Day by day

April 29, 2013 Family 8 comments

It’ll be four weeks tomorrow since Dawn passed.  The night before, I couldn’t keep my eyes open despite my fear that she would go while I was asleep.  Her breathing was getting shallow, she was virtually unresponsive, she couldn’t talk.  I tried my best to stay awake, but I just couldn’t.  I napped for about an hour at a time, waking up regularly with just about any noise that wasn’t common to the oxygen machine.  The oxygen machine became our white noise for the last two weeks in place of the box fan(s) we used for pretty much the entire 20+ years we shared a bed.

That night, when the boys went to bed, I made it a point that they kiss mom goodnight, and thankfully she was awake enough to do so.

The morning she died, she stopped asking to go to the bathroom every hour despite having a catheter.  Her breathing was getting worse, which I didn’t expect, but which didn’t surprise me.  There was no doubting her time was getting very short, and I did my best to stay by her side holding her hand the entire time.  My mother and her mother came over because we planned on having an Easter egg hunt for the boys, since Easter came and went without that tradition happening.  They both took their time with her then continued on to prepare the hunt.  I sat by her side and held her hand.  Eventually I leaned in and whispered in her ear that I loved her and would always love her, and I assured her that she could let go.  With every breath she took, I somehow hoped it would be her last, but every time her chest went flat, I hoped it would rise again.

It was no more than a couple minutes after I whispered in her ear that she took her last breath, as I held her hand and kissed her.  We were alone in the room.  I am incredibly thankful for that.

The boys and I said goodbye to her then, not realizing we’d be saying goodbye to her many times after that.  I still say goodbye to her pretty much every day, in hopes that one day I’ll get that she’s gone forever.

A Twitter friend, @califmom, lost her husband about three years ago to cancer.  They were the same age that Dawn and I are now and I can’t thank her enough for her advice.  One thing she told me was to get familiar with my shower floor and car, because that was where she spent most of her tear-filled times.  My shower floor is the fucking recliner that I can neither move nor avoid sitting in; the one that now resides where Dawn’s bed was in the family room the last couple weeks.  My car is, well, my car, where I drive home to an empty house every single day.  This realization reared its ugly head just recently after going to dinner with some friends.  I always drive home to an empty house.  Even if people are there, the house is just empty.

My subconscious has kept me from calling counseling services.  It’s kept me from selling her car.  It’s kept me from doing just about anything related to Dawn or her death.  Her jacket still rests on the floor next to my desk where we left it when we got home from the hospital.  It’s paralyzing.

This weekend I went to a birthday party for a friend’s son.  This was the first party, per se, that the boys and I went to since she died.  These were my neighbors, and we’ve been great friends with them for more than 10 years.  I can walk in their house any time of the day or night and raid their refrigerator, but I felt awkward this weekend.

Everything is just a little awkward.  Watching Jeopardy isn’t fun anymore.  Scrolling through the DVR is weird.  Doing anything and everything with the boys is strange now.  The worst time of day for me and the boys is nighttime, or more specifically, bedtime.  At bedtime we can’t do anything but try and sleep.  It’s time to stop reading, or playing with legos, or watching TV, and just try and sleep.  That’s when we think about Dawn and struggle with sleep.  Thankfully, the boys have gotten better about it and get to sleep okay now, but I haven’t seen the early side of midnight in a month.  I sleep well once I’m asleep, so there’s that, but getting there is becoming more and more difficult.

Every day we get a little bit better, but every day also brings a different challenge or realization about my future.  Widowed at 40 was never something I could’ve ever imagined, but here I am.  I’m sad and upset that Dawn is gone and I miss her like crazy, and much of that is because I know how much she loved living her life.  The business was very stressful but she loved so many things, the most of which were her children, and now she’s not here to see her son go to middle school, or to actually choose to wear jeans every day.  She loved those boys in jeans.  It’s just not fair to her.  She was too good a person for this.

Ultimately, that’s always what I cry about.  I hate all this, mostly, for her sake.  It’s just not fair.

