Chapter One - Introduction

Note:  The "Published" dates of these blog entries have been fictionalized so as to present the chapters in oldest to newest order.  The actual publication dates appear in the first line of each Chapter  

10/6/19 - I'm Tim, and this Blog is the sequel to my prior series, Us vs. Cancer (usvcancer.blogspot.com).  I am 69 years old, and until August 11th of this year, I had been married to Penelope O'Neill for 40 years.  On that day, eight weeks ago today, she died after four months of battling gallbladder cancer.  In my prior Blog, I detailed the discovery of cancer in a seemingly healthy, vibrant and energetic woman, how we dealt with the treatment and disease progression, and the sudden and precipitous decline that ended her life.  Although we were told from the outset that GBC is rare, aggressive and deadly, and that Penny's remaining life would be measured in months rather than years, the months that we spent together under that terminal prognosis did not even begin to prepare me for the emotional aftermath of her death.  As a lawyer who writes for a living, writing is also my personal outlet.  Composing my thoughts and experiences helps greatly to organize the highs and lows, and to take a step back and critically assess where I am in the journey.  In this Blog I will first try to review the first eight weeks of my grief, and then track forward a day or two at a time, hoping always to find a path to peace with Penny's death and hope for some measure of the happiness I found in my 42 years with her.  Please join me in that quest and feel free to leave your comments.

Chapter Two - Where to Begin?

10/6/19 - One statement made in my very first post in "Us vs. Cancer" has resonated over and over in my mind: "Every way I turn I am haunted by the specter of "Life Before", but my task is to have steely vision straight ahead".  I fulfilled that task as best I could to the moment Penny died.  It was so tempting to fall into "anticipatory grieving", to fill my mind with memories of the life we had and would not have again.  Penny was determined to look ahead, to focus on the battle, to push the envelope of her predicted survival.  Looking back at our wonderful life added very little to that agenda. But almost immediately in the very early hours following her death, that resolve evaporated for me.  Now there was no battle to be waged, no need to clear the mind of emotional distraction.  Very quickly the image in my mind of the thin pale face from which life had just departed was replaced by the smiling face and sparkling eyes I had loved for so many years.  I recall the final scenes of the movie "Titanic", when the present-day aged Rose drifts to sleep (to death?) with the image in her mind of young Jack:  not his frozen body sinking away into the dark ocean, but appearing on the Grand Staircase, looking handsome and vibrant in dinner jacket as he greets her.  That is the memory we hold, and already I must revert to the handful of photos of Penny during her illness to remember how she changed as cancer took its toll.  Instantly, the full panorama of "Life Before" became fair game for my emotional engine: the sepia-toned memories of children being born, moving into a new home, family celebrations, camping together, quiet moments holding hands.  And then there was looking ahead, to plans unfulfilled and dreams that will never come true.  All of these have become an emotional ocean in which I have felt, at times, like I was drowning.  Ironically, the life raft has been the demand for attention to the many post-mortem tasks facing a surviving spouse:  arrangements with the mortuary, writing and submitting the obituary, giving notice of her death to all who need or want to know, marshalling our assets to make sure financial and property interests are protected.  The Celebration of Penny's Life, a wonderful event for over 200 friends and family members, was held three weeks ago.  The sympathy cards have now stopped filling the mailbox, and all the beautiful flower arrangements have withered.  Friends sense that there is little more they can say to try to assuage my loss.  Now, I have learned, is the hard part of grieving.  Despite the heartfelt efforts of my sons and close friends to share the burden, despite the encouragement and patient listening by counselors, I am reconciled that, in the final analysis, this is a journey I must travel alone.            

