Peg Kerr's Journal

I've been doing these collages for several years, and somehow I've focused on the same subject during this week each year. January 26 is the anniversary of Rob's death in 2018.

This year, I really wanted to do a different subject. I mean, the grief is still there (and will always be there) but I can talk about other things, I promise.

And this week, I definitely have something different to speak of, something that makes me very happy! And yet, oddly enough, it has prodded my grief a bit, so I will end up speaking about Rob after all.

Alona and Fiona have given me permission to share some news publicly that I have been sitting on for several months: They are expecting a baby, who will be born in June. (Alona is the person who is carrying the baby.) They have done genetic testing, and the baby is just fine and entirely healthy. (Alona, alas, has been having a difficult time with nausea and other unpleasant symptoms, and we would appreciate it if that settled down. Thank you.)

I am delighted with this news. But of course, there is that underlying twinge of sadness for Rob, again, that he will never see or hold his grandchildren. He would have loved the experience, just as I will.

That's the thing about grief and widowhood: the losses keep playing out, even years later.

This collage includes a picture of him holding Fiona on the day that she was born. Here is another one:



Image description: An ultrasound of a fetus. Lower left corner: a man (Rob) looks down with an expression of wonder at a bundled baby in his lap. Lower right: a hand cups a pair of infant feet

Baby



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It has taken several weeks, but the huge brick-and-board bookcase that was in my bedroom, crammed with a large part of Rob's science fiction/fantasy book collection, is gone. I asked several family members if they wanted the books but got rid of only a handful of the books that way. Then, I checked with a coworker who is an SF/fantasy fan and he happily removed a couple of hundred books for the collection. As I had mentioned earlier, I took some and distributed them in local Little Free Libraries.

Finally, I decided that the most efficient method was to take the books, a box at a time, to Don Blyly at the Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction bookstore. Don would look through each box and generally took somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 of them. He would offer a sum, either in credit or half that value in cash. I took cash, because I am not trying to encourage myself to buy more books. It generally would come out to somewhere between $5 - $15 a box. I could hear Rob screaming in protest in my mind with every box, but I did it, and I am glad it is done.

I will probably take several more boxes of books piled up in corners. There are still many many books left in the house. But I am next turning my attention to doing over the bedroom. For one thing, getting rid of the books has revealed how disgusting the 30+ year carpet is. Ugh. I want to rip it out.

It has been hard, emotional work. It is odd--these were books I had not generally read myself. Why was it so difficult to get rid of them? I think it was because Rob was so passionately tied to his collection, it was as if a part of his essence had seeped into it, and it felt as though getting rid of them was getting rid of him.

I have worked through it, however, and the bulk of the books are gone. I did pull some off the shelf that I had read and loved myself. But I will go through them and see if I can get them out of the library, and if I can, I will take those too, in a future trip.

Image description: Three views of a brick-and-board bookcase in the process of being dismantled. Top: a semi-transparent view of the books from floor to ceiling. Center: a view with the books with one board left in place. Bottom: a view of the baseboard with the marks of the supporting bricks left on the carpet. All the bricks and boards are gone. Hovering over the semi-transparent bookcase is the signage for Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore/Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore.

Dismantling



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I am having a really hard grief day today. Took the afternoon off to go home, get into a bed with a book, and cry.

*Sigh*

This is the fourth year I've been doing these digital collages, and every year on the fourth week of the year, the collage has been about the same subject. I am not sure it always will be. But after all, I select the subject for the collage on whatever I've been thinking about that week.

This week included the sixth anniversary of Rob's death.

There is a diffidence, a shyness about grief that you sometimes see in widows in our culture. An embarrassed self-consciousness. As time extends further and further out from our loss, we face a certain amount of judgment, even (and yes, we widows can be oversensitive, but I have felt it) a very faint tinge of...contempt. Yes, of course we know that you loved and miss the person you lost. But life goes on. Shouldn't you as well? There's an unspoken but blunt sense of get over it already.

Well, I assure you I am continuing to live my life. I am not frozen in time. I have cleaned much of Rob's stuff out of the house. I continue to go out and have new experiences. I have even fallen in love again.

But I know Rob will never hear me speak Scottish Gaelic. He will never see his daughters marry. He will never hold his grandchildren. I may dream about him, but I'll never hear his spoken words or feel his touch again.

And it still hurts.

