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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I've been home for the past two weeks on vacation. I think I mentioned that Fiona and I had planned to take a trip to England, but that got put on ice when Fiona got her new job. So I've taken the time off (use it or lose it) and I have...not been in England.

I'm trying not to sulk too much, but that's been a bit of a challenge.

I've taken a few little day trips, as depicted in last week's card. This past weekend, Eric and I went to a bed and breakfast, and I did a half-day trip to Stillwater. But of course, my inner Puritan has looked at the fact that two weeks has been cleared on my calendar and reasoned, "Excellent, you can get to WORK and get things done. SO MANY THINGS."

But there's the heat and the fact that there is such a plethora of projects. And my inner sulk because, as noted, Not in England. Ongoing sleep issues. So my attempt to move things forward has been inching along at best.

I have continued working on clearing Rob's stuff out of the house, which is, as always, emotionally difficult. I've binned a number of books (library books so not worth anything to anyone) and I pulled out Rob's ties and sorted through them for donation (and had a good, hard cry before driving to drop them off at ARC Value Village).

I've been calling contractors trying to figure out how to get my foundation repaired (one of the contractors has the distinction of standing me up twice in one day. I will not be hiring them). I've been doing financial bookkeeping in preparation for updating my will. I've been working on the Special Project--oh, what the heck. My employer doesn't read this.

I'm job hunting.

So that's what I've been doing for the past two weeks. Inching along in various attempts to make my life better. But it feels as though progress, collectively, is so slow that it's hard to see any forward momentum without squinting hard.

Lower half: neckties on a bed. Upper half: the side of a house with a gap in the foundation facade by a door. Center right: an inchworm inches its way on a stem. Just underneath the stem is the logo for the website JibberJobber. Center left: a box packed with books. Upper right: the words "Last Will and Testament." Upper left: the logo for the website Angi.

Inching



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This collage is in honor of three men I remembered this week.

1) May 25 was remembered in Minneapolis as the date of the death of George Floyd, whose family called him Perry. I won't call him a martyr, because martyrs deliberately choose to sacrifice themselves for a cause. George, on the other hand, wanted to live and he was just casually stopping at a local corner store for a quick errand. And then he was murdered, dammit.

But his suffering and his death, just two miles from my home, changed my city and the world, and I thought of him this week, on the third anniversary of his passing.

2) Lilacs have been blooming in Minneapolis this week, including the bush that Rob planted in the back yard thirty years ago, 'Because every house needs a lilac bush.' He's been gone for over five years, but every spring, he sends me flowers again.

3) I went to Fort Snelling Cemetery today to leave flowers on my Dad's grave, as I do every Memorial Day weekend. Thanks, Dad, for your service. Love you and miss you.

Image description: Upper half of card: picture of the mural at the George Floyd memorial (at Chicago Avenue and 38th Street), with floral tributes on the sidewalk underneath. Lower left: a vase with blooming lilac flowers. Lower right: a gravestone at Fort Snelling cemetery for Allen Stewart Kerr (Peg's father), decorated with flowers and miniature flags for Memorial Day weekend.

Remembrances



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I'd mentioned in a recent collage, Rumphy, that I'd taken yet another fall. This is a serious matter for someone my age, especially since I live alone, and I did some research about what I might do to keep myself safe. Thanks to some kind generosity I've recently received, I now have a new iPhone and Apple Watch, and I have spent the last couple of weeks learning about the capabilities of this technology. Both the phone and the watch offer fall protection--if I should have an accident and fail to move, they can detect it. The device will ask if I am okay, and if I don't respond, it can alert both emergency services and my designated personal contacts.

I have a MacBook Plus, and I had an iPod touch, so I'm familiar with Apple products, but this is quite a step forward for me in the sophistication of technology. I'm still learning every day about new things that these gizmos can do. Cool camera, the ability to pay for things without carrying a purse, tracking my health data and exercise, etc. I'm playing with different watch faces, trying to figure out what information I want immediately available to me at the touch of a button.

