluations. Meanwhile, I now have enough documentation from the federal government to apply for services, such as food stamps, at the local level. Apparently, applying for Social Security, coupled with my disabled status, opens some otherwise closed doors. This could give me some relief in the area of groceries and personal expenses. Applying to the county is a project for next Monday when I’m not so rushed, as that process could eat up a half day.

On the way back from Salinas, Bill and I stopped by Grocery Outlet for a bit of shopping. Grocery Outlet is the area’s super-low price grocery store, but because it is in Marina, it doesn’t make much sense to shop there for only a few things. Bill watches local grocery stores for sales and we eat well, but Grocery Outlet just doesn’t offer the selection of other, closer stores. This was why Bill wanted to take a break before going on the remaining errands—we bought some frozen things and they would all have melted.

After a quick lunch Bill and I headed downtown for more errands. I needed to stop by our mailbox and reassure them that even though I’m late paying my quarterly bill, that I would pay it soon, or at least part of it. It is imperative that the mailbox keeps collecting mail as I need to keep receiving any mail for Joann, and Bill’s pension checks are sent there every month. The mailbox people have always worked with us in the past, but I thought I should put in a personal appearance as a matter of diplomacy.

My jeweler, Gaspar, was next on the list, also because I’m behind on payments. For the jeweler though, I took along Joann’s wedding ring from her second husband (the one before me) to offer up as collateral. I don’t know that he will actually buy the ring, or that its worth much more than I owe him, but as a sign of collateral, I thought it a good move. I don’t owe more than $250.00 on Joann’s and my wedding rings, but I don’t want to have to give them up, or lose my good relationship with my jeweler. Gaspar was the only person who was willing to give me credit to purchase an expensive watch six years ago, and has done so several times since.

I felt it was a satisfying day. I accomplished what I needed to and these all represented large steps in consolidating my financial future for the next few months while I try to figure out where to get the next dollar from.

Journal: 06/04/06

Another week moseys to a close, but not before scaring me half to death. Rose dropped off her taxes for me to do and left me with $10.00 and the promise of more on Tuesday when she gets paid. I planned to complete her work today because it was slow behind the front desk, but I was sidetracked most of the day. It looks like I’ll have enough beer and cigarettes to get through tomorrow and that’s a good thing, I hate it when I’m short on my day off and tomorrow promises to be a busy day.

Another Week Over

Much of today was about putting the papers together for the trip to Salinas and Social Security tomorrow. There are other tasks on the list for Monday as well, so I went through my list of preparations in anticipation of getting everything done tomorrow with time to take a nap in the afternoon.

My laptop suffered a mental illness today and that reminded me how fragile my position in life is right now. My laptop is the most important piece of equipment I have at the moment. I use it to keep in touch with my accounts, use it to write and post blog entries and spend my slow hours behind the front desk keeping up on the news. In short, my laptop and I are welded together at the hip. Almost every piece of information that is important to me or my existence is on the laptop’s hard drive. Losing the laptop would be catastrophic to whatever small part of my current lifestyle I have left.

The laptop also represents potential; it is my main tool for getting work outside of my time on the front desk. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to take small, odd projects like Rose’s taxes that provide extra income. Whatever work I find in the future will most likely be done on the laptop in my spare time. No small wonder that when I installed a new piece of software on it today, and it stopped performing some critical functions, I became a bit panicked after all of my best technological skill failed to revive it completely.

Luckily, I back up the laptop on a regular basis, usually weekly for a complete backup and several times during the week for a file backup. This time though, my disk image backup was fourteen days old, although I was able to get recently modified data files off the system and onto the file backup. It took me until 3:00 AM this morning to fully restore the laptop, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep if I hadn’t. Aside from the stress, the four hours of sleep I will get before I have to get up tomorrow is going to make for a wearing Monday.

I’ll post this later, as writing this post was a test of the laptop’s resurrection.

Journal: 06/03/06

Spring is here and so are the June bugs. I saw one this evening after work, it was chilly outside and the bug was on the ground, on its back and listless in the cold. I turned it over and it slowly crawled under Bill’s car, a relatively safe place, unless a cat found it. I imagine that in the morning when the air warms up it will recover and go on about its business. What surprised me was that the bug was huge, at least three inches long. Having done my good deed for the day, I returned to my evening beer.

