Monday, November 18, 2013

Plodding Through the Mire

My life these days is chiseled into four facets:

1. MY DESIGN WORK: which has been exacerbated by my business e-mail going haywire. None of the ad proofs sent out in the last few weeks ever got through. While technical support is unraveling this, I'm using a temporary Gmail account. Luckily, although no e-mails go out of my website address, I do receive anything sent in, so I won't miss delivered items.

2. DEALING WITH "THE SWITCHOVER": which ultimately will eradicate Steve's existence and place his worldly obligations squarely on my shoulders: House. Utilities. Insurance. Social Security. Medical Bills. IRAs. Lots of forms and death certificates and submissions and reviews and people who never knew Steve being sorry for my loss. And the weeks between things happening.

3. KEEPING MYSELF RELATIVELY SANE: Taking Care of Mark. Making Mark Happy. Keeping Mark Engaged and Content. Unfortunately, not much can occur on this front without the labyrinth of postmortem minutiae of Item No. 2 above having been surmounted. Item No. 1 is a split-stimulus source: I really enjoy the design work but I really hate dealing with the technical crap and stressing on the deadline. I do think about taking time off and traveling to visit people I haven't seen in years. I need time and room to successfully wrap my head around what has occurred in this last year. But it won't happen just yet.

I spent six years in my Hollywood apartment, deliberately single and celibate, learning to live by myself and feel complete and content. (For the moment, we won't discuss my agoraphobic period during that time.) In 2005, I started dating again because I didn't need someone in, but wanted someone in my life. When we met, Steve had been through a similar period, and I think that's one of the reasons we melded so well. I can truly say he was the love of my life.

3a. DECIDING WHAT COMES NEXT: This is not really a separate thing yet. I seriously can't think about it in detail until Item No. 2 is fully resolved. But some imagination time has to be handed over to this subfunction, feeding some hopeful, forward-looking thoughts into the major function of this third facet.

4. EXTRICATING THE MATERIAL REMNANTS OF STEVE: It has taken me a month to clear the bedroom closet and the dresser. Clothes are the most intimate of possessions, and folding them with care and inventorying them took a lot of energy out of me. And I still have to contend with three more closets and the garage. At this rate, the physical removal of Steve's effects will coincide with the completion of Item No. 2.

Item No. 1 does have a deadline of Dec. 9. It will come together nicely, I'm sure, but getting there might be a little on the insane side. I know it was last year. Luckily, all my other clients are fine with holding off on their projects during the holiday season. I know it's upon us (it starts Oct. 31 now; let's just face it), and I'm not even sure I want to acknowledge it this year. My Christmas present will be getting the chamber directory completed and to the printer.

A bit of sad news: I lost Steve's wedding ring. I was wearing it as a pinkie ring and it slipped off (somewhere in the house, I believe) and I didn't even notice it. It wasn't in the garbage disposal, or on the patio, so it must be tucked just under something. After I clear out Steve's stuff, I'm going to have the cleaning ladies come in and go over the place; I'm hoping the ring will show up then.

So these days, I'm not just doing No. 1 or No. 2, but also No. 3 and No. 4. I focus on one until I'm frustrated or worn out, then I turn to another and work on it for a while. After a couple of hours, I just have to stop and relax. Sometimes my eyes glaze over and I have to lie down for a 45-minute nap. Then I pop awake, ready to dive into the next-most-obvious list of chores.

Without Steve here, I find watching TV a very weak distraction. I realized that when my sister came down to visit this last weekend (she was alone because her husband had to work Saturday). With someone else to watch with, TV is enjoyable, except that most of the shows tend to put me to sleep. We did get to watch the DVD of the second half of "Angels in America" (Peristroika). When she and Dave were down two weeks ago, we watched the first half (Millennium Approaches).

Even though it is the most unpleasant time of my life, I am glad to be a legally recognized widower who stayed by his husband's side until death came. And now, in mourning, the world is treating me like a person who has lost a spouse. I find a secret pleasure in being treated like everyone else because, beyond acknowledging my loss, they are also acknowledging my equality.

That's something I have worked for and waited for my entire life. Steve died knowing we are citizens.

Friday, November 8, 2013

I'm Ready For My Breakdown,
Mr. DeMille

Shitty days. You know; really shitty days. You wake up just enough to realize you're waking up, and all you want to do is not wake up. You dread what reality has in store for you, and there's more that you can't even imagine about to explode like a burning bag of mysterious contents sitting on your front porch. If you wake up, you're gonna hafta stamp out that fire.

"Who's there? Is that burning poo I smell?"
This is not depression in the classical sense, because there are big piles of shit I have to deal with; not so smelly, but very unhappy things. But (perhaps luckily; I don' t know), each of these bureaucratic things takes days or weeks to take place, so the process feels viscous and remedial. I keep thinking that these people that I'm talking to deal with this stuff every day. But they don't need to possess the death like the survivors do, it is merely there to be processed from papers into computers.

We're coming into the last weeks of work on the chamber directory, and nothing has gelled, although it looks as though it will come together nicely. At this point, I usually start to wish that some process had happened in a different order, but this year, the fact that it happened at all is fortuitous. I really hate working on getting all the advertisers to send in their ads, but I've finally got a layout that will be cohesive in about a week. Just getting all the elements into a 96-page book is time-consuming. The one thing I have to say, it gives me something to look forward to, as does work on the poet's website. That job is on hold, as she is dealing with family crisis at the moment, as well.

But I'm not about to crumble. It's a wimpy alternative, but the world has become too cruel to rely on the kindness of corporate entities to understand your plight: if you don't do the paperwork, you perish. Happily, just enough of it is doable online, that it almost makes it like a video game.

