Day 37, mo’ bidness

Monday 1/7/2019

My run was not as easy as last week. Some days, including twice last week, I can go the whole 35-40 minutes without stopping except for a traffic light. Some days, like this one, there are “internal headwinds” — as I used to say when a bike ride got too long — and I end up pausing to breathe. No pattern to this that I can tell. Oh well.

Back home it was time to tackle the IBM Benefits package. I re-read the instructions for claiming the $5000 life-insurance benefit and carefully filled out the beneficiary form. Put it in the postage-paid envelope with the death certificate and sealed it — and noticed I’d left out the second page. Sigh. Tore open the postage paid envelope and made up a new one with stamps, and sealed it.

Then turned my attention to that peculiar $5/month settlement. I called the benefits office and spoke to a helpful gentleman. He said, well, it was a settlement for a lawsuit, and IBM had to pay some retirees extra. That was all he knew. Could I get it merged with my existing pension payment? Probably, but that would be up to the Pension group, and first I had to claim it. So, there was nothing for it but to return the necessary forms relating to that.

Which meant that, after I carefully filled out the form for direct payment to my bank account, and the state and federal withholding forms saying, no, I don’t want taxes withheld from this $4.89 payment each month, I had to tear open my stamped envelope and add several more sheets. Now it was beyond the capacity of a normal envelope but fortunately I had bought 9×12 envelopes (on Day 14). So for the third time I inventoried the sheets I was mailing, sealed and stamped them and later mailed the package.

Later I filled out a contact form with a senior housing referral service, and in the afternoon got a reply. I’m scheduling a meeting with “Alan” and we’ll see what kind of advice he has to offer.

Day 34, game day

Before the diary, a thought on the topic of

Not Screwing Up

The anxiety I’ve been having spells of this month? I’ve mentioned it several times. The best description would be the sinking feeling you get when you realize there was something you were supposed to do and you now realize you forgot to do it. Well, I had a bit of an insight on its source: I’m afraid of screwing up.

Here’s the thing: I, probably very much like most people, am prone to forgetting things or overlooking things. But for several decades I’ve been able to rely on Marian’s good memory and practicality to catch my mistakes or oversights before I make them. “Are you forgetting that…” or “You do remember we have to…” were common sentence openings for her, to me. Not so much the reverse, although once in a while I would think of some consideration she’d missed.

Now I don’t have that steady oversight. I lost my co-pilot; I’m flying solo. And apparently, it scares me. To a degree the fear is legitimate. I will screw up, forget things, drop balls. People do.

I find myself compensating, making lots of lists, checking my online calendar often, reviewing the upcoming hours to reassure myself that I have all my obligations under control. The extra efforts in home maintenance (treating the leather cushions, refinishing the table tops) are ways of asserting my ability to maintain in a general sense. Hopefully with time I will regain some confidence in my own wits.

Friday 1/4/2019

Started with a run. Exchanged emails with Scott about where to have lunch. Put in 90 minutes on one of my programming projects. Met Scott for lunch. Chilled out for the afternoon. In the evening, went to the Stanford WBB game against USC. Will tell the results tomorrow.

Day 27, socializing

Friday, 12/28/2018

Went for a run first thing. Ordinarily my Friday exercise is a long walk, but I’d shirked exercise both Tuesday and Thursday. Passed the time unproductively until 1pm when it was time to go to the Museum to lead a docent tour. The Museum was unusually crowded and I was the only docent who’d booked for the 2pm tour. Ordinarily there’d be two on a holiday weekend, so we can split the tour crowd to manageable size. Not today; so I started off with over 40 people in tow. That’s too many; there’s just not standing space around the exhibits I want to talk about, and the people in the back can’t see. Well, the visitors solved that for themselves by just peeling off and leaving. At the end of the tour I had about 20 still with me, which was just fine by me; but I regret the other 20-odd having a frustrating experience.

In the evening, met Su for dinner at a restaurant (hi, Su!). A lot of the conversation revolved around retirement facilities: what we want out of them, what we know of them. That was fine (and informative to me). At least we did not talk about that perennial subject among elders, our medical problems!

