The Pasty Heart

This first part was written on Saturday, April 26

The last week or so has been down and dismal for me. My borderline agoraphobia is trying everything it can to assert itself, showing up with its psychic disruptor buddy, insomnia.

Now, I haven't had severe insomnia since back in my twenties. My dad used to refer to it as my "diurnal variation." Basically, I'm getting to bed between 4 and 7 a.m. in the morning, sleeping until noon or 1 p.m., then getting up and feeling shitty about being incapable of getting back into a routine that matches that of the outside world. If I had things that I had to get done, I might be bouncing back faster, but the only thing of note for this month seems to be six months since Steve died.

Fancy highball glasses do dye double duty.

Kittie and David came down for the Easter weekend, which was a nice surprise (like they haven't been coming down every other weekend for months). Kittie had made it through tax season and put together a holiday care package, including our Easter dinner, which we had on Saturday, since they had to leave in the mid-afternoon on Sunday.

On Saturday we got a start on cleaning up the office, which has become a tangle of piles of paper and corners festooned with cat hair clumps the vacuum did not retrieve on its last pass in the room. We got it to the point where the cupboard was nearly cleaned out. But like so many times before, clearing out stuff from anywhere ends up with me feeling exhausted from the emotional portion of the experience, and with stuff getting moved from one room to another, still without a real new home.

Overview of the festive fabrications.

After an hour or so working in the office, Kittie and I went downstairs and set up the Easter egg dyes. Once we were finished with our ova fabulosi, Kittie turned to putting dinner together. She had brought a spiral-sliced had and a box of au gratin potatoes. I provided the frozen peas.

We had a lovely meal. Afterwards I brought my desiccated Peeps down from on top of the refrigerator, we hauled out the candy and baskets, and Kittie put two Easter baskets together: one for them and one for me. Needless to say, there was a lot of sugar consumed in the week following (which exacerbated the the insomnia and agoraphobia, no doubt).

Pretty nifty for Satan's testicles

So this weekend, I continue on the office, sorting, tossing, cleaning, organizing. Slowly, the things in the piles are finding homes and the trash bags and donation boxes are filling up. There is a kind of catharsis in seeing a new organization appear in the office. I'm really looking forward to being able to invite clients over without making apologies for the mess and the cat hair.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

This part is being written on the date indicated above

Clearing out stuff is a lot more complicated than I'd thought, especially with the surprise piles of papers that Steve left. Every time I clear out a cupboard or organize a pile, I come across more papers from early in the century or late last century that need to be shredded, an activity which can take several hours, depending on the number of staples to be removed.

And here it is, early May, and it's in the upper 90s and lower 100s here in Pasadena. I always get depressed when it's hot outside, so that hasn't helped my demeanor or insomnia.

I've decided that the mountain of paperwork that has been generated by Steve's death is going to get its own box; it's the only way I'll be able to clean the office up and get back my surfaces. What with the VA, sundry medical bills, IRA conversions, taxes, mortgage, line of credit, property deed, bills and half a dozen other things I'm not remembering at this point, every surface on both desks is stacked with piles of records.

Once the desks are fairly clean, the office will have progressed to the point where I am ready to pull all the wires and plugs from underneath the desks, remove Steve's computer and move mine to the larger desk (which is the one Steve had when I moved in). This is going to be a more daunting task than it sounds. 

As each layer of technology has been added, so has a tangle of wires, which tangles with the tangle of wires from the previous upgrade, which tangles with the tangle of wires that was here originally. So I move in with an extra computer (another layer) and we add a wireless router to the modem (another layer). We convert to cable Internet service (another layer); add peripherals (printer/scanner, phone/answering machine, cable TV split, fax phone lines, back-up drives): it's my own little techno-Gordian knot.

You may wonder why I'm so fixated on getting the office in order, but it has to do with my theory of hairball flow. I've been so frustrated being unable to keep the downstairs clean for more than a day or so, and realized the cat hair was floating down from the source (Marcel), and until I got his chair and the office in general clean, organized and under control, I wouldn't be rid of the hairballs.

So once the upstairs is organized and clean, the dilemma of hairballs on the bamboo floors downstairs should be mitigated. I worry about this from an aesthetic point, since I'm going to have to keep the place looking presentable once it's listed.

I have to keep reminding myself that I'm halfway across this sea of shit that is the first year after a spouse's death. At times, I sense glimmers of normalcy and happiness through this mourning process, so I'm hoping things become downhill-easy from here on out. But I'm not counting on it.