martha jane

Gwen, If you can only chat and listen that is one of the best things you can do for an older person. All they want is someone to be interested in them and listen. Let them tell you their life story. I once worked as a companion to a 98 year old lady and I asked her what was the very first memory she had. From there her life story flowed and we laughed and cried together. You don't have to say or do anything, just listen. That will help more than a bottle of medicine. And you will feel so much better knowing that you are doing something wonderful for an older person just by using your ears. You don't have to push them around or help them walk, just sit beside them, listen and be ready with a hug or smile when they need it. Although my friend was 98 and all her family was gone she still was sad over a time that she hurt her mother's feelings and said something hateful. She talked it out with me and felt much better. Until I became older I did not realize how important what I had done for her was. Now I just wish I had someone to do the same for me.

Gwen, If you call the church they are bound to know who you are talking about since she lost her husband just a year ago. She is probably disappointed that she can't find you either. Have you returned to the park? I hope you find her. It is so hard to find someone who you can really talk to especially in person. I can't talk to my children or relatives or really anyone. It is hard to put into words how you feel . Sometimes you don't even know yourself. I hardly ever feel happy or even excited about anything. I was thinking last night, every day for over 57 years I knew where my husband was. Even when he was working out of town I talked to him everyday. Now I look at a picture of us the day we got married and I don't know those two people. Where did we go? Where did I go? I read you posts, I don't often respond but it breaks my heart that there are no words I can say to help you feel better, to calm your mind, to bring a little sunshine in your days. Please know that I think about you and care so much that your life will get better and you will somehow find a purpose to understand why you are still here and your husband is gone. I can't seem to find a purpose, something that I can do to help me feel useful. I used to do a lot of volunteer work, especially at nursing homes and with hospice. I can no longer do that, it brings back too many memories of what my husband went through before he died. I have read that there is a time to live and a time to die. Our time won't come until we have completed our purpose for being born. I seem to have stepped out of my path and can't find my way back. I wish I could just sit with you and let you pour out your heart. I would love to do that but I can't seem to find anyone who I feel comfortable with to do that . I never dreamed that when we started our life together it would end the way it did. I have hope that I will see him again some day. And I wish I knew where he is now.

I have read through all your posting tonight. I want to say that you are one of the most intelligent persons that I have ever read. You make everything so plain and easy to understand. I have never had a " career" as you do, I have worked for doctor's offices and also for the state of Ala and Louisanna but the same things you experienced goes on in every kind of job there is. Everywhere I have worked I have always had what I call " a thorn in my side." I know how it feels to be treated unfairly and be disliked in a job just because you are doing it well. The last sentence in your latest post said exactly what I feel. How is it possible that it is all over? I was married for 57 years the day my husband was put on hospice and he died 15 days later, no food or water for those 15 days. No movement and no words spoken, eyes closed and his mouth wide open. My husband had Parkinson's. He had been diagnosed 4 years before. He was doing okay, he didn't have the shaking , just the weakness and freezing while he was walking. He would see people who weren't real sometimes mostly two little girls. I would hear him talking to them. He was hospitalized several times with extremely high blood pressure and UTI's but always managed to get better and come home. But the last time he got sick very suddenly and left home in an ambulance on Nov 1st, my son's birthday. He had sepsis and never recovered from it. It was so horrible, the way he died, so slow and silent. He was on morphine and Ativan and never knew what was happening to him. I know your dad had Parkinson's also and I wondered if he may have had sepsis from some kind of bacteria? I think my husband's was from his kidneys. My husband was my support and my world just as your dad was yours. I am so sorry for your grief and pain. I hope that you will find work that you will enjoy and there will be no more thorns, just nice people who will appreciate you and your sweet personality, your honesty and good work. My comfort is my cat also. She is a flame siamese, I got her from a no kill shelter and I have never had a cat who loved me like she does. I would love to have you for a friend, but Alabama is a long way from Arizona. God bless you.

Kieron, I too have my husbands bath robe still on the hook in the bathroom. I bought it just a month or so before he went into the hospital for the last time. It was beginning to turn cold and I thought it would be nice to have so he could be dry all over rather than having to be toweled off. He only used it a few times. I have all his clothes packed away, I haven't been able to part with them. His shoes are still in the bedroom and one pair I can see everytime I go in the bedroom. They are the very last pair he ever wore. Sometimes I just sit and look at them and see the shape of his feet. The strings are broken but he alway tied the ends together and kept using them. I noticed he did that right after we got married and I knew that the probably had done that since he was a boy because they were poor and I guess new shoe strings were hard to come by. He died on Dec 13, 2016. He had been on hospice and filled with morphine and ativan since Nov 28th which was out 57th wedding anniversary. He never spoke or moved again after that. He lay with his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. I keep seeing him like that when my daughters and I saw him draw his last breath. We never said goodbye, he did not even know we were there with him. I thought that things would be better by now but it isn't. Lately I don't want to talk to anyone go anywhere. I can hardly believe that he is gone forever. One day I was in the kitchen and I could see him through the living room window sitting in the porch swing like he was in deep thought. I thought to myself that I needed to go and sit with him but I didn't. Now I can hardly bear to look at that window, I see him there by himself when I should have taken time to sit with him. My husband had Parkinson's and he was admitted to the hospital several times with high blood pressure and a UTI but he always came home feeling better. I did not know that this time he would get sepsis and die. He went in the hospital on Nov 1st , My son's birthday and was in the hospital ICU for 11 days and then he was supposed to be so much improved that they sent him for rehab when he couldn't even stand up or walk. He improved for a day or two and then they found him in the floor one night and rushed him to the hospital and he became so much worse that the doctor talked us in having him be turned over to hospice. I felt like we starved him to death. He lived for 15 days with no water or food. I don't know how aware he was all that time and it breaks my heart that he went with no goodbyes from us. How much was he aware of what was happening to him? Was he afraid? Did he lay in the floor at rehab calling for me and wondering why I didn't come and help him? Thinking about this really haunts me. I look at a picture of the day we got married and it is like I no longer know who those two happy smiling people are. I don't know who I am.