Chapter Three - Unfinished Business

10/7/19 - Penny was almost 70, like me, and who knows how many more years we would have ultimately had together, but for the intervention of the rare and fatal cancer.  She was meticulous about her health, much more so than I ever was.  I have secured a complete copy of her medical records from the past nine years, and I see consultations, treatment, and even minor surgeries that I was barely aware of ("Oh, I had a doctor appointment this afternoon". "Oh really?  Everything OK?". "Yes, doc says I'm good until next year".)  Some of these were dermatologist visits to check her skin for suspicious moles and blemishes.  Two colonoscopies.  Regular breast exams.  Gynaecological checkups.  Ironically, just a year earlier she had volunteered to be part of a massive scale medical project at Stanford called "Project Baseline", an effort to establish the baseline of health in America using a thoroughly vetted sample of more that 50,000 participants.  The program involved a three-day exhaustive physical exam, far beyond any routine check-up.  Penny tried very hard to be sure she was healthy and would live.  She had no reason to believe that it was time to slow down, to prepare for the inevitable decline that comes with aging. Penny had plans and projects.  She had a wedding to get ready for (our younger son's).  She had a second grandson arriving in November (our older son's), and was looking forward to playing a big role in his young life as she had with four-year-old Lincoln.  She had a backyard landscaping project that we had just secured funds for, and the architect was standing by to get started... when Penny was diagnosed with GBC.  Even today, I find her notebooks and calendars filled with decorating ideas, contractor visits, a new front door, planting next Spring's garden.  Some of these she continued to manage during her illness, but eventually the fatigue and weakness took her off the front line.  Her sudden decline and death, of course, left a huge void in all of these activities.  My immediate instinct was to step in and cover the projects as best I could.  As time has gone by since her death, the completion of Penny's agenda has become very important to me, and has expanded to include just about every aspect of our shared life.  Besides supervising the completion of her landscape project, I am also trying to care for the rest of the indoor and outdoor plants that Penny nurtured and knew so much about (I do not).  She had a small online store for jewelry she had collected and wanted to sell, so I am making a game effort to do that as well.  I selected a new fountain for the yard with the hope that my choice was in line with what Penny would have chosen.  I clean the house and do laundry almost beyond the scale of those efforts under her watch.  Why do I do these things?  Am I trying to gain approval that will never come?  Am I preparing things for the remote (very remote!) possibility that she will somehow return?  I do not have an answer for this, except that it puts me into a connection with where things would have been, should have been.  In another view, it is like capturing Penny's life before it completely got away, and folding it into my own.  Her unfinished business is now my unfinished business....and I will finish it for both of us.

Chapter Four - My Fears

10/8/19 - In all of my reading and study about cancer, and now about grief, I have occasionally come across observations and commentary that connect immediately with my own experience.  In reading comments to an article specifically about husbands grieving the loss of a wife I learned of one surviving spouse's fears, which, as I realized immediately, echoed my own.  I fear the absolute, total and forever cessation of Penny's existence.  This fear ventures deep into questions of spirituality.  I was raised a Catholic, attended mass and Catholic schools almost exclusively through my early adulthood, but eventually slipped away when I found that my divorce from my early first marriage, and my subsequent marriage to Penny, constituted transgressions that put me, and our children, beyond the Church's constituency.  I had never had serious doubts about the existence of a soul, and some concept of an afterlife, but now I cannot say that I have a serious belief in it either.  Struggling with the deepest issues of faith, at this tumultuous time, seems almost beyond my ability.  I am meeting tomorrow with a priest, a friend and client of mine with whom I have never discussed faith or religion, but to whom I will lay out my doubts and concerns in the hope for some thread of credibility to the notion that in some form, someday, we will be together again.

But I have other fears that are equally real, secular, and formidable.  I fear that my grief (as an impediment to a level of happiness and contentment in any way approaching what I experienced before) will be with me for the rest of my life.  Our life was not perfect, but I thought on so many occasions that we had achieved as much happiness, with and for each other and our family, as anyone can realistically hope to find in life.  From my perspective today, I simply cannot contemplate having a moment in which that thought begins to form that does not immediately wilt away in the glare of the loss I have suffered.  The hole in my life is so immense that backfilling with new experiences, family members not yet born, friends not yet made, will not begin to fill it.  I have been so lucky in my life, from my childhood on, and achieved a pinnacle of happiness and satisfaction in the life I built with Penny and our boys.  I cannot imagine scaling that mountain again in any other circumstance without her.

My third fear is that time will erode even the last vestige of her in my life, my memories.  I previously mentioned that my mental images of Penny are already failing to register her as she was at the end.  I try to hear her voice in my mind, recreating conversations that we would have each day.  But that is becoming harder and harder to do without finding a sound clip that puts me back in the moment.  Already I must look for pictures of her in her every day look to imagine her once again coming through the doorway after being out shopping, or greeting me from her favorite chair as I came from work.  The image we retain becomes fixed and does not age.  The colors and texture fade, and just as I remember my mom and dad as snapshots in my life, I fear that the presence of my soulmate in my mind and heart will become only an icon.