Emotionally this was a pretty calm day, and at times I felt quite comfortable in my new skin. I’m only slowly grasping that this is really my life now, and it’s up to me to run it. You’d think I’d’a figured that out during the months of anticipation, and I did, at an intellectual level. But there’s an emotional settling-in taking place now which is quite different (and hard to describe).

Day 25, Boxing up shards

Wednesday, 12/26/2018

Began the day with the customary run. (Marian often complimented me on doing something for exercise every — well, almost every — weekday morning. I accepted the compliments but felt awkward, as if I didn’t deserve credit for doing something so simple. I really do it out of fear; I’m scared by prospect of how fast my body will turn into a blob if I don’t keep it moving. Twenty years ago, when I was still cycling, I was “off the bike” for six weeks because of a persistent pneumonia. I’ve never forgotten the shock, when I could get back on the bike, of how feeble I had become in a few weeks, and how long it took to get any sort of condition back.)

Then I took care of a loose end. I’ve been keeping Marian’s laptop going just so I could check it each day to see what mail she’d gotten. Boy, was she subscribed to a lot of lists! But after a couple of weeks of clicking “unsubscribe” — and changing the contact email on a number of financial accounts — I’d gotten it down to almost no incoming mail at all. But in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago, it had dawned on me, doh! why do I not simply redirect email to her gmail account, into mine? There must be some way to do that. Today, with only 15 minutes of fiddling around reading Gmail help articles, I found out I could sign in as her, then designate me as a “delegate” who could read her emails and reply or delete them. So I set that up.

Now I can let her laptop sit on a shelf until such time as I can get up the nerve to reformat the drive and sell it. Opening it to see her familiar messy desktop littered with files she’d created… I can’t. Not yet.

I spent a couple of hours on a programming project, or rather, an hour rummaging through system documentation trying to figure out how to do something, and then encountering a bug that kept me from running a test case, then an hour googling for solutions for this bug. Programming. I do it for fun, I tell myself.

Shards

As 2pm was approaching and I’m due to help sort books at FOPAL today I pulled down another shelf of books to box up and donate. Here I hit a couple of “shards”, bits of the old life that is going away, which hurt quite a lot as they peel off.

One is a box of bookmarks. We were both readers and until, say, ten years ago we had several books apiece in progress. So we needed bookmarks, and we’d grab free bookmarks wherever, and after a while Marian set up a box on a handy bookshelf to hold bookmarks so it was easy to grab one. There are bookmarks in the box from several decades of reading. Bookmarks from bookstores we’ve been in: Powell’s in Portland, Davis-Kidd in Knoxville, the Tattered Cover in Denver, Munro’s in Victoria. Dozens.

Now, here’s the thing. Starting a decade ago, we pretty much stopped buying physical books and moved to reading on our laptops: stuff on the web, or books on Kindle for Mac. We typically had one (1) bookmark in operation, in whichever book we were reading aloud from at bedtime. Everything else was on a screen. So these bookmarks have been gathering dust, unused, for years. The newest is from a hotel in Normandy from our 2012 trip there.

Unused, unregarded bookmarks. They should be tossed. But it definitely hurts to do it.

As I was boxing books from this shelf I hit three map books from our days touring the UK: a road atlas for Ireland, the AA road atlas of Great Britain, and a book that was absolutely essential to us for several years, the Master Atlas of Greater London. You see, children, there was once a time when we didn’t have GPS or a phone that ran a map app. We were utterly dependent on maps printed on paper, if you can imagine something so crude!

These handsome volumes have no use whatever now or in the future. The maps are out of date; before today they literally haven’t been off the shelf for 20 years; it has been literally forty years since we used the London Atlas. On my first day of sorting at FOPAL I learned that travel guides printed before 2000 are not kept; they go straight to the recycle bin. These books need to go into the recycle bin right here at home.

Along with the bookmarks.

And it hurts.

I can imagine a sympathetic person saying “Well, why don’t you keep them, then? Or a couple of bookmarks anyway.” But that just puts it off. I’d face the same issue when packing to move to wherever I go next spring. It’s just more possessions to be responsible for, and really useless ones at that.

There’s the contradiction: these objects have a triple nature:

To me, they are powerful symbols of a life I once lived.
To anyone else they are meaningless.
And for me, they have no practical use in the life I am moving into.