Improving the home

January 4, 2013 House and Home 2 comments

When we bought our house 10 years or so ago, I had wonderful thoughts of finishing the rather large basement that came with it, complete with an extra block of height just for the purpose of making it a living area.  It’s an L shape with a separate area for a bathroom that has all drainage needs already installed.  The walls are poured concrete and it was, at the time, an open expanse. A blank canvas, if you will.

Not long after we moved in, a crack formed in a sort of relief joint, flooding the basement somewhat.  It wasn’t enough to reach the sump pump, but it was enough to destroy a few unneeded items and require an emergency visit from a repair specialist.  Other than one other crack that we noticed during a tornado, it’s held up pretty well.

It took me a couple years to get started on the basement, and I had grand ideas about finishing the whole thing myself, including framing, insulation and drywalling, as well as a dropped ceiling and some sort of flooring yet to be determined.  The only thing I’d probably farm out was the installation of the bathroom fixtures, especially the toilet, because Lord knows I don’t want to mess that up.

I bought a BAMF of a framing nailer and proceeded to frame pretty much the entire basement, insulated the walls, ran electrical, installed a vapor barrier, and even did a pretty fair amount of the easy drywalling.  90% of the work was done perfectly.  It’s the other 10% that burns my ass to this day.

First of all, I learned while drywalling that I didn’t do a good enough job aligning everything, and at one point I was caking an area of the wall with drywall mud to fill a massive difference between two panels.  I also learned that my vapor barrier was installed incorrectly, and now I’m not even so sure about the framing job I did, although the walls are absolutely solid, with no give whatsoever no matter how hard you reef on it.

So now I want to rip it all out and redo it.  This is an expense that we need in no way whatsoever, but since I abandoned the job I started 8 years ago, the basement has just become a mess of storage and garbage, and I’m sick of it.  I’d love to trash as much as possible that’s down there, tear out my work (which is probably 10% perfect, after all) and start all over.  It’s an unbelievably monumental task, and I need to be sure that considering many other things going on in our lives, it will be worth it in the end.

We can certainly afford to clean it, however, and get rid of as much stuff as possible that’s down there.  For that matter, some of it is salvageable, but again, that’s maybe 10% of what I’ve already done.  There’s also a lot of tedious work to do to dismantle it all, since I ran a fair amount of electrical through it as well.  I’m excited about the possibility of doing it again and hopefully getting it right this time, but I’m not excited about the work involved.  I think I’m going to fool myself into calling it my exercise program, because hauling all that crap up the stairs will surely be physically taxing.  Perhaps even some day we can make the proper modifications to the house to be able to call it a living area, such as installing an egress window.

For now, I think I’m going to go home today and bring a box of garbage bags downstairs.  Also, don’t tell my wife, but I think I’m going to fill the garage up with garbage that will need to go, and get the basement as empty as possible.  I think this will be my new hobby.  I’m sure nobody will complain.

Write every day

January 1, 2013 Writing One comment

I’m still one to make New Year’s Resolutions, and like just about everyone I know, I never follow through on them.  I’ve resolved to lose weight and get in better shape for probably each of the last 15 years, and this year is no different.  Again I think I’m going to get up at 4:15 tomorrow and get on the treadmill and eat a good breakfast and be at work by 6:15.

Getting healthier gets more important every year, and now that I’m 40 I feel I need to finally grow up and get it done.  2012 did nothing to improve my health, as I exercised maybe ten times and continued to sit in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day for my job, and then again for a couple hours a night after work.  If I sprinted to the mailbox and back I’d be wiped out for hours.  I used to be an athlete.  I played sports regularly and was in relatively good shape, but since we had kids I’ve been lazy.

Anyway, that’s all excuses.  I hope I don’t use them anymore.

Other than exercise, a resolution I made for 2013 is to write much more regularly, and I plan to write every single day.  I’m not often inspired to write, but I think I should continue to write if I want to be better at it.  It may be here on this site, which I’ve cleared just for this purpose, or it might be privately via journaling on my own or even screenwriting.  Please don’t dump me if something I write is crappy, because I just want to practice, for the most part.  To be honest, I don’t really expect anyone to keep along with me.  That’s not what this resolution is about.  I’m happy if you’re along at some point, though.  So this is today’s writing.