Are these fears real and realistic?  Yes, to a large extent I will have to live with each of them for the rest of my life.  But I think often of a passage in C. S. Lewis' soul-baring "A Grief Observed", in the Foreward by Madeleine L'Engle, that "when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other."  If the marriage has been long and fulfilling, that first death is an amputation for the survivor.  The pain, fear and loneliness are baked into the cake that has nurtured and provided so much Joy for so many years.  The death could have been mine.  The fears would have been hers.  It is the risk we take and the price we pay for a chance at the happiness we shared.

Chapter Five - The Times When She Meant the Most

10/8/19 - Tonight is one of those times.  Through our 42 years together, our family braved many of the challenges that afflict those who choose to live away from tract homes on flat ground.  There were storms with a scary threat from the grove of eucalyptus trees at the front of our house.  There were torrential downpours that had the potential for landslides coming down the hill from above or below.  And there was the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Los Gatos hard in 1989, bringing down our two-story high chimney and emptying the contents of every shelf and cupboard in the house.  Then there were the kids' assorted illnesses and injuries, some quite serious, including baby Danny's bacterial infection in  the bones of his leg that could have crippled him. In each of these, Penny was the coolest head, with McGiver-like skills to fashion ordinary household items into just the tool or fixit to deal with the emergency, or taking aggressive action on the phone or in the car to make sure the necessary aid was secured.  Taking charge was in her DNA.  In fact, through all of these we made quite a dynamic team in a crisis, each of us playing to our respective strengths.  Today, we learn that high winds and dry conditions make it likely that power will be cut off intentionally by PG&E to prevent the risk of downed power lines sparking a wildfire.  Penny would be all over the crisis, mobilizing ways to keep the house lit without power, keep the refrigerated food  from spoiling, and generally insulating our family from the negative effects of the emergency.  I would return home from work to find all measures in place, and Penny barking directions to the family as to how we would survive the crisis.  Today I came home from work to start looking for candles and batteries, to try to figure out a way to keep my cell phone charged while the power was down, to prepare a large dinner to eat the food that will spoil if the refrigerator is off for more that 24 hours.  Pretty pathetic compared to how we would be faring with "Mom" in charge.  She just had that talent, and was not bashful about using it.  As the days and years go on, there will be so many times when Penny's unique and creative skills will be missed, and tears will flow, and we will survive with her in our hearts.

Chapter Six - What About God?

10/11/19 - When I was assembling photos for Penny's tribute video, I came across one that I had not seen before.  It was from a group of photographs that we had inherited from her mother when she moved to California at the end of her life.  The picture was of Penny at about age 7, smiling proudly and dressed in a very pretty white dress, holding a small white book.  It was the day of her First Holy Communion, a rite that all Catholic school children of that age observed in the 1950's.  Penny was raised a Catholic as a child, as was I.  But her fractured family life got between her and religion somewhere along the way, and by the time we met she had long since become what is euphemistically called a "lapsed Catholic".  I, too, had for many years ceased active involvement with organized religion, despite having attended Catholic grade school, high school and (after secular college) law school, and having my first marriage occur in the Church.   But when our son Patrick was born, we decided that we would take a fresh start with the Catholic faith, and have infant Patrick baptized.  When we met with the pastor at St. Mary's Church in Los Gatos for our interview, he had many questions about our personal histories as Catholics.  All went well until he learned that, prior to marrying Penny, I had gotten divorced from the woman I previously had married in the Church.  He advised that Patrick could not be baptized until I had resolved that transgression by having that first marriage formally annulled through the procedure required by the Catholic Church.  This was stunning to Penny and me, as we could see no justification for imposing the sin of his father onto the innocent child.  Further, on investigation, I found that the annulment process was complex and require the participation of the former spouse to establish that the marriage fell into one of the specific "defect" categories.  For a number of reasons, I decided that I would not create a fiction to satisfy that process.  The entire illogical and unreasonable obstacle to be baptizing Patrick also represented a roadblock to our re-engaging with the Church.