When I was considering seriously the question Am I really going to do another collage about this? I remembered a post I've seen floating around Facebook that hit me with the ring of truth. Here it is:

I'm middle aged. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not.

I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, father, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, pets, neighbors, and a host of other folks. Gratefully I have not lost a child but I know people who have (too many), and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents...

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. But I never have and I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it.

Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see. As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves.

When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

That is what the grief has been like this week, perhaps. The anniversary of his death have brought back memories that are like fifty-foot waves, instead of one hundred-foot ones.

There is much in my life that has gone on without him that makes me happy.

Yet I love him. I still miss him.

And this week, I grieved him.

Image description: Background is a stormy sea (a portion of Thomas Moran's painting "Moonlight Shipwreck at Sea.") A remnant of a wrecked ship is tossed by the sea in lower center. A semi-transparent of a woman dressed in white floats in the center of the painting. One extended hand hovers over the wrecked ship. The other stretches toward a white lily flower (a symbol of grief in the language of the flowers) in the upper right.

Shipwreck



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This week, I've been cold, and it feels as though the freezing temperature has sunk deeply into my bones.

I had an occasion on Tuesday where I was waiting outside for two and a half hours. In January. In Minnesota. I have a good coat, and I wore gloves, and I could occasionally break away to sit in my car and run the heat for a few minutes. But I had to keep leaving the car to check on where I was in the queue. I tried to manage my impatience by reading on my phone, and I kept having to take off the gloves to scroll, since the screen couldn't recognize my touch with the gloves on. So I got thoroughly chilled.

As I mentioned previously, I've been trying to keep the temperature of the house lower to save money. I took hot baths and would get out again and run the space heater, and still, I would shiver--it felt as if my inner furnace has gone out. I've worn up to four layers. Every time I'd open my clothes closet to pull out another one, the cold air would rush out from that uninsulated space and smack me in the face.

January. Gray skies. Minnesota.

I found myself meditating upon the heat death of the universe.

And I also thought this week of another death. Yesterday, January 26, was the fifth anniversary of the day that cancer took Rob from me. It is said that at the time of Samhain, Halloween, the dead draw near to the living. But I have come to recognize one particular ghost, my husband's, who comes to be with me again from January 24 to 26th: the days I left ordinary time to enter the hospital to be with him. I didn't leave again until he was gone.

He isn't angry or threatening or sad.

He's just there, invisible but close as my next breath.

Thinking about all this reminded me of a sonnet written by a friend, John M. Ford (Mike Ford to his friends), who also died too young. David Goldfarb writes here:

[the sonnet] was a comment on an entry on Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s blog, about an amusing error in Amazon.com’s database, which concluded:

if I were a better writer I’d conclude by yoking the trivial to the tragic, relating the twin inevitabilities of death and database error by means of a rhetorical figure involving worms.

…and John M. Ford (who I’m sure Patrick would be the first to admit was indeed the better writer) responded by doing exactly that — in sonnet form!

Here is the sonnet, Against Entropy:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

The universe winds down, yes...that's the cold that has been seeping into my blood this week.

The worm drives helically through the wood: that's cancer, I realized.

I am switching to a new phone, and I have spent the last three days screenshooting and saving old texts because I am switching from Android to Apple, and so I've been going through all the medical update texts I was sending out to friends and family five years ago. I'm remembering again how awful it was: once the leukemia set in, it devastated him. He lost fifty pounds in two and a half months, his kidneys shut down, his intestines fell victim to diverticulitis, and his strong, kind, and clever mind began to weaken and wander down paths of confusion and paranoia.

And now his ghost comes to me. The light of other days, the fading colors, the regret.

When we were planning his funeral, my pastor asked what Rob thought about life after death. After a perplexed moment, Rob's brother Phil offered tentatively, "Rob always said he would be star-stuff."

Perhaps Rob was right, and he's one star out there, shining to keep the heat death of the universe at bay.

So I'm bearing witness, remembering the name of my lover Rob. I loved him. I still love him.

I miss him.

I've turned up the heat again. It's all I can do. Although his ghost visits me and lingers awhile, he isn't here to keep me warm.

To create the collage, I used an image for the background that I found when I searched for "heat death of the universe." Instead of a crystal glass, I used a glass Coca-Cola bottle. Rob loved his Coke, and it was the last thing we gave him to taste before he passed away.

(Fuck that worm cancer anyway.)

