The work of grieving

They stress to us who attend grief counseling that grieving is a job that we have to work at.  Apparently the job has no vacation, no personal time off and no sick days, which is a big disappointment.

It certainly is NOT among my favorites of the jobs I've held in my life.  That would probably have to be the one when I operated the manual elevator at the downtown JC Penney store in Sioux Falls.  If you are old like me, you know what I'm talking about. Looking in from the outside of the elevator shaft, glass doors yielded a view of the elevator as it neared your floor.  First you saw the brass acordian gate pulled back, then the glass doors themselves opened. You checked to make sure the operator was a good one who could stop the car right on the threshold, not too far up or down before you stepped on.  This was my job when I was 17.  It was good clean fun.  The best part of all was that this guy named Gary could get on and ride for hours to talk to me when the car was empty and remain silent if there were other passengers to ferry. Kinda funny to think, Gary drove downtown, parked at, and plugged a meter just so he could ride the elevator at JC Penney.

One constant of my workshift in the elevator was the witty customer who would say to me, "I'll bet THIS job has its ups and downs!"  HAH Hah ha, yeah I almost forgot to laugh at that one after I'd heard it the first 50 times.

Well, this job of grieving is rife with ups and downs. More like a little up but mostly down and downer.
I am tired of it already, but I will be on its payroll for the rest of my life.  I have been mostly in a rut, not progressing the past couple of weeks.  I am very apathetic about most things.  There just isn't much to look forward to without Gary and our goals and ambitions together.

I did learn a word last Monday's group, Anhedonia-

ANHEDONIA: a psychological condition characterized by inability to experience pleasure in normally pleasurable acts 

 

Anhedonia is a classic symptom that most, if not all persons who lose a spouse experience.  So I'm just a face in the Anhedonic crowd.

I have been cranky too.  Bonnie Franklin, who played Valerie Bertinelli's mom on One Day At A Time died yesterday of pancreatic cancer.  Yeah, so what, we collectively yawn.  When is this cancer going to take the center stage that it should occupy!?  Of course everyone has their pet cancer it seems. But even the biggest baddest killer, lung cancer, has a longer survival rate than pancreatic. No one seems to care or notice that there are hopeful treatments for every cancer EXCEPT pancreatic.  The survival rate is still the same dismal 1% that it was in the 60's fergodssake.  Bonnie Franklin lived 5 months from her diagnosis last September.  I'd assume that she had money and access to the best treatments in LA and all of its research facilities there. I'm just so sick of this being such a killer of both men and women equally and that its devastation of human life is growing into the second highest killer of all the cancers. It is not rare anymore, yet everyone continues to throw up their hands in despair at trying to treat it or develop a screen for it.

Some would say I am angry, Yes, but not in the tired old cliches of grief that have been dispelled decades ago.  I am not angry at Gary for dying.  How could anyone BLAME the victim like that? I'm a victim of pancreatic cancer myself!  I don't see myself ever blaming Gary for leaving me alone knowing how much he felt sorry for me having to go on without him.  Like I told my sister-in-law, once you are diagnosed, you are tied to the tracks of the pancreatic cancer train and it doesn't stop for nuthin' until it runs you down.  This is what makes me so angry.  I meet many new widows from pancreatic cancer.  It feels more like those who have experienced a sudden death of their spouse rather than the ones who cared for their loved one for years before they finally died.  Pc is literally sudden death playoff.

I still can't be a cheerleader for any group attached to cancer.  I'm not sure if that day will ever come.

Right now, I am glad I don't have to 'perform' for anyone and pretend all is just fine and dandy.  I dread the day that people will say or think, 'OK buddy, your time is up, its time to get over the whole grief thing now.'
Well, you don't 'get over' a person you were meant to be with.  Nor do you get to 'move on' either.  Moving on means moving away from, but we are stuck with this person's love and their very real presence and memories forever.

So, yeah the work of grieving continues, but I'd like to say, "Take this job and shove it."

O-Kay!

A few days ago, hearing about the storms raging over the midwest, I heard that Oklahoma was hit as well.  There was news of traffic fatalities there blamed on the snowy road conditions.

Since the Oklahoma City bombings, we don't really hear much from the Sooner State.  Think about it- do you ever hear of anything much happening there?

Many people don't realize that Gary and I lived there for just over a year.  It left a big impression on me and indirectly on Gary, although he probably never realized it.