The trade-off, of course, is that with all these cool new features, there are consequences, some of which are not immediately clear.

I am...ambivalent? Yes, for example, I am moving more/getting more exercise, but that is because I jump to my feet when my wrist buzzes (I try not to feel like a lab rat trained to react to a buzzer). Am I allowing technology to intrude into my life too much? I can pay without my wallet, but is my personal information safe? At the same time, I can see perfectly well how I am being manipulated by what is being offered. Wouldn't I like to have the ability to do this cool thing? That's fine...all I have to do is to turn on this simple toggle switch to allow my new iPhone and Apple watch to collect this data.

Have I allowed a corporation too much power over my personal information, including personal medical records?

Having the fall protection (and the ability to make a phone call by pressing a button on my wrist if I suddenly am incapacitated without my phone nearby) has given me a huge sense of relief. I didn't quite realize until now how much this has been a mental load that was worrying me. I love the new capabilities that are offered by the watch, and I'm sure you'll see a leap in the quality of these collages, with the improvement of my camera.

But I still recognize that I have voluntarily ceded some part of my privacy. I wish that this country had more of the privacy protections observed in the European Union.

That ambivalence is reflected in the card. For now, the trade-off seems worth it to me.

Image description: Background: semi-transparent array of Apple app logos on a black background. Three different Apple watch faces are arranged in a triangle on the top half of the card. Bottom: a silhouette of a woman, arms spread wide in freedom and exhilaration. A man's hand emerges from the upper right corner, holding the strings of a marionette which dangles in the center of the card, over the three watch faces and above the woman's silhouette.

Watch



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This past Sunday at church, the first Sunday of Epiphany, our pastor handed out stickers with stars, each with a word superimposed over it. "These are Epiphany star words, which is a new tradition that some churches are beginning to do during this season. Take this word and meditate upon it this week. What does it mean to you?"

I perked up as I accepted my star sticker, 'Loyal.' Oh, cool, I thought, pleased. I won't have to struggle to come up with something for my digital collage theme for the week.



You will note, however, that this didn't turn out to be the theme of the week that I chose. Instead I chose the word 'Rumphy.'

Please note: This post will be slightly longer than usual and perhaps a touch whiny. You have been warned.

'Rumphy' is a family neologism that Rob, the girls, and I have used for years. Eric looked extremely baffled the first time I told him that I was feeling rumphy. "What on earth does THAT mean?"

I had to think back hard to re-uncover the meaning.

Here's the dictionary definition of the word 'harrumph':

verb: harrumph; 3rd person present: harrumphs; past tense: harrumphed; past participle: harrumphed; gerund or present participle: harrumphing

1) clear the throat noisily.
"he harrumphed and said, 'I am deeply obliged.'"

2) grumpily express dissatisfaction or disapproval.
"skeptics tend to harrumph at case histories like this"

Whenever Rob was in a certain mood where he got disgruntled about something, he would put on an old codger aspect and grumble 'harrumph.' Have to do too many phone calls to fix a problem? Harrumph. Stuck in traffic? Harrumph! Did your dinner get burned? Harrumph!

Eventually (as best as I can remember) we identified the underlying mood that makes you say the word 'harrumph' as 'rumphy.' It became an exceedingly useful word that we all used. When someone said they were feeling rumphy, everyone knew that some sympathy, kindness, and coddling (and perhaps gentle teasing) was the best response.

These are the reasons I'm feeling rumphy this week:

• Immediately after that church service, I went home expecting to see Fiona for her weekly visit. But she called to let me know that she had come down with the flu (with gross digestive symptoms). So instead of a pleasant visit with my beloved daughter, I just got a fleeting glimpse of her looking pale and miserable as I handed off some Gatorade to her on her front porch.

This only served to remind me that I was missing seeing Delia, too. Delia had not come to see me over the Christmas holidays because someone had hit her car during the snowstorm the week before, and she can't drive to the Cities until she gets it repaired.