Over the years of our marriage, religion never again became a significant part of our lives.  We attended Mass occasionally, we enjoyed many friends who were devoted Catholics, and we placed a high priority in our travels to visiting churches of historical significance.  We did not discuss deeper issues of faith, including even the existence of God or of an afterlife.  When Penny was diagnosed with cancer, and especially as the end of her life was clearly approaching, I intended nevertheless to ask a priest to administer last rites, though I hesitated to do it any sooner than necessary to avoid the signal to Penny that I thought it was the end.  Of course, the end came in a rush, and in the emotional turmoil of keeping her comfortable and saying goodbye, the call to a priest never got made.  I regret that very much.

As I explained in an earlier chapter, one of my fears has been that Penny's existence has been extinguished in every conceivable sense, physically, spiritually and metaphysically.  Regardless of what form it takes, I want so badly to believe in the survival of her spirit, her soul, the essence of her nonphysical being.  Whether that means that we meet again in some other realm or not is not so important; rather it is the hope and belief that there was so much more to her than the body growing cold that early morning or the urn full of ashes.

After giving it a great deal of thought, I contacted a Jesuit priest with whom I had become very well acquainted through my legal work for the Jesuit office.  He is an administrator, and we had never discussed religious topics during our several years of working together.  I was not even sure how much pastoral work he did beyond his business duties.  When I wrote, I asked for some spiritual counseling without telling him what it was about, and he responded with great willingness to meet.  I was afraid that tears would make the discussion somewhat difficult, and I was correct.  But when we met, he was a much different person than the guy I had discussed building permit applications with.  He asked me to pray with him before we got far into the conversation, and it felt good to do that.  I then stumbled through what had happened, our history with the Church, and why I was afraid.  The more I talked, the better I felt to be unburdened.  Our discussion about faith and some of the failings of organized religion were just what I was hoping to find.  No answers, but a renewed openness to exploring the questions and to letting my heart sometimes overrule my empirical mind.  At the end, he gave me absolution from my sins, and I literally felt the opportunity for a fresh start with God...in whatever form I believe him/her to be.... and for a new communication channel with Penny, both now and when it becomes my turn to leave this earthly life.

Chapter Seven - Navigating the Sea

10/16/19 - Penny died nine weeks ago last Sunday.  On that August day I plunged into an emotional ocean, sank deep, and struggled to the surface to catch my breath.  For all these weeks, this has been my world, as I search the horizon for beacons to swim toward, and ultimately the safe shore.  But slowly, very slowly, the water grows shallower and I am able occasionally to touch bottom with my toes.  I refer often to the soul-baring work by C.S. Lewis, "A Grief Observed", and follow some of the parallels between his journey and my own.  In prose beyond any I could author myself, he makes an observation that reflects my own, just over the past few days: "Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. For one thing, I suppose I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion. And I’d had a very tiring but very healthy twelve hours the day before, and a sounder night’s sleep; and after ten days of low-hung grey skies and motionless warm dampness, the sun was shining and there was a light breeze. And suddenly at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H. least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed a barrier."  Yes, I share the feeling that my vision and recollection of Penny becomes gradually less clouded with tears, and brings me, in a way, into a connection that I hope endures, where I feel the unseen tug of her hand to mine, in the way we so often walked, and sense the changing expressions on her face that communicated so well.  Reading on in the notebook of Lewis, the episode he describes is the beginning of a healing of sorts, the start of a complex reconciliation with his fears, with his memories, with God, with going forward in a life which must place the right context and perspective on that huge portion that was occupied by the relationship.  I sense that I may be at that same beginning, though the shore toward which I swim is not the same as that from which I departed.  I stress again the word beginning, as so many touchstones of memory and emotion loom large over the next three months.  I feel encouraged nevertheless.

Chapter Eight - Regrets....and Gratitude

10/19/19 - Almost from the moment she died, I have had thoughts of regrets - things I did or said over the years, or, more frequently, things I wish we had said or done that we did not.  These continue to haunt me, and while rationality says that regrets accomplish nothing, they persist nevertheless.  I have decided that perhaps confronting them in writing might be a path to putting them to rest.  By her nature, Penny kept her vulnerable side well protected.  She did not show hurt or disappointment, so on the very rare occasion when she did, I knew it was from a very deep cut.  Last Christmas, Penny had purchased tickets for all of us to do the special after-dark walk-through of the Fantasy of Lights at Vasona Park, usually a drive-through event.  It was quite a production, driving to the remote parking, waiting for the bus, loading and unloading Lincoln's stroller, then the couple of mile walk through the park looking at the lights, then the reverse trek to the car and home.  Somewhere near the end of the experience, probably at our 20-minute wait for the return bus ride, I said something to the effect that I was glad we "wouldn't have to do this again".  I felt bad the minute I said it, but she showed little reaction.  Later that evening, sitting near her in the family room, I looked over to see tears running down her cheek.  When pressed, she told me how badly those words had hurt her, how excited she had been about the event for her family.  I was crushed.  I pled with her to believe me that I had had a really nice time, and that I really was looking forward to doing it again next year, but we would do a different plan than the remote-parking-bus-ride part.  Over the following few months, I relished the opportunity next Christmas to make good on my promise.  I will now never have that chance.  And it still hurts to me to the core to remember that image of her quietly pretending to read a magazine while tears streamed down her face because of what I had said.

I have many more regrets as well.  I deeply regret that we did not spend time talking about my life after her death.  We knew it was coming, we had more than three months of spending nearly every hour together. We had many chemo sessions with me sitting just two feet away for a stretch of five or more hours...but the topic almost never came up.  I don't really know why.  We were both very realistic about her time being limited, but perhaps she saw talking about "after" as a sign of surrender.  And I did not want to be the one to initiate a conversation in that direction.  I am positive that each of us thought the same thing:  there will be time later, before the end comes, when we know it is imminent.  Somehow, we thought, there will be this moment down the road when we, fully coherent and comfortable, sit down for a comprehensive discussion of how I will go on.  How to manage the house, what to do with her jewelry and clothes, things she wants me to tell the grandchildren, how to care for her garden and plants, how to keep her memory alive.  And then it was too late.  Instead of an organized bullet point discussion of things I should know, the last days called for tenderness, gentleness and love, talking about warm memories of our life together, how we met, what she accomplished.  And then she was gone, leaving me alone and adrift.  But despite the way it ended, I have one more very deep regret:  I did not tell her often enough how much I loved her, how she had completed me in a way I never could have imagined, how proud I had been of all she accomplished, how amazed I was that a woman who came from a difficult childhood could become such a wonderful mother.  I believe she knew all of these things, but I regret so much that I could not say them again...and again and again.  I wanted the last thought she ever had in this life to be the knowledge that she had meant so much, done so much, for so many people....that she would live on in the love and beauty that she left behind.  But the moment her breathing stopped I knew it was too late.  And I regret that so much.

But for one thing I am forever thankful.  I have read many accounts of the end of life that cancer brings about, attached to tubes and devices, in the clinical setting of the hospital, filled with prolonged pain for the sufferer and the caregivers.  Penny told me many times that she was not afraid, but that she wanted to be at home when she died, and that it would not be prolonged.  She got her wish.

Chapter Nine - Touching the Memories

10/25/19 -
Dear Penny:
I would love to say that retracing steps I took with you during our life together made me feel closer to you.  Sadly, the experience at this point in my grieving simply puts front and center to the fact that I am taking those steps alone.  Today I sit on the patio of Bill's beach house at Morro Bay, just returned from a walk on the beach on a beautiful Saturday morning.  The air is cool, the sand was warm, the memories were everywhere.  Among my first memories of you is our trip down here just months after we met.  It was a night out in San Luis, fueled by several drinks, and I was hurt that you were flirting with Bill's friends (so "early relationship" of me!).  Dial ahead two years, and just months after Patrick was born we sat on the sofa with Deidre and Alan, answering their questions about how life changes after having a baby.  Their daughter, Kathryn, followed just a few years later.  Then there was the time we stopped here on our way to Disneyland with the boys and their two friends.  We rented wet suits for the kids to boogie board, and they slept in the giant motorhome we had rented for the trip, while we were cozy in the cottage.  And then our last trip here, in 2014, where we took a group picture on the beach, right where I was walking this morning.  Forty-two years of memories.  The beach house has barely changed, the ice plant garden is as lush as ever, the sand and ocean just yards away are eternal, and 42 years of memories wash over me like the waves.  Each one sucks the breath from my lungs like a punch to the chest.  Will it ever get better?  Will I ever be able to start new memories that aren't immediately drowned by the wave of old ones.  I don't want to run away from them, as I treasure them as the last bits of you I have left.  But every moment of "that was us" is promptly confronted with "this is only me".  I will be searching for the essence of you for the rest of my life.