Background: a portion of a black hole surrounded by a blue spinning nimbus representing the heat death of the universe. A cartoon worm emerges from the black hole. A semi-transparent Coca Cola bottle balances on top of the black hole, upper right. Three gradually enlarging semi-transparent Coca Cola bottles (like a vision seen in strobe light) fall toward the bottom of the card. Bottom center: a shattered Coca Cola bottle lies on its side. Top: three semi-transparent heads shots of Rob looking out at the viewer. From right to left they look neutral, amused, and astonished.

Entropy



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Every July 6 for the last 36 years, I have eaten strawberries and cream for breakfast.

This past Tuesday, July 5, was my 36th wedding anniversary. We spent our wedding night at the Sofitel and the next morning, I included a portion of strawberries and cream with my room service order. They tasted so incredibly delicious to me. Well, perhaps it's not so much that they were particularly delicious, but that I was so incandescently happy. I decided right then and there that I would always have strawberries and cream for breakfast on July 6, to remember that moment, that demarcation of my first day as a happily married woman.

This July 6, however, besides being the day I ate strawberries and cream, was significant for another reason: it was the first day I outlived Rob in age. I spent my entire marriage four and a half years younger than him. But it has been four and a half years since he died, and from now on, this date would mark another demarcation: from this day forward, I would be older than him, older than he had ever been...without him.

This Wednesday, July 6, was also notable for something else: after a mere five days of planning, my nephew and his fiancée got married in a small and simple ceremony at my sister's lovely lakeside home. My nephew is the first one of Fiona and Delia's cousins on my side of the family to marry. A new threshold has been reached for this generation.

As I pondered this, I started thinking about the Roman god Janus, the god of thresholds, of transitions, and of marriage. Janus is a two-headed god, looking back in the past and forward into the future. And so I took a picture from my wedding day that the photographer referred to as a "ring picture," as the position of our hands was meant to show off our wedding rings. I never particularly noticed the rings in this picture though; I just saw how incredibly happy and in love we looked. I used my bridal picture for one half of the Janus head, and a picture of myself taken yesterday, on July 6 for the other half of the Janus head. Not as young, not as incandescent. As you can undoubtedly see, it's been 36 years.

Also pictured: the strawberries I had for breakfast yesterday morning, and the hands of my nephew and his new wife, showing off their new wedding rings.

Oceans of love to both of you, my dears. May you enjoy a lifetime of incandescent love and happiness...and all the strawberries and cream you can possibly eat.

Janus



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Just as I did in 2018, I decided on Halloween to use my Harry Potter tarot deck to do a Deathly Hallows tarot reading. I like doing this spread on Halloween. As I noted in my post about the 2018 reading, Halloween is the anniversary of the awful day that Rob and I learned that the suspicious PET scan he had recently received was not lymphoma coming out of remission, it was leukemia (caused by the first chemotherapy he'd received) that would go on to kill him a little less than three months later.

Samhain, the day when the souls of the dead are said to approach as close as they ever do to the living, or Halloween, the day before All Soul's Day, seems to be an appropriate occasion to do the Deathly Hallows tarot spread.

1 2 3


1: The Elder Wand - something that is both winning and losing
2: The Resurrection Stone - what has been lost and will not, cannot, come back
3: The Invisibility Cloak - what you've come to accept

Here is the Tale of the Three Brothers and the Deathly Hallows:



I drew three cards.

1: The Lovers - Remus and Tonks



The book that came along with the deck explained that there are two traditional approaches for this card: either an established couple, or a man making a choice between two potential lovers. (In my Jane Austen deck, for example, the VI card shows Darcy sitting with Caroline Bingley but looking longingly out the window at Elizabeth Bennet). Remus actually fits both of these traditional approaches: he and Tonks were lovers, but a choice is also involved, because Remus lost faith in his relationship with Tonks and then chose to go back to be a husband and father again (after getting a scolding from Harry).

Three years ago, I drew the King of Cups card for the Elder Wand card, which I associated with Rob. I associate the Lovers card, of course, with Rob and myself. But it's a winning and losing card because while we were lovers, and our marriage grew stronger throughout the cancer journey, I of course lost Rob to cancer.

But this card can also represent myself and the new person in my life, Eric. I've lost Rob, but I have a new relationship. Yet, there is a choice buried in that fact, too. Do I cling to my old relationship, to my status as Rob's widow? Do I move forward into the new relationship, even to the point of marriage? I am trying to decide that. Is that winning? Is it losing?