• I've just discovered that apparently, I've developed high blood pressure. I was surprised by a high reading taken by the dental hygienist when I went in to have my teeth cleaned in October. I went into a CVS this week to check my blood pressure at the machine near the pharmacy, only to discover that apparently, the October reading was not a fluke. As I have been working hard to get healthier and have in fact lost fifteen pounds since July, this seems especially aggravating. It feels like my body is doing something that is totally uncalled for, not to mention unauthorized. I will have to go to the doctor and perhaps go on medication. My sister, brother, and both of my parents have a history of high blood pressure, too. Apparently, it's something probably genetically based that just shows up at this age.

• My sleep disorder has been acting up horribly. I am so groggy in the evening, but after I go to bed, I will wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the ceiling, unable to sleep, for hours. On top of that, I'm getting really fed up with using the CPAP machine. If I'm going to have to put up with the thing, at least it should WORK to make me sleep better, you know?

• I'm keeping my house extra cold this year, to try to lower my heating costs. I'm keeping the thermostat at 65 degrees during the day and turning it down to 60 at night. I find that keeping the house so cold puts me into a sort of torpor--I sit huddled up in blankets on the couch and don't want to do much of anything.

• Scam phone calls and scam emails--I wasted time dealing with both this week. People, just leave me ALONE.

• My employer gets its money from donations, and donations are down. There is a lot of worried talk at the office that the churches that pay our salaries with mission support have not sent in their pledged contributions. Understandable, because people are cutting back their charitable giving due to inflation--but conversely, inflation makes the prospect of not getting a raise this year even more appalling.

• The weather has been cold, gray, and miserable. The air quality was terrible this week, and the streets are badly plowed. The snow melted partially and then refroze, leaving a thick layer of ice over everything. This was worsened by freezing rain that fell Wednesday morning.

• On Wednesday, I fell on the icy steps trying to walk down three steps to get my newspaper. I wasn’t in any kind of hurry, and I was even holding the railing. I didn’t hit my head, thank god, so I don’t have another concussion. But I banged up my back and arm pretty good, and I am sure I will have bruises tomorrow.

And then, even more startling, I could actually feel myself going into traumatic shock after crawling back up to the porch. It was ten minutes in the cold on the porch, unable to move, trying not to faint, before I could get back into the house.

It’s my great fear about living alone, that I somehow get hurt or incapacitated and am unable to get help. I’m okay…but those were an awfully long ten minutes.

This is the fourth serious fall I've had in the past five years.

• I've been in a lot of pain the last couple of days from the bruises and from having my muscles wrenched so badly. Painkillers haven't been quite effective enough.

• In an attempt to make myself feel better, I took a long bath with Epsom salts yesterday. I went down to the kitchen and discovered water all over my kitchen island and floor that had apparently poured through the light fixture in the ceiling from the bathtub upstairs. So now I have to call a plumber.

• I can be prone to seasonal affective disorder in January. What's more, at the end of the month, it'll be the five-year anniversary of Rob's death. And I've been missing him. I've been missing him terribly. When I was out there lying on the porch, afraid and trying not to pass out, I just wanted to have him there beside me so desperately. And I've been missing having Eric with me, too. This week has made me all the more aware of how much I hate living alone. My relationship with Eric gives me a lot of joy--in so many ways, he's even a better match for me than Rob was--but we each have our own house, and so we're not living together. And so I'm lonely when I'm home by myself. As I've said before, I'm not meant to live alone.

It's funny--I remarked to Fiona once that being a widow and then falling in love again has helped me, a lifelong monogamist, really get polyamory in a way I never could before. I'm in love with two men at the same time--one of whom is my husband, who just happens to be dead. Eric is extraordinarily kind, gracious, and non-threatened about the fact that I still miss Rob--but I am not living with Eric either. I'm alone.

And that just sucks.

It's been a really hard week.