Chapter Ten - Moving On....a Bit

11/17/19 - Last night marked thirteen weeks since Penny died, thirteen weeks of a new life for me.  With the possible exception of the birth of my sons, nothing has had a greater impact on my life as it was before than the loss of my partner, best friend, love of my life.  Gallons of tears shed, heartache of a magnitude that I did not think possible, and occasional waves of grief that literally suck the air from my lungs.  I have immersed myself in the study of grief, and everything I have read and learned has manifested itself in my experience.  First among these is that the path is long and hard, and will likely last for the rest of my life.  I believe that.  But I have a life to live, and I reflect on the conversation that I know I would have with Penny now, if that was possible.  She would say "I know how much you miss me, and how hard this is for you.  But I want you to live your life, to take care of yourself, to be happy, to be a good Bumpa to our grandchildren, to live a long life."  So the tears will continue to flow from time to time, but I am beginning the process of rebuilding a life without her.  Since Penny's death, virtually everything has been left in place.  Her closets are untouched, her shower products are still on the shelf, her cosmetics still cover the top of her make-up table.  But today I took my first steps on the road that must be traveled, the removal of some of her things to storage or donation.  Her desk is no longer covered with the hundreds of get well and sympathy cards that filled out mailbox for many months.  They will all be kept and treasured, but stored away. The files and folders of treatment information, test results, cancer research papers will also go to storage, the historical account of "Us vs. Cancer".  Today I also made my first donation delivery, two boxes of clothes (granted, she had filled the boxes before she died), and her wheelchair and walkers.  Small steps, but feeling like a breakthrough emotionally.  While the holidays will undoubtedly be challenging, my best hope for surviving them is to have the freedom to steer away from the emotional hot buttons.  The kids have invited a record crowd of their friends for Thanksgiving dinner, and I want it to be memorable despite a different face at the other end of the table.  The same challenge will be present for Christmas, and for every family event for years to come as the inevitable memories fill my heart.  We had a glorious life together that filled every corner with love and happiness.  I know that life is gone.  I know that wishing, praying, crying, hurting, promising, pleading....none of those will bring her. or that life, back again.  But even suffering the greatest pain of my life is not going to keep me from trying to put a life back together.  Just as I promised her the night she took her last breaths, I will be alright.

Chapter Eleven - The Missing Half

11/21/19 - At the end-of-term celebration for my year as Rotary District Governor, just a month before she died, Penny bravely took the microphone and read a tribute to me that I will treasure every day for the rest of my life.  Twice in her speech she held back tears as she said that I was the best half of her.  My feelings are the exact mirror of hers.... Penny was the best half of me in so many ways.  Whichever of us was "best", the fact was that our lives had merged over our 42 years together such that we were a single living, breathing, thinking and feeling being.  Each of our strengths and weaknesses complemented the weaknesses and strengths of the other, like the tabs and notches of a jigsaw puzzle fitting perfectly together.  Nothing was done, nothing was felt by either of us that did not equally affect the other.  During her illness, I was caring for myself with every gesture of care I extended to Penny.  And when she died, it was an amputation of so much of my identity that  I am left with a giant void, a disembodiment, that I don't recognize my life, my dreams, my future, my needs like I once felt so clear about.  Each day I am a stranger in my own soul, reflexively walking through the routines I know so well, but completely rudderless for a core direction or identity.  I have not given up hope, as I know the loss is still so fresh and that healing, or reconciliation as my counselor calls it, is a long process.  But for the moment, I am as emotionally and spiritually handicapped as if I had lost the use of an arm and a leg.