I read a lot of books but after I finish them, in a few days I can't remember what they were about. I have to go on good reads and review them to remember. I have Acorn through Amazon because I love English movies. Watching them rests my mind for awhile. If I don't have my mind occupied with something I am miserable missing my life before my husband died. I still can't believe he is gone, One year and three months now. A whole year since I have heard his voice except for on videos we made. Never hear him say my name anymore. He had such a thick southern accent that a lot of people thought he was calling me Johnny instead of Jane. My younger brother tells me that the first time he heard him talk , he and our cousin went into another room and laughed and laughed. I don't know why he talked like he did, we were from the same state but his family all talked that way. When he was working in Coral Gables, Fla building a Kentucky Fried Chicken place people would ask him where he was from and he would say New York City and they would look at him so funny. If you are familiar with the east side of Fla you know that many of the people who live there are from New York and other surrounding states. On the west side the people are from the mid-west. Only in the panhandle do you hear many southern accents. They call it Lower Alabama. I so wish I could turn back time and have him get a phone call from a company asking him if he would go some place out of state to work and we would get so excited. Those years were like one long vacation. Even the kids didn't mind moving until they got to be teenagers and it was hard to make friends in new schools especially out of the south. Now they say they are very glad that we moved around, that it was always a wonderful experience. My whole married life was a wonderful experience and I didn't appreciate it like I should have.

Tom, I will be thinking of you tomorrow on the anniversary of Susan's death.

Gwen, I see what you mean. Didn't think about that. Funny!

I feel the same way, Gwen. I thought it might get easier the second year but it hasn't.

It is a Ford Tarus. So far so good. It is special because when my daughter and I drove to Colorado last year we were passing through the hometown of a Nascar driver that we loved to watch race. My son in law is a state trooper and knows him through the Talladega races. He called him and the driver met us and as he was leaving I asked would her autograph my car. He wrote on the sun visor Jane, drive fast and signed his name. I wish I could tell my husband about it.

IS there a delete button somewhere? Got carried away, thinking it wasn't saved. Sorry

Tom, it breaks my heart for you, seeing that picture. I can just feel how pleasant it was to sit on the boat in the sunshine, feeling the wind and the clanging of the rigging. When I walk past a flag pole and hear the thing that pulls it up hitting the pole it makes me think of sailing. We sold our boat, we didn't get to use it much because he was always working out of state. I remember that I stood at the wheel, it seemed I could sail better if my feet were in the floor. Maybe there will be sailboats in heaven. And lots of wind.

After my husband died my daughter thought I needed a better car. I was signing the papers for a Ford which my son said would make his daddy turn over in his grave. He was a Chevrolet and Buick man. The dealership had that canned music and it played back to back two old songs that I had played at his funeral. I looked at my daughter and said were they there? The salesman said that is your husband letting you know that he approves of you buying this car. I hope so much that is why those two songs played.

Tom, please let know if the flower is blooming on the 31st. Below is a picture of our sailboat, a 30 ft Hunter.

I have posted about this before but will again as this subject has come up. My husband died on Dec 13, 2016. Two days before Valentine's day my daughter and I was at his grave cleaning and I began raking his grave trying to remove some of the small rocks that covered it , being that the dirt from the grave was very rocky. As I raked a small rock got stuck in the tines of the rake. When I removed it there it was, shaped like an almost perfect heart that just fit in the palm of my hand. It made me and my daughter very happy. Perhaps that was my valentine card that he would have given me had he been alive.

Today is my husband's 86th birthday his second in heaven. Never spent any of his birthday's apart before. For 57 years we talked to each other everyday, sometimes on the phone when he would be away starting a new job. I have been in the house we bought when he retired for ten years now, ten years of memories that come to me everyday. It is hard to believe that he is gone. I am sorry for anyone who is living with the memory of a birthday, anniversary or any special time they spent with their wife or husband. It is so hard. I am just sitting at my computer listening to songs that have meaning and I can't keep from crying. I need to do something with myself today instead of just sitting. But what? Where ever I go it's always the same when I come back home.