Remembering Joann’s Home Hospice Decision

An article in today’s newspaper triggered memories of the discussions I had with Joann about her decision to go through home hospice. "Late-life chemotherapy under fire," in the Monterey County Herald, June 3, 2006, talks about the increasing tendency of patients at end-of-life to submit to radical procedures even though there is no hope left. The article discusses cancer patients as the primary group and what a waste of professional time and effort additional procedures are when death is a certainty.

One point leapt out at me in the article, that the number of cancer patients entering hospice care in the last three days of life also increased. "’That’s like a waste of the whole hospice process,’ which stresses preparing the patient emotionally and physically for death." This thought triggered a memory of Joann’s decision to do home hospice.

Before Joann came home for the last time, we discussed what she wanted to do when it came time to quit doing "recovery" things. These dialogues took place many times over the year before she came home in February and entered home hospice. Every time we talked about it, she said that she would rather be comfortable than be supported by machines. When she came home that last time, there wasn’t any thought of putting her into an actual hospice either for the "last three days," although the VNA offered it as an alternative if I couldn’t handle it. She only wanted to die at home, around those she loved and cared for.

I can understand fighting to the end, but there is a point where it is pointless. When all normal support measures fail and the patient isn’t responding to treatment, then it is time to shift gears and let it go. Joann understood that. She had a collection of doctors who were honest with her and as a former nurse; she well knew the state she was in. There wasn’t any point in fighting anymore, as she had done for three years. The choice was hers and she took the best way out she could for herself and all the rest of us.

She was also right about something else: it is tougher on those who remain than those who have moved on. I know I will make the same decisions for myself when my time comes.

Journal: 06/02/06

Still in my euphoric mood from yesterday and having caught up with my blog posts, I approached the day in good spirits. Rose wants me to work on her taxes and she may be able to give me a little cigarette money for the work. It beats offering to weed her garden on Monday. I started the process of combining this blog into one, readable piece as the first step in writing the new book (see below). This Friday turned out to be a slow day and I’ve had plenty of time to work on my own personal projects.

Assembling the Blog

It’s kind of like scrapbooking. Today I started assembling all of the individual blog entries into one document. This will become both my outline for my new book, and a repository of all About Dying blog entries in one readable presentation. Aside from using it as an outline (blogline), I’m not clear yet on what I’m going to do with the resulting collection. Maybe I’ll include annotations and clarifications to make it a more complete piece of work. That’s for some future inspiration though, in the meantime, I’ll have all of the blog in one spot.

I read these pieces as I assemble them into their chronological order. It is like taking a stroll through history, a history that I’ve lived and remember all to well. All of the details are there though; my increasing distance from Joann’s death and all that went on before it might have censored some of the uglier memories from daily thought, but reading through the blog entries brought it all back in Technicolor, all at once. Not that I don’t remember everything anyway, it’s just that my memory has become more selective in the slideshow it presents me with these days. I still flash back on obscure details, such as the suppositories, when something triggers the memory, but those events are coming less often.

When I write a blog entry, I write it as a dated, individual piece of writing. These are stored in their own folders relating to the blog itself. Keeping these posts separate makes it easier to transfer them from Microsoft Word into web pages. The rules for web pages are different from word-processing documents, but MS Front Page 2003 is quite intelligent about it. After saving the post as a web page, I then post them to the web itself. This process has proved useful because web-based tools for blogging have extreme limitations and I can better manipulate the way the posts look on the web by using web design software. However, it has left me with folders full of individual posts.

I got about halfway through the assembly process today and will continue over the next couple of days. It should be complete by Tuesday at which point I’ll start thinking in terms of the book itself. In their current collected form, I am careful to not edit the posts in the assemblage. I think it is important to preserve the posts as they are posted to the web. I don’t edit any web-posted piece in order to preserve the accuracy of the writing itself, including typos and grammatical errors, as those errors may reflect my emotional state that day.

One thing I have found is that most of these posts are really boring, just the day-to-day motions of a life in repair. When I start work on the book I’ll look at combining posts or dumping some of them that are just reports of an empty day. After all, I want the book to sell, not be a compendium of triviality.