There are a lot of objects in this house that have this contradictory nature. How many do I keep?

Day 23, Calendar, Cushions, Varnish, Amazon, Good Grief

Monday 12/24/2018

My Calendar

It’s Christmas eve, and as of the morning my calendar for today and tomorrow was completely blank. This did not perturb me. I have intentionally, deliberately ignored everything about the holiday season this year, first as Marian was getting sicker and neither she nor I wanted any celebration; and of course after she died I did not want to go through any empty motions.

In an academic sort of way I thought it might seem sad to have nothing to do Christmas day, not so much because I desired company, but because if someone asked me later in the week, “What did you do on Christmas?” I would have to say (no doubt in an Eeyore-like monotone) “Ohhh, nuthinnn.” Which would be embarrassing, and would provoke entirely unwanted sympathy from the questioner. Or maybe I could lie, invent dinner with a relative the questioner doesn’t know.

I went for my customary run, which felt fine. During it, I got a text from my friend Suzanne, very graciously inviting me to share supper with them on Christmas day! I replied with a grateful acceptance, and now I have something on the calendar for tomorrow.

I texted back asking what I could bring, and Suzanne suggested “flowers for the table”. Sure, I thought, no problem… oh, wait. It’s Christmas bloody Eve and I have no idea where to get a flower arrangement, OMG OMG OMG what’ll I do? Yelp to the rescue; there are at least four florists within a mile radius. I walked into the nearest and the proprietor, a very pleasant woman, said, “Well, there’s this one I’m just working on,” and showed me a nice arrangement of red candles and red roses in pine branches (not botanically convincing, but a good color match). So I stood by and commented as she finished it with lots of sprigs of tiny white blossoms, so it ends up a bit like miniature fireworks. So that’s set.

Cushions and Varnish

After that I finished putting Leather CPR goop on all the green cushions for the second and last time, and put yet another goddam coat of urethane varnish on the little tables, because there were two little screw-ups in the previous coat that I couldn’t stop seeing.

Amazon Fail

Back in 2014 when I was an original backer of Soylent, my first order of Soylent came with a pretty Takeya pitcher for mixing a day’s nutrition. Last week, the plastic top ring split, so I ordered a replacement from Amazon. According to Amazon it was delivered to my porch Saturday at 5:30pm. That would be 15 minutes after I left the house to get supper and go to a movie. It wasn’t there, and didn’t show Sunday; then today when I got back from my run, on the porch was the empty box. It had been crudely ripped open, and inside was only the little air pillows for packing. Inside my mail slot was a business card of a Palo Alto police officer, with the note, “Inform Amazon your package was stolen, if that was the case.” I assume the officer had found the emptied package somewhere and brought it around to my house.

Well, you know, Amazon offers no way to tell it, “My package was stolen.” You can return a shipment if the goods or the package are damaged. I started down that path but realized, how could I return an empty box? It would just confuse things. Back to the “where’s my stuff” link: nope; Amazon doesn’t give you any way to say, my package was stolen, please send another. At least, that I could find. It was only $18, I just ordered one.

Good Grief

Pathways Home Health, the company that provided home care for Marian after her operation, and again during her Hospice period, send me a brochure on Grief Support. Based on this I think I’m getting off pretty lightly:

As we grieve during and after the death of a loved one, we may feel numbness or anxiety, shock or fear, nausea or exhaustion. Confusion, denial, or disorientation are also common. … You may feel flooded with sadness, guilt, or a sense of being in a fog.

OK, I’ve recorded anxiety a couple of times, although not the last few days. Surges of sadness, definitely; although the strongest of these are associated, as I’ve written, with the loss of a lifestyle or life-pattern, rather than the loss of a person. When I think of Marian I feel pity and regret. But the sadness of bereavement is different, comes at different times and from different triggers. (I still can’t bring myself to take down that list of entrées from the bulletin board; and there is a whole closet I am carefully avoiding.)

Anyway they offer a “Partner Loss” group session on Tuesdays, resuming January 7th. I will think about this; maybe I’ll attend one.