Background: a misty winter background of snow-covered tree branches. Over this background are a series of words in blue text: From the bottom, going up: 'Missing my boyfriend. Pain. Plumbing. Elevated blood pressure. Gloomy weather. Sleep disorder. Cold. Missing my daughters. Ice. Money worries. Taking a fall. Scammers.' Top, in semi-transparent text: 'Missing my husband.' Diagonally across the card in larger text, is the semi-transparent word 'Harrumph.'

Rumphy



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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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Okay, this one will be long. I re-did this card three times because it was so important to me, and I wanted to get it absolutely right.

I've remarked with some relief that this year I haven't descended into seasonal affective disorder as I often do in the winter. And yet this week has been extra challenging. It's been cold this week, and it's cold AF today (-11°F, -32°F wind chill), and I'm wearing fuzzy slipper socks and bundling up in my fluffy black hooded wrap that's a cross between a jacket and a blanket. I've been reluctant to go out.

Then, there's the pandemic. My employer has told us all not to come into the office. At all. At the start of the pandemic, before vaccination, I went into the office once a week (wearing a cloth mask) to print documents. Things feel different: Omicron is SO contagious and I know people who have been caught it even though they've been vaccinated and boosted and are ultra-careful. I'm wearing an N95 instead of a cloth mask. I'm isolating even more than I did then. My twice-weekly walks with a couple of friends have stopped, and although I started going to church during Advent, I've stopped again.

And there's an anniversary today, and I'm sad. I told my supervisor I would be taking the day as sick time as a mental health day. A grief day.

I'm cocooning.

I watched Encanto with my daughter Fiona, and this week I've downloaded the soundtrack by Lin Manuel Miranda and I'm obsessing. Yes, I've listened to "We Don't Talk About Bruno" loads of times. It's a hit that has taken everyone by surprise, but that wasn't the song that the Encanto production submitted to the Academy for consideration for the Oscar for Best Song. Instead, they submitted "Dos Oruguitas," a song that Lin Manuela Miranda said he composed with the hope that it would sound like a 100-year-old folk song. And it does. It absolutely hit right in the solar plexus of my feels, especially after I listened to the English translation. I will be adding it to my widow playlist on YouTube.

Because of course I identify with Alma's (Abuela's) story. She fell in love with a handsome, bearded man with kind eyes who adored their children, and she lost him too young.

Of course I do. ( Encanto is a widow's story )

Watch the video. It's only five minutes long. I'll wait:



( Here are the lyrics in English )
I kissed Rob goodbye for the last time four years ago exactly today. That devastated look on Alma's face at 1:56 on the video? That was the look on my face, four years ago today.

But I have to be willing to change. I have to be willing to emerge from my own cocoon. In "Waiting for a Miracle," Mirabel compares the gifted members of her family to shining stars. In the last song, "All of You," keeping with the theme of change, Mirabel sings:

Look at this family, a glowing constellation
So full of stars, and everybody wants to shine

But the stars don't shine, they burn
And the constellations shift...

You'll note that at the end of the video I posted, there is now an opening in the valley, a breach in the range of protective mountains. This is an invitation to Albuela and the community: It's time to leave the cocoon.

What does that mean for me?

I'm still trying to figure that out.

All three iterations of the card included Alma and Pedro's last kiss. The first draft of the card included an image of Abuela and Mirabel with the butterflies as the image at the bottom, but then I decided to make it more personal and included an image of myself wearing the black cocoon coat.

Then it occurred to me that I wanted to be holding Rob's candle. This is the candle that was lit for the first time at his memorial service. I have burned it since whenever I was particularly missing him, and now the candle is almost entirely gone, just like Abuela's candle. I was mulling in frustration yet again the problem of how I could take the picture of me holding the candle when it occurred to me for the first time that I could download an app that put the camera on timer. Duh. So you can actually see both my hands! Over that, I superimposed a butterfly's chrysalis. The name of the card is the word "chrysalis" in Spanish. The background is the storm of butterflies.

Here's the card:

Crisálida



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Edited to add: Wow, right after I posted this, I checked Facebook, and this came up in my memories from four years ago: