I do not know what I am going to about Christmas Day or even the few days remaining leading up to the holiday. I had hoped that my experience with Thanksgiving would have provided me with some clues but no luck there. I opted out of going to North Las Vegas to see my son Dan because I got a massive case of cold feet about leaving my comfort zone and not having good ways to mitigate the effects of the difficulties of my daily existence. My son John and his wife drove in from Lancaster and spent thanksgiving day with us and we had a good visit and a quiet meal. I cried some after the meal when I began thinking of the family members who have passed away. I know well that the lot of the survivor is to bear the grief one feels when someone you love passes away. This grief accumulates as one gets older and more people die. The temptation to suppress memories becomes greater and that is one of my greatest concerns – that time will dim my memories of Patty. The holiday season is particularly hard as it seems like every thing that touches my life does remind me of Patty and our life together. I sometimes mentally flog myself for being too sorry for myself when the memories become too vivid. I try to not pursue that train of thought because it does me no good. My son David, I know, is feeling the holiday effect. He is doing a lot of work in our yard, front and back, to put the place into good shape for his Mom. She would be very proud of the place.
I frequently have to remind myself that Patty was a mother, sister, grandmother, great grandmother, great great grandmother, aunt, in – law, and friend to many as well as my wife for 66 years. I feel at times that I have fallen short in my duty to properly commensurate with the many persons who have been hurt by Patty’s death. This, I fear, is the result of me being me – for better or worse. My only defense is that speaking and thinking about Patty is painful for me and I cry a lot – neither of which is among my favorites.
I am slowly becoming more tolerant of the mental anguish that seems to afflict me when I dwell on my life with Patty. I am trying to stay connected with family and friends and I am writing this Post to my Blog as part of my effort stay engaged. It seems to help me a lot. I recently published a gallery made up of images of Patty that I ran across as I went through my image files. I made up my mind that I had to confront my difficulty in viewing these images. This has done me some good, I think, because I am thinking of getting out the slide images I took on our Alaska adventures and using them to illustrate a post, yet to be to be written, about those very happy times in our life. Bear with with me my friends, I will be OK.
As to my plans for the next few days – I still don’t Know. I’ll just take it day by day as I have been.
BRAIN DRAIN UNCLOGGED 