In the real world, I am getting things done slowly, but that is how they like it. On Monday, I got together with a probate attorney to file a petition to waive probate, since there was no will, yet there are no relatives alive to contest my inheritance as his spouse. It's a simple procedure, so it should only take four to eight weeks and $2,000.

Also, I called Social Security and got the voice maze machine; you know, the one that has you speak all your replies and then says, "I'm sorry, would you repeat that?" On the first try, after answering all the questions quite clearly, speaking in clipped, crisp tones, he told me the waiting queue was full, and I should call back later.

This is a technique I use, which works about half the time: I called back immediately and the call slipped through. Even better, once you've escaped the maze, you can give them your phone number, and they will call you back when you get to the front of the line. It took about an hour, but finally Connie called. We set up an appointment at my local office for three weeks from now (the earliest available) to deal with the Social Security and Medicare issues.

The medical bills. The tiny ones are $200-$500. The big ones are $2,000-$4,000. They're from labs and ambulance services and emergency room doctors and anesthesiologists, and the two hospitals. And it doesn't help that we're in the choose-your-Medicare-provider season, as many of those ads masquerade in official-looking envelopes with things like "your immediate attention" and "urgent notice" stamped on them: you know it's a come-on, but you've got to check to make sure it's junk, just in case: everything has the potential these days of being not what it seems.

So I'm putting the medical bills on hold, unless I know they've already charged Medicare and my obligation is a copay.

After a short break from going through Steve's stuff, I have the goal of getting the bedroom cleared out. The closet and the dresser are both done, but there are still a couple boxes I haven't gone through, and a lot of books I want to dump (his mom must have been a fan of those Reader's Digest condensed classics with cheap leather binding and foil-stamped details, because they're everywhere.)

Since I've sold my car to friend Doug, I'm slowly moving everything down into the now-roomy garage (well, not moving slowly, but doing it bits at a time) and will stage the final dispensation of Steve's material artifacts from there. In the end, I shall have a bit more space inside.

I've been going out to dinner with Jessie on Thursday evenings, and that helps a lot. Conversation and getting out of the house. Now's the time to find a job, so I have somewhere to go and people to deal with on a daily basis. Working at home can give you cabin fever, as I am well aware.

Kittie and David will be coming down a week from today to spend another weekend, and I will be going up to Grover Beach for the Thanksgiving weekend. I still haven't decided how I'm going to deal with Christmas this year. Last year we left in in the boxes because we spent the week in Eureka. God, that seems like a decade ago.

Einstein was right: time and space are relative.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

If You Pick It, It Will Fall Apart

Little Boxes on the Platform
Steve's home again, or at least his leftovers are. In a box inside a box, a very nice box: deep brown wood (mahogany?) with a light bird's eye maple veneer inset on the top. It's all artificial, of course; a simulation of wood, with special care instructions. I put it with the other boxes on the platform in the living room. It lends an illusion of organization and order to the house.

I'm in a kind of haze. I do my design work, which consists mostly of file maintenance right now; try to get both projects moving forward at an adequate pace. Then there are the Death Papers. Everyone who had business with Steve when he died has to be notified, documentation processed, and procedure followed to the letter. So I hop between deadlines and death, and try to make progress on things around the house in between. I shut down easily, though, and most days I take a short nap in the afternoon to change gears between these three very different chores.

The day after the last blog entry, I went down to the bank to make sure his credit card was flagged and the mortgage and equity account payments were made on time. When I got home, the Neptune Society (over Toluca Lake way in the San Fernando Valley) called to say the death certificates had arrived, Steve's cremains to go were ready, and I could drop by and pick them up, if I wanted.

So the next afternoon, I picked him up. I knew just where he was going to go; I'd known it for months: sitting at the center of the platform, a photo of him and me from an Oscar party last year at Steve and Roberto's home. He had wanted me to don a rainbow afro wig for the picture, but I felt a white feather boa was quite enough fabulousness for me, thank you very much.

A lot of my time is taken up with folding, bagging and making an inventory of his things, since I plan to donate most stuff to the Rescue Mission and Out of the Closet. So a fond memory is touched with each shirt I fold, each pair of shoes I match up and carefully tie together: walking through the old-growth redwoods in Eureka, strolling through the Louvre in Paris.

The strangest thing so far, though, has been pulling out boxes that I have never seen open since I moved to Pasadena nearly nine years ago. Most of the stuff is from his tour of duty in Viet Nam (like a monstrous scrapbook with every letter he wrote his mother while on deployment. His Purple Heart and its certificate. High school yearbooks, letters, notes and cards. What to keep, what to donate, what to toss?

And, lastly, an odd side effect of this process is that I'm going through my things and seeing what's there that I can cull out and release. I'm not being reckless about it, but all the closets in the house are filled with things that I haven't looked at or used, some for more than a decade. And don't even get me thinking about tackling the CD collection: hundreds to go through.

Kittie and David came down again this weekend. Kittie cooked, went through the paperwork we have left to pull all the documents the attorney will need for the probate petition, and helped me clear out and pack Steve's things in the dresser. David untangled an ivy plant from its holder on the patio and helped me build a moss cage in the holder, transplanting the ivy from its small pot into the moss-lined holder.

And it was time with family. It was time with company. It was people filling up the solitude. I know, at some point, the house will fit me and feel like home with just me here, but for now I still suppose I hear Steve upstairs, when it's the cats knocking something over. They're on edge, too, because they know something's going on, and they know they haven't seen Steve for nearly two months.

I keep pointing out the very nice box on the platform in the living room, but I don't think the cats get that what's left of Steve is sitting up with Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary.