Day 31, New Year’s

Last night’s dinner with Bob and Lolly was a mild pleasure. My connection to them is rather weak; I always felt like they were more Marian’s friends than mine. I thought they might have some questions about her death or final days, and was braced to tell them how it went. But no, they expressed no curiosity about that at all, nor did they want to reminisce about her. I don’t know if they were being nice to me or just didn’t care. Anyway, I left after the meal and was home by 8pm.

Tuesday 1/1/2019

Filled out a check for the cleaning lady and got the year right in the date, so there. New Year’s day, the day you are all set to start out with many projects and activities, but absolutely nothing is open anywhere so you can’t do any of it.

Began with a long walk. Ordinarily when I walk for exercise, I walk to the center of Palo Alto where I can get a food reward for my efforts at a coffee shop. But of course nothing would be open. So instead, how about a scenic walk? I decided to walk the Palo Alto Baylands. It’s a linear walk, not a loop, so I took a Lyft to the South end, walked for an hour and a quarter (about three miles?), and took a Lyft home from the North end. It was a sparkling clear day; this and the prior two days have been the rare, ultra-clear days that usually only come in January, when every distant hill is visible, even Mount Diablo 50 miles away.

This was a walk that Marian liked to take ten years ago, before her walking range diminished. But today I very consciously thought “I am doing this for my own pleasure, not out of nostalgia.”

Back home I spent a couple of hours re-creating the big spreadsheet that Marian made to track our various investment accounts. The final numbers for 2018 were available on the Schwab web page, so I could close out the 2018 sheet (bottom line, our wealth is down about 7% from year-end 2017) and transfer the totals into the “Prior Year” column of the new sheet. Marian had created the first of these annual sheets beginning in 1997(!), using AppleWorks(!). Then each year she’d copied it, zeroed the data, and started a new one. At some point a decade ago she converted to Numbers, Apple’s current spreadsheet, which caused some oddities in the formulae and formatting. Rather than try to copy the sheet and zero the values for the new year, I elected to make a completely new spreadsheet, following her design but from scratch with no legacy code.

That was another item scratched off the to-do list on the desk. I do like crossing off to-do items. Maybe I’ll go do another one.

Day 20, More closet work

Friday, 12/21/2018

A drizzly morning so instead of the long walk I like to take on a Friday I drove to the Y and ran a half hour on the treadmill. Back home I revisited the problem of disposing of the “better” selection of Marian’s clothes — the four bags and several hanging items that Jean thought were too good for her church’s thrift shop, and should be consigned, with the receipts perhaps going to Stanford Women’s Basketball. This was a brilliant idea of hers.

However, I emailed two basketball friends who I thought might know about consignment shops, and they replied that they didn’t. So I started researching them. Actually Yelp lists second-hand and consignment clothing shops. A couple in Menlo Park, a couple in Los Altos.

From the sites for these stores I got a better idea of the kind and quality of clothes they want and how they operate. It wasn’t looking very promising, frankly. So I unpacked the four bags and did another division of sheep from goats, that is, setting aside only items with fine fabric (cashmere, silk) or brand names that I recognized as not being run-of-the-mill store or catalog brands. About half made the cut and went back to the closet: leather coats, silk or cashmere tops, a couple of other obviously fine items.

On Santa Cruz ave. in Menlo Park is the American Cancer Society “Discovery store” where donated clothes are sold to benefit cancer research. I took the two big bags of lesser items there. Then I checked out the two shops in Los Altos. The lady at one said she was overstocked, she might look at my things in January. The lady at the other was quite negative: people look for high-end designer brands (the only one of those that Marian had was a little blouse from DKNY); leather and faux-leather jackets don’t sell well; silk and cashmere tops are pretty slow. Welp, that just about eliminates my inventory.

Probably in January, unless another idea surfaces, I’ll take the remaining items to the ACS shop.

In the evening I finished playing The Return of the King and spent some time going through the bonus material on the third disc of this “extended edition”. As to the film, I was most impressed by the way Peter Jackson and crew created battle scenes. The seamless mix of live and CGI and model work to produce the chaos of a fantasy battle is amazing. I still don’t forgive him for discarding the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire”. He addresses this directly in one of the bonus talks: to him, the story was all about Frodo. He just didn’t see the wonderful possibilities for irony and humor in this closing chapter, or the importance of finishing the arcs of Merry and Pippin. It could all have been done in three minutes of film.

Day 19, Marian’s closet

The play last night was oooo-kayyy I guess. Into the Woods is a very complicated play with lots of characters, and the Los Altos group did a very good job of staging it in the confines of the tiny Bus Barn Theater. My seat was in the front row and I had to be careful not to stretch out for fear of tripping one of the actors. Most of the cast was competent (the young woman playing Cinderella was really good). But the play itself, oh my goodness. The first act ran an hour and a quarter, the second didn’t start until 9:40 or so, and it is slow and full of long, soliloquizing songs with very little melody. Didn’t get home until 11pm.