Day 18, Books and Haircut

Last night’s adventure was to attend a “story slam” put on by The Moth. Back-story: my niece Laurel has been trying to connect me to her friend Ed Lewis, who has an avocation as a story-teller. Ed was going to be in San Francisco for this slam, and we agreed to meet before the event to eat. My friend Scott was interested so we drove up together. Ed is a cheerful guy with a lot of stories. At the slam, anyone can put their name in a bag, from which ten names were drawn to tell their stories in five minutes each. Ed’s name wasn’t drawn. His professional opinion of the tellers who were chosen was not positive, except for the two who were scored highest by the judges. Those two really did tell gripping personal tales with confidence and panache. Ed invited us to come to a story-telling festival he’s running in January to hear “really good, professional tellers.”

Wednesday, 12/19/2018

After a run (another good one, 40 minutes nonstop and felt fine) I spent some time trying to master this WordPress blog’s styling. Ended up using the WordPress online chat for help, which was quite helpful. But I really would like to get an archive of prior posts in the sidebar, similar to what Blogger offers, and it doesn’t seem possible.

New Gig

At 1pm I went for my first volunteer gig at FOPAL. This was quite enjoyable. I’m going to like this weekly 2-hour gig. What I’m doing for now is sorting. FOPAL has defined about 60 interest categories, like “computers”, “classic literature”, “travel narrative”, “movies/tv” and so on. Each category has some shelf space in the big Sale Room, where the monthly book sales take place. Each category has at least one volunteer “manager” who prices and arranges her category’s books on the shelf before sale day.

People come to the door with bags and boxes of books as donations, and of course these are not nicely categorized. The donation boxes and bags pile up in a small mountain in the center of the Sorting Room. Around the walls of the Sorting Room are shelves with boxes labeled for each category. What I and other sorters do is to open a donation box; look at each book; decide if it is worth keeping at all, and if so, into what category box to drop it. Then put the book in the box for its category. When a category box fills up, move it to the appropriate area of the sale room for the category manager to handle.

It’s a fun job, good mental exercise evaluating the books, and physical exercise as well, walking back and forth and carrying heavy boxes of books around. Nice people to work with, too, as one would expect at an all-volunteer outfit.

Haircut

Since the 1980s, Marian and I both had our hair cut by Chris Johnson. She gave Marian’s last shampoo and blow-dry the week before she died. On the way home from that appointment Marian asked what I planned to do about haircuts when she was gone. I said “Oh, probably stay with Chris, no point in changing”. So today was the appointment for haircuts that we’d made weeks earlier. I left early from the FOPAL gig to make the 4pm appointment. Chris and I kind of talked around issues, not doing a lot of reminiscing about Marian, so I only choked up a couple of times.

Home for a rest and supper, then I go out again at 7:30 to see Into the Woods at the Bus Barn theater.

Day 16, Takin’ care of bidness

Monday 12/17/2018

I suppose “takin’ care of bidness” could be the default title of a lot of these posts. Went for a run and was pleased it went well, 35 minutes of my gentle jog (4.5mph when on a treadmill) without stopping except for a couple of traffic lights, and felt good.

After a shower I spent a couple hours continuing to tidy and organize and discard stuff from the various file drawers. I’ve a 6-inch pile of Schwab monthly brokerage statements, and some other categories of paper financial records, all from the era 1997 (when we set up our trust and managed accounts) through about 2002 when it seems Marian decided it wasn’t worth it to save them any more. But I broke out some sub-categories, like the documents that show the history of how our respective IRAs rolled from company to company, or the documents that establish when we each bought IBM shares, and how much they sold for. I wrote an email to our financial advisors’ office listing these groups of records and asking if I can recycle them. I’m guessing all this stuff is dead history, but I haven’t heard back yet. (Later: yes; recycle the lot.)

I set up a wide pendaflex in which to collect everything related to getting Marian officially deceased, bureaucratically speaking. The Neptune Society docs, the notes from different banks, and so on. One section that looms a bit ominously is the inch-thick pile of Medicare EOBs dating back to spring when her illness began. So many services rendered by PAMF and by Stanford Health, each specified as “provider billed” (huge sum), “medicare approved” (1/4 that), “you may be billed” (a pittance). But the pittances add up, and so far as I know, I’ve yet to see any kind of bill from either PAMF or Stanford. So the thick wad of EOBs is the bulk of that pendaflex. I’d love to see it go in the recycle bin.