I was working for Southwestern Bell in Austin, Texas and Gary was working on a framing crew for Centex Homes back in 1981 when I got the desire to move back north to be just a little closer to family in Sioux Falls. The oil fields were booming in both Texas and Oklahoma at the time and many people were being hired to work as service reps in the business offices of Southwestern Bell throughout its 5 state territory.

I landed a job within a week of submitting my transfer.  I made the eight hour drive up to check out our new city, Enid, Oklahoma.  Enid was and still is a town of around 48,000 people. I stayed one night in a motel while securing a duplex for us to move into.  I visited my future workplace and found out I would be training for six weeks in Tulsa which was somewhat of a shock.  It was a logistical nightmare, with Gary and Nathan staying in Austin and me in Tulsa, while we tried to get our belongings up to Enid somehow.

For a couple of months Gary drove his Toyota truck the eight hours up each Friday night after work with a load of our furniture and little Nathan (or as the Texans pronounced his name, Nye-thahn) up to Enid where I waited for them after driving three hours in on the turnpike from Tulsa myself.  Finally after getting everything moved, we settled in and Gary went to work for Southwestern Bell as a term frame attendant working nights. We both earned so much in overtime and differential that we could put whole paychecks into the credit union because we did not need the money to pay bills. Those were the oil boom days for us!

I met so many honest-to-goodness nice people in Enid that I am still convinced there are no people kinder as a group than Oklahomans. I was pregnant with Forrest when this song by Alan Parsons Project played on the radio in 1982. Hearing it puts me back into that place in that hot summer and fall.

It takes me back to our days living in the smallest town we ever lived in. I vividly remember getting off work at 6pm and walking to the parking lot in the summer heat, which at the time I thought was the worst heat ever imagined(I hadn't been to Arizona). Hearing the cicadas' constant buzzing and seeing the surface of the parking lots covered with the flower droppings from the Mimosa Trees that were everywhere.

Enid is near the Kansas border and is topographically like Kansas. Flatter than flat.  I remember one slight incline in town is all. Great place to ride a bicycle, I guess. At the time, the air smelled like oilfields and the town had lots of alley ways with oil barrels that were used as trash receptacles. Enid also had many very beautiful streets of one level brick homes and expansive lawns.  Vance AFB is still there and serves as a flight training school.  I am reminded of the days near Vance now because this house in Peoria is on the flight pattern path of Luke AFB, also a flight training school.  The jet noises are familiar.

We all learned that Oklahoma is/was all about not only oil, but wheat.  We saw many custom combiners whose livelihood was traveling with their enormous expensive machinery up and down US Highway 81 starting in spring in Texas with cotton heads, switching to wheat heads and finally to corn heads as they wound down in late fall in northern South Dakota or North Dakota.

 

Enid has one of those southern style central squares in its downtown.  It is quaint and elegant with a park and trees flanking the government buildings for Garfield County. Gary and I enjoyed Enid and I think Nathan did too. We once went with him to a nicer restaurant called Nathan's.  On 4th of July, we all sat near the lake in the park with Grandpa and Grandma Hopper and Linda and Margaret to watch fireworks and see the reflections in the water. Dean and Cherie made the drive down to see us there too, because it was only an eight hour drive from Sioux Falls.

The overtime for me eventually ended.  Then Gary's ten month term job ended in December and he said he had had enough of working for a large corporation with all the layers of managers who didn't often know squat.  Still, his time there and the hierarchy and rules he was exposed to at Southwestern Bell served him well many years later when he got his jobs at Summit Group and then Heartland Industries.  He learned that corporate survival is playing the game with the right people.  It is always being available for customers because they are always right even when they aren't. Years later, Gary understood that management still doesn't know squat about your job, but you still do what you're told agreeably.  He was a good manager and I think he was a good guy to work with, even though he could be very inflexible when he didn't feel a person was working as well as they should. He could be a hardass sometimes, which he even admitted to me.

Forrest was born at Bass Baptist Hospital in Enid on December 30, 1982 and he came home to a daddy who got to stay home for a few weeks while caring for him. Then Gary decided that he wanted to start his own business doing what he loved, building cabinets.  We waited until our lease ended and in March 1983, called up brother Dean to come help move us back up to South Dakota where we knew our sons would get a good education in public schools.

I still think fondly of Enid and of Oklahoma.  Sometimes I also think of it as a possible contender for a place I may someday want to call home again.  As usual, I'm still uncertain, but its nice to know that  "OOOOk-lahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain"(yeah, in the form of a tornado!) is still there smack dab in the center of the country.