Chapter Twelve - The Ways I Remember Her

12/12/19 - I seldom see Penny in my dreams, which, in the world of interpreting dreams, probably has a significance that I don't understand.  But last night she appeared as a voice from out of view.  I don't recall the circumstance in which she was talking, or even what she was saying.  But it was her strong, confident voice in the way that she most often talked.  A little later in the dream, she was in view -- partially.  Something was obstructing my view, so I could only see her legs, in the black yoga pants she so often wore.  Now, both of these dream visits are likely the result of yesterday watching a short video clip from two years ago of our then two-year-old grandson, Lincoln, climbing up and down a step-stool as Penny and I encouraged him and counted his steps: "One....two...three...YAY!"  It was a fun and wonderful moment with our grandson that made me quickly grab my cell phone to record.  It is also the way I remember Penny so often from "Life Before".  But my waking memories of her are all over the place.  I once wrote that it will be difficult to remember her as she really was at the end,  since when she died I immediately defaulted to the happy memories of our 42 years together.  But that has turned out to be not necessarily true.  Besides the video clip I saw yesterday in a Facebook "memory", I have very few of her.  But the two I play and re-play most often were taken during her illness, and those portray her almost as she was at the end, and I so love watching those.  For you see those remind me of the time of our deepest and closest love.  For all the years we were together, and all we experienced in our lives as lovers, parents, partners and best friends, none compared to our sharing her final journey, despite the pain and the certain outcome.  More than any time before, we were unified in purpose and destiny, knowing that we shared the pain, we shared the hope, and that when death came it would take our shared existence.  I think of the last time I gently helped her climb our stairs and how I wanted to simply fold her in my arms and hold her tight forever.  As much as I love looking at the photo boards I prepared for her Celebration of Life, showing her life of smiles, laughter, travel, and happy children, the pictures that mean the most, that immediately bring the tears, are those of Penny with arms so thin, often in her wheelchair, but always with the sweet smile and loving look that I long to see every night in my dreams.

Chapter Thirteen - Unsolvable

12/14/19 - From the very beginning I have been a problem solver.  As early as first grade, I was given a place in the corner of the classroom where I could work quietly on learning arithmetic at a much more advanced pace than the other students.  This eventually led to my college majors in mathematics and physics.  But as much as I relished studying and solving math equations and scientific questions, I was too much in need of regular human interaction to contemplate a life in the lab.  So midway through college I switched gears and decided to apply my problem solving talent to a life in the law.  Even my hobbies, woodworking and furniture building, for example, involve identifying a desired function (most often provided by Penny) and solving the problem of how to build it.  Challenge followed by solution.  It has made for a very happy life.  Until now.  When Penny was diagnosed with cancer, of course, we had to look to the doctors for solutions.  When we learned that there were none, the next challenge was to extend her life at least to our son's wedding.  That challenge could not be solved either.  Since her death, the remaining challenge for me, the biggest of all of those in my life, has been find a happy and fulfilling life without her.  So far it has been a challenge that, even left entirely to my own skill, devices and determination, I have been unsuccessful in solving.  It is still too soon, you might say.  But my heart tells me that the hole is so large and deep that it defies the application of reason or logic to fashion an escape.  No matter how long or how much I cry, devise, plan, plead or pray, I know I will forever be without her.  In a life filled with successes, this is a devastating defeat.

Chapter Fourteen - The Fog of Sadness

1/12/20 - Yesterday was the five-month anniversary of Penny's death.  It could have been years ago, or it could have happened only last week.  My frame of reference for time has become completely disabled, despite the avalanche of events that have transpired since that early morning in August: the memorials, relocating my office, the Celebration of her life, Penny's birthday, Danny and Jen's wedding, the birth of little Harry, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year...and now, the long, quiet stretch to think, to reflect, to remember, and to reconstruct the plan of my life.  I have now identified the hallmarks of my long-term grief: I will continue to search for her trail of breadcrumbs in every nook and cranny of the life we shared.  I will carry on with projects she began, and strive to achieve her standards in so many things I do.  I will persist in trying to solve the medical mystery of her death.  On the other hand, I have also found that I am fully functional and reasonably content in the routine parts of my life.  My clients are taken care of, my Rotary duties are well-fulfilled, my finances are current, and I regularly interact with my family and friends.  But over all of these lingers a perpetual fog of deep sadness, sometimes intense, often a light haze. Tears are always just a tipping point away, even for stimuli not related to Penny.  On Saturday, I attended a funeral mass for a longtime friend attorney.  Unexpectedly, I found myself overwhelmed with sadness far beyond my affection for the deceased.  Penny had specifically asked that there be no religious service after her death, but my mind made the direct association between her and God in all of the prayers, scripture readings and songs.  I was silently praying that, if there is a God and if there is an afterlife, that Penny has been welcomed there, and, like my departed friend Vince, will be waiting to greet me when my time has come.  But my overwhelming realization, now that life has settled down somewhat into a pace similar to the months before the cancer, is how profoundly different it is in every way, how I am touched every moment by memories, how uncertain is my vision looking forward into a future that once seemed so clear and bright, but is now seen through the fog of sadness.