Who indeed! It takes a certain nerve to start posting a detailed diary of your activities and your thoughts, online, every day.
I am a retired programmer and technical writer, author of a few books, and (I like to think) a decent person. Nobody special, certainly.
When Marian, my wife of 45 years, got a diagnosis of a cancer that was almost surely terminal, I had some months to think about what I would do when I “became a bachelor again.”
I knew that the transition from comfortable married old guy to an old widowed guy would be profound, and probably full of emotions and events. I wanted to document that transition, in part to supplement my own memory, and in part because journaling is a very natural mode of expression for me. I hoped that keeping track of the incidents and emotions as I progressed to codger-hood, would be good for me, and possibly useful to other people in the same fix.
As of 2024, nearly 6 years on, I live comfortably at Channing House, a senior residence in Palo Alto. And I continue posting every day to this blog. However, the first year was the major time of transition. When it was past, I compiled a summary, linked above as “First year review”. That would be my small contribution to the literature of bereavement.
Transitions continue, however — apparently even old geeks can still have emotions. So I keep journaling.
Here are me and Marian, at Monet’s garden in Giverny in 2012. We looked pretty much the same up until 2018 when the disease arose.
I look more or less the same now, but appropriately older.
Codgerville 