Spent an hour sanding the tops of the other two little tables, then put them away. Tomorrow looks pretty busy; I’ll try to paint them Wednesday, maybe.

Eduardo’s Gutter Cleaner crew indeed merit their 5-star rating on Yelp. They pulled up 15 minutes ahead of schedule and were gone an hour later. All the leaves are off my roof, my downspouts are sluiced clean, and the house looks tidy from the street. Good.

Got a head start on tomorrow by stripping the bed and washing the linens. This something I normally would do on “Suli day,” the day the cleaning lady comes, which is tomorrow. This was also the scheduled quarterly day to rotate the mattress, five minutes of heaving and hauling, and something I will continue to do (once more? twice?) as only one side is getting used anymore.

Emotionally a pretty tranquil day, which is welcome after yesterday.

Day 13, mo’ paperwork

Friday 12/14/2018

Went for a run first thing. On return, began the process of informing IBM benefits of Marian’s death. Tara, customer service rep, put me on hold for several minutes while she “typed a notification to survivor services.” Took my phone number and email, and promised that in no more than 3 weeks, I’d receive a packet with information on what benefits there are and how to claim them. Marian’s pension should stop, but if a January payment appears (unlikely) it will have to be returned.

Tara also suggested I call Via Benefits, the administrator for the IBM Retiree health benefits (as contrasted to pension and insurance). So I did, and eventually was connected to customer rep Colton, who thanked me for the information and asked if I had any questions. My main question was, what benefits exactly had Marian been getting, aside from the “SHAP”, an annual payment to assist in purchasing supplementary coverage. Well, Colton was sorry, but he was unable to talk to me in any detail. You see, he had to be assured that I was in fact Marian’s executor. (Probably a HIPA thing.) He sent me an email listing the documents they would need to see. Unfortunately the email was a generic form letter that didn’t actually address post-mortem executor proof.

So, I dug out and made copies of a her notarized “Nomination of Conservatorship of Body and Estate” naming me, and her will, naming me as executor, and added a copy (but not an original) of the death certificate, and made a cover letter. But I don’t have an 8×11 envelope so I’ll go buy one and mail that wad tomorrow. All to find out what exactly Via is, or rather was, doing for her and us.

Then I spent an hour re-sanding that little table and re-coating it with varnish. Hopefully getting a better result.

Started on the process of clearing out the “back file drawer”. For a long time we’ve had a large tub-file drawer full of pendaflexes in the custom wall unit in my office area. It has been the repository of folders of “stuff not to throw away.” Earlier this week I cleaned out most of the smaller file drawer in (what I think of as) Marian’s desk. Now I’m going to winnow out all that old stuff, with all due appreciation of family history etc. but if it hasn’t been useful in the last five years, say, it better be really significant or it goes. What survives will move to the desk drawer.

First up, after chucking a couple of obviously out of date things, was the folder of maintenance records for the car. Amazingly little maintenance required by a Prius. One or two trips a year to the dealer for a routine service. One change of tires. The folder includes the original purchase records and window sticker; I kept them for nostalgia.

Had a phone chat with Dennis about our plan to see a movie together on Sunday. It’s not going to work; he’s got a relative coming in and we couldn’t get times to jibe. So try to reschedule for next weekend, assuming the movie we were going to see, The Green Book, is still playing… OK, I decided I’d treat myself to a solo movie on Sunday afternoon instead. On a whim, Ralph Breaks the Internet. But oh, noes! I never saw the original Wreck-it Ralph, so I won’t know the back-story! Can’t go to a movie without being up on the canon! No problemo, it is downloading from DirecTV On Demand as I write. An expense of $3.99; but on the other hand, if I really hate it, I’ve saved the price of a real movie ticket.

Eduardo, Mister Highest-Rated-on-Yelp Gutter-Cleaner-Outer, finally got back with a date, which to my surprise is next Tuesday. Yay. Be glad to have that done.

Signed up for every Thursday in January to work on collections for CHM. So: Wednesdays at FOPAL sorting books, Thursdays documenting and storing objects for CHM. Tomorrow I’ll sign up for some Docent tours as well. My calendar is filling up nicely.