Thursday 20/12/2018

Walked to the Y for a workout in chilly fog. Then spent an hour beginning the process of clearing out all Marian’s clothes. I started with drawers in various cabinets. When sister in law Jean arrived, we began the process of dividing the clothes into “thrift shop” versus “consignment”.

Jean said her church’s thrift shop would take all used clothes, even shoes and socks, which surprised me. So everything worn-looking or inexpensive went to them, about 8 large plastic garbage sacks to stuff into the trunk of her car.

Almost that much bulk, four plastic sacks and some jackets and ensembles still hanging up, are the “consignment” collection. I don’t know anything about second-hand clothes stores, so I have emailed a couple of women who might, for advice.

This was not too bad an emotional experience, as long as I kept focussed on the practical job at hand and took care not to picture Marian wearing any of the items or remember a time when she got it or wore it. I was astonished at how much she had neatly (of course) packed away. She had at least 20 nice scarves in a wide variety of patterns, and she almost never wore a scarf. I recognized just one, a very soft knitted lavender-brown one. She bought it in Germany because we kept seeing German women who were wearing scarves and she thought the style looked good.

One object just broke me up. I tried to talk about it to Jean and just could not make my voice work. (Fortunately emotion doesn’t clog up my typing fingers the way it does my throat and mucous membranes…) Sometime in the 1990s, Marian embarked on making a quilt, based on a very elaborate pattern of stitched flowers. She bought the fabric and the matching thread; she stitched probably four complete squares out of the twenty or so in the pattern; cut and sewed parts (stems, petals) for a few more. But she found her eyesight just wouldn’t support the very fine hand-stitching required. She stowed the project neatly in a drawer; once every few years she’d take it out and look at it; but she could never finish it.

So here is this unfinished quilt, a pile of neatly-cut fabric sections, paper patterns and templates, and small boxes of completed components, representing probably a couple hundred hours of work with hundreds more to finish it. Does it go to the landfill?

Jean took it and said she was confident that the thrift shop people would find someone who wanted it. I hope she’s right; anyway it is a relief to have it out the house, I guess.

Day 10, Lunch and handyman stuff

Tuesday 11/12/18

Walked to the Y for my little workout. On return, put all the leather cushions back in the couch and chairs. They look great. I might do another round, I have plenty of the goopy stuff. Then I pondered the table-nest project.

For years we’ve had and used a set of three small nesting tables. They are elegant, delicate, Danish Modern perhaps, though a bit of a Japanese curve to the edge of the largest of the three. That one has for a number of years supported a potted plant; the other two went anywhere we wanted a table for the moment.

The project part is, the largest has circular stains where the plant pots got wet, and the others have stains, and their glue joints have dried out and started to separate. Yesterday I used Gorilla Glue to repair the loose joints in two of them. But I mean to sand down and re-stain the top of at least the larger.

That means finding a stain to match the existing color. And, while handling the middle-size one, I realized that it has lost a screw, a rather large 4/20 with a conical head, not your standard item. So I tossed that table in the car and went off to lunch with Scott (Hi Scott!) at Michaels on Shoreline.

Coming out of Michaels, the phone rang. It was Maria at the Neptune Society, informing me that Marian’s cremation had taken place over the weekend, and her ashes were now back at the Neptune office in San Jose. I’d emailed her yesterday saying that we would not be using the family cruise option, but to go ahead with the standard service. She had called to let me know that Marian would be scattered on their next cruise, January third. I’ll receive an official scattering document signed by the boat captain after that. Meantime, the death certificates should be ready sometime this week.

I continued up 101 to Embarcadero and thence to Ace Hardware, my go-to hardware store now that Orchard Supply closed. There I found a stain/urethane paint that looked like it would match, and found a match to the missing screw. Back home I spent a half hour with the orbital sander getting the stains (mostly) out of the top of the bigger table, and coated it with the stain. It’s drying now. We’ll see.

Day 5: root of the malaise?

Finished up Day 4 by watching a Midsomer Murders episode, the TV equivalent of comfort food, while applying leather conditioner to one of fifteen large leather cushions.

Sidebar: Fifteen cushions

Sometime in the late 1970s, we bought a Danish Modern set of sofa and two armchairs. Spare, angular wood frames supporting big soft cushions all the same shape, for seats and backs. Sometime in the early 2000s we realized the leather had dried and cracked and looked pretty bad. Shopped for a while but couldn’t find any equivalent seating that we liked. So we hired an upholsterer to basically rebuild all 15 cushions in new leather, dyed the same deep-green color. Now, 15 years on, that leather is holding up but looks a bit tired and stressed. I ordered a big bottle of “Leather CPR” two weeks ago, figuring the slow hand task of working conditioner into the cushions might be a nice project for “when I’m a bachelor”. Ok, starting that now. Anyway, back to today.

Thursday, 12/6/18

Walking, thinking

Walked to the Y, did my exercises, walked home. Thinking all the way, trying to isolate and examine this not-quite-constant feeling of anxiety, malaise. What is it that eats on me? I think I have a handle.

For 45 years, Marian and I formed a tight little mutual support group of two. Psychologically siamese twins. For most of that time, the act of walking home from the gym had the context that I was walking home to where Marian was. This fact of being part of a couple was the basic context (or milieu or background) for every act. Yes, I went to the gym and returned on my own initiative, I didn’t have to, I chose to. But in the deep background, whatever I did, I did in the context of being part of “Dave’n’Marian”. It didn’t supply “meaning” exactly, but was the water in which we goldfish swam.

And that’s gone; the context, the background stripped away, leaving all actions isolated in space. The practical reasons for going to the gym, or going at that hour, are exactly the same as ever.

And yet, because there’s no context except me and my choice, it seems to call the act, every step in it, into question; seems to demand justification, or re-verification.

Hopefully this will fade as I begin to establish a new context for myself as “Dave the Bachelor”. Toward this my friend Wally is a model and an inspiration. He lost his wife a decade ago, and now leads a very interesting, confident, self-sufficient life. When we met for the Jake Shimabukuro concert Tuesday night he mentioned how he was just back from New York City, where he’d seen the Rockefeller Center Christmas special. I, figuring he had business there, said, “Great, so why were you in New York?” “For that!” he said, “And for some art galleries and things.”

That’s the kind of bachelor I want to be: one who goes out and gets experiences for his own sake.

Day 3

Tuesday 12/4/18

It seems incredible it has only been 2½ days since Marian stopped breathing. I’ve accomplished just a ton of stuff in that time, busy busy busy. But first, a few words about

Grief

It just comes on at unpredictable times, then passes off. Something reminds me of our life together — as when, yesterday morning, I passed the local ice-cream store and suddenly remembered she always ordered mocha almond fudge flavor — or it will be nothing at all, just a sudden uprush of pity and regret. And the eyes prickle, the throat constricts, the voice, if I’m talking, becomes thick and broken. A deep breath, a shake of the shoulders, and it passes off.

So these little fugues, every couple of hours or so, are the metronome to my days. But in between them, today I was

Making Arrangements

Walked to the Y on Ross Road, did my little round of exercises, walked back in plenty of time to strip the bed and put the linens in the washer. Then drove to San Jose, to the office of the Neptune Society, where Maria led me through reading and signing all the papers that have to be read and signed in order to get somebody cremated and scattered at sea, all proper and legal.

There’s a decision to be made: do I want to see the ashes scattered off the Marin coast near Angel Island? If so, I have to reserved a spot on a sailing of their “family” boat for $495. Or I can just let it happen anonymously on their standard scattering cruise where nobody witnesses the operation. That service is included in the fees we paid back in 1997 (Marian’s signature on the contract, from back before her handwriting deteriorated…)

I’m on the fence about this. Do I want the finality of this little ceremony? Marian is gone; the ashes won’t be her in any sense. I’ll consult with her sister, see if she wants in.

Housekeeping

On return, Suli, our cleaning lady for many years, had arrived, and had already guessed from the rearranged furniture what had happened since her last visit two weeks ago. But we shared a bit of a cry. “Oh, I hoped I would see her one more time,” she said.

After Suli had finished and left, I sorted the rest of the laundry and got that going. And put the sheets back on the bed. And called a two of Marian’s insurance companies. Oddly, the drug benefit company said they would be informed by Medicare, and would process the termination then. The other, AARP medicare supplement, didn’t say that, and processed the change at once. Whatever.

Finally I reverted Marian’s phone, an iPhone 6s, to factory default and then installed Uber and Lyft apps on it with new accounts. The plan is for Marian’s sister Jean to use that. She’s not had a smart-phone; and I’ve offered to let her use this one, while keeping it on my T-Mobile family plan. It would probably cost me money to go back to a single line plan anyway.

Still plenty of time then, for

Entertainment

About 4 weeks ago, while I was sitting in the audience at the Pear Theater waiting for the play to start, I checked my email (as one does) and saw one from the Fox Theater in Redwood city announcing a concert by Jake Shimabukuro. Knowing he sells out quick, I managed to get two good seats before the lights went down in the theater. A week or so later it was clear that Marian’s strength had declined such that she wouldn’t be able to attend using her walker, but the theater assured me she could come in the wheelchair.

Well, that didn’t come to pass, and yesterday I contacted our friend Wally and asked if he’d like to come. I left early in order to get a quick supper at the Five Guys burgers next door to the Fox, which was fortunate since traffic was a mess. I know how traffic is, on a rainy evening at 6pm; yet it always comes as a surprise. Anyway I did manage a quick bite, met Wally, and attended the concert.

Jake is truly a master and for this tour he has teamed with two other virtuosi, Dave Preston on guitar and Nolan Verner on bass. Still, I thought the concert was a little bit long and repetitive. The absolute best moments where when Jake stood alone and played a standard, acoustic ukulele. His ability to pull sophisticated, complex counterpoint out of that tiny instrument is amazing.

So home to fold the last load of laundry — including Marian’s three favorite tops; another grief spasm — and write a blog post.