Another way to think of the card is that it simultaneously reflects me losing Rob and winning Eric.

2: the Four of Swords - Truce



This card shows the moment when the trio tries to cross the chessboard but they are blocked by the crossed swords of the pawns. They have to pause and regroup and figure out what to do. Cards with the number four are associated with stability: four sides make a square, a very stable, balanced form.

If the card in this position in the reading represents something that I have lost forever, that, too, makes sense: I have lost stability. My married life wasn't always easy, but I knew what to expect. Now my life seems upended, and as a widow living through a pandemic, I have no idea what to expect next.

3: the Seven of Swords - Deception



This card depicts seven sword-like teeth of the Monster Book of Monsters. Traditionally, (as in the Rider-Waite deck), this card shows a man carrying away a pile of swords. There is an element of sneakiness to the card. Another traditional meaning to the card is "betrayal."

I thought about how this card and meaning applied, in terms of something I have come to accept. I mentioned that Halloween has been so hard for me the past several years, because it is such a painful anniversary. It was the date that we learned that Rob's lymphoma was now leukemia, the disease that would go on to kill him. He was betrayed by a sneak attack: the chemotherapy that was supposed to save him ultimately was what killed him.

But although I have suffered from this memory for the past several years, I am definitely coming to accept it. I had fled the celebration of Halloween every year since Rob's death--turning out the lights, leaving the house, unable to bear the parade of cheerful children in costumes. Halloween was just too painful.

Until this year. I carved pumpkins and put them out on the porch with lit candles. I bought candy and handed it out. I lit all the candles in my living room, curled up with a cozy blanket, and again watched the movie Coco. For the first time since Rob's death, I actually enjoyed the holiday. And that makes me genuinely proud of myself.

I'm uncomfortable with this week's theme, although it was definitely the right one. It feels too personal somehow. And I'm not satisfied with the card--perversely, it doesn't seem quite personal enough.

I spent some time with other people this week: we gathered at my sister's lakeside home for a Fourth of July celebration. I've had some pleasant get-togethers with Eric, too.

But the 5th of July was also my 35th wedding anniversary, and all I wanted to do that day was to stay in bed and cry. Which took me by surprise: I was fine the day before, and I hadn't expected the terrible upwelling of grief that I experienced.

In the days since then, it has seemed to me that what I was feeling was not only grief but loneliness.

I've talked about being a widow and about grief, and I've collaged about them before (see, e.g., the Widow card). For me, the sense I have of being a widow and of grieving, and of being lonely are overlapping experiences.

I live in my house alone. I am not meant to live alone, truly. I'm an extrovert. I like to talk with my housemates, and laugh, and cook for other people. I would love to have a pet to keep my company, but the pet I want the most, a cat, is impossible because I'm so terribly allergic. It doesn't seem satisfactory to try a substitute such as a hamster or an iguana or a ferret. I had an occasional meal with another person in the last week, but I mostly eat alone.

It isn't natural.

It isn't right.

It isn't how my life should be. And I resent it, and it makes me so sad.

I'm not living alone because I want to. I'm living a solitary life because the person who I had intended to live with for the rest of our lives left me, even though he wanted desperately to stay with me.

I thought for a long time about how to express loneliness in images, and I'm impatient with myself: what I came up with feels like a cliche. The images are not original ideas, nor are they about me, about my life.

But then, I live alone, meaning there is nobody to take pictures of me, standing in a field in front of a solitary tree, that I can use to make a collage. Ironic, that.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time finding and rejecting various images. The final result feels more like I'd exhausted myself to the point that I gave up, rather than finding what was right.

I've had a lot of lingering sadness this week. And yet complaining about my loneliness seems embarrassing somehow, something that my inner Elinor Dashwood doesn't think is appropriate to admit. I'm not quite sure why.

Loneliness



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It's just that Halloween is an anniversary--the anniversary of that horrible day at Mayo two years ago that we learned that Rob's lymphoma had morphed into leukemia.

For the second year in a row, I fled the house rather than face trick or treaters. Unfortunately, the restaurant I went to for dinner had a whole bunch of houses on the same block (I had to walk past them to get to my car) that were heavily decked out for Halloween--with graveyards in their front yards. That was a little tough. I ate dinner out, came home and did a Deathly Hallows tarot reading, as I did last year, and then watched Coco, which was comforting under the circumstances. Watching Coco on Halloween may become a new Halloween tradition.

Father’s Day without the father is hard.